"Lawful Deeds": The Entitlements of Marriage in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well

Dover, England 1599: The day is warm; the meadow is quiet. It is also deserted, save for two people, a man and a woman. Intent on the conquest of his love, and sure that there is only one way to achieve victory, the man takes the woman by the hand. He looks her in the eye, then says the same words that have sounded for ages before (and would for ages yet) throughout marital celebrations in Western Christendom: "I take thee as my wife." The woman exchanges the promise and succumbs. Seemingly, the world has not noticed a thing.

Except that it has. For different views on how marriage could be performed in sixteenth-century Europe gave these words--a present tense utterance of an intention to marry--markedly different powers: If spoken by the man in Dover, the couple is married--with or without a witness, consummated or not. However, if spoken by his French cousin in Calais, at the exact same time, under an identical set of circumstances (right down to the field and the warm summer day), the couple is not married; the man is not a husband, the woman, not a wife. Subsequent intercourse amounts to fornication, with all its attendant consequences, but the status of the couple [Begin Page 117] vis-à-vis each other is unchanged. The couple in England, however, has performed a "clandestine" or "handfast" marriage. ¹

The difference between the cases goes to the root of marriage as understood in medieval and Renaissance times. The Church had long conceived marriage as a sacrament that the two parties, husband and wife, conferred upon themselves. Although strongly encouraged, Church witness was not central to the validity of the marriage contract. For obvious reasons, the private marriage caused problems for the Church, both before and after the Reformation. On ideological grounds, a private ceremony dispensed with holy witness to the most life-affirming of institutions. On practical grounds, it was nearly impossible to ensure that a marriage had actually taken place. It is not surprising that countless men, having satisfied their lust, subsequently denied their responsibility. In fact, records show that out of seventeen such cases in the Bishop's Court of Chester, ten involve men trying to sneak out of their contracts after having taken their pleasure. ² Children born of such frustrated unions were bastards; they had no name and could not inherit.

On the Continent, the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Churches recognized the problem of the private marriage and made a public, Church-witnessed ceremony necessary to marital validity. ³ As part of the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church even passed a decree, known as Tametsi, to address the abuse. ⁴ However, Anglican England was under no obligation to these decrees, and the Englishman, as opposed to his Continental counterpart, could wreak all sorts of havoc with his secret promises, hand-clasping, and ring-giving.

And therein lies the play, at least for William Shakespeare, who penned some of his most philosophical--and to many critics, maddening--set of comedies around the turn of the seventeenth century: the so-called "problem plays." The "problem" with--or "in"--the plays is variously defined, and the constitutive plays themselves are variously grouped, but one play that shows up on nearly everyone's list is All's Well That Ends Well. ⁵ It is perhaps the least liked of these roundly disliked works. Reasons for critical distaste are numerous, including a lack of poetic justice for the rakish hero, the implausibility of the young heroine's love for such a man, and the mixture of realistic and fantastic plot elements. The story is essentially taken from Bocaccio's Decameron, the ninth novel of the third day. ⁶

Helena, the maiden in the play, is the...