Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage (review)

This study of the law of marriage as reflected in Shakespeare's plays is billed as an interdisciplinary study, combining legal, historical, and literary approaches to the theory and practice of marriage in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. More particularly, as the authors explain in their "afterword on method," the book integrates legal-historical with literary studies, aiming to "gather the contexts of literature from the workings of law in society" (186). This methodology promises more than it delivers. Each of the book's nine chapters, which deal in rough chronological order with the various stages of marriage (including spousals, dowries, solemnization, divorce, and inheritance), begins with an exposition of the law as it prevailed in early modern England. These summaries, while presented clearly, are based exclusively on secondary sources and do not advance our knowledge of English legal history in any significant way. The authors then show how the law governing these different stages of marriage is reflected in William Shakespeare's plays. The thematic structure of the book explains why the same dramatic work merits treatment in more than one chapter.

The authors do not defend a central thesis nor venture many generalizations, except the unsurprising observations that "contemporary English marriage laws provide the inevitable background for Shakespeare's plays" and that in most cases the content of the plays mirrored contemporary legal reality (73–74). The authors also argue that Shakespeare's handling of legal matters was "typically complex, ingrained, and implicit rather than simplified, highlighted, or explicit" (14). A concluding observation that law was "a vital part of the cultural fabric" will not come as a surprise to any historian or literary scholar of this period (187).

The value of this book lies almost entirely in its contribution to Shakespearean studies. It provides literary scholars with a historical introduction to the legal world within which Shakespeare's dramatic characters operated, and it reveals the depth of Shakespeare's legal knowledge. It also sheds light on his "satiric or subversive" responses to the official English marriage ceremony, which incorporated both Protestant and Catholic elements (92). The authors make a modest contribution to the Law and Literature movement, although only as a study of law in literature rather than the textual study of law as literature. As a work of interdisciplinary history, however, the book has little utility, mainly because the authors do not engage in historical research or use the research techniques of more than one discipline to shed light on the legal culture of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.