Although Shakespeare’s England was ruled by a woman, men and women largely accepted the supremacy of men. Patriarchy, from the Greek for "rule of the father," is the belief that women are naturally inferior to men and must therefore accept male domination. In Elizabethan England that belief, accepted—though not practiced—by virtually all, was founded on the authority of the Bible. Eve’s creation out of Adam’s side in Genesis 2, an inversion of sexual procreation in which woman is formed out of the body of a man, was interpreted to give Adam a claim of possession over Eve—"Then the man said, This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh"—although the text anachronistically invokes fathers and mothers before sexual procreation—or sexual difference—has occurred to them: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed" (2:25). And God curses Eve for her disobedience by granting Adam the same dominion over her that he grants him over every living thing that moveth upon the earth: "I will greatly increase thy sorrows, and thy conceptions. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire shall be subject to thine husband, and he shall rule over thee" (3:16).

On these Old Testament texts St. Paul based the subjugation of women in the New Testament. "For man was not made from woman, but woman from man," he wrote to the Corinthians; "Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man" (I Corinthians 11:7–9). " For man was made to this end and purpose," says the note in the Geneva Bible, "that the glory of God should appear in his rule and authority: but the woman was made, that by profession of her obedience, she might more honor her husband. He proveth the inequality of the woman, by that, that the man is the matter where of woman was first made," and "Secondly, by that, that the woman was made for man, and not the man for the woman’s sake."

The First Letter to Timothy, ascribed to but probably not written by Paul, also bases male supremacy on Genesis: "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. I permit not a woman to teach, neither to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and was in the transgression" (2:11–15). "It is not lawful for women to teach in the Congregation," the Geneva Bible adds in a marginal note, "because by this means, they should be placed above men, for they should be their masters: which is against God’s ordinance." Paul, they note, "proveth this ordinance of God, whereby the woman is subject to man, first by that, that God made the woman after man, for man's sake. . . Then, because that after sin, God enjoined the woman this punishment, for that the man was deceived by her."

THE LEGACY OF PAUL

The Pauline texts bequeathed a powerful anti-feminist and even misogynist strain to all of Christian thought, even that of the Renaissance humanists. An early humanist, student of Erasmus and friend of Sir Thomas More, Juan Luis Vives exemplifies the learned defense of male supremacy. Vives was invited to England by Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon to draw up a pattern of study for Henry’s eldest child, Mary Tudor. Catherine commissioned him to write De Institutione Feminae Christianae for Mary; finished in 1523 and translated into English in 1529, it proved the most influential treatise on the education of women in a time when educating women was a controversial idea. Vives first derives women’s subordination and submission to men from God’s second book of revelation, what Milton calls "the book of knowledge fair . . . Of nature’s works" (Paradise Lost 3.47,49), as well as from Scripture. He cites Aristotle, who first grounded the inferiority of women in biology: "In all animals," Aristotle wrote, "nature has given a similar disposition to the males and the females. . . . The female is softer, and more tamable and submissive. . . . males are more passionate and fierce" [Historia Animalium (History of Animals) IX.2, 608a–608b]. But Vives's main argument is based on the fact of woman’s intellectual inferiority as demonstrated by Scripture.

JUAN LUIS VIVES, INSTRUCTION OF A CHRISTIAN WOMAN (1529)

CHAPTER IV. HOW SHE SHALL BEHAVE HERSELF UNTO HER HUSBAND

HOLY MATRIMONY

The text that Vives cites, from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, "But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ: and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God"(1 Cor. 11:3), invests patriarchy with divine sanction. Such instruction from the pulpit was incessant. The marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, which demands that a woman vow to "obey" and "serve" her husband, ended with a mosaic of citations from Paul.

A WIFE’S DUTY

The same Pauline texts echo throughout the "Homily of the State of Matrimony," one of the sermons to be read from the pulpit at Anglican services added to the first book of homilies by Elizabeth’s bishops in 1563. Of husbands the authors of the Homily, reminding the congregation of Paul’s characterization of women as "the weaker vessel," advise: "he ought to be the leader and author of love in cherishing and increasing concord, which then shall take place if he will use measurableness [temperance] and not tyranny, and if he yield some things to the woman. For the woman is a weak creature, not endued with like strength and constancy of mind."

MARRIAGE AND PROPERTY

When man and wife became "one flesh," they became a single legal entity as well. All of the legal rights and responsibilities belonging to a single woman of legal age, the rights to own and sell property, will it to her heirs, enter into contracts, and sue others, were subsumed into those of the husband, and the woman became a "feme covert," her legal person "veiled as it were, clouded and overshadowed," in the words of the author of The Law’s Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632), by those of her husband. Only if they were widowed did married women reclaim the rights of single women of age.

A widow or dowager could be a person of considerable power, for good or for ill. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Theseus, eager to be wed, complains that the moon

just as a widow stands between an eager young man and his patrimony. But in the same scene Lysander tells Hermia, whose father claims the power of a patriarch to choose his daughter’s husband,

Before they were married, and especially if they belonged to families with property, women were subsumed under the legal and moral authority of their fathers, who were responsible both for their livelihoods and for finding them husbands. Almost all of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have agreed with the tamed Kate in her final speech of submission in Taming of the Shrew: