The yoke of matrimony made sex lawful but at the cost of confining it to single partner.

But marriage is not just a relationship between two people. It is also an arrangement for transferring property between families and generations of legitimate children. Its purpose, in the words of William Gouge, a Puritan divine under James I, is the "procreation of children . . . that the world might be increased . . . with a legitimate brood." Because of the part it plays in transferring property from generation to generation along the male line, it is a crucial institution in a patriarchal and aristocratic society like Shakespeare's. Especially under the Tudors, who had made wealthy nobles of men of obscure birth, gentility was a complex thing, figured upon blood descent or "family" but based increasingly upon wealth or property. And marriage, which united families while it distributed property, figured in both. It was, as the historian Lawrence Stone pointed out, "an institutional device to ensure the perpetuation of the family and its property," but it was also a means by which ancient families could renew their wealth and newly wealthy families could ally themselves with noble blood. By Elizabeth's time marriage had become a public event, celebrated, when they could be afforded, by feasting and dancing. The weddings of the elite enacted the superior status of their class by including their social inferiors in their displays of magnificence.

Noble and royal marriages were matters of state; some, like the proposed marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk, were considered acts of treason, and most, like that of Essex's follower, the Earl of Southampton, had to win the approval of a sometimes reluctant Queen. In the 1570s Bess of Hardwick landed briefly in the Tower of London for arranging a match between her daughter Elizabeth Cavendish and the brother of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the murdered husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. Queen Elizabeth objected because the groom had a claim to the English throne. And she repeated frustrated all plans for the marriage of their daughter, Arabella Stuart, whom Bess of Harwick lobbied to have named as Elizabeth's successor. When the Queen died, her successor, James I, also forbade Arabella to marry. Among the middling sort, especially for daughters and younger sons, considerations of rank and wealth in making a match often yielded to personal attraction, although they never disappeared entirely. Only the humbler sort, those unencumbered with property, were free to follow their likings.

Among families with property the success of a match often turned on the arrangements for the transfer of property negotiated between the families of the prospective bride and groom: on dowries, the property a wife brought to her husband; portions, the share of an estate to be settled upon the couple; and jointures, the portion of a husband's estate set aside for his widow. Courtship was initiated and controlled by men: the father of the groom called on the father of the bride, and negotiations began. No one—supposedly—could be forced to marry against his or her will; in its marginal note to Genesis 24:57 the Geneva Bible says, "Parents have no authority to marry their children without consent of the parties." But children, whether out of duty or naked economic calculation, often bowed to the influence, sometimes quite forceful, of their parents and friends.

If they exchanged vows in the present tense (per verba di presenti )—"I do take thee to be my wedded husband or wife"—their contract was binding, and their marriage was valid before the law "without lying together," that is, whether consummated or not. "I have heard lawyers say," claims the Duchess of Malfi in John Webster's tragedy, "a contract in a chamber / Per verba di presenti is absolute marriage" (1.1.477-8). A contract de futuro, made in the future tense (such as, "I will marry you") was only a promise to wed. It could be simple and binding or conditional; in either case, the couple was married only when they ratified their contract by having sexual intercourse. Neither a present nor a future contract needed to be witnessed. Derived from medieval law, this common law description of how one married, was not changed in England until 1753.

But, as the Law's Resolutions shows, opinion was turning against marriages made by simple, mutual consent and especially against promises or contracts in futuro. Although the law did not require parental consent if the couple were of age, "it is now received a general opinion that the good-will of parents is required in regard of honesty, not of necessity, according to the canons which exact necessarily none other consent but only of the parties themselves, whose conjunction is in hand, without which the conclusion of parents is of none effect." And although "secret promising," contracts in futuro made without witnesses, were "tolerated" by the law, they were less "esteemed" than public promises, "misliked" because there was no proof of their existence. "The ghostly enemy doth deceive many persons by the pretense and color of matrimony in private and secret contracts," Richard Whytford wrote in A Werke for Housholders (1530, 1537). "For many men when they cannot obtain their unclean desire of a woman will promise marriage, and thereupon make a contract promise each other saying, 'Here I take thee Margery unto my wife, I thereto plight thee my troth.' And she again unto him in like manner. And after that done, they suppose they may lawfully use their unclean behavior, and sometime the act and deed follow, unto the great offense of God and their own souls." Because such contracts were binding, a spurned suitor could thwart a successful rival and prevent the marriage by claiming that she or he had a pre-existing contract to wed. Or a reluctant suitor, repenting at leisure, could escape a contract by claiming that his or her consent hinged upon a condition that had not been met. Such disputes arose constantly, and the church courts dealt with an almost infinite variety of contracts that were ambiguously worded, unwitnessed, or claimed to hinge on unmet conditions.

For this reason the Puritan godly ministers in particular insisted that contracts or troth-plightings between couples should be marked or celebrated with a solemn public ceremony. William Gouge insisted that a couple should pass through "three steps or degrees" on the path to matrimony: "a mutual liking," based upon the couple's own "mature deliberation" and the "good advice" of family and friends, followed by "a joint consent and absolute promise of marrying one another before sufficient witnesses." "This rightly made," solemnized by the joining of hands and an exchange of oaths, "is a contract," but it was only "the beginning of marriage." It bound the couple to marry at some future time. "A lawful contract knitteth so firm a knot as cannot be broken," Gouge insisted. But it should to be followed by "a public solemnization of marriage" to confer conjugal rights and render the issue of the union legitimate. Neither the church nor the state, however, required a contract or a ceremony. As long as the banns—public notice of an intended marriage given in church so that anyone knowing of any impediment to that marriage could lodge an objection— were published or a license exempting them obtained, a couple could consider themselves lawfully married without either.

Although the author of the Resolutions conceded that the law required only "the consent of the parties themselves," many felt that even children of legal age should get their parents' consent to marry. In practice, this meant the consent of the patriarch, since he ruled his wife. Even before the Reformation reached England, Juan Luis Vives had argued for such consent. God commands that we honor our father and mother, Vives had pointed out, in love as in all things.

But, especially among families with property, there were sound social and economic reasons for parental consent as well. During Shakespeare's lifetime more and more of the writers of sermons and "conduct books" insisted upon the role of parents and "friends," kinfolk and advisors with an interest in the family's fortunes, in making a match. In 1582 George Whetstone, whose Promos and Cassandra provided Shakespeare with much of the plot for Measure for Measure, took up the question of balancing the interests of parents and children in choosing a mate. Parents, he suggests, play the part of "foresight," tempering the "fancy" or desire of their children with their experience.

"Marriage hath need of many counselors, and dost thou count [her] father too many . . . which is like the foreman of thy instructors?" asked Henry Smith in A Preparative to Marriage from 1591. "Mark what kind of youth they be, which have such hast, that they dare not stay for their parents advice, they are such as hunt for nothing but beauty. . . . therefore honor thy parents in this, as thou wouldest that thy children should honor thee." And most of the moralists agreed that the foundation of marriage, according to the influential domestic adviser William Gouge, was "reciprocal affection" between the intending parties. Parents and kinsmen should make their suggestions, of course, and the courtship should develop with the counsel and approval of "wise and understanding friends." But without "mutual liking," most insisted, the marriage should not proceed.

Nonetheless the drumbeat for reuiring parental consent continued. The Canons of 1604 required that children under 21 could not marry without it. And the most influential and widely read Puritan preacher of the time, William Perkins, insisted relentlessly upon the necessity of parental—that is, patriarchal—consent. Perkins wrote Christian Economy, or A Short Survey of the Right Manner of Erecting and Ordering a Family, According to the Scriptures not merely as a book of precepts guiding family life but as laws based on the absolute authority of Scripture superseding both common and canon law. Church and state required only the free consent of husband and wife, but Perkins insisted that true Christian marriage also required the consent of parents.

Unless parents give "their full and free consent," Perkins insisted, their children are not married in God's eyes but only in the eyes of men.

The church took it as a fundamental belief that marriage ought to be free and uncompelled, and a forced marriage could be annulled. But throughout the sixteenth century the moralists insisted over and over again that mutual consent was merely the first step in the process of marriage and not, as canon and civil law had always held, marriage itself. Increasingly they identified marriage not with consent but with the public ritual or wedding ceremony, with going to church. The church courts, labeled "bawdy courts" because of their jurisdiction over sexual misbehavior, did the same; increasingly they ruled that contracts that had not been witnessed and solemnized in church were invalid. Like their insistence on parental consent, the moralists' and the church's campaign to redefine marriage reveals how marriage itself is contested in Shakespeare's time. The folk largely observe the consensual marriage forms of the middle ages: the binding contract yokes the couple and grants them conjugal rights. The moralists and reformers shift the locus of marriage from the contract establishing mutual consent to the giving of the couple in marriage by their parents in church: to parental consent and the withholding of conjugal rights until the wedding ceremony

THE MISERIES OF ENFORCED MARRIAGE

Enforced marriages, child marriages, or crudely arranged matches that went against the wishes of at least one of the partners were not commonplaces in Shakespeare's time. No one could lawfully be forced to marry against his or her will. In his emblem of "Unequal Marriage," Geffrey Whitney alludes to a "tyrant vile" who would bind living men to dead bodies and leave them to die.

But enforced marriages were not unknown. One famous case of enforced marriage gone sour occurred in Yorkshire in 1605, when Walter Calverley attacked his wife and killed two of their sons. It spawned two plays, George Wilkins's The Miseries of Enforced Marriage and the anonymous Yorkshire Tragedy, sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare although now thought to be largely by Thomas Middleton. In Wilkins's tragicomic version, an underage heir of an ancient family, left a substantial income, falls in love with a local girl of good family and "by private assurance" makes her his trothplight wife in the sight of Heaven. Her father, discovering their feelings, "is contented with the contract." The young man's greedy guardian, however, resolves to match him with the guardian's niece. The young man protests that because he is already contracted, marriage will make him an adulterer and his children bastards, but his guardian refuses to recognize a troth made by the young man himself and with threats and coercion forces him to marry the niece.

But marriage leaves him "like a cashiered captain discontent," and sending his betrothed a simple note, "Forgive me, for I am married," he deserts the wife he was forced to marry. His jilted lover knows that their contract forbids her to marry, even though he has married another; she is

She takes her own life, and her grieving father curses the young man as a murderer, the woman he has married a strumpet, and his children bastards. The desperate young man, bowed with guilt, vows to lead a life of dissipation to warn others by the example of "his life so foul, [that] men ne'er should join the hands without the soul" (1032–3). "Though we heard the words of ceremony," he tells the woman he was coerced into marrying, "But had hands knit as felons that wear fetters/ Forced upon them" (2445–7).

Wilkins tacks a happy ending onto his tale. A Yorkshire Tragedy hews close to the actual events. Its nameless protagonist abuses his wife, calling her a harlot and their children bastards, insisting like the historical Calverley that "from the first hour he embraced her to that very minute he did loathe her." Wasting his estate like a prodigal, the spendthrift finally causes his young brother to be imprisoned for his debt. Crazed with shame, he snaps, kills two of his sons, and attacks his wife and servant before he is captured. His explanation is closely modeled on the historical Calverley's: "I had brought them to beggary and am resolved I could not have pleased God better than by freeing them from it."

A second case enveloped some of the most powerful families in England. In 1616, Sir Edward Coke was dismissed from the King's Bench because of his outspoken efforts to limit the royal prerogative. In search of influential friends, he offered his fourteen-year-old daughter Frances in marriage to John Villiers, the twenty-six-year-old brother of George Villiers, then Earl of Buckingham and King James's handsome favorite. Sir Edward's daughter, Frances Coke, was an heiress with great expectations on her mother's side, and Coke offered a dowry of £10,000, a yearly allowance of £1,000, and her greater fortune to come. Frances and her mother, Elizabeth Lady Hatton, objected to the match; John Villiers, her intended, suffered from bouts of mania in which he would smash glass and "bloody himself."

When Coke insisted, his wife, Lady Hatton, spirited Frances away to the country and tried to forestall the marriage to John Villiers by contracting Frances to another suitor, Henry, Earl of Oxford. Forging some love letters from Oxford, Lady Hatton then convinced her daughter Frances to sign a document pledging herself to Oxford, whom Frances now favored over Villiers because of the forged letters. Armed with a dubious search warrant, Coke broke into the house, discovered Frances and her mother hiding in a dark closet, and dragged off the weeping girl. Lady Hatton hired a troop of men with pistols to steal Frances back. Coke then had his wife arrested for counterfeiting the contract with Oxford and retaking their daughter by force. His wife answered that Frances had been "forced against her will contrary to her vows and liking to the will of him she disliked." The Privy Council, fearing to offend the powerful Villiers family but hoping to mollify Lady Hatton, returned Frances to her but ordered that John Villiers be allowed to court Frances. Oxford withdrew his suit, fearing the favorite's wrath.

But Frances still would not accept Villiers. Finally Lady Hatton had to be put under house arrest, and her daughter was "tied to the bedposts" and flogged by her father until she consented to the match, writing her mother a dictated letter accepting Villiers's suit in which she was forced to acknowledge that she was a mere child "not understanding the world nor what is good for [her]self." King James himself gave away the bride and visited them in bed the next day for the details of the wedding night.

The groom's fits grew worse; he had to be restrained from doing violence to himself. The bride fell in love with the unmarried Sir Robert Howard, who would visit her at night, taking a secret passage to her chamber. Buckingham declared that his brother had gone mad and took control of his estates, including Frances's portion; then, declaring her conduct the cause of his brother's madness, he forced her off her own estate. She became pregnant by Howard, and they were called before the Court of High Commission, accused of adultery and bastardy. After three years they were convicted and sentenced to public penance. Howard was pardoned, but Frances was ordered to pay a fine and to walk barefoot, dressed only in a white sheet, through the London streets on a Sunday to stand in shame at the door of a church. She escaped house arrest instead, was imprisoned again, and fled to France, where she was reunited with Howard.

THE ANCIENT PRIVILEGE: PARENTAL CONSENT IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

The ongoing debate over parental consent takes on mythic form in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Hermia's father claims the ancient privilege of Athens:

Egeus claims that Athenian law gives the patriarch the power to choose his child's mate because she is his property. She must become the sexual property of the man he has chosen or she must die. In ancient Rome, although not in Athens, a ruling father or grandfather, the paterfamilias, had the power of life and death over his descendants that was not terminated upon a child's arrival at any age of majority but most commonly by the death or voluntary decision of the paterfamilias. His consent was necessary for the marriage of his children, and he had the power to cause a divorce. The power over life and death was usually exercised soon after birth, when a father chose to acknowledge and rear a child or not to do so. But legends and some historical accounts show a paterfamilias executing, banishing, or disowning an adult child. Sons are portrayed as liable to punishment for offenses against the state, daughters for unchastity. The law against adultery passed by Augustus Caesar gave the paterfamilias the right to kill adulterous daughters on the spot if taken in the act. The right of paternal authority, patria potestas, remained on the books until Justinian's codification of Roman law in CE 529. And Shakespeare was aware of it; in Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet, the source for his play, Shakespeare read: "if children did rebel . . . by law . . . .parents had the power of sudden death." In A Midsummer Night's Dream Theseus revises the ancient privilege in a way that reflects the power of parental consent in marriage as the Elizabethan moralists and conduct writers like Perkins urge it:

Egeus cannot force Hermia to marry without her consent; as the Geneva Bible instructs, "Parents have not authority to marry their children without consent of the parties." But it adds, "the consent of parents is requisite in marriage, seeing the very infidels did also observe it as a thing necessary." If she does not consent to marry the man her father chooses for her, she cannot marry at all. Thus Hermia cannot marry without her father's consent, and so must live "a barren sister" all her life (72), her power to reject a suitor hardening into the rejection of all heterosexuality:

The lovers' escape into the woods is a fall into the dark wood of fancy, of love-in-idleness or arbitrary desire which does not confirm the wisdom of denying parental choice but instead exposes the lovers to the patriarchal control of Lord Oberon, whose love juice reveals the essential randomness of fancy or sexual desire and who is able to redirect their desire onto the appropriate mates.

Except for the women. In a patriarchal society, women have only the limited agency of accepting or rejecting their suitors, and the action of the play, the lovers' flight, is undertaken to preserve that agency from the harsh Athenian law that gives fathers the power to deny their daughters any right to choose their mates. The action of the play is to secure the daughters' right, and Hermia and Helena, by the very constancy of their choice, earn their right. Why does Shakespeare, writing from and for a patriarchal society, choose to defend their right, to preserve that agency?

May Day was a yearly rite of pagan origin celebrating the coming of spring, when, the Puritan Phillip Stubbes wrote, "all the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills, and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes." They held archery tournaments, Morris dances, sword dances, feasting, music, and drink and stayed out to greet the May sunrise and bring back boughs of flowers and garlands to decorate the village the next morning. On May Day the Lord Mayor led a procession of Londoners out into the fields, and even the Queen indulged in the sport, riding in the woods and coming home with the May boughs; in 1602, at the very end of her life she, too, went a-Maying. "There's not a budding boy or girl, this day," Robert Herrick wrote in "Corinna's Going A-Maying,"

so that

May Day became associated with sexual license, but especially with the kind of clandestine or informal marriages not sanctified by the church or registered with the state in which a couple would marry by contract or simple agreement and proceed immediately to have sexual relations without publicly announcing their intention to be wed or without a priest asking the banns, "to wit, whether any man can allege a reason wherefore they that are about to be married may not lawfully come together" publicly in church. Herrick poses that challenge to sanctified marriage very clearly:

For every couple who choose their priest for a sanctioned, public marriage, "many a green-gown"—proverbially green from having been tumbled or rolled over in the clover—"has been given," and many a treasure of chastity has been rifled, its "locks picked."

In A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare draws on the Puritan construction of May Day as a contesting of marriage. He identities the lovers' flight to the woods as a contesting of patriarchal marriage in which the patriarch, Egeus or Theseus, has the power to choose his child's mate or to deny her the sexual use of her body altogether. But having evaded patriarchal law, the lovers find themselves in a dark wood of contention and desire in which they are themselves unable to achieve constancy or even protect chastity. Demetrius, whose sexual transgressions have already drawn the attention of the state, threatens Helena with rape:

But maidens have as much to fear from those who do love them. When Hermia, "faint with wand'ring in the wood" (2.2.35), prepares to spend the night there like a May celebrant, Lysander lies down next to her, declaring:

"Troth" can simply mean "good faith," but troth, the OED points out, hardly survived the sixteenth century except in archaic locutions, like "plight one's troth," in which it meant "to engage oneself to marry" (OED 2). "Troth plighting" was one of the terms for contracting to marry at the time, and the contract was binding. If an Elizabethan plighted troth with someone she or he was not free to marry someone else. Many contracted couples, including Shakespeare himself, considered themselves married in the eyes of God and began full sexual relations upon lighting their troth. Hermia seems to catch such am implication in Lysander's offered "troth."