The Social Context of Marriage Marriage, the Social Context of Author Kaitlin Zaugg Author Kate McPherson Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor 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 Kaitlin Zaugg and 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). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. 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 Courtship Marriage Published file. Updated metadata proofed updated author respStmt. Created File. 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.

 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.

 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.

 Kaitlin Zaugg Kaitlin Zaugg

Kaitlin Zaugg was a student at Utah Valley University.

 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/
Courtship

Love 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

Many 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.

Some 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

High-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

Money 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.

The 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

Courtship 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

Historians 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.

Among 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.