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

100Comparative Drama Sid Ray. HolyEstates: Marriage and Monarchyin Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. The Apple-Zimmerman Series in Early Modern Culture. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2004. Pp. 162. $46.50. Sid Ray's Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries is a valuable addition to the study of early modern drama in the context of contemporary conduct manuals and the marital and political ideologies that shaped and were shaped by them. Ray's work, as her subtitle suggests, extends the critical relevance of conduct books beyond their contributions to the period's ideas about marriage. She argues that such texts provided not only a realm in which to explore the idea ofa wife's subjection to her husband and marital tyranny and resistance, but also a safer realm in which to explore subjects'subjection to their ruler and political tyranny and resistance. Her argument focuses on a particular fault line in these prescriptive texts, arguing that the conduct manuals'bondage metaphors (knotting,tying,yoking) often exceed their intended meaning, especially when appropriated by authors Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and John Webster: The authors listed above tend to respond to the Church's pervasive and insistent marital injunctions by putting forth characters that flout marital directives, and, by having those characters appropriate the language of marital tracts for dissident purposes, the authors mock and resist such propaganda. These writers, perhaps more memorably by others, illustrate the subversive possibilities of literalized marital metaphors, all of them offering extraordinary scenes in which characters are at the mercy ofsome literal form ofbondage or torture. (17) By focusing on the potential subversion ofliteralizing metaphor, Ray contends that early modern drama allowed, and perhaps even encouraged, its audiences to envision the possibility of change. Ray's first chapter appropriately focuses on the metaphors in the conduct books themselves, tracing the proliferation ofwhat she calls "martial bondage metaphors" (26). In doing so, she astutely argues that the metaphors continually exceed, extend, and/or exaggerate their intended meanings and therefore undermine the verygender hierarchies theyare meant to prescribe.When metaphors like to "tie the knot" take on literal connotations, implying the bondage and beating ofwives, Ray suggests that the tracts' exaggeration of male dominance and female submission backfires; in other words, the metaphors move from reinforcingsupposedlynaturallyoccurringhierarchies to"provoking fear of the opposite" (40). Since Ray focuses on politics as well as marriage, one might hope formore analysis ofthe conductliterature's relationship to political Reviews101 texts and metaphors.Yet it is not until the end ofthe chapter that she makes an explicit connection between marriage and politics:"Ironically, then,in theirrhetoric designed to augment the power ofhusbands and further to subordinate wives, the tract writers diminish their own positions as subjects of the monarch" (52). In examining how these metaphors function in prose romance and drama in the succeeding chapters, Ray aims to show how they "contest [the very] orthodoxy" they were originallydesigned to support, and she often succeeds in elucidating the way these literary texts challenge marital and political ideologies to varying degrees (17). The most important aspect ofRay's book, its dedication to the slippage between the challenges to political and marital ideologies elicited bybondage metaphors,is also the most difficult to achieve and thus the least even aspect ofher argument. The second chapter,"'To Have and to Hold': Arranged Marriage, Rank, and Bondage in Mary Wroth's Urania" offers a balanced reading of the intersection of politics and marriage by focusing on the arranged marriages (themselves inherentlypolitical) represented in Urania. Ray's analysis of the tortures inflicted on the heroines who refuse the mate chosen for them offers new insights into the towers and iron rods scattered throughout the romance. In Ray's reading,Wroth's romance insinuates that "those invested in controlling women ... are somehow promoting unorthodox sexual behavior in their injunctions to contain women" (58). Thus Wroth creates a world in which such codes ofconduct are subverted as women characters rightfully rebel against them. Ray suggests, though, that Wroth's critiques of women's inability to choose their own husbands aren't fully transferable to the political realm because Wroth's class status allows her to go only...