Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (review)

In Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Sid Ray reviews the early modern literature concerning marriage, finding that there is no overriding doctrine, but rather contention and mutation. Indeed, she argues, because the household is a political unit establishing male rule at the micro level, there is a similarity between the marriage pamphlets and the debate about monarchy—is the monarch absolute in power or a public servant? In subsequent chapters, Ray suggests that Shakespeare, Lady Mary Wroth, Beaumont and Fletcher, and John Webster use marriage discourse, especially marriage bond metaphors and jokes, to question and critique the social order.

In the first chapter, Ray explores bondage metaphors in the conduct literature on marriage, examining the disagreements between those who represent marriage as an equitable partnership of "yokefellows" and those who represent marriage as bondage, turning the metaphor of the bond between husband and wife into material for misogynist social satire. The result is a mixed message, the ideals of companionate marriage infiltrated with male fears of commitment and female domination.

Chapter 2 is Ray's most successful application of her theory, an insightful reading of the Limena episode and other tales in Lady Mary Wroth's 1621 Urania. While the anti-marriage tracts attack marriage for subordinating men, Ray argues, Wroth attacks it for subordinating women. In the story of Limena, who loves Perissus but is coerced into a marriage to Philargus at her father's behest, Wroth literalizes the bondage metaphors by representing the husband as a jealous sadist who ties up and beats his wife, intending eventually to kill her. Wroth redirects sympathy to the wife, even though she is resisting early modern expectations for wifely fidelity, Ray suggests, by making Limena's lover an aristocrat, by keeping technically chaste, and by portraying her husband as criminally cruel. Ray further traces bondage imagery in Wroth's romance in the series of towers where women are prisoners of love, arguing that through satire Wroth constructs an "alternative marital conduct book" (73).

In the remaining chapters, where Ray pushes her thesis from marital satire to political allegory, her readings are much less convincing. In chapter 3 Ray reads Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy as political allegories, the trials of oppressed women figuring subjects under a tyrannous ruler. Here the lack of chronology in the argument is confusing. What ruler is tyrannous? The context Ray builds is interesting: she explains that Puritan marriage tract writers were frequently anxious about the abuse of governmental authority and that they displaced this fear of tyranny onto the specter of unruly wives. But she pushes her readings too far, arguing not only that Shakespeare has no sympathy for Petruchio, but also that the uneasy mixture of marital and political metaphors in the play requires the audience to see the play as an allegory about "the battle of the people for constitutional rights" (80). Ray reads even the Induction not as a joke the early modern audience would enjoy but as aristocratic torture of a commoner. In addition, Ray interprets Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedy as political critique, imposing her own metaphors rather than excavating those in the play: "the King's interference with the free trade (marriage) of Aspatia between Calianax, her father, and Amintor, her beloved, and his own monopolization of Evadne represent James's abuse of royal prerogative," especially with regard to monopolies awarded to his favorites (95). In chapter 4, arguing that the bride's marriage consent is analogous to the people's consent required at English coronations, Ray proposes that Titus Andronicus usurps the people's power when he refuses the crown and offers it instead to Saturninus, and that Titus tyrannizes over his own children, killing his son and offering his daughter to the emperor. In addition, Ray suggests that Lavinia's dismemberment results from Titus's choices: Chiron and Demetrius, like...