The Marriage Ceremony The Marriage Ceremony 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

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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.

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 Clothing Marriage Gender Female Virtue Published file. Updated metadata updated citations. proofed updated author respStmt. added a gloss tag. Added date, pubPlace, and publisher tags to sources Added Shakespeare’s Life and Times database to Best sources. fixed mistakes in formatting and works cited. Added cit and l elements. Left a couple comments for Leah. Fixed div xml:ids. Created file and encoded content. Michael Best 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.

 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.

 Martin Holmes Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

 Navarra Houldin 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.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

 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/

In the early modern era, marriage was a religious, economic, and practical event for both men and women. In the gentry and nobility, it was a major means of forming alliances, as well as increasing capital and land holdings. In the middle classes, such as among families of merchants and skilled artisans, each partner contributed significantly to the household economy. Profitable marriages also involved a dowry the bride brought to the match—some amount of property, goods, or cash that her family agreed to provide the couple.

Shakespeare’s comedies feature much discussion of dowries, which were negotiated ahead of any betrothal engagement. In The Taming of the Shrew, the father Baptista is willing to match his superficially compliant daughter Bianca to the highest bidder and also offer a suitably extravagant dowry to Petruchio for taking on his more problematic daughter Katerina.

The Bride’s Virginity

In common with most early modern European societies, the virginity of the bride was of paramount importance. How else could the family of the husband be sure that the blood line was being continued? In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero is adamant that his daughter Miranda and Ferdinand remain chaste before marriage: If thou Ferdinand dost break her virgin-knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite be minist’red, No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow; but barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both. (4.1.15–22)

The Betrothal

Couples were betrothed with the consent of their parents or guardians. It was a serious breach of protocol for young people to get betrothed without formal approval. Eloping was difficult, mainly due to the requirements in the Church of England about licensing or publicizing upcoming weddings. English couples typically got familial consent and then notified the local Church of England priest, who had the banns read. This was a notification to the community on three successive Sundays in which the couple’s names and their decision to wed was read aloud in the church of their home parish. If this process was not followed, couples has to pay for a license, which was special permission from a bishop that certified there were no impediments (such as previous marriages or blood relationships) that would disqualify the union. Even with a license, couples still had to wait a month. Part of the question surrounding Shakespeare’s marriage concerns the license he had to obtain to marry Anne Hathaway without the banns being read in their parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Ceremony

The ceremony for weddings, formally known as the Solemnization of Matrimony, was established in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, which contains the language still familiar to 21st century audiences. The minister addresses the bride, Wilt thou have this man to man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance, in the holy estate of Matrimony; wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health; and forsaking all others, keep only unto him, so long as you both shall live? The husband’s language is identical, except that he is to love her, comfort her, honor, and keep only unto her… Modern Church of England marriages leave out the obey part of the vows for the bride.

Despite pressure from authorities, another type of marriage called a handfast marriage was relatively common. This form of marriage dates back to the Middle Ages, when the weddings of country folk left little trace because they were oral transactions. Handfasting involves the joining of the bride and groom’s hands in the presences of witnesses, as well as a public exchange of vows called plighting the troth (pledging the truth).

During the second part of the 1500s, however, the number of handfast marriages began to concern both Church of England officials and parents because it did not require they be informed or approve of the union. Shakespeare himself may have engaged in one, similar to Perdita and Florizel in The Winter’s Tale. Handfasting was encouraged as a binding form of betrothal. Some legal cases resulted from one part of a betrothed couple breaking off the match before the wedding could be solemnized.

The Clothes and Rings

Couples typically wore their very best clothes on their wedding day, which means that very few brides would have worn white gowns. The bride was sometimes decked with ears of wheat to symbolize fertility. At the end of the wedding there was a toast in sweet wine—or ale for the less wealthy— as well as a wedding feast that also changed with the couple’s socioeconomic status.

Rings were exchanged, although not necessarily as part of the ceremony. The rings, with the circle symbolizing perfection and gold symbolizing purity and nobility, were often inscribed with poesies (poetry). Grationo, in The Merchant of Venice, attempts to defend giving away his wedding ring: It was a hoop of gold, a paltry / That she did give me, whose posy was love me and leave me not (5.1.147–150).

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 Marriage Ceremony. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/family/ceremony.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023. Forme of Solemnizacion of Matrimonie. The Book of Common Prayer. http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/Marriage_1549.htm. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023. Lyon, Karen. Wooing and Wedding: Courtship and Marriage in Early Modern England. Folger Shakespeare Library. 8 Jun. 2018. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/folger-story/wooing-and-wedding-courtship-and-marriage-in-early-modern-england/. Niccholes, Alexander. A discourse, of marriage and wiving. London: Nicholas Okes for Leonard Becket, 1615. STC 18514. ESTC S113190. Free online access to transcription: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A08179.0001.001?view=toc. Ros, Maggi. More Wedding Customs. Life in Elizabethan England. 22 Mar. 2008. https://www.elizabethan.org/compendium/62.html.