The Age of Marriage Marriage, The Age of Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Marriage Published file. proofed updated author respStmt. swapped the desc and figDescs to be correct. Added desc and figdesc to figure, added an image source. Added date, pubPlace, and publisher tags to sources Added Shakespeare’s Life and Times database to Best sources. Fixed mistakes Created file. Leah Hamby 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.

 Kate McPherson 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.

 LEMDO Team 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 https://www.uvic.ca/
Title page of A Bride-bush or a Wedding Sermon, a 1617 sermon by William Whately that describes the duties of a husband and wife. A Bride-bush or a Wedding Sermon, a 1617 sermon by William Whately that describes the duties of a husband and wife. Image courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library. Public Domain.
Overview

One common belief about the early modern period is that children, especially girls, married young. In some noble or very wealthy houses, marriages were indeed contracted at a young age, for reasons of property and family alliance, but in fact the average age of marriage was only slightly younger than the average age of marriage in many Western countries in the 21st century—in the middle twenties.

The very young age of Shakespeare’s Juliet—who is not quite fourteen—is part of what the playwright did to heighten the tragedy he was writing in the mid-1590s, but he was not reflecting the historical reality of either early modern England or Italy. In the source material for that play, Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, the young woman who falls so impetuously in love is sixteen. The couple’s youth in Shakespeare’s version gives the tragedy much of its force, but the play’s popularity and widespread use in secondary schools has led to incorrect assumptions about how and when young noblewomen married.

Marriage Statistics

Marriage statistics indicate that the mean marriage age for the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras was higher than many people think. Data taken from baptism records and marriage certificates reveals mean marriage ages for women to have been as follows: 1566–1619 27.0 years 1647–1719 29.6 years 1719–1779 26.8 years 1770–1837 25.1 years
The marriage age of men was probably the same as or a bit older than that of women. During this period, the age of consent was twelve for a girl and fourteen for a boy, but for most children puberty came two or three years later than it does today. And even if a young noblewoman was contracted in marriage, the union would not have been consummated until she had passed through puberty.

Oddly, there seems to be a time in the late sixteenth century when the mean marriage age of women in and around the area of Stratford-on- Avon dropped as low as 21 years: the mean marriage age from 1580 to 1589 was about 20.6 years. It was in this decade that Shakespeare, at the age of eighteen, married Anne Hathaway.

Marriage Among Common People

The reason for late marriage among the labouring and the middle classes was simple enough: it took a long time for a couple to acquire enough wealth and belongings to set up housekeeping, even in a room of their parents’ home. Young men in training for a skilled trade via an apprenticeship also had to complete that seven-year commitment before they could marry. Young love, however romantic, had to be kept in check if the two lovers were to survive in a world where subsistence earnings would not purchase a roof over their heads and put food on the table.

Marriage in the Nobility

Children of gentle or noble birth ran a great risk if they tried to marry without the approval of their parents, since they would be left without resources. Perhaps the caution of young Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing has something to do with the fear of acting without permission: he is careful to make sure that his beloved, Hero, is the sole heir to her father’s estate (see 1.1.242–243). His inquiry demonstrates that financial concerns were top of mind for many members of the privileged classes, as was ensuring that the parents consented to the match. In Romeo and Juliet, Lord Capulet’s rage at Juliet when she resists his suggestion that she marry Prince Paris (see 3.5.203-207) indicates the severe consequences that marrying without parental permission might have, although like Juliet’s age, Capulet’s rage may also have been exaggerated for dramatic effect by the playwright.

Key Print Sources Crawford, Patricia, and Laura Gowing. Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England. Routledge, 2008. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800. Harper and Row, 1979.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. The Age of Marriage. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/family/marriage.html. Accessed 17 Feb. 2023. Brabcová, Alice. Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England: The Woman’s Story. University of West Bohemia, https://www.phil.muni.cz/angl/thepes/thepes_02_02.pdf. Accessed 17 Feb. 2023. Dunne, Derek. <q>Deny thy father and refuse thy name</q>: The Generation Gap in <title level="m">Romeo and Juliet. Academia.edu, https://web.archive.org/web/20240420110950/https://www.academia.edu/9645370/The_Generation_Gap_in_Romeo_and_Juliet_for_Playing_Shakespeare_2013_. Accessed 17 Feb. 2023.
Image Sources Whately, William. A Bride-bush, or A VVedding sermon: Compendiously Describing the Duties of Married Persons: by Performing Whereof, marriage Shall be to them a Great Helpe, which now Finde it a Little Hell. 1617. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/bib158813-150532.