Adapting Marriage: Law Versus Custom in Early Modern English
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ADAPTING MARRIAGE: LAW VERSUS CUSTOM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH PLAYS by Jennifer Dawson Kraemer APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Dr. Jessica C. Murphy, Chair ___________________________________________ Dr. Pamela Gossin ___________________________________________ Dr. Adrienne L. McLean ___________________________________________ Dr. Gerald L. Soliday Copyright 2018 Jennifer Dawson Kraemer All Rights Reserved For my family whose patience and belief in me allowed me to finish this dissertation. There were many appointments, nutritious dinners, and special outings foregone over the course of graduate school and dissertation writing, but you all understood and supported me nonetheless. ADAPTING MARRIAGE: LAW VERSUS CUSTOM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH PLAYS by JENNIFER DAWSON KRAEMER, BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES – STUDIES IN LITERATURE MAJOR IN STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS August 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The inspiration for this dissertation can best be described as a kind of coalescence of droplets rather than a seed that was planted and grew. For these droplets to fuse at all instead of evaporating, I have the members of my dissertation committee to thank. Dr. Gerald L. Soliday first introduced me to exploring literature through the lens of historical context while I was pursuing my master’s degree. To Dr. Adrienne McLean, I am immensely grateful for her willingness to help supervise a non-traditional adaptation project. Dr. Pamela Gossin has been a trusted advisor for a long time, and her vast and diverse range of academic interests inspired me to attempt this fusion of adaptation theory and New Historicism. I would like to especially thank my chair, Dr. Jessica C. Murphy, for her patience—especially with the early drafts. Without her encouragement and advice, this project would still be an unorganized and amorphous array of trivia instead of an argument. I would like to thank all the Arts and Humanities and Office of Graduate Studies staff who were patient with my endless questions and need for assurance. A special acknowledgment of my dissertation writing group is also in order. To Ray, Cristen, Lance, Madhavi, Sharron, Ken, and Thomasina, I tender my everlasting gratitude for all your advice and copy edits. My four children—Libby, Ian, Jess, and Gretchen—deserve much credit for not only their support but also their willingness to let me explain my work. And to my husband, Mark, who supported my dream to complete my PhD: these words cannot express how much I love you and appreciate your championing of me. April 2018 v ADAPTING MARRIAGE: LAW VERSUS CUSTOM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH PLAYS Jennifer Dawson Kraemer, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2018 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Dr. Jessica C. Murphy Since Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), new historicist critics have analyzed the historical context of plays and how those plays reflect their culture’s preoccupations. However, they have largely refrained from considering these plays as adaptations, or, to paraphrase adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon, works that are both autonomous from and deliberately evocative of their source texts. Early modern playwrights drew inspiration liberally from poetry, short fiction, mythology, history, and true crime stories to appease their society’s appetite for entertainment. Though they are ever expanding their range of study to include new forms of media, adaptation theorists have for the most part ignored looking backward in time at very old adaptations. This dissertation seeks to combine new historicist and adaptation theory methodologies in the examination of early modern plays, with the goal of determining what solutions or commentary these plays were offering on the time period’s cultural anxieties surrounding marriage. It will observe areas where playwrights expanded, complicated, and excised material from their source texts to highlight cultural anxieties of their own era. In my study, I will examine four areas of vi anxiety surrounding marriage—broken betrothals, clandestine marriage, coerced marriage, and divorce—in a state of flux in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I argue that early modern English playwrights adapted their sources to exacerbate these issues, arguing for either a more traditional solution to problems based on centuries of common custom or advocating for a legal reform of marriage. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..........................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................ vi INTRODUCTION: THE INTERTEXTUALITIES OF MARRIAGE .........................................1 CHAPTER 1 BROKEN BETROTHALS ...................................................................................16 CHAPTER 2 CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE ............................................................................66 CHAPTER 3 COERCED MARRIAGE ...................................................................................118 CHAPTER 4 DIVORCE ..........................................................................................................169 CONCLUSION .........................................................................................................................222 BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................................................................229 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ....................................................................................................241 CURRICULUM VITAE viii INTRODUCTION THE INTERTEXTUALITIES OF MARRIAGE Drama can…properly be used as historical evidence, not of realities but of the imaginative and ideological constructions of the period, of its mentality.1 -Anthony Fletcher The quotation above provides the justification for the entire argument that follows: early modern plays can attest to their culture’s tensions and, through these “imaginative constructions,” can work through these issues and present solutions for the dilemmas of their time. I wish to examine how early modern plays addressed the cultural anxieties surrounding marriage in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and their proposed remedies for what they perceived as social ills. This dissertation primarily considers plays produced between 1595 and 1613 though it also engages works written in the decades preceding and following these eight years. In less than a decade, England experienced several unsettling events including Essex’s rebellion, continued tensions with Spain, a change of monarchs, the Gunpowder Plot, and legislative attempts to reform canon law concerning marriage. Additionally, the seventeenth century was still culturally processing the previous century’s even more dramatic political and religious changes. The violent swings between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism that marked the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth would leave their mark on the reign of James VI and I, and England as a nation had not yet fully embraced the Reformation, especially in terms of its 1 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) xx. 1 legal implications. Christopher Haigh describes England’s move to Protestantism thus: “change was piecemeal, and it took twenty years to get from the first real attack on church jurisdiction in 1532 to the first Protestant church service in 1552, and then it was almost all undone by Queen Mary. Only in 1559 did an English regime opt for a full Reformation, and still there were theological, liturgical, and legal loose ends to tie up.”2 Among these dangling “loose ends,” cultural anxieties about what constituted a valid marriage found expression in early modern plays. The Reformation redefined marriage, transforming it from holy sacrament to legal contract. As a result, secular governments in Protestant continental Europe adjusted marriage laws by increasing the age of consent, requiring witnesses at weddings, and relaxing consanguinity regulations.3 Reformation England did not follow suit. The Church of England did write rubrics for marriage addressing clandestine unions and lack of parental consent, but the theological redefinition of marriage did not trigger substantive legal reform as it did elsewhere in Europe. Clerical marriage became an option during the reign of Elizabeth I, but the changes to divorce laws enacted in Protestant Europe that allowed remarriage after the dissolution of a union were not approved in England until 1857.4 However, during the late sixteenth and early 2 Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford Universtiy Press, 1993) 12. 3 Eric Josef Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) 6. 4 Tim Stretton, “Marriage, Separation, and the Common Law in England, 1540-1660,” in The Family in Early Modern England, ed. by Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 18-39, 19. 2 seventeenth centuries, ecclesiastical courts did begin to more strictly enforce existing laws.5 The medieval practice of spousals, in which a couple’s exchange of verbal consent was the