Shakespearean Marriage

Marriage features to a greater or lesser extent in virtually every play Shakespeare wrote - as the festive end of comedy, as the link across the cycles of the history plays, as a marker of the difference between his own society and that depicted in the Roman plays, and, all too often, as the starting-point for the tragedies. Situating his representations of marriage firmly within the ideologies and practices of Renaissance culture, Lisa Hopkins argues that Shakespeare anatomises marriage much as he does kingship, and finds it similarly indispensable to the underpinning of society, however problematic it may be as a guarantor of personal happiness.

Marriage features to a greater or lesser extent in virtually every play Shakespeare wrote - as the festive end of comedy, as the link across the cycles of the history plays, as a marker of the difference between his own society and that depicted in the Roman plays, and, all too often, as the starting-point for the tragedies. Situating his representations of marriage firmly within the ideologies and practices of Renaissance culture, Lisa Hopkins argues that Shakespeare anatomises marriage much as he does kingship, and finds it similarly indispensable to the underpinning of society, however problematic it may be as a guarantor of personal happiness.

Booknews

Proposes that the most outstanding feature of Shakespearean comedy is its obsession with marriage. In the plays, marriage entails a loss of personal freedom and psychological security, but is nevertheless necessary for its ability to regulate relations in groups, and ensure the maintenance and perpetuation of the structures of civilized society as a whole. Woman is consistently the unexamined term in the playwright's repeated instantiation of the marital status quo. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.