Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage (review)

Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage by B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol provides a thorough and useful compendium of laws shaping marriage in early modern culture and their enactments in Shakespeare's plays. The book achieves its aims — to understand the law, which comprises "legal institutions, practice and procedures, law-texts (statutes, treatises, and commentaries), and texts concerned with law###query;ED2### (literary, polemical, or political)" (187–88), as a dynamic part of the social order; to correct misunderstandings about marriage law in early modern England; and to show how its operations are reflected in the plays. It is an narrative elaboration of the Sokols' earlier Shakespeare's Legal Language: A Dictionary (2000), and, drawing on recent work by historians and literary critics, it addresses the legal issues surrounding marriage more fully and coherently than that work's alphabetical organization permits.

The book is helpfully organized according to the chronological stages of marriage from spousals, parental consent, and property settlements to separations, wills, and widowhood. Each chapter examines the requisite legal issues and then exemplifies them in a series of plays; some are glanced at, some receive several paragraphs of analysis. The plays most often considered — piecemeal within various chapters — are Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, All's Well that Ends Well, and The Taming of the Shrew; the latter play is perhaps that most strenuously reinterpreted through the prism of the law.

Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage is strongest when expertly analyzing the complex jurisdictional inconsistencies that make marriage law a battleground in the period, the plays, and the scholarship. It forcefully reiterates that spousals de presenti by the couple constitute valid marriage by common law but are considered sinful by church courts without solemnization (which however was ignored, objected to, and never enforced). It lucidly sorts out the differences between dowry or portion and dower: "'dowry' and 'dower' mean endowment of a woman on marriage, but in the first case by her father (or family) and in the latter by her husband" (58). It explains how jointure (a contract between groom and women's family) can qualify or block dower (the women's customary right in common law to one third of her husband's real property upon widowhood). It authoritatively uses the complexities of dowry, dower, and property laws to show that married women had legal means to qualify coverture's restrictions. A succinct summary of the makeup, procedures, and jurisdictions of the various courts discussed (like that in Tim Stretton's Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England) would have made the book more comprehensible.

Such legal debates, the Sokols claim, are reflected in the plays in three "modes": as a "mirrorland," which "more or less realistically represents actual and well-known practices of English law"; as a "fableland," where "folkloric, biblical or stereotypical images hold sway"; or as "fantastical mootings," where "impossibly complex contrived legal situations are premised" (8). The Sokols' discussion of the plays' use of legal materials everywhere informs, but only occasionally surprises. One eye-opening discussion reveals how Shakespeare's plays reflect dissent from the (contested) Prayer Book marriage ritual by the omission of enacted marriage ceremonies and by satires of the ritual in Petruchio's narrated wedding antics, Claudio and Hero's interrupted nuptials, and Lavatch's parody of the Prayer Book's three reasons for marriage. The Sokols also weigh in on Shakespeare's most hotly debated marriage, claiming that Petruchio's unconventional protectiveness of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is apparent in his provision for her of dower instead of the jointure contract which would be to his advantage and in his parody of the wedding ceremony.

The authors — he an English professor and she a lawyer and research fellow — eschew in their methodological afterward the postmodernism and constructivism which characterize some branches of law and literature studies like Ian Ward's Shakespeare and the Literary Imagination. They treat culture and literature as separate entities and show how understanding mirrored...