If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow
By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,
Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite…(185–8)
‘The rite’ is eventually performed off-stage by Friar Lawrence. Romeo promises to tell him ‘when and where and how We met, we wooed and made exchange of vow…’ even though, as far as the audience has witnessed, neither of them has made a vow. What is more, no banns have been published and parental consent has not been and will not be given. By the end of Act II scene ii of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is already hopelessly compromised. The friar, ‘a ghostly confessor and a sin-absolver’, the like of whom had not been seen in England for more than fifty years, is hardly as cheery and reassuring a character as he is usually played. Juliet is to be shriven—an exotic concept for most of Shakespeare’s audience—then married in short order. Romeo, whose vow-making has been anything but satisfactory, tells the friar that his job is to join their hands ‘with holy words’. The friar’s answer would have chilled many an anxious parent to the bone.
Come, come with me, and we will make short work,
For by your leaves you shall not stay alone
Till holy church incorporate two in one. (II. iv. 35–7)
It is the same meddlesome friar who advises Romeo to consummate his marriage before fleeing to Mantua where he will live till they can find a time to ‘blaze’, that is, publicly proclaim, the fact of the marriage and reconcile the friends of both parties. Verona is and is not the Warwickshire of the 1590s; what Romeo and Juliet do was identified with the bad old days, but the anxieties evoked by their wilfulness were real and present to Shakespeare’s audience. Scandals arising from secret or invented handfastings, troth-plights and weddings occurred every year, and cruel and tyrannical proceedings by parents were not uncommon either. To Shakespeare’s audience Capulet’s contemptuous treatment of his daughter would have been every bit as shocking as her impetuosity.
In his search for an explanation of the high incidence of premarital pregnancy in early modern England, Laslett came across the Proceedings of the Registry of the Archdeaconry at Leicester, July 1598:
The common use and custom within the county of Leicester…for the space of 10, 20, 30 or 40 years past hath been and is that any man being a suitor to a woman in the way of marriage is upon the day appointed to make a final conclusion of the marriage before treated of. If the said marriage be concluded and contracted then the man doth abide the night the next following after such a contract, otherwise he doth depart without staying the night.2
Again and again in the record we find rather confusing references to the fact that, after the contract to marry is concluded, it is made binding by the beginning of cohabitation, before solemnisation can take place. In The Christian State of Matrimony (1543) Heinrich Bullinger deplores the practice: ‘in some place there is such a manner, well worthy to be rebuked, that, at the handfasting, there is made a great feast and superfluous banquet, and even the same night are the two handfasted persons brought and laid together, yea, certain weeks before they go to the church’.3
If the couple do not sleep together after the troth-plight it is not consummated and may, with difficulty and at considerable expense, be set aside by an ecclesiastical court. The separation of wedding from the solemnisation of matrimony was not, as we might think, a division of the civil contract from the sacrament, as happens in Europe today, when couples marry in the town hall and then go to church. Rather it is a separation of the actual wedding from the public recognition of that wedding. Under the old dispensation, the actual contract of matrimony, the wedding, had taken place in the church porch; the bridal couple then entered the church not for the wedding but for the nuptial mass, when their union was blessed.
The protestant reformers who drew up the Book of Common Prayer during the brief reign of Edward VI brought the wedding into the church, so that the spouses uttered the words of both the pre-contract and the contract before the altar in full view of their families, friends and neighbours. This was the ideal, but it was far from the real. For several generations local custom had filled the doctrinal void and was not so easily abandoned. Besides, nothing could alter the underlying tenet that if a man told a woman that he was taking her to be his wife, and she replied in kind, in the present tense, they were married in the sight of God. When Edward VI died and Mary acceded to the throne, the Book of Common Prayer was thrown out, and the attempt to make publication of the banns and the church wedding itself a condition of the validity of marriage was abandoned. Catechisms like the Bishop of Lincoln’s Wholesome and Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Seven Sacraments (1558) reiterated the old Catholic canon law:
although the solemnisation of Matrimony and the benediction of the parties married is made and given in the face of the church by a priest, yet the contract of matrimony wherein this sacrament consisteth, may be and is commonly made by the layman and woman which be married together. And because for lack of knowledge how such contracts ought to be duly made, and for omitting of such things as be necessary to the same, it chanceth oftentimes that the parties change their minds and will not keep that promise of marriage which seemed to have passed between them before, whereupon cometh and groweth between such persons and their friends great grudge and hatred and great suit in the law.
The good bishop then goes on to supply the correct form of words for the contract, and goes to on to reassure the faithful that ‘the parties so contracting may without scruple or evil conscience for so much live together in godly and chaste matrimony to the good will and pleasure of almighty God’.4
Laslett is tempted to interpret pre-solemnisation cohabitation as a sort of ‘trial marriage’, which is a little misleading. If the contract itself was valid, in that there was no legal impediment, the only way the trial marriage could fail would be if one or other partner was incapable of sexual intercourse. This too would become a matter for the ecclesiastical court, which could order an examination of either party or both parties. Hence the rage and disgust of the puritans at the antics of the learned clerics in what was known to the common people as the ‘bawdy’ court.
This court poulleth parishes, scourgeth the poor hedge priests, loadeth church-wardens with manifest perjuries, punisheth whoredoms and adulteries with toyish censures, remitteth without satisfying the congregation, and that in secret places, giveth out dispensations for unlawful marriages, and committeth a thousand suchlike abominations.5
The matters that came before the church courts were:
so handled that it would grieve a chaste ear to hear the bawdy pleading of so many proctors and doctors in those courts, and the sumners, yea, and the registrars themselves, Master Archdeacon and Master Chancellor are even fain to laugh it out many times, when they can keep their countenance no longer. An unchaste kind of dealing of unchaste matters: when folk may not marry, what degrees may not marry…6
The assertion by the likes of Anthony Holden that Ann’s pregnancy was the result of a single ‘roll in the hay’ is more revealing of their own attitudes than of the social context of Ann’s pregnancy. Elizabethans were not hillbillies. The marriage prospects of their children were matters of the highest importance. Young people were never unobserved by their neighbours and kin. Demographic historians would not take Nicholas Breton’s Countryman as a reliable observer of what really went on, but his is certainly a description of a bucolic ideal, to which village elders could aspire.
…at our meetings on the holy days between the lads and the wenches, such true mirth at honest meetings, such dancing on the green, in the market house or about the may-pole, where the young folks smiling kiss at every turning, and the old folks checking with laughing their children, when dancing for the garland, playing at stool ball for a tansy and a banquet of curds and cream, with a cup of old nappy ale, matter of small charge with a little reward for the piper, after casting of sheep’s eyes and faith and troth f
or a bargain, clapping of hands, are seals to the truth of hearts, when a pair of gloves or a handkerchief are as good as the best obligation, with a cap and a curtsey hie you home, maids to milking, and so merrily goes the day away.7
At such gatherings a young woman who was not spoken for would have found it difficult to steal away with an unattached boy, but space was made for young people known to be courting, so that they could be together unobserved, even to the extent of leaving them together in the family house in the dark. The likelihood is that Ann Hathaway and young Shakespeare were known to be courting months before her father’s friends applied for a special licence for them to marry. Further evidence of a tradition in parts of England of bedding the couple first and going to the church in the morning can be found in the well-known ballad of The Northamptonshire Lover:
The damsel, this perceiving
And noting his behaviour,
Thought fit to entertain him,
Possessed of all her favour,
Which he enjoyed with full consent.
So unto church they go,
Where he espoused the maid he loved,
Fa lero lero lo.8
Ann’s enemies among the bardolaters have seen a rejection of his own youthful behaviour in Measure for Measure, in the harsh treatment meted out to Claudio, who seems to have done pretty much as he did in 1582.
upon a true contract
I got possession of Julietta’s bed.
You know the lady. She is fast my wife,
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order. This we came not to
Only for propagation of a dower
Remaining in the coffer of her friends,
From whom we thought it meet to hide our love
Till time had made them for us, but it chances
The stealth of our most mutual entertainment
With character too gross is writ on Juliet. (I. iv. 133–48)
There was nothing sinful in Claudio’s and Julia’s cohabitation, because, having said the words of the sponsalia per verba de praesenti, they would have been married in the eyes of God. The ‘denunciation of outward order’ is merely the making public of the state of affairs to enable its recognition in law. When Isabella hears of the pregnancy she simply cries, ‘O let him marry her,’ which would have been the reaction of most of the audience. Lucio, the whoremonger, tells her that Angelo has ‘picked out an act’ under which the punishment for fornication is death. When the disguised duke comes across Julia, he asks her if their ‘offenceful act’ was mutually committed, which, as we have seen, is enough to sanctify it, but the duke interprets the fact as increasing Julia’s burden of guilt: ‘Then was your guilt of heavier kind than his’ (II. iii. 30). Julia takes the burden upon herself:
I do repent me as it is an evil,
And take the shame with joy. (37–8)
Measure for Measure was written in 1604–5; bedding before wedding had been roundly condemned from the pulpit for years and by then the protestant reformers were beginning to see a result. More and more vicars’ courts all over the country were summoning newly-weds to face charges of fornication if their first child was born within forty weeks of the wedding, and punishing them by the same public humiliation and fines that had earlier been imposed for fornication and adultery. Public perceptions were changing; although the average age of marriage was the highest ever recorded, premarital pregnancy and bastardy were both disappearing from parish registers.9 The full extent of this step-change in public mores has yet to be charted, much less explained. Claudio’s behaviour and Angelo’s summary justice would have been judged differently by different sections of Shakespeare’s audiences whether at court or in the public theatres. Measure for Measure squarely confronts the shift in moral perception together with the distressing truth that more and more women fleeing disgrace in the church courts or actually driven out of town by the parish authorities for ‘unlawful pregnancy’ were arriving in London every week to swell the ranks of prostitutes.
The solemnisation of the marriage of Ann Hathaway and William Shakespeare is not to be found in any surviving register, which doesn’t mean that they were married hugger-mugger by a hedge-priest. The issuing of the special licence itself suggests that the wedding of Will and Ann was to be properly solemnised, in coram populo, before a congregation, and by a priest with the authority to perform the ceremony. We could hope that, though it was out of season, they treated themselves to a village wedding. Ann may even have heard the bridesmaids singing The Bride’s Goodmorrow as she opened her shutters on that dark November morning.
The night is past and joyful day appeareth
Most clear on every side.
With pleasant music we therefore salute you,
Good Morrow, Mistress Bride.
From sleep and slumber now wake you out of hand.
Your bridegroom stayeth at home,
Whose fancy, favour and affection still doth stand
Fixed on thee alone.
Dress you in your best array!
This must be your wedding day.10
Traditionally, the wedding celebrations took a whole summer’s day, beginning with the waking of the bride by her maids and ending after sunset. At sun-up the village girls would form a procession and walk to the bride’s house, singing as they went. Having roused the bride and dressed her they would then escort her on foot through the village to the church. In the epithalamium that he wrote for his own wedding with Elizabeth Boyle in 1594, Spenser conflated popular custom with the classic form; though he summoned the Muses to be bridesmaids, their duties are recognisable as those of English girls.
Early before the world’s life-giving lamp
His golden beam upon the hills doth spread,
Having dispersed the night’s uncheerful damp,
Do ye awake and with fresh lustihead
Go to the bower of my beloved love,
My truest turtle dove;
Bid her awake…
Bid her awake therefore and soon her dight [i.e. dress]—
And while she doth her dight,
Do ye to her of joy and solace sing,
That all the woods may answer and your echo ring.11
It was the maids’ job to arrange the bride’s gown and hair, which would be worn spread on her shoulders for the last time. As a married woman she would put it up and cover it with a kerchief. Spenser gives us an idea of the costume of a bride of the 1580s:
Clad all in white, that seems a virgin best…
Her long loose yellow locks like golden wire,
Sprinkled with pearl and pearling flowers a-tween,
Do like a golden mantle her attire,
And being crowned with a garland green,
Seem like some maiden queen.12
Ann is unlikely to have dressed in white, but she would have had a new gown for the occasion. When widowed Jack of Newbury took a second bride she appeared before the company of local gentry,
attired in a gown of sheep’s russet and a kirtle of fine worsted, her head attired with a biliment of gold, and her hair as yellow as gold, hanging down behind her, which was curiously combed and pleated, according to the manner in those days. She was led to the church between two sweet boys, with bride-laces and rosemary tied about their silken sleeves.13
Sometimes the bridesmaids prepared the way to the church, so that the bride did not sully her slippers:
As I have seen upon a bridal day,
Full many maids clad in their best array,
In honour of the bride come with their flaskets
Filled full with flowers, others, in wicker baskets,
Bring from the marsh rushes to o’erspread
The ground whereon the lovers tread.14
Sometimes the groom too was woken with music; in The Merchant of Venice the music Portia will have played while Bassanio considers the caskets will be such:
As are those dulcet sounds in break of day,
That creep into the
dreaming bridegroom’s ear
And summon him to marriage. (III. iii. 51–3)
The groom too had new clothes for the occasion: ‘[The groom’s] house was as full of lusty gallants that took care to set out their bridegroom all new from top to toe, with a pair of green garters tied cross above the knee and a dozen of crewel points that set off his hose very fair.’15 The groom then walks to the bride’s house with his attendant knights, ‘fresh boys’ ‘in their fresh garments trim’ with the musicians, the pipe, the tabor and the excited crowd.
The whiles the boys run up and down the street,
Crying aloud with strong, confusèd noise…16
Among the garlands brought by the maids should be a special one for the bride, according to Spenser, ‘of lilies and of roses Bound true-love-wise with a blue silk riband’.17 The onlookers begin to applaud as the groom’s party approaches and at last the bride appears:
Forth, honoured groom; behold not far behind,
Your willing bride, led by two strengthless boys…18
The wedding was above all a celebration for the neighbourhood. Rather than bringing presents the guests brought flowers and herbs, and were rewarded by the bride with tokens, usually twopenny gloves.
All things are ready and every whit prepared
To bear you company.
Your friends and parents do give their attendance
Together courteously.
The house is dressed and garnished for your sake
With flowers gallant and green.
A solemn feast your comely cooks do ready make,
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