SOURCE: Gossett, Suzanne. “‘I'll Look to Like’: Arranged Marriages in Shakespeare's Plays.” In Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, edited by Carole Levin and Karen Robertson, pp. 57-74. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Gossett examines the tensions between romantic love and political expediency in Shakespeare's portrayal of arranged marriages in such plays as Love's Labour's Lost, Henry V, and The Tempest.]

Writing to Prince Henry in 1612 regarding marriage, Sir Walter Ralegh comments, “There is a kind of noble and royal deceiving in marriages between kings and princes; yea, and it is of all others the fairest and most unsuspected trade of betraying. It has been as ordinary amongst them to adventure or cast away a daughter, to bring some purpose to pass, as at other times, for saving of charges, to make them nuns” (Ralegh, “Marriage” 239). Daughters of royal houses were raised to expect that they would be pawns in an international alliance market. The future Queen Elizabeth was the object of marriage negotiations from the age of fourteen months, and in her fifth year her father was “lumping Elizabeth together with his niece, Margaret Douglas, and Mary Howard, widow of his base-born son, in a special bargain offer—all three girls to be bestowed by the Emperor's advice ‘upon such of the princes of Italy as shall be thought convenient’” (Plowden 17; 22). Elizabeth's namesake, Princess Elizabeth, was properly trained: she wrote to her father, James I, shortly before her marriage was arranged that “il mio fine e solo di piacere a vostra Mta,” and told her future husband after he arrived in England that she was pleased with his attentions “la quelle je cheriray d'autant plus afectionement que c'est le commandement du roy” (Baker 31-32).

When there was “some purpose” to bring to pass, little consideration was given to personal taste, physical compatibility, or similarities of age or religion. Catholic husbands suggested for Queen Elizabeth included her sister's widower, King Philip of Spain, and three sons of the French queen mother, Catherine de Medici: Charles IX, the Duke of Anjou, and the Duke of Alençon, who were sixteen, eighteen, and twenty years her junior respectively. Catherine contemplated for her own daughter Marguerite de Valois, the model for the princess in Love's Labour's Lost, “the heir of Spain, a lunatic and only half a man … the King of Portugal, who hated all women … the Archduke Rudolph, who cared only for the beauty of the stars”; finally she gave her to the King of Navarre, a Protestant to whom the Catholic Marguerite apparently had a physical aversion (Mariéjol 45, 47). Nevertheless, Marguerite assured her mother that she “had no will nor choice save” her mother's (Memoirs 85).

Marriages based on family interest were not confined to royalty. Among the wealthier classes in England, “property and power were the predominant issues which governed negotiations for marriage. … Personal factors entered into the strategy of marriage only in so far as it was important to ensure a healthy genetic strain for breeding” (Stone 70-73). But by the end of the sixteenth century the type of arranged marriage in which the inclination of the partners was not consulted at all was under increasing pressure. Stone traces the progression: “in the early sixteenth century, children were bought and sold like cattle for breeding, and no one thought that the parties concerned had any right to complain. But Protestant moral theology, with its stress on ‘holy matrimony,’ slowly forced a modification of this extreme position, which was only maintained in its pure state through the seventeenth century in the highest ranks of the aristocracy where the stakes of property and power were largest. To retain holy matrimony … it was necessary that the couple should be able to develop some affection for each other. It was therefore thought necessary to concede to the children the right of veto” (135).

During Shakespeare's lifetime both positions were hotly defended. Pamphlets appeared suggesting that the plague was God's punishment for “widespread disobedience on the part of marriageable offspring,” while others ascribed “most familial difficulties to enforced marriages” (Fitz 10). Andrew Gurr believes that the King's Men and Henslowe's company took opposite sides in this debate, Shakespeare's company defending young love and Henslowe's the right of parents to arrange marriages (195-196; 200). Yet the general trend was toward some freedom of choice: Puritan, Anglican, and even Catholic writers demonstrated a new concern for mutuality in marriage, which required consent from both partners (Novy 5).¹

Shakespeare was familiar with the older model and the newer one. His own marital history suggests individual choice, but he was close enough to the court to know how marriage was used in uniting great families. Antony and Cleopatra contains a pure case of alliance: Octavia is given to Antony by “the power of Caesar, and his power unto Octavia” for the purpose of holding two men, Antony and Caesar, “in perpetual amity” (2.2.152-153; 132); the marriage, as Enobarbus predicts, enforces affection neither between the spouses nor between the brothers-in-law. Romeo and Juliet begins with the accepted late-Elizabethan compromise, whereby Capulet urges Paris to win Juliet's heart, since “my will to her consent is but a part” (1.2.17), and she dutifully promises to “look to like” (1.3.98). Disaster ensues when Juliet attempts to exercise her right to veto; Capulet, it turns out, has never doubted that “she will be rul'd in all respects by me” (3.4.13-14); his threats when she opposes him, “An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend; / And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets” (3.5.192-193), can be paralleled from actual cases. A notorious one concerned Frances Coke, whose parents had differing ideas about whom she should marry. To enforce their wills mother and father successively kidnapped her, her father, the former Lord Chief Justice, at the head of a band of armed retainers. When Frances finally yielded to his proposal that she marry Sir John Villiers, she added the following suggestive postscript to the letter she wrote her mother: “Dear Mother believe there has no violent means been used to me by word or deed” (Bowen 408).²

Stone dismisses Shakespeare's plays as “propaganda” for an unrealistic “ideal of romantic love” rejected “by all theologians, moralists, authors of manuals of conduct, and parents and adults in general” (128). Yet Shakespeare's dramas, often treated as uniformly romantic,³ take careful account of the differing constraints upon young people of different classes. His plays do usually convey a sense that young people should have a say in picking, or at least in accepting, their own marriage partners. Although in tragedies like Othello independent choice may lead to disaster, in many plays on the New Comedy model young men and women choose mates without or against their parents' wishes, and nevertheless all turns out well. The Merry Wives of Windsor offers this pattern in a middle class setting. Anne Page eludes two separate arrangements proposed by her parents, and Fenton justifies the lovers' actions:

You would have married her most shamefully,
Where there was no proportion held in love …
The offense is holy that she hath committed.

(5.5.215-219)

As both Page and his wife wish the young couple joy, they apparently accept their marriage, and perhaps Fenton's argument. Similar successes for impetuous young lovers occur in only slightly more gentrified settings in Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice.⁴

As soon as he dealt with the nobility, Shakespeare was more cautious. In As You Like It Rosalind, whose status as the daughter of a deposed duke is ambiguous, consciously avoids her father in the forest while she plays at courtship with Orlando. Nevertheless, when she is ready to marry, she cautiously asks the Duke whether, if she produces Rosalind, “You will bestow her on Orlando here?” and reminds him to “keep you your word, O Duke, to give your daughter” (5.4.7; 19). Though she says to Orlando, “To you I give myself, for I am yours,” (5.4.116), in actuality she has herself ritually given to her new husband by the Duke, to whom she also gives herself (Boose 327). She has been influenced all along in her choice by her father's desires: her first reaction to learning Orlando's identity as “the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys” is “My father lov'd Sir Rowland as his soul” (1.2.212-213; 225). Celia's question, “Doth it therefore ensue that you should love his son dearly?” (1.3.30-31), intimates that in loving Orlando, Rosalind, despite her apparent independence, has honored the considerations that led to arranged marriages.⁵

In the remainder of this paper I will examine three liminal cases, cases where, even in an ostensibly comic mode, Shakespeare could not ignore the external factors which affected “the highest ranks of the aristocracy.” In these three plays—Love's Labour's Lost, Henry V, and The Tempest—Shakespeare dramatized the situation where potential conflict between personal and political choice in marriage was greatest. In all three cases the young woman is a princess;⁶ in all three cases she has been designed by her father for a particular husband to confirm an international alliance; yet in all three cases Shakespeare constructs the situation to alleviate audience anxieties about her lack of choice. The complexities to which this gives rise reveal themselves in the language of the plays and in conflicting generic conventions. All three plays parallel or recall specific political situations, and all implicitly ask how—to use Novy's terms—patriarchy and mutuality can be compromised when political fortunes are at stake.⁷

In Love's Labour's Lost, Erickson argues, “female power is virtually absolute” (67), and Huston considers the world of this play painless, partly because there are “no tyrannical parents to run from” (36). But both ignore the political limitations on the romantic plot. The Princess arrives in Navarre on a diplomatic mission, and she has with her Boyet, whose diction, like the structure of the play, is calculated to recall her real purpose while concealing it. Boyet does not tell the Princess directly what she is to do. His job is to encourage her to do it of her own volition, to make her, like Elizabeth of Bohemia, choose to cherish the man her father may choose. He begins:

Now, madam, summon up your dearest spirits;
Consider who the King your father sends,
To whom he sends, and what's his embassy:
Yourself, held precious in the world's esteem,
To parley with the sole inheritor
Of all perfections that a man may owe,
Matchless Navarre; the plea of no less weight
Than Aquitaine, a dowry for a queen.

(2.1.1-8)

The audience, like the princess, is invited to “consider.” The language is that of political marriage: Navarre is an inheritor, Aquitaine a dowry. The emphasis throughout this scene is on heredity: Maria, describing a marriage solemnized “between Lord Perigort and the beauteous heir / Of Jaques Falconbridge” (2.1.41-42), does not bother to include the bride's name; Katherine is identified as “The heir of Alençon” and Maria as “an heir of Falconbridge” (2.1.194; 205). Like Katherine and Maria the princess is an “heir.” Yet it is a sign of simplicity to make this too overt. Only the Forester will later openly equate the princess with her possessions: “Nothing but fair is that which you inherit” (4.1.20). However, Boyet's comment on the King of Navarre's visible infatuation is hardly less direct, as he reemphasizes the purpose of the alliance he hopes for:

I'll give you Aquitaine and all that is his,
An you give him for my sake but one loving kiss.

(2.1.248-249)

Despite the apparent importance of the political strand in this comedy, the disagreement between the King of France and the King of Navarre is obliquely described and difficult to follow. Comment about it disappears from the middle acts, intentionally I believe. If the play is not to take on the tone of the opening of King Lear, where the marriage auction for Cordelia, like the daughters' love contest, is originally structured as an exchange of love for lands, Shakespeare must avoid insisting on the princess's role as a political pawn. Therefore, as soon as the matrimonial solution to the contention between France and Navarre has been suggested, the subject, and the attendant “serious business, craving quick dispatch” (2.1.31), is hidden under a cloud of games and sports.⁸ Comedy conceals history: the play proceeds as if it were As You Like It, where for “sports” Rosalind devises “falling in love.”

In the fifth act, when the Princess learns of her father's death, there is a notable change. Until this point the Princess has not responded to Boyet's insinuations. She has consistently treated the declarations of the men as “courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy … a merriment” (5.2.776; 780). The choice of husband, she and the audience know, will not be hers anyway: she will be matched at her country's and father's will. But suddenly she does have power over her own destiny; now there are no fathers, tyrannical or not. Abruptly, history dominates comedy. Like Queen Elizabeth, this new Queen of France takes control. Elizabeth refused to marry anyone she had not seen, an insuperable obstacle in the negotiations with Archduke Charles. The French queen shows her power to “subdue a lord” (4.1.40) by dismissing her suitor.

Though the new queen promises she will be the King of Navarre's if he can meet his “trial” for a year, Berowne recognizes that “that's too long for a play” (5.2.874). Elizabeth, too, made promises of marriage and did not keep them. In the case of the Duke of Alençon, she declared before the French Ambassador and various English nobles that, “the Duke of Alençon shall be my husband,” dramatically kissing “him on the mouth, drawing a ring from her own hand and giving it to him as a pledge.” Yet at this time “Elizabeth's one idea … was to avoid marriage” (Mendoza, quoted in Plowden 189; Neale 261). The difference between a princess's duty and a queen's power, between comedy and history, emerges as generic tension when Berowne exclaims against the failure of dramatic convention: “these ladies' courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy” (5.2.871-872). Instead the ladies have acquired the power of veto, and the new form of marriage arrangement alters the dramatic form.⁹

The reverse mixture occurs in Henry V. In the fifth act scene between Henry and Princess Katherine of France, history becomes comedy. The victor of Agincourt comes wooing like a tongue-tied countryman, like Orlando “a quintain, a mere lifeless block” (AYL, 1.2.241), able to wrestle but not to talk French. Williamson argues that Henry's “entire maneuver in getting Katherine to justify his demanding her as one of the treaty terms depends for its effect on the pretense that both are as free as ordinary men and women to love and marry by choice.” Yet Katherine “never forgets she has no choice about whether she will marry Henry” and when Henry forces her to kiss him it is a sign of his imperiousness emerging (“Courtship” 331).

Katherine, indeed, has no choice, but this need not mean she is an unhappy victim. The play's marriage is as complex as those of real royalty, because Shakespeare intentionally foregrounds the duality of Katherine as princess and person. We see Katherine first in 3.4, following Henry's speech to the Governor of Harfleur, a speech full of images of “hot and forcing violation,” of “the blind and bloody soldier” defiling “the locks of your shrill shrieking daughters” (3.3.21; 34-35). Her brief appearance will be succeeded in 3.5 by the Dauphin's prediction that “our madams,” disgusted at French ineptitude, “will give their bodies to the lust of English youth” (28-30). Sandwiched in between is Katherine's simple recognition that she must learn English: “il faut que j'apprenne” (3.4.4-5). The scene prepares for the two critical aspects of Katherine and Henry's relationship in Act 5 and later: their difficulty in communicating verbally, and the necessity that they communicate sexually.

Katherine's desire to learn vocabulary for the parts of the body is her unconscious acknowledgement that this is to be her role in the French peace terms, and thus it is she, rather than her waiting woman, who hears the sexual overtones of the last few words. Unlike similar scenes between Portia and Nerissa or Desdemona and Emilia, here knowledge of the sexual realities cannot be displaced down the social hierarchy. Kate, though she will not “prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France” (53-54), is aware she will have to use their physical reality with the ruler of England. In one sense she is, like the maidens of Harfleur, a sexual spoil.¹⁰

Yet in the final scene, when Kate, like the “maiden cities,” yields, it is an oversimplification, as an Elizabethan would know, to assume she will be unhappy. Her very concern, “is it possible dat I sould love de ennemie of France” (5.2.170-171), assumes marriage will entail love, even as it acknowledges a well known problem of such alliances. Ralegh comments:

We will take it for granted, that marriages between foreign princes, for the most part, are but politic: for wheresoever they employ their own affections … they commonly make choice of their own subjects. Now this policy in marriages hath either respect to the enlarging of dominion and uniting of kingdomes, dukedomes, or other principalities … or to the end of some great war and the establishing of peace.

(“Match” 223-224)

How, then, in drama or in life, to create a sense of personal attraction and mutual interest? The kiss which offends Williamson is the heart of the solution. While it recalls comic scenes in which young men “stop the mouths” of their beloveds, it has historical precedent. In 1589, at the insistence of the people of Edinburgh, James VI of Scotland was married by proxy to Anne of Denmark, whom he had never seen but with whom, as his biographer says, “in boyish and romantic fashion [he] became more and more enamoured” (Willson 88). Anne was 15, James 23. She sailed from Copenhagen in late August but contrary winds forced the ship into Oslo; in late October the romantic young lover “secretly resolved to sail in person to fetch home his bride” (89). There are two accounts of what happened next, and the conflict between them precisely embodies the actual and dramatic difficulties of sorting out the factors involved in royal marriages:

A Scottish account relates in homely fashion that the King made his way at once to the old Bishop's Palace where Anne was lodged, “passed quietly with boots and all to her Highness,” and offered to kiss her after the Scots fashion. Anne demurred. “Marry, after a few words privately spoken betwixt his Majesty and her, there passed familiarity and kisses.”

(90-91)

Willson objects that this is a “good story,” but one unhappily belied by a Danish narrative of the King's sojourn in Scandinavia. According to this account, James “entered Oslo in some state, preceded by heralds and accompanied by Danish and Norwegian nobles. … He and Anne spent half an hour together, and he then was escorted to his lodgings” (91).

The “Scottish account” has the same purpose as the end of Henry V: it presents—or creates—the king as an eager wooer, rather than as a ruler exercising his rights; it emphasizes sexual rather than legal persuasion. And we must never forget that this could work: Willson admits that soon James was “deeply in love with his young bride” (91). Shakespeare, simultaneously revealing and concealing the political basis of royal marriages, was doing no more than the royal players themselves did.¹¹

In his last three romances Shakespeare once again has heroines who are princesses, and all three plays conclude with marriage or the confirmation of marriage. With each succeeding play Shakespeare progressively softens the conflict between parental arrangement and personal choice. Both Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale return to the New Comedy pattern: in defiance of parents, royal youths choose their own mates. Yet because Cymbeline is an awkward generic mixture, long delaying the shift to tragicomedy, (and actually appearing as a tragedy in the Folio), the happy ending does not entirely elide the picture of suffering caused by a princess's independent choice.

In Cymbeline Imogen, employing what Ralegh calls her “own affections,” “refers herself” to her subject, despite the king's intention that she marry his stepson Cloten. Cloten officiously but correctly reminds her of her obligations to her rank:

And though it be allow'd in meaner parties
Yet who than he more mean?—to knit their souls,
On whom there is no more dependency
But brats and beggary, in self-figur'd knot,
Yet you are curb'd from that enlargement by
The consequence o' th' crown. …

(2.3.118-123)

Imogen's angry retort that Cloten is “too base” to be Posthumus's groom does not respond to his political point or to his criticism that she has sinned “against obedience, which you owe your father” (2.3.113-114). However, from the first scene we are reminded that the king's proposed arrangement for Imogen is both personally inappropriate (Cloten is “a thing too bad for bad report”), and politically useless: Cloten, the king's “wife's sole son” (1.1.16-17; 5), brings no new international alliance to the state.¹² Furthermore, Cloten's pursuit of Imogen seems sexually perverse: their brother-sister relationship gives the proposal overtones of incest, and he is apparently undeterred by Imogen's marriage. Nevertheless his objections linger, and at the conclusion Shakespeare attempts an interesting reversal of the conclusion of Love's Labour's Lost to mute the conflict. Where in the early play the princess's elevation gave her control over her marriage and the ability to refuse a proposed husband, in Cymbeline the reappearance of Imogen's brothers, which her father reminds her means she “hast lost … a kingdom” (5.5.375), reduces her political stature and removes the question of her marriage from the central political arena.

In Winter's Tale, since Perdita does not know her aristocratic rank, it is Florizel who defies parental authority. As a male Florizel receives a concession made to no princess in Shakespeare's plays: even the disguised Polixenes allows it is “reason my son should choose himself a wife,” though he insists “the father … should hold some counsel in such a business” (4.4.406-410).¹³ There is no previous arrangement for Florizel, and the audience knows his beloved is herself a princess. Florizel is prepared to tempt tragedy by his obstinate disobedience, but since his choice for himself could not be bettered, personally or politically, by his father's “counsel,” the apparent conflict between love and political arrangement evaporates.

These two plays might seem to confirm Stone's suspicions of Shakespeare's excessive romanticism. But The Tempest, apparently equally romantic, takes full account of the realities of arranged marriage. In this play Shakespeare presents his most extensive dramatic solution to the problem of the royal marriage, using a variety of techniques to blur the distinction between political arrangement and personal love.

Immediately after Miranda first delights in the sight of Ferdinand, Alonso bemoans the marriage of his daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis. His grief is double, for he believes he has lost his son on the return voyage, and Claribel is so far removed from Italy that “I ne'er again shall see her” (2.1.113). Sebastian “rubs the sore,” reminding Alonso that he has only himself to thank for the loss:

You were kneel'd to and importun'd otherwise
By all of us, and the fair soul herself
Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at
Which end o' th' beam should bow.

(2.1.130-133)

On to Claribel, who never appears and for whom audience sympathy is thus limited, are displaced all the negative factors of the political alliance. In observations written in 1611—the same year that The Tempest was first produced—on a marriage proposed for Princess Elizabeth with the Catholic Prince of Savoy, Ralegh analyzed the potential “comfort and contentment of this young lady.” He found “little in appearance presently,” and “less to be hoped for in the future. For at first she must be removed far from her nearest blood both by father and mother. … And what true correspondency or matrimonial affection there can be maintained between those persons, whose minds are different and opposite in the religious points of their Christian faith, is greatly to be doubted” (Ralegh, “Match,” 235). One can imagine what he would say of Claribel, “loose[d] … to an African,” and dwelling “ten leagues beyond man's life” (2.1.127; 248). The issue of distance was not hypothetical: after her marriage in April 1613 to the acceptably Protestant prince Frederick, Elizabeth never saw any of her immediate family again.

Distance, difference, personal loathing are all Claribel's, while for Miranda is reserved the happy marriage that Elizabeth of Bohemia enjoyed despite political troubles. But Miranda is the object of two plans, her father's and an alternate one that exemplifies the dangers that may follow from arranging marriages purely for state purposes. Personal inappropriateness is of no importance to Caliban as he plots to marry Miranda to Stephano. With much historical precedent he ignores the princess's feeling, telling the butler, “She will become thy bed, I warrant, / And bring thee forth brave brood.” Stephano immediately envisions the rest of the political arrangements: “Monster, I will kill this man. His daughter and I will be king and queen … and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys” (3.2.100-109). Unacceptable difference here comes not from race, religion, or distance, but from class distinctions which Stephano would violate or subvert. He does not even fear his wife's reaction to the murder of her father. This arrangement parodies and, by contrast, softens and condones the one projected by Prospero, who claims to do “nothing but in care of” Miranda (1.2.16). Shakespeare's magic may make us forget that the outcome of Ferdinand and Miranda's wedding will be the “uniting of kingdomes, dukesdomes, or other principalities.”¹⁴

As in Henry V, in The Tempest a generic shift to comedy assists the audience in accepting a marriage arranged for state purposes. The Tempest begins with elements of a revenge play: Prospero has gained control of all of his enemies, the sea “hath requit” Prospero's supplantation and exposure, and Ariel's great speech to the “three men of sin” threatens “ling'ring perdition” before offering forgiveness (3.3.51-82).¹⁵ However, once Miranda and Ferdinand meet, Prospero encourages us to read events through the lens of the familiar comic form: he takes on the role of the heavy father, “lest too light winning / Make the prize light” (1.2.453-455). The “rarer action” replaces revenge: instead of a masque of vengeance there is the wedding masque of spirits, “harmonious charmingly” (4.1.119). Yet the comic ending still awards Prospero his dukedom and title to the Kingdom of Naples for his heirs.

In this late play Shakespeare collapses the apparent opposition between the two components of royal marriage. He achieves this legerdemain by displaying such a marriage from two perspectives. On the one hand the audience sees that Prospero “carefully engineers the romance of Ferdinand and Miranda” (Williamson, Patriarchy 156).¹⁶ Despite his pretense at being the heavy father, he is not the blocking but the propelling figure, manipulating the young couple's emotions through magic as well as through natural attraction. The visual emblem of this control is 3.1., where Prospero, unseen, observes and comments on Ferdinand and Miranda's wooing. Yet in this same scene Miranda conceives of herself as a romantic heroine, like Bianca of Taming of the Shrew or Perdita the shepherdess. Believing her father to be “hard at study,” she gives away her hand in full awareness that she has broken his “hest” to do so. Williamson praises Miranda's spirit in wooing for herself (Patriarchy 166), but Miranda's spirit, like her actions, lies within the intentions of her father; he has constructed her desire. At the end of The Tempest Shakespeare has finally found a way to show a princess observing perfect filial obedience by choosing for herself.

Shortly before he escaped the marriage market by an untimely death, Prince Henry was asked by his father which of three princesses he preferred. He replied, “My part, which is to be in love with any of them, is not yet at hand” (Willson 285). This witty statement sounds paradoxical to the modern reader, but it was a paradox familiar to Jacobean Englishmen and audiences. Chamberlain's letters show no concern for Princess Elizabeth's feelings while negotiations proceeded with various royal houses. When Savoy was being considered, he wrote Carleton:

The ambassador of Savoy followed the King to Tiballs. … For ought I can learne he had but a cold aunswer, and yet the Duke his master was so confident that he offered to come in person to conduct her. Yt is thought the breaking of the match in Spaine hath marred this. … Our speculativi make many discourses as yf this younge Lady was a likely match for the king of Spaine, others that the same busines is now in treating for the royne blanche in France, but I thincke they are both wayes wide.

(McClure I 316)

Yet once the chosen husband arrived, Chamberlain notes repeatedly, and apparently with pleasure, that the future bridegroom is “every day at court, and plies his mistresse hard and takes no delight in running at ring, nor tennis, nor riding with the Prince … but only in her conversation” (I 381; cf. 387). These lines remind us of Prospero's direction to Ferdinand, “Sit then and talk with her; she is thine own” (4.1.32).

By the early seventeenth century the English, while acknowledging the desirability of family alliances, apparently recognized the need for personal affection as a basis for marriage. When an ordinary young girl like Bianca runs off with an appropriate young man they, like her father, could be “contented.” The importance of alliance was immensely augmented when the young girl was a princess. Yet the more that attention was paid to the purposes of holy matrimony, the more that even in aristocratic homes young women were offered the possibility of veto, the harder it was to look upon young royalty as cattle for the marriage market. Shakespeare's solutions were not a simple endorsement of defiant young love. Caught between the realities of court life and the call of the comic form, he found ways to acknowledge the obligation to self at the same time as the obligation to political necessity. Using the resources of dramatic form, he managed to copy Prince Henry: bit by bit, and culminating in The Tempest, he wrote the conflict out of existence.

Notes

1. For a balanced view, see Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984). Houlbrooke concludes that “in practice, matches ranged across a wide spectrum which ran from the arranged … to the completely free. The degree of freedom allowed the individual depended … upon his or her sex, prospects of inheritance and social rank.” According to Houlbrooke, “in the seventeenth century, parents were often ready to allow greater freedom of choice” but in fact “the duty of compliance with parental wishes [had never been] … inculcated with uniform success even in wealthy families. There was a widespread belief among would-be marriage partners that freedom of choice was their right” (69-71).

2. Lynda E. Boose analyzes the psychological implications and ritual substructures in plays where a father must give his daughter in marriage; my concern, instead, is to consider the plays against the historical and social background of the period.

3. Typically, G. R. Hibbard uses the romanticism of Romeo and Juliet to contrast “Elizabethan marriage as it was,” depicted in Thomas Middleton's London comedies (134-138; 142).

4. In this case, Jessica's actions are partly excused because she flees Shylock to marry a Christian, a change which the play approves.

5. Celia's status is likewise ambiguous; her father is a false duke, and by the time Celia marries Oliver, Frederick has chosen the hermitage, thus declaring his indifference to worldly arrangements. The play is very slippery as it negotiates between pastoral comedy and courtly politics.

6. Although Prospero is the Duke of Milan, he repeatedly refers to his daughter Miranda as a princess. Cf. 1.1.59; 173.

7. David Bergeron reads the Stuarts as a “text” influencing Shakespeare's romances, and emphasizes the ways in which the family of history coalesces with the family of art, including in the matter of marriage.

8. For Montrose, the reason the “significant [political] issues seem to evaporate as the play unfolds … is surely not that Shakespeare's interest wandered but that he was contriving to point up the wavering interest of some of his characters.” However, Montrose thinks that the princess is “aware of her mission all the time” (87-88).

9. One should not exaggerate Elizabeth's power over her marriage. It is perfectly possible that she did want to marry Dudley, or even Alençon, and yielded to good sense and her counselors' opposition.

10. Tennenhouse also recognizes that Shakespeare dramatizes the “conquest of France as Henry's wooing of Katherine” (69) by activating “the strategies of romantic comedy.” But he emphasizes the way in which the wooing “confirms the value of blood” and does not consider Katherine's feelings.

11. That James soon lost interest in Anne, and eventually in women, does not belie his early affection for his bride, with whom he had seven children.

12. The contrast with Philaster is instructive. There, too, the proposed husband is unacceptable for sexual reasons (he can't wait for the wedding but goes off with Megra the court's lady of easy virtue). Nevertheless, Pharamond is a prince of Spain, presumably able to offer a political alliance to Sicily. Arethusa, like Imogen, chooses a native instead. However, since Philaster is actually the rightful prince, this union is itself a solution to the political problems of the kingdom.

13. In All's Well that Ends Well the French king's failure to accord Bertram the opportunity to “choose himself a wife” is a major cause of that play's uneven critical and theatrical reception. See Williamson on wardship (59-64) for a discussion of arranged marriages for wealthy male orphans.

14. Paul Cantor emphasizes Prospero's political motives in letting Miranda and Ferdinand “play at being Romeo and Juliet” (249).

15. I am grateful to Karen Robertson for suggestions about the revenge elements in The Tempest.

16. For a more negative view of the symbolic scheme whereby “Miranda is deprived of any possibility of human freedom, growth or thought,” see Leininger, 291.

Works Cited

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