The Social Context of Marriage
Courtship
Para1Love was not yet seen as the primary basis for marriage in the early modern period.
Parents or guardians typically chose a partner for their child, thinking little of
romantic love and deciding instead based on economics, alliances, and politics. This
practice was shifting in the period, though, and children gradually became more empowered
to veto a parent’s choice. People tended to marry within the same status, such as
nobles marrying other nobles or artisans marrying within their own group of artisans.
Age of Marriage
Para2Many people know that in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet was engaged to be married to Paris when she is not yet 14, but this was not
a common practice in reality. By 1604, the English government forbade parish priests
to marry people under the age of 21 unless they had guardian or parental consent.
Researchers have found that most commoners were married as late as their mid-twenties,
although marriage at puberty (age 12–15) was acceptable, especially among the higher
ranks. Even in these early marriages, sexual consummation of the marriage was delayed
until the parties were physically mature.
Para3Some argue that Shakespeare’s plays show an opposition to early marriage. In Richard II, he changed the character Isabella, who was eight years old in historical records,
to be older. However, Shakespeare also changed Juliet to be younger than she is in
the Italian sources, so these are not necessarily indicative of the playwright’s point
of view.
Agents and Go-betweens
Para4High-ranking nobles sometimes employed an agent to find a match for their child. The
agents proposed a match and offered reasons why their employer should choose specific
candidates. The agents would also look at the power that an alliance with the candidate’s
family brought. Go-betweens were also sometimes used when a nobleman found a match
he was interested in to help either negotiate with the family or even to woo his potential
bride if she was at a distance. Oftentimes, though, marriages were negotiated by family
members, if not by the parents themselves.
Dowries and Jointures
Para5Money was one of the major concerns for marriages during this period, with the amount
of a dowry and also a jointure negotiated long before the wedding. A dowry, which
was a sum of money paid to the groom’s family, allowed the bride’s family to ensure
a stable financial future when she married into a new household. The dowry, sometimes
called a portion, could be one or all of these things: money, land, property, and valuables such as
jewels and gold or silver plate. Lack of dowry did mean some women did not marry and
were left as spinsters, an undesirable social status due to the financial burden it
placed on families.
Para6The jointure had a different use than the dowry. The main purpose of the jointure
was as a safeguard; this sum of money was set aside to make sure that a widow would
be taken care of and would be able to live somewhere in the event of her husband’s
death.
Courtship and Politics
Para7Courtship was not typically about love, rather it was about gaining political advantage.
For royalty, marriages were used to strengthen or repair alliances. For example, in
Shakespeare’s King Henry V, the English King Henry marries the French princess, Catherine of Valois, because
France desired peace between the two countries.
Marriage and Companionship
Para8Historians identify the early modern period as a time when dynastic and economic reasons
for marriage began to be supplanted by emotional and spiritual ones. Much of this
shift was due to the Protestant Reformation and is surprisingly attributed to Puritans.
Puritans saw companionate marriage, with consent and unity of purpose between the
spouses, as the foundation upon which a strong society was built. Men still held strong
patriarchal power in families, but they increasingly consulted their wives as partners
rather than purely as superiors.
Para9Among the upper ranks, property and family alliances remained important even as companionate
marriage began to evolve. Connection between the spouses encouraged and valued, but
romantic love seldom inspired or anchored marraiges among the elite, regardless of
what the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries show. In reality, this meant
that after children had been born to ensure that property could be passed to an heir,
many noblemen separated from their wives and perhaps pursued other romantic interests.
As many as one-third of older noblemen did this between 1595 and 1620. There is little
or no data to indicate what inspired this choice or what the women in such separations
thought.
Key Print Sources
Cook, Ann Jennalie. Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society. Princeton University Press, 2014.
Crawford, Patricia, and Laura Gowing. Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. Routledge, 2000.
Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart
England. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Key Online Sources
Best, Michael.
The Age of Marriage.Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/family/marriage.html. Accessed 23 Feb. 2023.
Dolan, Loretta.
Child Marriage in Early Modern England.Australian Women’s History Network. 3 Jan. 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20231104150237/http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/child-marriage/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2023.
Layson, Hana, and Susan Philips.
Marriage and Family in Shakespeare’s England.Seventeenth-Century Collection Essays. The Newberry Library. 16 Jul. 2012. https://dcc.newberry.org/?p=14411. Accessed 23 Feb. 2023.
Lyon, Karen.
Wooing and Wedding: Courtship and Marriage in Early Modern England.Shakespeare and Beyond: The Folger Shakespeare Library. 8 Jun. 2018. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/folger-story/wooing-and-wedding-courtship-and-marriage-in-early-modern-england/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2023.
Prosopography
Kaitlin Zaugg
Kaitlin Zaugg was a student at Utah Valley University.
Kate McPherson
Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley
University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity
in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities
Institute,
Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom,at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.
Leah Hamby
Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed
several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from
Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her
other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.
Michael Best
Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the
Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the
ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery,
a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on
Electronic Shakespeares,and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.
Navarra Houldin
Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual
remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major
in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary
research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They
are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice
Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.
Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | The Social Context of Marriage |
| Type of text | Critical |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | Early Modern England Encyclopedia |
| Source |
By Kaitlin Zaugg and Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
|
| Editorial declaration | This document uses Canadian English spelling |
| Edition | Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a |
| Sponsor(s) |
Early Modern England EncyclopediaAnthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
|
| Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
| Document status | published |
| Funder(s) |
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University |
| License/availability |
Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by
Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions:
(1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of
the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3)
the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes
of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without
the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor
the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion
into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are
considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.
|