Negotiating love, law, and inheritance through marriage in ten plays by Shakespeare and Middleton (William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton)

This dissertation explores marriage—its economic, legal, and ideological aspects—as represented on stage in comedies by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. I suggest that marriage comedies implicitly analyze the institution of marriage and inheritance laws, which were changing in response to a new idea of the family. My study examines the conventions of courtship and marriage contracts as well as the actual English laws that govern inheritance. Although Shakespeare and Middleton treat inheritance practices and laws differently in each play, family property and status constitute an ideological undercurrent and factor into each marital equation. A dialectic arises between law and comedy; each play responds to challenges that English statutes placed upon children in their negotiations with marriageable characters and with their family inheritances. I pay special attention to the agency of individual characters who shape and manipulate the marriage brokering process. Such characters seek a kind of individuation that does not defy but rather makes use of the constraints and opportunities afforded by the systems in which they live, often playing such systems off against each other. In chapters that pair The Taming of the Shrew with A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, All's Well that Ends Well with A Trick to Catch the Old One, Measure for Measure with A Mad World, My Masters, The Merchant of Venice with The Roaring Girl, and Much Ado About Nothing with No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, I argue that dramatists link enhanced individual agency and companionate marriage together as a social and personal goal for their characters. The dramatic representation of marriage studied in this dissertation not only creates alternative kinds of marital relations but also suggests alternative norms of inheritance and thus of family relations. These alternatives point toward modern life and are one reason why these plays remain vital for modern audiences.