Abstract
In 2002, a white paper on reform of civil marriages in England and Wales promised a change in the law to allow ceremonies at any hour, at home or in open-air locations. Previous to this the law stipulated that ceremonies must be held before 6.00 p.m. (so there was no mistaking your partner in the dark) inside churches, register offices, or buildings with a special licence (John Carvel, The Guardian (23 January 2002)). The new position is a mark of changed social relations and restores some autonomy to couples. It also bears a dialogic relation to the early modern period and to Shakespeare’s play, The Taming of the Shrew.
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Notes
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. H. J. Oliver, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Ann Jennalie Cook, Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991): ‘Kate must agree to the betrothal for it to be valid, and her uncharacteristic silence — however obtained — marks her consent during the crucial moments of espousal’ (p. 170).
Susan Bassnett, Shakespeare: the Elizabethan Plays (Basingstoke: Macmillan now Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), refers on pp. 78–9 to Louis B. Wright’s discussion of Protestant orthodoxies on domestic harmony.
See Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (London: Methuen, 1958).
David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 476.
H. Edward Symonds, The Council of Trent and Anglican Formularies (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 145.
Revd H. J. Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent: Original Text with English Translation (St. Louis and London: B. Herder Book Company, 1941), p. 183.
Art Cosgrave, ‘Consent, Consummation and Indissolubility: Some Evidence from Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts’, Downside Review, 109 (1991), pp. 94–104 (p. 94).
Peter Meredith (ed.), The Mary Play: From the N. Town Manuscript (London and New York: Longman, 1987), p. 60.
Martin Ingram, ‘Spousals Litigation in the English Ecclesiastical Courts c.1350–c.1640’, in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R. B. Outhwaite (London: Europa Publications, 1981), pp. 35–57 (p. 46). As well as ‘spousals’, the pre-contract is also referred to as ‘espousing, affiancing, betrothing, or handfasting, “sponsion” or “sponsalia” or simply “Making themselves sure”’ (see Cook, Making a Match, p. 154).
Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey (eds), A Pleasant Conceited Historie, Called The Taming of A Shrew (Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 53.
M. Konrath (ed.), The Poems of William of Shoreham, AB.1320 Vicar of Chart-Sutton (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1902), p. 58. Sue Niebrzydowski pointed this out to me.
George Wilkins, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). Jen McGowan directed me to this text.
Paul Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 149–50.
Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery (eds), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Unless stated, references to Shakespeare are from this edition.
Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (London and New York: Longman, 1984), p. 86.
John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, Vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), p. 380.
Roderick Phillips, Untying the Knot: a Short History of Divorce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 19–20.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 137.
William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Ann Thompson, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 22.
Tori Haring-Smith, From Farce to Metadrama: a Stage History of The Taming of the Shrew, 1594–1983 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 73.
Scott Eyman, Mary Pickford (London: Robson, 1990), p. 192.
R. Windeler, Sweetheart: the Story of Mary Pickford (London and New York: W. H. Allen, 1973), p. 161.
Mary Pickford, Sunshine and Shadow, foreword by Cecil B. de Mille (London, Melbourne and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1956), p. 311.
Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: the Woman Who Made Hollywood (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997), p. 267.
Kevin Brownlow, Mary Pickford Rediscovered: Rare Pictures of a Hollywood Legend (New York: Harry N. Abrams in Association with The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1999), p. 222.
Maria Jones, ‘“His” or “Hers”?: the Whips in Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 18:3 (Summer 2000), pp. 36–7. See Vsevolod Pudovkin’s explication of leitmotif as a category of relational editing in, ‘From Film Technique: On Editing’ (Film Technique and Film Acting (London: Vision Press, 1929)), in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 83–9 (p. 89).
Franco Zeffirelli, Zeffirelli: the Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), p. 216.
Graham Holderness, Shakespeare in Performance: The Taming of the Shrew (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 69.
Michael Foucault writes in ‘The Birth of the Asylum’ from Madness and Civilization of the case of a girl of 17 who is subjected to ‘a regime of strict authority’ and ‘tamed’ after showing disorderly behaviour and bitterness towards her parents. See The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinov (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 161.
Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today: Carol Rutter with Sinead Cusack, Paola Dionisotti, Fiona Shaw, Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter, ed. by Faith Evans (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), p. 23.
Leah Marcus, ‘The Shakespearean Editor as Shrew-Tamer’, ELR, 22:2 (Spring 1992), pp. 177–200 (p. 178).
See Sheridan Morley, Spectator (6 November 1999).
RSC promptbook, The Taming of the Shrew (1999–2000).
Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 47.
Chris Dunkley, Financial Times (24 October 1980).
Robert Hewison, Sunday Times (5 April 1992).
Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday (5 April 1992).
Dunkley, Financial Times (24 October 1980).
Tim Hallinan, ‘Interview: Jonathan Miller on Shakespeare’s Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 32:2 (1981), pp. 134–45 (p. 140).
John Wilders, The BBC TV Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew (London: BBC, 1980), p. 11.
Susan Willis, The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 109.
E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1950; 1984), p. 180. Interestingly, Miller included the Arnolfini portrait in ‘The 1998 Esso Exhibition at the National Gallery’ entitled ‘Mirror Image: Jonathan Miller on Reflection’ (16 September–13 December 1998) where the exhibition plaque beside the painting read: ‘It has been suggested that it represents a marriage ceremony’.
Stanley Wells, ‘Commentary: Television Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 33:3 (1982), pp. 261–77 (p. 276).
Robert Weimann, ‘Representation and Performance: the Uses of Authority in Shakespeare’s Theater’, PMLA, 107 (May 1992), pp. 497–510.
Garry O’Connor, Plays and Players (May 1992), p. 47.
Robert Smallwood, ‘Shakespeare Performed: Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1992’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44:1–4 (1993), pp. 343–62 (p. 346).
Ruth Garnault, Wales Actors’ Company programme: The Taming of the Shrew (2002).
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© 2003 Maria Jones
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Jones, M. (2003). Producing Consent in The Taming of the Shrew. In: Shakespeare’s Culture in Modern Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597167_2
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