Roman Marriage

Abstract

Even in the most far-flung geographical settings of his comedies, Shakespeare visibly adheres to the norms and mores governing early modern English marriage customs, and he is, to a great extent, equally reliant on the same traditions in his tragedies. Just as a wood outside Athens, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, proves home to the insuperably English-sounding Puck, and just as a household in Illyria accommodates characters with the Anglo-Saxon names of Belch and Aguecheek alongside its Feste and its Malvolio, so Shakespeare insistently anglicises the social customs of even the most alien of his communities. Critics have been quick to respond to this; when Ann Jennalie Cook or Diane Elizabeth Dreher comments on the correlation between dramatised betrothals and real ones, she consistently assumes an English norm.¹ In one group of his plays, however, Shakespeare does seem to me consciously to offer an alternative picture of a different kind of marriage, a relationship structured within very different social forms and assumptions. This is in the three Roman plays of his maturity, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and the early Titus Andronicus, which all contain portrayals of marriages which are visibly, in one respect or another, malfunctioning, and which also run along notably different lines from those expected of English marriage.