Sex in Elizabethan England E-Book

Alan Haynes

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Approached through the literature and literary personalities of the period, this fascinating study examines sexual behaviour in the Elizabethan age. Although there is much we will never know, poets and playwrights can provide valuable insights into our ancestors' sexual lives. Here, with help from the work of figures such as Shakespeare, Marlowe and Donne, Alan Haynes builds up a vivid picture of of the sexual experiences of Elizabethans at all levels of society. We peep behind the bed curtains at the 'Virgin Queen' herself, who slept alone despite rumours that she was as sexually promiscuous as her mother, Anne Boleyn, and at characters such as Moll Cutpurse, a gutsy female transvestite who shocked and amused generations of Londoners in almost equal measure. The pressure of desire was profound and the author explores this to find compelling details. A unique behind the scenes study of the sex life of the Elizabethans, from courtiers to maids of honour and from citizens and their wives to drabs and pimps, this book will intrigue and fascinate anyone with an interest in the private lives of our forbears.

Leseprobe

Sex

IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

In Loving Memory of my Parents Eve and William Haynes

Sex

IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

ALAN HAYNES

First published in 1997

This edition published in 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

©Alan Haynes, 1997, 2006, 2010, 2011

The right of Alan Haynes, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 O7524 7640 7

MOBI ISBN 978 O7524 7639 1

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Text

Preface

1 Vestigial Virtue

2 The Unholy Royal Family

3 Love Bites

4 The Honour of the Maids

5 ‘A Proud Spirit’

6 ‘Love’s no Love’

7 The Casual Corinthians

8 ‘Untam’d Desire’

9 ‘Unstaid Desire’

10 The Pursuit of Ganymede

11 Their Every Move

12 The Marred Male

13 Trouble in Mind

14 The Fires of Venus

Epilogue

Appendices

Abbreviations

Select Bibliography

Notes

An animal is prepared to sacrifice its happiness, its physical wellbeing and even its life, in the hope of sexual intercourse alone.

Michel Houellebecq,

The Possibility of an Island (2005)

Acknowledgements

While working on this book nearly ten years ago, I moved to live in part of a Jacobean house in Worcestershire, beguiled by the architecture, local accent and clean air. Though remote from academic libraries it has proved inspirational and I offer my thanks to the late John Hanford (d. 1616) for the work he did on the building he inherited.

The most particular and direct contribution to sourcing the book has been that of Dr Mark Nicholls, now of St John’s College, Cambridge University. In a busy professional and private life he has still managed to respond with cordiality and generosity whenever I have sought his help. Moreover, he has read this book in typescript so my debt remains incalculable and spectacular.

With the book before them I hope my family, friends and neighbours will think their kindness and tolerance has brought forth something worthwhile – maybe ‘something understood’. Completing it on a tiny budget has been made possible by my sister and brother-in-law, Hilary and Tony Keen, who have a warm house, a sofa-bed and a willingness to pour drinks for the exhausted researcher.

A Note on the Text

Dates in this book conform to the modern style with the year beginning on 1 January, and not on 25 March.

To assist the reader I have modernized the spellings in quotations from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts. Titles remain in their original form, though the longest have been trimmed. The original £ s d currency has been retained. A rule of thumb to calculate rough modern values is to multiply by a factor of 500:

Preface

In any Elizabethan household, whether furnished by a prince, playwright or yeoman, the most important item of furniture was the bed, with its bedding. Each new born Elizabethan came into the hubbub of the world in a domestic bed (if lucky), attended by a woman of the truly oldest profession, that of midwifery. So we have the birth bed, the marriage bed, the sick bed, the bed for sleep and the death bed. In The Flower of Friendshippe by Edmund Tilney there was an insistence on the merry bed, which meant the setting aside of the day’s upsets before repose. Given the emphasis by many male writers over generations on the sweet-tempered docility and silence of the best kind of wife, it is not so surprising to find Iago in Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello objecting that his wife Emilia will not let him sleep when they retire to bed but regards it as a space for a privileged torrent of conversation. In A Curtaine Lecture Thomas Heywood has talkative wives endlessly regaling tired husbands with many whispered ‘private lectures’ – whispered because the bedchamber might often be shared with other adults and children. Putting up with curtain lectures and bed-requests was one of the fifteen joys of marriage noted by Antoine de la Sale. Scarcely anyone slept alone in Elizabethan England; exceptionally, of course, the queen did and always had done presumably, even if a female attendant slept in the same room – a gentlewoman of the Bedchamber.

Elizabeth’s grandfather, Henry VII, had slept in a four-post bed in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster. This was the highly decorated bedroom of his medieval predecessor Henry III, where the king was long expected to sleep with his crown placed on a bedside cushion. Henry VII’s bed required ten attendants to make it ready. The first action of the Groom of the Bedchamber was to summon in turn four yeomen of the wardrobe carrying sheets and blankets, four yeomen of the bedchamber and a gentleman usher to direct the octet. On entering the chamber the groom stood at the foot of the bed holding a flaming torch, with the yeomen in fours on each side. One of them, using a dagger as a probe, searched the straw for any suspect item. The straw was then covered with a length of canvas to depress it and on top of that went the feather bed on which one man flailed about to disperse any clusters. Sheets and blankets were laid in a time-honoured ritual, each lowered by eight pairs of hands to reach the bed corners simultaneously. Pillows were beaten and according to the royal preference placed high or low. On top of the blankets went a sleek ermine coverlet, and then came the complicated tucking. each yeomen then made a sign of the cross upon the spot where his hands had touched the bed, and he kissed the same. The usher drew the heavy curtains and left a page to watch the bed, while the bed-making party departed ensemble for a nightcap of the liquid variety.

The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn lived an oppressive childhood. Princess Elizabeth had no opportunities to dive into the warmth of a parental bed. Her mother, liberal and intelligent, was brought to the block for execution on spurious charges. Elizabeth went on sleeping alone, whatever the ill-founded rumours much later that she was as sexually promiscuous as her mother. Certainly when queen she favoured rich hangings and bedding for this most intimate space where the future of the nation was decided in silence rather than chat. In 1581 a wardrobe account noted an order from the queen of a bedstead of walnut wood, richly carved, painted and gilded. The selour, tester and valance were cloth of silver figured with velvet, lined with changeable taffeta and heavily fringed with Venice gold, silver and silk threads. The bed curtains were to be of tapestry, with the seams and borders trimmed with gold and silver lace caught up with long loops and buttons fashioned from precious metal. The head-piece was of Bruges crimson satin, edged with crimson silk and decorated with plumes – these were ostrich feathers variously colour dipped and dusted with gold spangles.1 All remarkably ostentatious and majestic, but with no indication of size, so perhaps it was no wider or taller than the bed in the room designated the Queen’s Bedroom at Loseley House, near Guildford, Surrey; the home of Sir William More was visited by the queen on progress in August 1569.

From rustic and unyielding beginnings the bed had developed in size, comfort and ostentation, with the woollen blanket being introduced from France in the fourteenth century. For the next few centuries, in homes and lodgings of all kinds it was common for friends and for strangers to share a bed. In small manor houses visitors often had to sleep in the same room as the master and mistress, but as a desire for greater privacy grew so did the number of bedrooms. Still, the truckle (or trundle) bed remained in use, rolled out from under the larger bed when required. In his will made in the early 1580s Robert Southern, an Evesham farmer and inn keeper, had his property inventoried and in the ‘parlour next the street’, converted into a bedroom, was a bedstead with featherbed, coverlet, bolster and pillow and a red blanket (value £4). There was also a truckle bedstead with featherbed, coverlet, bolster and pillow valued at 30s. Over the parlour was the only upstairs chamber where the bed and bedding were valued at £6, and a minor second bed with bedding and mat was judged worth 20s. Some thirty years and less miles away from Evesham a very successful playwright and gentleman made his will and allocated the household beds: the double bed (the matrimonial) went to his daughter Susanna and her husband, Dr John Hall, the smaller or ‘nextbest’ to his wife Anne. There was nothing mean or illogical as far as we can tell in Shakespeare so doing; it was just utilitarian and quite forward looking. Anne Shakespeare (née Hathaway) was his senior by some eight years, and her husband correctly anticipated she would not remarry, although she lived on until 1625.

Familiar objects like beds became authentic family objects, but Shakespeare’s perhaps unspoken hope that his family would also prosper and burgeon did not come about. Susanna and John Hall had only one daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1608. In 1613 the child’s mother was accused of having a sexual liaison with Rafe Smith, a married neighbour, a claim defended in Worcester Cathedral by the accused. Elizabeth, like her grandfather, married at eighteen and when her husband, the lawyer Thomas Nash, died she married Sir John Barnard of Abington (Northants.) When she died there he had the ‘old goods and lumber’ in the house disposed of, or burned. Did the double bed of William Shakespeare that day go up in flames? A bed from Crackenthorpe Hall, Appleby (West.) has survived and is now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum loan collection, but we may suspect that curators would themselves set fire to it if they could have that of William Shakespeare. Perhaps not, for the headboard of this museum piece bears the strong carved inscription DREDE GOD LOVE GOD PRAYES GOD. It has too a series of carved shields with the initials HF and on the footrail three inverted Js, which suggest that it was commissioned by a merchant whose armigerous bearing consisted of bale hooks. This was a bed for navigating through the hazards of life; it was not a bawdy and burlesque item like the notorious, outsize bed of Ware (Herts.) measuring 10 × 11 feet. This colossus, mentioned by Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night became a tourist attraction; capable of occupation by four couples according to a German prince who slept in it in 1596, it exercised the libidinous imaginations of many. By it was a large horn from which visitors would drink to enhance ribald conviviality. In Thomas Dekker’s collaboration with John Webster on the play Northward Ho! the curtain line at the end of the farcical comedy refers to the bed and the epic possibilities of partner swapping and simultaneous couplings within the confines of the bed. As a prodigious item of more colourful days the bed is now chastely museumed at the V&A. And it is not clear now if anybody did get sexual diversion or even sleep in a bed which seems more fanciful than real. For many theatre companies a bed was an essential prop, mainly used for tragedy, but history plays and comedy too.

‘Nothing is more protean or more susceptible to cultural pressure’, according to Germaine Greer in a recent article, ‘than human sexuality’. This observation suggests that she has at some time been Foucaulted, for Michel Foucault, historian, social commentator and homosexual bandit, argued at inordinate length, developing Freud’s culturally inscribed sexual categories, that sexuality is a construct of the human imagination. It changes from time to time, like preferences for styles in food preparation, literature and clothes. If this seems unlikely consider when last you ate roast swan, wrote a villanelle (to your lover or anyone) or employed the discourse of courtly love. Sexuality is as much a matter of images today as it was four hundred years ago. ‘When we talk about sex, we talk mostly in metaphors’. And the affectional consequences of biology and bio-chemistry are the area with which literature best deals.

ONE

Vestigial Virtue

Before the Church Council of Florence held over fifteen years (1431–46), the outsize blemish on marriage had been its correlation with sexual activity. The late medieval idealization of celibacy took a knock when marriage was officially recognized as a sacrament. Until then celibacy had been appropriate for nuns and priests, with the hope that the whole community would regard this as ideal behaviour. After the Reformation this ideal, with its profound distrust of sexual desire, ‘continued to haunt the Renaissance imagination of the moral and spiritual life well into the seventeenth century’.1 An attitude of mild unease with the only available option then for humans was recorded by the Norwich doctor, Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82): ‘I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction . . .’ Many edgy churchmen would have agreed that sex was ‘an odd and unworthy piece of folly’: John Donne’s late advancement in the church gave him time to form a different view, and to write erotic poetry.

Trees had no governable inheritance and could do without ‘this trivial and worldly way of union’. For the upper classes with blood lines to transmit as securely as possible, and for the enhancement of family property, marriage was of critical importance. Moreover, it was a mode of controlling fornication, an otherwise unruly and irregular form of sexuality. For those with such concerns the greatest life disappointment was infertility after procreation. Sexuality can be free and radical; opinions, attitudes and behaviour would collide and overlap. Out of the disturbances and changing sensibilities emerged slowly the view of affectionate marriage as the foundation of an ordered society, and also a willingness to view sex as a game or sport expressing conviviality and harmless pleasure. ‘Those who clung too firmly to the image of sermons, household manuals and social theory had nothing but disappointment awaiting them.’2 Aristocratic marriages by the end of the sixteenth century were in great number afflicted by failure, with a third of older peers estranged or separated.3 If nothing else this wrecked the possibility of any marital sex and it hints at a dwindling of marriage as morally neutral for the participants. Marriage had been politicized, and politics is contestatory. Also the law made marriage an assortment of tribulations for the unwary. Matrimonial suits came into the courts because of ‘confusion, conditions by one party or parental pressure.’4 Even a civil lawyer could be blithely ignorant of ecclesiastical law, and the matter of the secret marriage of the Attorney-General Edward Coke to Lady Elizabeth Hatton, led to his appearance before a church court to refute the charge of irregular marriage. To obtain a dispensation even he had to plead ignorance. Had he known that his wife would prove impossible to control he might have stepped back. She lived in great state at Ely House, Holborn, and entertained lavishly, but excluded her husband, whom she provoked, teased and libelled.

The propositions of ‘household order’ defined by men might hold for some, but for many quotidian behaviour caused a slide of such things into desuetude. To illustrate this a specimen from 1624, when eighteen-year-old Henry Scrope entered the household of Sir Edward Plumpton for service, and within days had clandestinely married Anne Plumpton. Neither her father nor her mother were present at the night nuptial, and there was no certainty that the man who had taken the ceremony was a priest of any sort. Moreover, Henry had an impediment to his desire – he was already married – but living with his new bride he fathered several children before his past caught up with him. The case came before the Star Chamber in 1631 when he was charged with bigamy. Court cases, and sometimes thereafter plays and pamphlets projected into the public domain the collisions between competing public and private notions of what was appropriate and permissible. So in a play like John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, the focus is on the ‘domestication of sexual energies’, and by giving voice through his characters to various opinions of marriage he wrote a morality play about a vexed institution still central to a unstable society. Re-evaluation could also be made in poetry and reflecting a different state of mind. In John Donne’s poetry there is the junking of idealized love for an explicit collision of bodies –bodies are sex, that is the truth of experience – as he reminds his coterie readers in The Extasie. Prior to this love had been a single-minded ardour, ‘idealized in solitary suffering’. In the English Renaissance, along with language which echoed the medieval, Petrarchan and neo-Platonic traditions of love discourse, the object of desire was frequently immobilized. ‘Women’s honesty was determined and judged by their sexual behaviour’, so that of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, seemed a challenge not only to her cousin Elizabeth, but also to the men of England. For many Protestants she was both enchantress and whore; in the 1590 Faerie Queene Spenser was quite explicit: Duessa stands for deceit, the exiled queen and Catholicism. For a Puritan-inclined statesman like Sir Francis Walsingham, locking away Queen Mary in a remote castle or country house was a preliminary to permanently immobilizing her in death.

For Catholic gentlemen like Anthony Babington who sought freedom for the Queen of Scots, substituting treason for quiet fidelity to his wife and child did not seem hideously improbable. If Babington had read all the earlier literary defences of Mary’s harmless virtue and purity, no doubt he was scandalized by the vituperation in Parliament of men like Peter Wentworth who called Mary ‘the most notorious whore in all the world’. Babington’s associates were other like-minded men and no case of treason in Elizabethan and Jacobean England ever involved a husband and wife in the way that Macbeth (c.1606) does. The play was written in the gloomy aftermath of the greatest act of treason ever broached by an Englishman against the royal family and the great men of the government, aristocracy and Church. To advance himself and his progeny Macbeth fashions himself into a tyrannical mass-murderer in a play that trawls through many aspects of Robert Catesby’s Gunpowder Plot. At the same time in the play a marriage is held up for critical inspection, with the thane of Glamis and his wife strikingly united in anxieties about gender and procreation. Moreover they are correct, as it turns out, to fear the worst: insanity and destruction. The play famously begins with bearded women, manlike images of feminine power whom the lady of Glamis would ape. She redefines her gender and purpose in life and by persuading her husband to undertake evil she swamps his promptings of pity. For the rest of the play the sterility of violence becomes achingly clear to the audience.

The instructors and pundits took the view that the principal duty of a wife as loyal subject was to obey her domestic monarch, and when this did not happen, so the aggrieved declared, the household fell into disarray and dispute. The husband’s duty was to shape his wife’s personality in such a way as to bring out the good in her, but he must also befriend her ‘that she might walk jointly with him, under the conduct and government of her head.’ This has been sardonically subverted by the end of Macbeth. The queen has gone off her head forcing her withdrawal from the action, and Macbeth has had his head hacked off by Macduff in symbolic retribution. Now it is Macbeth’s blood that flows post-mortem rather than that of his wife who earlier had raged against her menstrual cycle. It was witches, held the view of the time, who could turn a woman into a man. In the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a Renaissance study of witches, it is noted that ‘witchcraft comes from carnal lust’, and in respect of the latter women are insatiable, capable of endless coupling with sexual partners. In many of the tragedies of the period sexual obsession vents itself in savage declamations against incest, adultery, promiscuity, fornication, prostitution and perversities, as well as against love and marriage, against men and women, most often against women as such and in the mass.

Until Macbeth begins with the unspecific sexuality of the witches, it seems that the thane of Glamis and his lady have lived the companionate marriage. The speed with which this disintegrates may be satirically inflected. Having annexed marriage for intense scrutiny, and then broadened the matter to gender relations, Protestant reformers looked again at sexual relations and at least two attitudes emerged towards sex in marriage. In one the ethical idea of moderation holds sway; in the other there is the dominating attitude that the body rules, not out of elementary lust but a more meaningful conjunction of mind and body. According to William Whately the two strands can be harmoniously united: ‘To sanctify the marriage bed, and use it reverently, with prayer and thanksgiving, will make it moderate.’ This is the so-called canonization of heterosexuality; the Catholic ideal of celibacy derived from the saints was in full retreat. ‘Poor greenheads’ was the Puritan phrase for those who having married purely for ‘love’ forfeited society’s strained goodwill when the first fissures appeared. When young aristocrats, like Lucius Cary, made a marriage entirely based on his feelings for his impoverished bride, it could lead to acute family disharmony and a flow of angry retorts from father to son Yet this was at least a quarter of a century after the beginning of the liberation of affectional feeling among the young in the 1590s. In the early comedies of Shakespeare there is a triumphant surge towards marriage as the ultimate good, but as has been recently noted it is also a dangerous option when the older generation are finessed by the young with blood pounding in their veins. Indeed, when Romeo and Juliet ‘chill out’ they do so permanently which may not be the best option for young lovers, but they do achieve a fine gender equality in death.

‘All the fun is in the wooing.’ The froth on the milk quickly curdles after marriage, and as Stephen Orgel has noted most families in Shakespeare have only one parent; where there are rarely two there is usually only one child, a situation exceedingly dangerous to the child.5 It is noticeable that for the playwright’s own wife and family he was an often absent husband and father; were they totally persuaded that he needed to be in London so frequently and for so long? Did Anne Shakespeare resist moving south in order to limit her pregnancies, or was the question never asked? There is an open and trusting marriage in that of Brutus and Portia, but it is strikingly rare as are the sexually compatible husband and wife, Claudius and Gertrude. In a clutch of his early comedies Shakespeare tricks out the commonplace notion that the course of true love never did run true with festive larks. In Hamlet we have the most sinister reflection that true love is the province of a murderer and an adulteress; the court conspires to revel in this union, only Hamlet resists it on the promptings of a ghost claiming to be his late lamented father. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign the fun has gone out of the wooing to be replaced by a singular harshness in expressing disgust with sex. The bitterness against women does not occur in Elizabethan tragedy until about 1600, by which time the country was awaiting her death while imbibing a morale-sapping cocktail of anxiety, irritation and even a guilty boredom. Satire on women and cynical utterances on love are, of course, not unfamiliar to Elizabethans who had seen John Lyly’s comedies. In Campaspe (1584) what Diogenes most dislikes about women is their gender; some may even now regard this as a laudable frankness, but it does not come near in acrid expostulation the hard-bitten fury that Hamlet directs against his mother and Ophelia.

Is it possible to identify a particular event in the 1590s that resonates as the possible direct cause of this literary revolution in the treatment of sex? It seems unlikely that the shift from a comparatively carefree view of sex to one of ill-tempered revulsion should have happened to most Elizabethan poets simultaneously around 1595. Nor does it seem even remotely likely that prostitution, venereal disease, promiscuity, sodomy, perverse jealousy and adultery were conditions suddenly more rife after that date. Then the growing predisposition of writers, especially dramatists, to incorporate such things into their texts must be a collective whim. The unsavoury and the more acceptable exposures of sex were present simultaneously in late Elizabethan England, some glaringly, some sombrely. If we expose male anxiety of the period to more scrutiny then we may be approaching the subjective core of the matter. The mechanism for the action of the stage is often concerned with individual efforts by those who profess love for another to overcome all obstacles to union. As in life the lovers are young, passing ignorant of the world (and themselves), and the young men are especially excitable and callow. The girls often fare better from an indulgent author. This is certainly true of the main female character Margaret in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; she is vital, gracious, witty and chaste in a play written for the popular theatre in 1589–90. The dominant love story gives a controlling shape to the play, and the struggle that goes on within it arises from the conflicting social, sexual and emotional needs of the three main characters. This collision provides the suspense that engaged the audience, with a resolution to suit them and the characters – all are married and happy. The hugely expectant and positive attitude to marriage for life, whatever the bumps and stumbles that might happen, chimed with this constant theme of Protestant (mainly Puritan) theologians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In many thousands of sermons over decades nuptial propaganda was included, and in some cases these sermons became a form of theatre – a dramatic monologue delivered from the pulpit. Preaching undoubtedly influenced dramatists, just as Renaissance dramatists influenced preachers. Moreover, being a Puritan-minded person did not preclude a love of theatre.

Marriage in the deliberations of one writer was viewed as ‘an high and blessed order ordained of God in Paradise’ – which has a sublimely affirmative ring to it. As the old English proverb noted more earthily, ‘there belongeth more to marriage than two pair of bare legs’. It must be a union of minds rather than just procreative bodies, since that is the only way to ‘increase unto Christ’. Anthony Nixon found four reasons for marriage: first, that God instituted it; that it is a kind of ingratitude to deny to our posterity the life which has been granted us; we achieve immortality by means of our offspring and that by this institution comes a welcome increase in kinsfolk, friends and allies.6 Not only has God ordained matrimony but history bears witness that mankind has long favoured it. According to Robert Cleaver and John Dod in their widely read courtesy book A Godlie forme of householde Government (1598), those who are most vociferous against marriage are the ones who offend most against it because of the unchaste lives they lead.

The bigamist in Renaissance England was nearly always a man. Adultery was far less gender specific, yet the law took little notice of it. Under the common law it could not be prosecuted because it was a spiritual matter governed by ecclesiastical courts and canon law. Adultery seized the public imagination (and hence that of playwrights) after 1595 or so because of the unshackled behaviour of one woman, an inspirational beauty of huge vitality and sexual allure, whose adultery became notorious. Whether there was ever any attempt to disguise it is difficult to say, but the poets who acclaimed Penelope Rich could not avoid knowing of her adultery with Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and when they punned in open text on her married name, how could they avoid punning on his in secret. Indeed, new evidence is now emerging that Mountjoy, one of the best friends of the Earl of Southampton, was also an important connection of Shakespeare’s at the court. Is this perhaps the reason that Shakespeare never treated the question whether an adulterous wife might be forgiven? It was a topic to be taken up and debated by others; for example, Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois; Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy and later Philip Massinger’s Fatal Dowry. The law did not favour a husband whose wife had taken up with another man, and no dramatist found it compatible with ‘honour’ for a husband like Lord Rich to live with a wife guilty of adultery as Lady Penelope straightforwardly was. Some playwrights took the view that a husband could at least forgive, and some Puritan moralists seem in addition to have thought a husband could continue to live with a penitent adulterous wife. But not even Thomas Heywood chanced this view on stage, and although he allows for the rehabilitation of a fallen women, and the pardoning of an adulterous wife by her husband, the forgiven adulteresses all die. One particular irritant, a point of conflict between Catholics and Protestants, was the question as to whether marriage was really a contract or truly a sacrament. The latter, said Catholics, so all questions pertaining to it must be determined by ecclesiastical judges only. The Protestants argued for the contract – the marriage of Olivia and Sebastian in Twelfth Night is described as ‘A contract of eternal bond of love’ – so all matters germane, such as impediments and degrees of kindred, are social not sacral matters. As such they are the exclusive prerogative of the civil magistrates. There were two definite parts to marriage: the contract (or spousals/espousals), and the marriage itself which gives form to the contract. Enough time should elapse between the two for the minister to proclaim or publish the banns (announcements), by which time if the bride lived in rural Devon there was over a 30 per cent chance that she would be pregnant, whereas if she lived in Yorkshire this figure plunged to 13 per cent. There were two types of espousal: in verbis de futuro and in verbis de praesenti. If the ceremony includes the expression ‘I shall take thee to my wife’ or ‘I will take thee’ then this espousal expresses future intention (de futuro) and even in the presence of a priest it was not binding upon either party. Two young people, or parents acting for them, could make such a contract, but if the intention decayed and just cause for it shown then an unwilling party to the contract could withdraw. The exception to this was when the couple had slept together: ‘where there hath been a carnal use of each others bodies, it is always presupposed, that a mutual consent, as touching marriage, hath gone before.’ This was the view of William Perkins in his Christian Oeconomie (1609).

The espousal de praesenti was different because it contained the key words – ‘I do take thee’. Perkins highlights the importance of this form of espousal when he states clearly that the marriage has begun, ‘though not in regard of fact, yet in regard of right and interest’. Church and state both held such a union to be valid, so it is the contract that is crucial, projecting itself before the actual marriage service. It is often been observed as likely that the de praesenti espousal took place between young William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway when she was pregnant in the summer of 1582. So a de praesenti espousal such as happens in Twelfth Night is in effect an abbreviated form of marriage, squeezed into a few core items. As the Duchess says in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi:

I have heard lawyers say, a contract in a chamber

Per verba de praesenti is absolute marriage