Abstract Women's Marital Property in Shakespeare's

ABSTRACT

WOMEN’S MARITAL PROPERTY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL AND MEASURE FOR MEASURE

by Christian Brant Williams

Many scholars have investigated the bed trick and its significance within the context of gender and sexuality in two of Shakespeare’s plays, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Yet, I contend that an analysis and discussion of the physical bed is as important as the trick itself. Just as the trick has brought about important discussions relating to men’s and women’s sexual experiences in the early modern era, an examination of the physical bed and Helena’s and Mariana’s return thereto, illuminates the different yet equally important issues surrounding early modern women’s marital property. In this thesis, I will demonstrate that despite restrictive and limiting coverture laws of the time, both plays indicate that early modern married women were experiencing more autonomy over their own persons and possessed more rights to property than is often associated with or discussed in relation to the early modern era.

WOMEN’S PROPERTY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL AND MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

by Christian Brant Williams

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2017

Advisor: Cynthia Klestinec

Reader: Katharine Gillespie

Reader: James Bromley

This thesis titled

WOMEN’S MARITAL PROPERTY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL AND MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Christian Brant Williams

has been approved for publication by

The College of Arts and Science

and

Department of English

______Cynthia Klestinec

______Katharine Gillespie

______James Bromley

Table of Contents Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Chapter 1: Introduction: Marriage law and Practice in Historical Context ...... 1

Chapter 2: All’s Well that Ends Well ...... 11

Chapter 3: Measure for Measure ...... 23

Conclusion and Future Research ...... 34

Works Cited ...... 37

iii

Dedication

I dedicate my thesis to my wife, Lakesha Williams, and my daughter, Samara Williams. Returning to school as a non-traditional student with a family has been very challenging. Yet, both of you have supported me throughout my entire college career, and for that, I am truly grateful. Thank you for your love, understanding, encouragement, and support, especially these past two years of graduate school. Everything I have accomplished has truly been a team effort. I look forward to everything the future has for us.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express a sincere thank you to the following people, who have supported me and helped me in this research project:

To my thesis chair, Dr. Cynthia Klestinec, for her encouragement and feedback throughout the process of researching and drafting;

To my committee members, Dr. James Bromley and Dr. Katharine Gillespie, for their time and dedication to me on this project;

To the rest of my instructors and colleagues at Miami University, who challenged and inspired me to be an exemplary teacher and scholar.

Introduction Many scholars have investigated the bed trick and its significance within the context of gender and sexuality in two of Shakespeare’s problem plays, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.1 Because of the sexual matters surrounding the bed trick, it is clearly important to discuss the bed trick in the context of gender and sex, not only in the context of the play, but also in the context of early modern society. Yet, while the bed trick has drawn much scholarly attention, I contend that an analysis and discussion of the role of the physical bed is as important to understanding the play and early modern society as the trick itself. For just as the return to the bed (that is, the marriage bed) of two of Shakespeare’s main female characters (Helena in All’s Well and Mariana in Measure for Measure) has illuminated the nature of male- female relationships and men’s and women’s sexual experiences, an examination of the role of physical bed illuminates an important set of issues surrounding married women’s property in the early modern period. The legal reality often discussed in terms of married women’s property in early modern England is married women’s legal status of coverture. The legal system of coverture was instituted by common law, a legal system responsible for the strictest policies for married women and their property rights. Common law was most restrictive in married women’s autonomy over their own persons, and most limiting of their rights to marital property.2 When looking at coverture laws historically, one would be correct in assuming married women had little (if any) autonomy over their own persons or property (including property women brought into marriages) until the Married Women’s Property Act in 1882. However, Helena and Mariana provide us a different picture of this legal and cultural reality in early modern England. In both All’s Well and

1 Such discussions range from observations of the more readily noticeable purpose of the bed trick – for Helena to gain access to Bertram’s bed to fulfill the marital conditions Bertram set out (Harmon, 119), to, as Janet Adelman discusses in ““Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy,” the use of the bed trick as a way to direct the “illicit desire of men back to their socially sanctioned mates” (2). In “Helena's Bed-trick: Gender and Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well,” David McCandless even contends that the bed trick is an act of prostitution in which Helena “services Bertram’s lust and submits to humiliating anonymous ‘use,’ and that the trick is an act of rape against Bertram by Helena since Helena coerces Bertram into having sex with her against his will (450). 2 Among modern scholars, a popular text outlining coverture laws of the time is The Law’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights: or, the Law’s Provision for Women (accessed via Early English Books Online (EEBO)). As W.R. Prest mentions in “Law and Women’s Rights in Early Modern England,” The Law’s Resolutions has been used as a “handy quarry of quotations on the legal position of Englishwomen in the early modern period” (172). Book three, Section eight of The Law’s Resolutions has two sections on marital property, “That which the husband hath is his own” and “That which the wife hath is the husband’s,” both of which are restrictive of women’s autonomy over person and property. 1

Measure for Measure , Shakespeare’s treatment of Helena’s and Mariana’s marital situations indicates that despite coverture laws of the time, early modern married women could experience more autonomy over their own persons and more rights to property than is often associated with or discussed in relation to the early modern era. Indeed, these plays allow us to understand how the experiences of women extended beyond coverture law when it came to the power they held over themselves and their property. Though the marriage bed is central to my general and overall discussion of married women’s property, the physical bed will be an entryway into examining and discussing additional property in the plays, particularly property associated with marriage. This includes property women brought into the marriage as well as the property acquired through marriage. In the early modern era, the property typically brought into a marriage was a woman’s dowry, which came in two forms, landed and moveable. The moveable dowry consisted of a financial payment arranged as a gift to the husband on the part of the wife. Landed property could also be arranged as dowry at the outset of the marriage, and consisted, as its name suggests, land. But, there were additional properties women brought into marriages. For instance, in the Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War Frances Verney records that when Tom Verney, settling in Barbados in 1638, wrote to his mother asking for “‘household stuff, plate, spoones, and the like, then pewter and brass of all sorts, and linen of all sorts, both for mee and my servants,’” he did not ask his father since those items did not belong to him (152). In “The Landed Woman in Early Modern England,” Amanda Capern mentions that “Property can mean personal estate (chattel) such as jewelry, Bibles or valuable linens and household crockery, and it can mean real estate such as land, buildings, and the legal rights that attach to them, including rights of public office” (186). Jewelry, land, medicine, books, and dowry are the different types of property important in both All’s Well and Measure for Measure. Along with these inanimate properties, I will also focus on people as property, namely women as property (which I will often refer to as her ‘person’). Yet, my focus is not on a husband ‘owning’ his wife as property, but married women’s autonomy over their own persons (including their own sexuality), which becomes particularly important in the case of Helena who asserts her autonomy despite coverture laws of the time. My interest in the married woman’s autonomy over person and rights and relationships to property stems from my interest in the indissolubility feature of the marriage contract as a means

2 to protect married women from easily being deserted by their husbands and often left without their rightful property.3 As Ann Cook discusses in “Social Restrictions Against Illicit Unions in Romeo and Juliet,” the marriage contract is generally known as a mechanism to restrict illicit male-female relationships (100). However, the indissolubility feature of the contract came about because women in sexual unions were being ‘put away’ too easily and relatively too often by their male companions.4 When the wife, or wife in question, is deserted, what then becomes of her? What becomes of her property? This is the complex situation Helena and Mariana are in when their husbands or husbands-in-question desert them. It is especially economically challenging for Mariana when Angelo deserts her when her dowry is lost in a shipwreck and she goes to live at the moated grange at Saint Luke’s. Examining Shakespeare’s treatment of these deserted women and their autonomy over person or their rights property, my essay also investigates Shakespeare’s treatment of marriage law and practice in the wider context of the legal culture in order to understand how such laws came to influence, frame, and shape Shakespeare’s two texts, or even how the plays subvert contemporary England’s common laws and practices. To understand early modern marriage law and culture as it pertains to All’s Well and Measure for Measure, a few problems must be addressed at the outset. The first is that All’s Well and Measure for Measure are not set in Shakespeare’s England, though some scholars discuss marriage law and practice in Shakespeare’s plays against the backdrop of early modern England with its respective ‘English’ laws. For instance, B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol in Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage state that “regardless of the period or locale of his dramatic settings, Shakespeare’s depictions of marriage usually mirrored the laws and practices of contemporary England” (15).5 They believe that while Shakespeare’s dramatization of certain legal situations are “fantastical,” the plays

3 My study and analysis will also include fiancés and fiancées which I will refer to as husbands- and wives-in- question since the plays raise questions as to whether some couples are actually married, or if someone is truly a husband or wife (such is the question or questions with Claudio and Julietta in Measure for Measure). For the sake of being concise I will often generally refer to the people in question as married people except in places where it is important to differentiate between the marriage, unmarried, or married in question. 4 Because women had relatively little legal protection or agency against desertion, in that it was too easy to put away women who entered into sexual unions with men, it was the Church’s aim to bar men from being able to easily put away their wives by forcing them to “contract” an indissoluble sexual union. See Ruth Karras’s Unmarriages, pp. 38-42. 5 Sokol and Sokol characterize Shakespeare’s “mirrored laws” as one of three modes of his ‘deployment of legal materials and ideas, stating that, “Shakespeare creates a dramatic ‘mirrorland’ in which (within the margins of verisimilitude allowing dramatic shorthand or other artistic license) his drama more or less realistically represents actual and well-known practices of English law (8). 3

“dramatic articulations allude to actual English legal problems, ambiguities, or enigmas” (9). While I agree that certain legal ‘situations’ and problems may mirror those in contemporary England (that adultery and or also laws against adultery in Florence, Italy are the same in London, England), the study of marriage law and practice, however, is more complicated than that. One problem is trying to determine or understand what is meant by ‘English’ law. The law or courts that are often discussed in relation to early modern marriage are the common law courts, which were most restrictive of women’s autonomy over person and rights to property.6 Though some modern scholars read Shakespeare’s plays in light of coverture, coverture is not always explicit; it is historically assumed, and therefore may not be the most accurate way to interpret marriage law or practice in the plays. Therefore, when examining Shakespeare’s presentation of marriage laws and practices, it is important to remember that there were different contemporary governing bodies (common law courts, the ecclesiastical courts, and the Chancery, to name the main three) attempting to regulate marriage or settle marriage disputes, including property disputes. What partly attributed to the complexity of the legal system is that these different governing bodies did not have the same views on marriage. For instance, in From Children to Citizens: Volume II: The Role of the Juvenile Court, it is stated that in England, “marriage was considered both a civil contract – a relationship which, at common law, altered the status of a woman for property actions, and a spiritual union consecrated by the church” (Hartman, 240). In other words, marriage was viewed as two different types of contracts which also differed in the way women were treated in relation to property. As another example of the contrasting legal views, in Love, Lust, and License in Early Modern England: Illicit Sex and the Nobility Johanna Rickman states that civil law and the Church did not always agree on cases regarding illegitimate children (another case of marital ‘property’ dispute) or always agree on what made a marriage valid (15-16).7 Sokol and Sokol state that “a late Elizabethan population

6 In “Common Law Marriage in Measure for Measure,” Larry Weiss mentions, “Common-law marriage is a misnomer, at least as it applied to marriages in early modern England. The law governing the formation and elements of marriage in Tudor and Stuart England was a product of ecclesiastical law enforced in the church courts, not the common law created by the royal courts or statute law enacted by Parliament with the consent of the monarch” (1). 7 I want to note that the contrast here is between civil law courts and the Church courts. To be clear, civil law was not the same as common law. For the differences between the civil courts and common law courts see “The Common Law and Civil Law Traditions” from The Robbins Collection, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. The purpose of this information is to show the even broader landscape of the early modern legal system, especially regarding marital matters (in this case, illegitimate children, which were based on parents’ marital status). 4 of about four million persons were involved in over one million legal actions every year” and that “such enormous volumes of litigation were heard in a large range of sometimes overlapping, sometimes competitive, sometimes co-operative, sometime waning, sometimes burgeoning, sometimes conservative, and sometimes innovatory jurisdictions” (4). As we picture this complex early modern legal culture, Rickman’s following response on the varying court systems is so vitally important that I felt the need to quote her at length: When surveying the early modern legal landscape, it is important to realize that the law was not an objective and static “background” against which the lived experiences of illicit sex can be compared. Rather, it was contentious and often reinterpreted, an ongoing “cultural dialect” especially since English common law was built on precedence rather than a set law code. The meaning and the purpose of the law was worked out in the process of law, and in general, early modern English society was very litigious, where people of most classes availed themselves of the wide array of law courts. Fornication, adultery, and illegitimacy were punishable acts throughout the early modern period. However, the early modern laws on sex and reproduction were often vague, contradictory, and elastic, especially since it was not always clear who had jurisdiction over these offenses (15). As highlighted above, the early marriage legal system is not a simple system to navigate from a modern perspective, and it was often left up to early modern litigants to decide in which court they wanted to try their cases. But this was the time and place in which Shakespeare was writing, and it is difficult to apply ‘English’ law to Shakespeare’s plays without specifically attempting to identify which English laws are applicable to the plays. For instance, despite contemporary coverture laws, the relatively new Elizabethan Chancery granted women more autonomy over person and property. For a general picture of the Chancery and its purpose, Thomas Egerton (the last Elizabethan Chancellor) described the Chancery in the following way: The case why there is a Chancery is that man’s actions are so divers and infinite, that it is impossible to make any general law which may aptly meet with every act and not fall in some circumstances. The office of the Chancellor is to correct men’s

consciences of what nature soever they be, and to soften and mollify the extremity of the law (Cioni, 7). Some of the “extremity of the law” had to do with the “fiction” under common law that women “could have no proprietary rights separate from their spouses” (Cioni, 11). Maria Cioni describes this remedy of disabled married women in more specified terms: Chancery, like the other courts, was a product and a reflection of the wants and needs of society. Therefore, the fact that Chancery was not only receptive of and attractive to women’s plight but actually realized that they should be accorded some rights and duties indicates that social attitudes towards women were changing. The desire to give women some sort of future security moved Chancery to protect future equitable interests and the step of allowing married women to have a “separate estate” free from their spouses’ control was achieved through Chancery’s “creature,” the trust (Cioni, 2). As a real example, in Divorce in medieval England Sarah Butler alludes to a popular case from 1581 that historians refer to regarding the Court of Chancery and the property rights of married women: When Mary [Walgrave] wedded Arthur [Goldinge], she was a wealthy heiress in her own right. Her marriage to Arthur was not a happy one, however. His abusive behavior towards his wife soon led to a judicial separation, and Mary abruptly found herself in need of financial support. Thus, she turned to the court of Chancery, petitioning to have the property she brought into the marriage revert back to her name now that she was required to maintain herself. Her request found sympathy with the Chancellor. Although coverture prevented him from choosing this precise course of action, her appeal to justice may well have influenced the tenor of chancery’s decision. The court ordered that lands from her inheritance be sold and that the proceeds be put into a trust for Walgrave in order to guarantee her separate maintenance, setting a guiding precedent for future wives in need of support (79). Butler calls this the turning point in the law of marital property, stating that before this case, there was no “clear-cut method of determining how to divide property in the event of a divorce.” Though this reference speaks to divorce, the Elizabethan Court of Chancery

6 essentially sought to remedy the legal disabilities early modern married women and female litigants suffered under the common law, especially in terms of their autonomy over person and property even as feme coverts. In attempting to pinpoint English law in Shakespeare’s plays, one must also consider the religious laws in England. If we look to England’s religious laws of the time as an influence on marriage laws in Shakespeare’s plays, we must consider marriage law and practice after the Reformation, with the rise of Protestantism in England. Due to the Reformation, there were certain ‘influences’ contributing to (or at least attempting to contribute to) ideas about marriage law and practice as the Reformation brought with it varying views on marriage and divorce from its two key leaders, Martin Luther and John Calvin. For instance, for a Lutheran view, Alan McFarland in Marriage and love in England discusses how Luther “declared [marriage] to be a ‘temporal’ worldly thing’ which ‘does not concern the church’; it is ‘of itself a thing indifferent’, nothing but a civil contract” (153). In Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World, Merry Wiesner-Hanks discusses the Calvinist perspective, stating that “Calvinist ideas were one of the influences on those in England who saw the English Protestant church as still too close to Catholicism” (74). These ‘puritans’ not only opposed Catholicism, but Anglicanism too, including views on marriage, including varying views on dissolution or termination of marriage.8 As Torri Thompson mentions in Marriage and Its Dissolution in Early Modern England, the diverging views make English social practices “difficult to establish because Anglicanism did not accept Continental Protestant positions on marital dissolution” (xviii). The diverging views nonetheless inform us that ‘Protestant’ views on marriage in England were not all necessarily Anglican, or that not all Anglican views on marriage were necessarily ‘Protestant.’9 Therefore, to look at early modern English marriage through a general ‘English’ lens may be too broad a scope to view marriage practice and law in the plays. The question then remains, what marriage laws are at work in the play?

8 For more on the general diverging views among Protestants and Catholics on marriage and family, see Lisa Hopkins’s The Shakespearean Marriage, pp.3-5. 9 It may be helpful to remember that the initial Reformation in England came about because of Henry VIII’s break from the Catholic Church over his being denied a divorce from his then wife Katherine Aragon. As Velma Richmond mentions in Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance, “Although his divorce from Katherine of Aragon in 1530 led to a formal break with Rome in the spring of 1533, Henry’s opposition to those who wanted theological changes from conservative religion persisted until his death in 1547” (11). Though Henry used some of Luther’s ideas to justify an annulment of his first marriage, a Reformation did not take place in England necessarily due of the ideas propagated by Luther or Calvin, and much of marriage law thereafter remained, in essence, Catholic (Thompson, xii). 7

This brings me to Shakespeare’s ‘Catholic’ intent. Though living and writing in Protestant England, Shakespeare would not have been a stranger to Catholic marriage law.10 Indeed, considering his mother and father were both Catholics, and because, as some suggest, Shakespeare’s own marriage was possibly ‘Catholic,’ some scholars suggest that Shakespeare’s Catholic background had an influence on his plays.11 Though no one can be unconditionally sure of Shakespeare’s authorial intent to provide an accurate account of the laws (especially considering these plays were written for entertainment), and though, as Margaret Scott says in “Our City’s Institutions,” one should be careful of “treating romantic fiction as historical fact” (796), Shakespeare’s problematizing of certain Catholic elements in something like Measure for Measure (elements he possibly problematizes implicitly in All’s Well) may indicate Shakespeare’s desire or willingness to preserve some cultural and legal Catholic reality.12 This bring me to my final point about my approach to the laws in Shakespeare’s two plays. Regarding the question of Shakespeare’s Catholic intent, I think the real legal issues raised in the plays pertain not to differences in Catholicism and Protestantism, but to differences between canon law and ‘Church’ law, which were at times contradictory and conflicting. Therefore, in trying to understand and determine what Shakespeare knew or did not know about marriage laws, I contend that Shakespeare was problematizing differences between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ marriage laws, that is, between old de jure canon law of marriage and the relatively new de facto Church regulations. It could be for this reason in their introduction to Shakespeare and Religion, Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti state that some scholars portray Shakespeare as “both intellectually and emotionally attached to some of the features of the “old religion” as he sought ways to translate some of them into psychologically and ethically powerful theater” (5).

10 There are, however, arguments that Shakespeare’s knowledge of Catholic law is suspect. For instance, in “Our City’s Institutions,” Margaret Scott says that it is not clear what Shakespeare or his audience knew about Catholic law stating that, “Arguments concerning Shakespeare’s knowledge of affairs and, still more, assertions about what his audience might have been expected to know are, as often as not, mere guesswork” (796). Scott does however say that it does not seem “especially rash” to assert that many people in Shakespeare’s audience might have known that the Catholic Church differed from the Church of England in certain legal matters such as respective views on the hand-fast marriage (796). 11 In Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, Dennis Taylor states that since the late twentieth century, there has been much more scholarship written about the importance of Shakespeare’s Catholic background to the study of this plays. See p. 24. 12 In Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays, David Beauregard argues that in All’s Well, the theology of grace and Helena’s working of miracles are both Roman Catholic theology (41). 8

A major conflict between canon law and church regulation problematized in the plays is what made a marriage valid. For instance, in “Shakespeare and Marriage: An Open Question,” Frances Dolan states: It [was not] entirely clear what constituted a legally binding marriage. By the 17th century, it was widely accepted that marriages should be advertised in advance by the calling of banns three times, solemnized in open church by a minister, and recorded in the parish register. Still, many marriages were transacted outside of these rules and they remained binding nonetheless… Indeed, the Reformation insistence that marriage was not a sacrament placed more emphasis than ever on the spouses as those who made the marriage, through vows and sexual consummation, even as the Church of England attempted to exert more control over the sanctification and regulation of marriage. What Dolan is alluding to is the difference between canon law and Church regulation. As I will discuss in more detail in my analysis of marriage laws in the plays, the older canon law of marriage was based on the theory of consent that allowed couples to contract marriage privately anywhere and at any time by spoken vows alone (this is an issue Claudio raises in Measure for Measure when he argues that his marriage is indeed a marriage ‘upon a true contract’). However, the Church required a more ceremonial, public path to marriage, and punished (or attempted to punish) any couple that did not adhere to such regulations. Furthermore, what Dolan also highlights is that canon law was not exclusive to Catholicism, but also applied in Protestant England. In Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama, Subha Mukherji states, “Marriage law in early modern England was something of an anomaly in the European context, in that it still retained, in spite of the Reformation, the rule of canon law” (18-19). Speaking also to specific details of canon law marriage in England is Charles Sherman who in “A Brief History of Medieval Roman Canon Law in England” states that prior to the 16th century Council of Trent, “the Canon law required no ceremony or rite as a necessity for marriage” (248). He goes on to state: From the middle of the 12th century down to the middle of the 16th century and the Council of Trent, this was the law of England as to marriage: no priest, no religious ceremony were necessary to form a valid marriage; the exchange of

consent to take effect at once operated to make the parties married, as did the exchange of consent to take effect in the future followed by physical union (249). The conflict then is that, like the Catholic Church, despite canon law, the Anglican Church sought to enforce certain ceremonial regulations for marriage that went beyond the canon law, including having to be married in the church.13 The issue surrounding the canon law and Church regulation is something that is strongly evident in Measure for Measure. For this reason, I will not look at marriage laws and practices necessarily as an allusion to the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism, but as an allusion to the conflict between canon law and Church regulation. However, I do not intend to argue for a certain reading of the play based on these two legal models as much as I attempt to establish a working model of marriage law and practice to show how women’s rights and relationships to property are predicated on what the plays determine to be legally binding marriage, something that will include discussions surrounding consummation in both All’s Well and Measure for Measure. And therefore, by looking at Mariana’s and Helena’s return to the physical (marriage) bed, and Helena’s use of her own property as a feme covert to remedy her marital situation, I seek to understand how Shakespeare’s treatment of marriage law, despite contemporary common laws, appears to grant or allow women autonomy over their own persons while also granting them certain rights to marital property.

13 Martin Ingram in Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 states that “In handling marriage contract cases… the church courts laid increasing stress on solemnization as the only guarantee of a socially and legally acceptable marriage. An important complementary development in the period c. 1570–1640 was that the courts, by stepping up disciplinary prosecution for prenuptial fornication and bridal pregnancy, tried more firmly to insist that betrothed couples should remain chaste before they were married in church: that a properly solemnized marriage alone made sexual relations illicit” (219). 10

All’s Well that Ends Well A common theme in many of Shakespeare’s comedies is the coupling of a young man and a young woman. Yet, as David McCandless mentions, “No other comedy of Shakespeare’s dramatizes such a startling romantic mismatch” than does All’s Well that Ends Well.14 The plot of All’s Well turns on this romantic mismatch when Bertram, the object of Helena’s affection, does not desire Helena in return, in part because of her lower social standing (2.3.123-26). To get Bertram to marry her, Helena manipulates the marital situation by performing a ‘miracle’ in which she heals the King of France of a fatal disease. In exchange, the King promises Helena that she can marry Bertram. Healing the King sets the tone for and underscores the theme of remedying the disabled in the play. But the remedying of the disabled in the play is not limited to the physically disabled, but also includes the legally and socially disabled. Socially, Helena represents a type of early modern woman whose lowborn status rendered her unable to marry higher-born men; this was their ‘disability.’ To overcome this disability, she heals the King of his deadly disease, after which the King grants her Bertram’s hand in marriage. Legally, married women (feme coverts) were also disabled because they had very little autonomy over their own person or property due to coverture laws of the time that prevented them from being able to represent themselves in court, gave the husband the right to subsume any property the wife brought into the marriage, and prevented women from entering contracts without permission from their husbands.15 While Shakespeare’s plays do not always seem to fit marriage law to the letter of the law, if we are to seriously consider (as I believe we should) the place and importance of marriage law in All’s Well, common law was not the only regulatory power over marriage and marital property at the turn of the seventeenth century. This is not to say that coverture is unimportant to the study of law in All’s Well, but that it is also important to consider a wider range of jurisdictions in early England that may have influenced Shakespeare’s text. Indeed, it may be that the play can be read against the backdrop of coverture in order to compare and contrast differences

14 See David McCandless’s “A Modern Perspective,” in the Folger publication of All’s Well that Ends Well, p. 235. 15 According to Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe, under medieval common law (a law that carried over into the early modern era) “married women were theoretically disadvantaged as they were deprived of a separate legal capacity from their husbands” and that “all of her chattels [i.e. moveable property] ultimately belonged to her husband, with whom she became, effectively, one person under his guardianship” (Beattie and Stevens, 94). 11 between one cultural norm in the common law and an alternate reality for women in the early modern era that extended beyond or existed outside of coverture. This brings me to the Elizabethan Chancery. Despite assumptions that married women by law had very little (if any) property rights or autonomy over their own persons due to the notion of coverture, this was not necessarily the case with the Chancery. For instance, Amy Erickson in Women and Property in Early Modern England states that “in fifteenth-century England the system called ‘equity,’” which was a court system within the Chancery, “originated in order to modify what was perceived as the harshness of common law, and throughout its history a considerable part of the business of equity courts consisted of cases involved the property of married women, which common law did not recognize” (5). In Shakespeare's Domestic Economies, Natasha Korda contests the assumption that early modern married women had no property rights in early modern England, stating that “This assumption has… been perpetuated by the acceptance of the purported hegemony of the common law doctrines of coverture in marriage and primogeniture in property” (7). For this reason, Sokol and Sokol state that, “Treatments of early modern law and marriage must consider equity because the court of Chancery was then developing a way for married women to overcome some of the extreme legal disabilities imposed on them by the doctrine of coverture” (7). As hegemonic as early modern England’s coverture laws may seem to modern scholars, such laws were not the only laws that regulated marital matters in the early modern era. When looking to the Church courts, though canon law had no explicit way in dealing with married women’s property rights, Michael Sheehan in Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe states that “certain doctrines were advanced [to involve] a partial statement and defense of the property rights of women during and after their marriage” (16).16 Though what the Church promoted in theory was not necessarily a legal reality on ‘the books,’ the Church was apparently calling for more autonomy for married women over person and property. While the Church could not always remedy the legal disability that many women suffered in the early modern era, certain advancements in supporting women’s autonomy and rights were signs of a

16 It is not clear what the wife’s property rights “during” marriage actually were. Some of the post-marriage property rights Sheehan refers to has to do with the rights of the widow, though he does go on to say that when looking at Episcopal registers of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, that upon dissolution of a marriage, the Church sought a return of the wife’s dowry (both landed and moveable), and sought to force the husband to provide child support for his children. 12 time and society that recognized the need for married women’s increased autonomy over person and property. What we essentially have to work with in the play is not necessarily an explicitly stated legal system (as we see in Measure for Measure), but a marriage culture with certain realities that exist because of (or in response to) the law. This context helped to create a culture that either supported or allowed for the Helena’s of the early modern era.17 In Reading Early Modern Women, for instance, Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer state, “Though gender became a determining factor in matters of title and property, Chancery developed the idea that a married woman could have separate property in addition to her dowry, and could act as the executor of another’s will without the approval of her husband, something prohibited under the common law” (16). These realities, in turn, perpetuate certain marriage practices that fall along a marital spectrum within early English society (with Helena and Bertram’s marriage falling somewhere along that spectrum). And, though not explicitly stated in the play, the Church or the Chancery may have had an impact on the way Shakespeare concedes or grants Helena authority and autonomy over property and that none of the characters (men or women) appear to have any anxieties about the amount of control Helena displays over her own person or property.18 The difficulty in discerning authorial intent is that the play does not definitively say if Bertram’s refusal to obtain power over Helena or her property is due to the law or simply his lack of interest in Helena. If the latter is solely true, Bertram makes coverture law void since, as Margaret Hunt states, “For coverture to work properly the husband needed to be there a good part of the time.”19 Nonetheless, by looking at how marriage is treated in the play, and the fact that marriage law (mainly the issue of consummation) is somewhat of a ‘problem’ in this problem play, Helena appears to understand the authority she has over her own property that comes to serve her interests regardless of any legal disabilities under coverture laws of the time.

17 W.R. Prest says that there needs to be more research before we can determine to what extent women were able and willing to exploit the legal system in a certain autonomous fashion. However, several scholars vouch for this new era in women’s autonomy over person and property, including Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer. 18 We may be able to consider Bertram as having anxiety over Helena’s autonomy over her own person or property. However, it is because he is the object of her affection (she wants to marry him). If she wanted to marry someone else, one can only speculate as to whether he would display any anxiety over women’s autonomy over person or property. 19 This is discussed at the beginning of chapter seven of Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World. However, the book was accessed through Google Books and no page number was provided. 13

This demonstrates that early modern married women had or were gaining a greater level of autonomy over person and property per the theoretical support of the certain laws and courts. Because of this relatively new level of autonomy, Helena is able to use her own property to remedy her marital dilemma.20 First, as property, is the medicine Helena inherited from her father and uses to heal the King, thereby remedying her own social disability (that is, being lower-born and finding it difficult to marry higher-born men). But, in examining Helena’s use of medicine, I want to also address her socioeconomic situation and clarify how Helena uses to her property to her advantage. Nancy Bunker in Marriage and Land Law in Shakespeare and Middleton states that “Females without a substantial bridal portion, especially those who wished to marry into a higher class, found themselves at a distinct disadvantage because they could not provide the equal monetary match fathers and suitors expected to ensure parity in the marriage” (61). For this reason, Bunker states that Helena’s use of medicine to heal the King is her contribution to the marriage. Thus Helena, who Bunker says brought “neither money or property into the marital union” (61), represents women who were socioeconomically disadvantaged because they could not afford a sizeable enough dowry to marry higher-born men (61). However, part of Bunker’s argument relates to the King offering to pay Helena’s dowry: “If thou canst like this creature as a maid / I can create the rest: virtue and she / Is her own dower; honour and wealth from me” (2.3.154-155). But because the King offers to provide a dowry for Helena, can we assume that Helena cannot provide a sizeable enough dowry to marry Bertram, or that she did not bring any property or money into the marriage? Though social status is a problem for Helena, I do not believe her socioeconomic situation is, which brings me to more property, that is, her money, Helena uses to remedy her marital situation. The King’s offer to pay a bride price is probably more so gratuity than necessity, for Helena appears to be financially secure as seen when Helena uses her money to enlist the help of the widow and the widow’s daughter Diana: “Take this purse of gold / And let me buy your friendly help thus far / Which I will over-pay and pay again / When I have found it” (3.7.17-20). Helena needs the widow and her daughter’s help in fulfilling the marital conditions Bertram set out earlier in the play: “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger which, never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband. But in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never’” (3.2.59-62). As further provocation, Helena

20 Though the bed is essentially Diana’s, I will discuss later how Helena comes into possession of the bed. 14 even agrees to “add three thousand crowns to what is passed already” (3.7.39-40) to Diana’s dowry to help Diana marry a husband in return for Diana’s help in the bed trick. Helena later accounts for her dowry in the following manner, telling the widow, “doubt not but heaven / Hath brought me up to be your daughter’s dower / As it hath fated her to be my motive / And helper to a husband” (4.4.18-19).21 This is one of the first instances where we see Helena as a feme covert exercising a level of autonomy over her property in a feme sole fashion. How Helena becomes wealthy is not discussed much in the play; it could be from an inheritance considering her father held the typically lucrative position of physician to the King. Helena may also be using money from the wealth she received from the King (probably a dowry gift): “Virtue and she / is her own dower, honor and wealth from me” (2.3.155-56), some of which she pays to the widow to push her matrimonial agenda. All of this paints a different portrait than the conventional picture of a married woman (lowborn especially) being wealthy apart from her husband. The play thus suggestively places a rich feme covert in conversation with a feme sole widow whose “estate be fall’n” (3.7.4) to possibly juxtapose the ‘typical with the ‘atypical.’ It was typical (that is, more possible and probable) for a widow to be wealthy (if the late husband were wealthy), even in a coverture society. It was, however, atypical in a coverture culture for married women to be wealthy apart from their husbands. However, Helena offers a purse of gold to the once wellborn widow since it appears she needs, or will eventually need, the money. Considering contemporary culture, Helena’s discussion with the widow seems to frame the rich feme covert having wealth apart from her husband as something relatively normal (or at least ‘acceptable’) since the widow (or any other character) never questions or displays any anxieties over the amount of money Helena possesses as a married woman. This draws more attention to Helena’s autonomy over her property (in this case, her wealth) by contrasting her status as a feme covert with the feme sole widow who was afforded more rights over person and property by common law. Nonetheless, though a wealthy widow was not unusual, it was not guaranteed that a widow would be wealthy or financially secure in perpetuity. Christine Churches in “Women and Property in Early Modern England” writes, “Although a widow commonly enjoyed much

21 As Julie Crawford points out in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, it is not clear by this passage that there was ever intended to be a husband for Diana (44) who at one time swears to “live and die a maid” (4.3.86). 15 more property from her marital estate than the law entitled her to, the intent was to give her an ample maintenance, not to make her independently wealthy” (166). In contrast to the widow’s fallen estate, Helena is independently wealthy. At first, the widow is reluctant to follow Helena’s plan since she is concerned about the morality of the scheme. And thus it appears that Helena wins the widow, not because she convinces the widow of the plan’s morality and lawfulness, but because of the amount of money offered: “I should believe you / For you have showed me that which well approves / You’re great in fortune.” Helena follows up by requesting to buy the widows “friendly help,” and eventually the widow agrees. Helena being independently wealthy allows her to pay the widow for her help, and to furnish Diana’s dowry, thus placing Helena in a more patriarchal role. If husbandly maintenance was a patriarchal practice, then Helena in an economic sense operates in the same way as husband to the widow and father to Diana. As the widow’s inheritance from her deceased husband dwindles, Helena helps financially by her ‘employing’ and paying the Widow. Because we can assume that Diana’s dowry for a prospective husband is dwindling with the widow’s b’fallen estate, Helena then acts as a father when she says she will provide Diana’s dowry. Helena’s dealings in an independently wealthy, patriarchal role illuminates the need to ensure married and betrothed women had proper financial maintenance during and after their marriages. Assurance of financial maintenance was an important feature of the marriage contract. Part of the reason fathers wanted to ensure that their daughters married was to ensure that they would have proper financial ‘maintenance’ beyond the father’s home (this, of course, was not necessarily true for the relatively poor). For this reason, marriage was often treated as an economic institution.22 One of Shakespeare’s plays that exemplifies marriage as an economic institution is The Taming of the Shrew. Baptista has suitors for his younger daughter Bianca’s hand in marriage, but will not allow her to marry until he first finds a husband for the older daughter Katherine (the shrew). When Petruchio agrees to marry Katherine, and Baptista and Petruchio discuss the financial arrangements of the marriage, both Baptista and Petruchio make certain financial agreements when ‘contracting’ the marriage. Baptista is to provide the ‘dowry,’ that is, one half of his lands and 20,000 crowns after his death. Petruchio is to provide the ‘dower’ – that is, all his ‘lands and leases’ upon his death if Katherine should survive him

22 The phrase “marriage as an economic institution” is taken from M. E. Robinson’s article of the same name (though only the name is borrowed from his article). 16

(2.1.121-134). Marriage as an economic institution is further exemplified in Baptista’s dealings with Bianca’s suitors when Baptista says, “Content you, gentlemen: I will compound this strife / ‘Tis deeds must win the prize; and he of both / That can assure my daughter greatest dower / Shall have my Bianca’s love” (2.1.361-364). After Baptista’s remark, the two suitors begin to discuss how they can provide maintenance for Bianca, one trying to outbid the other to ensure Bianca’s hand in marriage. Though marriage was often treated as a business arrangement, Baptista’s concern about husbandly maintenance for the wife showed a concern for daughters that went beyond commodification of children. In other words, he is not solely concerned with marrying off his daughters simply to receive payment in return. Rather, Baptista’s concern is to ensure Bianca and Katherine are maintained financially during and after their marriages (if their husbands predecease them), which is something more than a convenience for married women whose ‘occupations’ were mostly limited or relegated to non-paid domestic duties. This is partly why the dowry (given from the father to the husband) was initially important to the marriage contract, because it helped the husband provide maintenance for his wife.23 Another portion of property that also comes to serve Helena’s matrimonial agenda is her jewelry, that is, her ring. As Bertram attempts to use his property (his ring) to serve his marital interests, so too does Helena, with Diana’s help, use the ring the King gave her as part of the bed trick.24 The ring is switched with Bertram’s ring during the bed trick to ensure that Helena came into possession of the ring Bertram promised would never be placed on Helena’s hand. In addition to the sexual relation Bertram unknowingly has with Helena, Helena’s possession of the ring fulfills the “conditions” set out by Bertram, and the two are married per Bertram’s conditions (though he does not know he is married until near the end of the play).

23 According to William Smith’s A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, etc, during the time of the Roman Empire the dos (the early modern dowry) was “everything which on the occasion of a woman’s marriage was transferred to the husband or the father’s husband… for the purpose of enabling the husband to sustain the charges of the married state” (437). Though the dos here refers to a practice in the era of the Roman Empire, there is no reason to believe the purpose of the dowry as a means to help financially ‘maintain’ a wife ceased to exist in the early modern era, especially for men who were not wealthy. Indeed, Alice Clark in Working Life Of Women in the Seventeenth Century states that fathers of brides would provide ‘dots’ (a woman's marriage portion or the property which she brings with her into the marriage (OED)) to relieve some of the financial burden of maintaining a wife and a household (39). 24 Diana says to Bertram, “When midnight comes, knock at my chamber-window / I’ll order take my mother shall not hear / Now will I charge you in the band of truth / When you have conquer’d my yet maiden bed / Remain there but an hour, nor speak to me / My reasons are most strong; and you shall know them / When back again this ring shall be deliver’d / And on your finger in the night I’ll put / Another ring, that what in time proceeds / May token to the future our past deeds / Adieu, till then; then, fail not. You have won / A wife of me, though there my hope be done (4.2.65-77). 17

As a fulfillment to Bertram’s conditions, the ring belongs to the category of material property, which Helena uses toward a matrimonial end. However, the ring has a dual function in the play. Along with fulfilling Bertram’s conditions, the ring also represents Helena’s autonomy over her own person, that is, her female genitalia. Mukherji discusses how the ring in All’s Well (and other early modern literature) is analogous for a promise of marriage and the female genitalia (48). Mukherji points out that the ring functions as a token of early modern contractual marital agreements as well as a figure of speech for “what cannot be decently shown” (48). Thus, the ring also belongs to the category of the personal, wherein it becomes symbolic for the hymen and, subsequently, marital sex, a vital legal component that initially makes a marriage valid. Bertram denying Helena’s rights to the marriage bed brings me to the issue of consummation. In Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage, B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol discuss how the legal aspects of Bertram’s refusal to consummate his marriage have been discussed by many scholars with much confusion (146). Sokol and Sokol believe that the marriage is indeed a ‘marriage’ while other critics believe the non-consummation of the marriage could result in an annulment (that it was not a marriage). It is known also that some marriages were annulled on the grounds of non-consummation.25 But whether a marriage is valid depends on interpretations of canon law (the old law of record) and the relatively new Church laws. Per canon law, a marriage contracted through the speaking of vows, but not yet consummated, was still a marriage (Sherman, 248).26 Even then, the underlying difference in canon law was whether the marriage was contracted per verba de future (future tense) or verba de presenti (present tense), neither of which were not easy to dissolve. Verba de future was a future promise to be husband and wife. Verba de presenti was contracted in the now, “that they now at the present moment take each other as husband and wife” (Sherman, 248). In the play, the ceremony (albeit a Church

25 For more information, see Frances E. Dolan’s “Shakespeare and Marriage: An Open Question.” 26 Part of the argument about the consent theory of marriage has to do with the marriage model patterned after Mary and Joseph. Some consider Mary a perpetual virgin despite her being married and called ‘wife’ in the Christian Bible. The ‘morality’ of sex even within the confines of marriage was another issue surrounding the theory of consent. Early Christian Church (which, essentially became the Catholic Church) promoted virginity over marital sex and marked sexual consummation in marriage as something imperfect. Therefore, the early Christian Church prescribed two different types of marriages, one being what I would call ‘regular’ marriage and the other being what was considered a ‘spiritual’ marriage. In the spiritual marriage, the couples practiced abstinence. The point here is that a marriage, which was based on a canon of marriage law that was formulated by or in response to such discussions, could exist without consummation. For more information on the discussions and debates on consent theory, see Irven Resnick’s “Marriage in Medieval Culture: Consent Theory and The Case of Joseph and Mary.” 18 requirement) solidifies the marriage contract in the now; thus, the two are married. And therefore, what we can glean from the text is that consummation was apparently a legal right to Helena: “I am not worthy of the wealth I owe / Nor dare I say ‘tis mine, and yet it is / But, like a timorous thief, most fain would steal / What law does vouch mine own” (2.5.88-91).27 Bunker agrees that what Helena vouches as her own is consummation. However, she goes on to state that “Marriage law creates a wife with words, but words are not deeds, and, in order to be a legal union, the marriage must be consummated” (62). While I agree that sex may be a theological duty according to Paul’s address to the Church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7:1-5), her assertion that consummation has to take place for it to be a legal union may be a bit of a misnomer. While a present tense marriage, if consummated, could never be dissolved (Sherman, 248), non-consummation did not necessarily make the marriage illegal. Despite lack of consummation, Helena and Bertram’s marriage is not illegal. Thus, what law does vouch Helena’s own could be read as what law grants her as her own, that is, Bertram’s genitalia. In this case, ‘what law does vouch [her] own’ becomes ‘what is now lawful for her to have,’ something that was once illegal to have. Therefore, it is not a question of whether the marriage is legal, but what property is now legally Helena’s. Essentially, not only does Helena display autonomy over her own person (that is, her own genitalia), she is also working to ‘possess’ Bertram’s ‘property,’ which is now her property. Because of Bertram’s desertion, Helena attempts to remedy her situation by exchanging rings, not with Bertram, but with Diana (alluding here to genitalia). This is probably a play on the exchanging of rings between the betrothed, which was, much like today, customary in the early modern marriage ceremony. If this is a play on the marriage ceremony, there is a similar parallel between the bed trick and the marriage ceremony in that in a marriage ceremony, the betrothed exchange vows to contract marriage accompanied by exchanging rings, just as Diana and Helena too contract an agreement and eventually “exchange” (i.e. replace) rings in the bed. In this case, there appears to be a type of contractual consummation between Diana and Helena that somewhat mimics or even mocks the sexual consummation that was supposed to happen

27 Nancy Bunker in Marriage and Land Law in Shakespeare and Middleton agrees that what Helena vouches as her own is consummation. However, she goes on to state that “Marriage law creates a wife with words, but words are not deeds, and, in order to be a legal union, the marriage must be consummated” (62). However, her assertion that consummation has to take place for it to be a legal union is a bit of a misnomer. If consummated, a present tense marriage could never be dissolved (Sherman, 248), but non-consummation did not necessarily make the marriage illegal. Thus what law does vouch Helena’s own could be read as what law grants her as her’s, that is, 19 with Bertram and Helena since Diana and the widow fulfill their agreement to Helena, while Bertram does not. When Helena enters into a contract with Diana and the widow, the play stages another matter that undermines coverture law and culture. Due to coverture law, not only did a married woman’s property get absorbed into her husband’s property, but also the married woman, as the feme covert, could not enter into contracts. As we know, verbal contracts were legally binding

(much like present tense marriage contracts, though these types of early modern contracts are in dispute like most matters pertaining to marriage law). It could be for this reason Diana says, “I am yours,” as she easily bequeaths herself to Helena, thus acting as a counterexample to Bertram’s reluctance to fulfill his “contract.” The later exchanging of the genital rings become symbolic for the exchange of wedding rings, which solidifies the contractual agreement. However, Diana and Helena do not trade weddings rings. Instead, the two substitute their own genitalia as Helena takes Diana’s place in bed in order to trick Bertram. In “The Ring’s the Thing: Elizabeth’s Virgin Knot and All’s Well That Ends Well,” Kaara Peterson underscores this thought saying that “In early modern England, wedding rings are familiarly understood to be in metonymic relationship to the female body” and that “the wedding ring replaces the female virgin’s hymeneal “ring” lost upon sexual consummation” (104). In this case, female genitalia are reduced to commodified objecst, not only in the sense of something that is sold, but also in the sense of something that is objectified. Nevertheless, Helena understands this, and up to this point, she has now used not only her money and her jewelry to serve her marital interests, but also displays autonomy over her person by using herself physically to fulfill Bertram’s request. This develops a peculiar paradox in that Helena is using her own sexuality—objectified and rendered as property— to get what she wants, which, in opposition, is something Bertram does not want. I deem this a peculiar paradox because of the issues surrounding the early modern married body as property. It is generally understood that women were the property of men in early modern society. Even more, the Bible, which drove many of the early modern ideas on sexuality and marriage, discusses how the husband’s body belongs to the wife, and the wife’s body belongs to the man (1 Corinthians 7:4). In Helena’s case, she has autonomy over her body, but seeks to give it to Bertram. On the other hand, Bertram theoretically and theologically owns Helena’s body, but does not claim it. This suggests instability in conventional gender roles and identities in the early modern era, and that sexuality is not something static but rather resides on

20 a spectrum of sexualized experience. My point here is that Helena is doing what she wants with what she has, and what she has is autonomy over not only material items, but her own sexuality, again uncharacteristic of a feme covert and of sexual norms of the time. The remaining property in question, and probably the most essential material property to and in the play, is the bed. Part of the bed’s essence as material property is, of course, its significance to the bed trick. However, the bed also operates figuratively. In a medical or medicinal sense, for instance, Helena heals the King of France while he is on his figurative “sickbed” or “deathbed.” In a legal sense, Helena remedies her own marital issues by, among other measures, using a bed that essentially becomes the ‘marriage bed.’ As I have focused on the autonomy over person and property experienced by the legally disabled, it is important to note that the bed Helena uses is owned by neither Bertram nor Helena; it belonged, of course, to Diana. Diana’s bed is in her bedchamber, which is a room in a house Diana’s mother presumably inherited from her late husband. Though Helena does not own Diana’s bed, the bed in some way acts as Helena’s ‘rental property’ per the agreement and payment between her and the widow. Though neither the bed or the bed trick is explicitly mentioned in Helena’s conversation with the widow, Helena’s agreement with the widow about the plan to deceive Bertram is discussed in the following passage when Helena says to Diana: You see it lawful, then: it is no more, But that your daughter, ere she seems as won, Desires this ring; appoints him an encounter; In fine, delivers me to fill the time, ………………………………………………. Why then to-night Let us assay our plot; which, if it speed, Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed And lawful meaning in a lawful act, Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact: But let’s about it. (3.7.34-54)28

28 The plans for the bed are explicitly laid out in Diana’s conversation with Bertram: “When midnight comes, knock at my chamber-window: “I'll order take my mother shall not hear. / Now will I charge you in the band of truth, / When you have conquer'd my yet maiden bed, / Remain there but an hour, nor speak to me: 21

This rental agreement is yet another move that undermines or complicates contemporary coverture law and culture considering women were not allowed to enter contracts without the husband’s consent (regardless if the husband was a deserter). As a rented piece of property, by the turn of the plot, Helena has paid for, and now taken over the most crucial piece of property in the play and has essentially turned it into her own marriage bed. This transformation from Diana’s bed, to a rented bed, to the marriage bed, shows the latitude Helena has even as a feme covert. Ironically, in a time where coverture was hegemonic, all of the characters appear to support her agency in her use of her property visible and invisible on stage as remedy her own legal disability. As author, rather than disable Helena, Shakespeare seemingly enables her. For even as a feme covert, she uses her property to her advantage, is able to represent herself in court (as we see toward the very end of the play), gains a certain level of social mobility as she is able to marry up by her own choice (as opposed to a husband choosing to marry down), and enters into a verbal contract with another woman.

My reasons are most strong; and you shall know them / When back again this ring shall be deliver’d: / And on your finger in the night I'll put / Another ring, that what in time proceeds / May token to the future our past deeds. / Adieu, till then; then, fail not. You have won / A wife of me, though there my hope be done” (4.2.65-77). 22

Measure for Measure In contrast to the oblique laws in All’s Well, certain parts of Measure for Measure portray Catholic law as hegemonic, including, among other Catholic elements, the presence of the “father” or Catholic priest (Vincentio in disguise), Isabella’s initial retreat to a convent, and the fact that Angelo calls himself “the voice of the recorded law” (2.4.65).29 As Scott says, “The law of Measure for Measure is not only story-book law, it is also, on the face of it, foreign, Roman Catholic law (794). However, as I outlined in my introduction, Measure for Measure exemplifies the issues and conflicts arising from differences between canon law and Church regulation. Thus, the ‘problem’ in this problem play is not the law, per se, but law enforcement, that is, how laws governing or regulating marriage and or also sex are interpreted and enforced by Angelo, the new ‘law enforcer.’ Being bothered by the growing sexual depravity in Vienna, Austria, Duke Vincentio employs Angelo as deputy to enforce laws against fornication more strictly. Therefore, Angelo uses Claudio, who has been charged with fornication and sentenced to death, as an example for other offenders, later contending that enforcers of the law “must not make a scarecrow of the law” (2.1.1). Being that fornication is a non-marital sexual matter, enforcement of certain laws regulating fornication in the play highlights the confusion as to what made a marriage valid. Claudio’s principal complaint is that the deputy has decided to enforce laws that have not been enforced in almost two decades.30 However, Claudio’s overarching contention is that he is being wrongfully charged for fornication; he does not consider himself a fornicator because he has had sexual relations with a woman he claims to have already married “upon a true contract” (1.2.142- 52). Says Claudio: Thus stands it with me: upon a true contract I got possession of Julietta’s bed You know the lady; she is fast my wife

29 The reference to recorded law is a refence to the canon law. Though Angelo declaring himself the voice of the recorded law could be an allusion to the recorded canon law of the Anglican Church, I have considered his declaration ‘Catholic’ in consideration of the play’s overall Catholic context. 30 Says Claudio, “And the new deputy now for the duke / Whether it be the fault and glimpse of newness / Or whether that the body public be / A horse whereon the governor doth ride / Who, newly in the seat, that it may know / He can command, lets it straight feel the spur / Whether the tyranny be in his place / Or in his emmence that fills it up / I stagger in: but this new governor / Awakes me all the enrolled penalties / Which have, like unscour'd armour, hung by the wall So long that nineteen zodiacs have gone round / And none of them been worn; and, for a name / Now puts the drowsy and neglected act / Freshly on me: 'tis surely for a name” (1.2.155-69). 23

Save that we do the denunciation lack Of outward order: this we came not to Only for propagation of a dower Remaining in the coffer of her friends From whom we thought it meet to hide our love Till time had made them for us. But it chances The stealth of our most mutual entertainment With character too gross is writ on Juliet. (1.2.142-52). Thus, Claudio’s contention is that Julietta is truly his wife “upon a true contract.” This “true contract” would have been based on the canon law’s theory of consent that stated a couple is married by spoken vows alone (which the two appear to have spoken in private). The confusion surrounding consent is where some modern scholars turn to Henry Swinburne for his insight on the issue.31 For instance, Sokol and Sokol state that according to Swinburne’s Treatise of Spousals or Matrimonial Contracts, “consent to marry was legally understood to be an inward state, constituted by a sober and well-considered intention” and that “no particular formula of words or deeds was required to give valid consent” (15). According to Swinburne: “Albeit there be no Witnesses of the Contract, yet the parties having verily, (though secretly) Contracted Matrimony, they are very Man and Wife before God” (Wentersdorf, 136). Because Swinburne’s view on consent echoed canon law, I want to provide a brief look at what canon law said about what constituted a valid marriage: 1. ‘Present Consent’ (“I take thee as wife/husband”), freely given by a man and woman capable of marriage, made a valid marriage, which was indissoluble during the joint lives of the contracting parties, except in the most unusual circumstances.

31 According J. Duncan Derrett, Swinburne was a civil lawyer and the first Englishman to write textbooks on English canon law” (1). One of those books were Treatise of Spousals or Matrimonial Contracts (also referred to as Spousals), wherein, as the lengthier title of Spousals suggests, “all the questions relating to that subject are ingeniously debated and answered.” For more detail as to the nature and purpose of Swinburne’s Spousals, see also Mukherji’s Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama, p.20. 24

2. ‘Future Consent’ (“I promise to take thee as wife/husband”), freely given by a man and woman capable of marriage, made a valid, indissoluble marriage, if that consent followed by sexual intercourse between the parties.32 The third criterion (not mentioned above) has to do with other matters that are not necessarily applicable to my study, such as couples being Christians, their legal age to contract marriage, and so forth.33 But the first two points caused considerable confusion among early moderners were confused about, that is, how couples could legally contract marriage (speak vows) in private based on canon law, (as it appears Claudio and Julietta did), and still yet be punished for committing fornication or for contracting a clandestine marriage if not publicized in the church.34 This was a problem some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries also dramatized. One particular play well known for problematizing the confusion as to what made a marriage valid was John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. In the play the Duchess says, “I have heard lawyers say, ‘a contract in a chamber / Per verba de presenti is absolute marriage’” (1.1.478-479).35 Her statement is indicative of contentions and confusions that centered on what legally made a marriage contract valid. Commenting on the Duchess’s remark, Sokol and Sokol state, “The Duchess’s remark makes an explicit (if perhaps defensive) reference to legality, and also refers to an indissoluble Gordian knot. In so doing, she correctly claims that the secret union she is about to form with her steward Antonio will be ‘absolute marriage.’ She then marries privately, without any written license or other form of permission from Church or state. She is not married in a church. There are no clergy present, and no religious rites. Her family plays no part, and there is no more publicity than the witnessing presence of a waiting woman. No

32 These points are taken from Charles Donahue’s “The Canon Law on the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages”). According to Donahue: “In a series of decretal letters dating from the end of his pontificate in the late twelfth century, Pope Alexander III synthesized the canon law of the formation of marriage. Because of the church courts’ exclusive jurisdiction throughout Western Europe over cases concerning the formation of marriage, rules derived from Alexander’s synthesis were applied in all Western European countries until the Reformation. For most Catholic countries, they were changed by the decree Tametsi of the council of Trent in 1563. They remained in effect in England, however, until the middle of the eighteenth century.” See p. 144. 33 For more information on the third criterion, see Donahue, p.144. 34 Punishments for clandestine marriage varied drastically depending on the time and location (country). For instance, per Donahue, in France in about the 1500s, a couple was fined a pound of wax and ordered to solemnize their marriage within a week, while others a century earlier were being excommunicated. See Donahue’s “The Canon Law on the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages.” 35 Per verba de presenti is the present-tense vow Donahue alludes to in which the couples were immediately married after speaking the vows. 25

particular formal words or ritual words are spoken. Rather, she and Antonio express, using highly figurative language, their agreement to be married. Because they are prohibited from giving such consent… they are then immediately and irrevocably married (13). What the Duchess means, then, by “a contract in a chamber” is that a valid marriage could be contracted privately without having to publicize it, that is, in the Church.36 Another good literary example of this private marriage contract is found in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. To escape notice of Romeo’s and Juliet’s feuding families, who would have never allowed the two to wed, Romeo seeks to secretly contract marriage with Juliet to which she responds, “although I joy in thee, I have no joy of this contract tonight: it is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” (2.2.117- 119).37 Although Juliet initially has no ‘joy of this contract,’ and therefore does not initially agree to marry Romeo (though later in the same scene she does explicitly agree to marry him), the mention of the contract draws attention to the private nature of the contract that was based on certain language spoken between the two contracting parties. Essentially, Romeo and Juliet appear to do what some couple assumedly did in the early modern era, and that is to contract marriage in private and in public to make sure they abide by Church regulation. According to canon law, Claudio and Julietta are truly married. However, Claudio mentioning that his marriage lacked the “denunciation” (public announcement) and “outward order” (marriage ceremony), means that, despite canon law, he did not marry in the way the Church required. In “Performing Social Practice: Measure For Measure,” Victoria Hayne also discusses the legal ambiguity surrounding of Claudio’s marriage: “As Claudio explains to Lucio, he and Julietta were betrothed, having exchanged a private promise to marry. They intended to complete their marriage with the proper “denunciation ... / Of outward order [i.e., public betrothal and/or marriage ceremony]” (1.2.137-38) but temporarily refrained from doing so in order to gain the consent of Juliet’s relatives, who controlled her dowry” (7). Considering the church sought to make marriage a more ceremonial matter and to punish those who did not

36 For more information on the ecclesiastically approved path to making a valid marriage, see chapter one, “Making a Marriage,” in Shannon McSheffrey’s Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies. 37 It is stated in Shakespeare and the Law that Juliet “imagines when she inadvertently confesses her love to Romeo under the cover of darkness that she has contracted herself to him… Unaware that Romeo is listening, Juliet has invited him to ‘take all’ herself; he steps forward and replies, in a parody of the words de praesenti which constitute the wedding contract: ‘I take thee at thy word.’ This is as near to a contract as any party gets and yet Juliet is convinced that what has passed between them is indeed a contract” (Raffield and Watt, 57). 26 follow regulation, “It was quite possible,” writes Sokol and Sokol, “both to be legally married, and yet fined by the church courts for marrying in a ‘clandestine’ manner, that is, without church solemnization” (15).38 Therefore, the only plausible explanation for Angelo’s treatment of Claudio is that he does not recognize the ‘contract’ as a marriage at all (not even clandestine), for had he recognized the contract as marriage or even a clandestine marriage, fornication would not have been an issue. Thus, Vincentio’s proposal to enforce stricter laws on sexual impropriety also reflects the necessity to clarify what it meant to be legally married since the question of what makes a marriage a ‘marriage’ is what is in question when Claudio is prosecuted for what is essentially a “contract in a chamber.”39 As with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Claudio and Julietta too contract marriage (a clandestine marriage per Church regulations) to hide their marriage from friends and family who would not approve of the marriage. In Claudio and Julietta’s case, however, the problem between the two families is their contentions about Julietta’s dowry: “Only for propagation of a dower / Remaining in the coffer of her friends / From whom we thought it meet to hide our love…” (1.2.146-48). Claudio’s argument is that the two would have been married sooner had it not been for contentions over the dowry holding up the marriage plans. Nonetheless, the early question of Julietta’s dowry and the obstacle it posed for the marriage of Julietta and Claudio sets the stage for Angelo and Mariana’s situation when Angelo breaks his marriage contract with Mariana when her dowry is lost at sea.40 This turn of the plot thus leads the reader to the feature of the marriage contract as a means to lessen the number of women being “put away” too often and too easily by their male companions. In the historiography on marriage law and contracts within the dramatic traditions of early modern England, one common assumption is that the contract served to regulate male-

38 Hopkins draws attention to the confusion about the marriage contract commenting that, “Localised marriage practices and confusion as to what actually constituted a marriage complicated the supposedly absolute distinction between legitimate and illegitimate, and the many instances of litigation over the validity of marriage or alleged contracts to marry tell their own story of widespread confusion and ambiguity” (1). 39 To add to the confusion, Claudio is being charged with fornication, not clandestiny, which undermines the theory of present consent outlined in canon law. 40 Angelo’s treatment of Mariana after her losing her dowry raises the question as to why Angelo would need or desire Mariana’s money to the point that he breaks his vows when her dowry is lost. As deputy to the Duke, Angelo is in an assumedly lucrative position. The fact that Angelo owns his own land (discussed by Isabella in 4.1.28-35) likely indicates that he is landed gentry which further suggests he is financially well off. To Angelo, the marriage is apparently more of a business arrangement than a love match, an arrangement that would allow him to secure even more money. 27 female sexual relations and to control and subsequently prosecute fornication (a type of “regulation of vice” religious authority in the Middle Ages and early modern era attempted to do with much difficulty), especially since there were theological reasons the Church sought such regulation.41 However, indissolubility of the marriage contract also worked to mitigate the happenstances of men deserting women after forming a sexual union with them. In Women's Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies, Rosemary O’Day states, “Desertion, usually of wives by husbands, seems to have been relatively common… although hard statistics are difficult to come by. In 1570, 8 percent of poor women in Norwich had been deserted by their husbands” (195). Desertion, for obvious reasons, was especially challenging economically for non-wealthy women, and Measure for Measure highlights this in Mariana’s impoverished situation having lost her dowry and having no husband to provide for her any financial ‘maintenance.’ To speak, therefore, of Mariana’s property necessitates discussions of the married woman’s right to her husband’s property as her own. Even coverture did not completely render the married woman void of property since wives were at least entitled to some of the husband’s property, that is, in a general sense, room and board. This is important for Mariana’s situation: if Mariana is indeed entitled to room and board, then she is particularly destitute when Angelo deserts her and she has no access to any of his material property that are, in a sense, her possessions too. Having lost her brother, her dowry, and her place in Angelo’s home, Mariana essentially has nothing left. Though desertion happened at every socioeconomic level of early English society, as we see with Mariana, it became more economically problematic for women who had little to no financial resources and found themselves in financial trouble when the husband decided he no longer wanted to maintain the sexual union. This is why Frances Dolan in Marriage and Violence says that though “desertion was often an unofficial solution to irreconcilable differences,” it was “hard on women, especially those with children, since it left them without financial support” (53). Financial stability is important to the play’s treatment of Mariana’s socioeconomic situation and living conditions. Mariana’s dowry is large enough to attract the attention of the nobleman, especially if we read her “fortune” as having a sizeable dowry. However, it appears the dowry is coming from her brother since there is no mention of a father, as fathers were often

41 “Regulation of vice,” is a term Edith Houghton Hooker uses in The Laws of Sex, p. 55. 28 responsible for paying the dowry to the future or prospective husband as part of the marriage arrangement.42 As Friar, Vincentio’s free leasing or lending of the moated grange as a living space for Mariana could be a play on the word ‘father’ – that is, the Catholic ‘father’ or friar becomes a substitution for Mariana’s biological father. Setting aside for a moment the fact that Angelo is only acting as a Friar, it appears that with Marianna’s assumption that the Friar is truly a ‘father’ in the Catholic sense, the word ‘father’ moves from the religious to the familial. Since Mariana has no biological father to provide her maintenance, the religious ‘father’ provides it for her just as the father of a household would. Because Mariana seemingly has no family or financial support, when her marriage contract is rescinded, she goes to live in the moated grange at Saint Luke’s.43 The grange referred to in the play is assumedly a type of farmhouse or barn. Though Shakespeare does not allude to the barn’s function, the OED describes some historical granges as “an outlying farmhouse with barns, etc. belonging to a religious establishment or a feudal lord, where crops and tithes in kind were stored,” which suggests that the grange was not purposed or fit for people to live in.44 Emphasizing separation and even ostracization from the city, the farmhouse figuratively becomes the ‘poor house’ (that is, as a place that houses the poor) for Mariana, and is a stark contrast to Angelo’s seeming plush living conditions.45 While it draws a sharp contrast between the haves and the have nots, it calls attention to what Mariana should have but does not. Though Angelo has sought to distinguish her literally from the people by casting her out to the place of animals, Mariana is a person, an identity that should grant her the right to possess (or at least have access to) Angelo’s property. When conversing with Isabella about how Mariana can “avail out of this” impoverished, deserted state, Vincentio (as Friar) tells Isabella, “It is a rupture that you may easily heal and the

42 In theory, it could be that Mariana’s father has passed away, has left his ‘fortune’ to his son, and that some (if not all) of the inheritance money was to go toward Mariana’s dowry. This could explain why, as Charles Creighton mentions in Shakespeare's Story of His Life, “A great soldier should have his sister’s dowry at sea with him” (362). 43 Charles Whitworth states that “A few suggest that the grange is a dependency of a monastery called Saint Luke’s. One or two think that Luke’s may be a village somewhere near Vienna.” See “Why Saint Luke’s? A Note on Measure for Measure,” p.214. 44 When Vincentio is talking to Mariana (and Isabella) at Saint Luke’s, he is probably alluding to the purpose of the grange being a place to store either corn or tithes by his play on the words ‘corn’ and tithes’ when he says to Mariana, “Come, let us go: Our corn’s to reap, for yet our tithe’s to sow” (4.1.82-83). 45 Angelo’s property is an indication of his plush living conditions. Isabella discusses Angelo property, stating, “He hath a garden circummured with brick, / Whose western side is with a vineyard back’d; / And to that vineyard is a planched gate, / That makes his opening with this bigger key: / This other doth command a little door / Which from the vineyard to the garden leads” (4.1.28-35). 29 cure of it not only saves your brother, but keeps you from dishonor in doing it” (3.1.261-63). Like the bed trick in All’s Well, Vicentio’s plan is for Isabella to tell Angelo she will agree to his proposition to have sexual relations with him, but to send Mariana in her place: “Haste you speedily / to Angelo: if for this night he entreat you to his / bed, give him promise of satisfaction. I will / presently to Saint Luke’s: there, at the moated / grange, resides this dejected Mariana. At that / place call upon me; and dispatch with Angelo, that / it may be quickly” (3.2.289-94).46 Angelo, having had relations unwittingly with Mariana, will then be forced to marry Mariana due to the law of consummation and she will be restored to the marriage bed.47 As the validity of Mariana and Angelo’s contract is in question in the play, it is apparent that the contract is a future-tense contract (what Shakespeare refers to as a ‘pre-contract’): “Nor, gentle daughter, fear you not at all / He is your husband on a pre-contract / To bring you thus together, ‘tis no sin” (4.2.78-80). Mukherji, who refers extensively to Swinburne’s Spousals, states that “Such a contract could be turned into indissoluble matrimony by solemnisation or consummation, and rescinded on the lapsing of any conditions if conditions were attached to the promise in the first place” (19).48 But, we cannot tell by the play whether there were any actual ‘conditions’ set by Mariana or Angelo as their ‘speech of marriage’ (5.1.245-246) takes place offstage. According to Angelo, there was a conditional future-tense contract based on provision of Mariana’s dowry: “And five years since there was some speech of marriage / Betwixt myself and her; which was broke off, / Partly for that her promised proportions / Came short of composition” (5.1.245-49). However, Mariana declares herself to be affianced as a wife to Angelo when she says, “This is the hand which, with a vow’d contract, / Was fast belock’d in thine” (5.1.253-236), and later contends, “I am affianced this man’s wife as strongly / As words

46 The initial conversation between Angelo and Isabella about Angelo’s proposition takes place in act 2, scene 4 (line 31 to the end of the act). Having overheard Angelo and Isabella’s conversation, Angelo sets out his plan for the bed trick. 47 Sexual intercourse only legally consummated a marriage that was first contracted; otherwise, such relations were considered fornication. It appears Shakespeare (and Vincentio) regard Angelo’s original engagement to Mariana as a legally binding marriage contract, underscored by Vicentio’s statement, “With Angelo to-night shall lie / His old betrothed but despised / So disguise shall, by the disguised / Pay with falsehood false exacting / And perform an old contracting” (3.2.278-82). 48 Swinburne points out that there were diverging views on whether or not a future-tense contract was indeed a marriage: “Now forasmuch as there be divers, both Divines and Professors of either Law which do condemn the difference which is here put betwixt these words [I will, and I do] affirming, That if the Party contracting say [I will take thee to my Wife] it is in effect as if he had said [I do take thee to my Wife,] and so importeth Spousals de praesenti, being in truth and substance in∣dissoluble Matrimony.” See the beginning of section X of Swinburne’s Spousals. 30 could make up vows” (258-259). Here it appears that Mariana believed the two to be married even without consummation, and that the bed trick was merely a way of confirming or solidifying its indissolubility.49 The contract and consummation therefore become key factors in how Mariana is treated in relation to Angelo’s property. Without the contract (or pre-contract), Mariana has no claim to a marriage with Angelo, and therefore no rights to Angelo’s room and board. Yet, Vincentio acts as if Mariana was indeed contracted to Angelo and works to ensure Mariana comes into possession of Angelo’s room and board. For instance, when talking to Mariana about her husband’s possessions, Vincentio says, “Consenting to the safeguard of your honour / I thought your marriage fit; else imputation / For that he knew you, might reproach your life / And choke your good to come; for his possessions / Although by confiscation they are ours / We do instate and widow you withal / To buy you a better husband” (5.1.479-85). In this case, Vincentio ignores Angelo’s claim that he could break off his contract with Mariana due to loss of dowry (Angelo acts as if breaking the contract is not even an option).50 Indeed, Vincentio is treating the marriage contract as if it is a present-tense contract that needed no consummation. However, in an attempt to cover all bases, he also appears to arrange the bed trick as a means to fulfill the requirement of the future-tense contract that stated such a contract was indissoluble upon consummation. The purpose of such legal finagling on the part of Angelo was for the protection or restoration of Mariana’s marital property. However, Vincentio’s concern with a restoration of marital property is tied to the maintenance of Mariana’s ‘person,’ that is, her reputation. There were two main reasons why a woman keeping a ‘good name’ was important, something that the play also addresses. First, a good name was important to a woman’s ‘marriageability.’ Shannon McSheffrey states that the “Maintenance of reputation was of the upmost importance in late medieval society. The concepts of honor and reputation were, however, gender specific values: women’s value and

49 It is important to note that part of Mariana’s argument has to do with the tradition of handfasting. According to Hayne, “After brief courtships… a couple began the process of becoming married by exchanging a promise to marry. A more-or-less public betrothal, a “contracting” or “handfasting,” usually followed; this ceremony, in which the couple's joining hands symbolized their union, may have been the most socially significant part of the process. After exchanging this promise, couples usually regarded and referred to themselves as “husband” and wife”” (4). She does, however, go on to state that the two were not fully married without fulfilling Church regulations (4), again, placing emphasis on the difference between consent theory of canon law and Church regulation. 50 In theory, Angelo may have legal cause to break his marriage contract with Mariana for loss of the promised dowry, if the dowry was indeed a stipulation of the contract. But, I think Shakespeare is purposely painting Angelo as an unbelievable self-witness due to, among other things, his apparent false witness of Mariana’s reputation. 31 identity were more closely tied than men’s to marital status, marriageability, and above all, sexual repute” (164). McSheffrey further states: “A crucial aspect of sexual misbehavior was its publicity or notoriousness… in a society that placed huge importance on rumor and fame – knowledge that embraced, in other words, both what other people knew about a person and what they thought they knew” (175). As McSheffrey acknowledges, the reason for maintaining a pure or moral sexual life (that is, a life and name free from adultery and fornication) was because it was socially important for women to keep a “good name” in a time and culture that placed much emphasis on reputation typically spurned on by rumors and gossip (175). Sexual impropriety was more than a legal issue; it was a matter of public perception wherein people could be ‘judged’ in the court of public opinion before ever stepping foot in a court of marriage law. The play appears to address this when Vincentio says, “For that he knew you, might reproach your life / And choke your good to come” (5.1.481-82). Having had sexual relations (that he “knew” her) during the bed trick without contracting a marriage would have been damaging to Mariana’s reputation and would have impeded her marriageability to a future and “better husband.” Where the appearance of sexual impropriety would have also choked her good to come, was her receiving Angelo’s property: “for his possessions / Although by confiscation they are ours / We do instate and widow you withal.” Along with Mariana being accused of ‘dishonor,’ she is also being accused of not paying the dowry, both of which, in their own respects, may be breaches of the marriage contract. Says Claudio, “My lord, I must confess I know this woman / And five years since there was some speech of marriage / Betwixt myself and her; which was broke off / Partly for that her promised proportions / Came short of composition…” (5.1.245- 250). Shakespeare is obviously dramatizing and addressing a ‘what if’ gray area in marriage law. What if, through no fault of her own, a fiancée’s dowry is lost after contracting the marriage but before solemnizing the marriage in the church? Since it appears Angelo’s accusations against Mariana are feigned, “pretending in her discoveries of dishonor” (3.1.253), he probably started a rumor about Mariana’s ‘dishonor’ as a means to nullify the contract if the contract is ever called into question after he broke off the contract once he found out he would not be receiving Mariana’s dowry (though his strategy does not work, it appears relevant since the contract is indeed called into question).51

51 Despite Angelo’s attempt to ‘dirty’ Mariana’s name, Shakespeare makes it clear that Mariana is of good report. In discussing Mariana, Vincentio says to Isabella, “Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful. Have / you not heard 32

After Angelo has been indicted and convicted on the charges of oath-breaking, Angelo’s property becomes property of the state, which the state then awards to Mariana. However, if Angelo does not first honor the original marriage contract, the bed trick renders their sexual relation fornication, or ‘sin’ as Angelo calls it (4.1.80), which would disqualify Mariana from legally receiving Angelo’s property as a theoretical widow. As McSheffrey discusses, “allegations of sexual misbehavior were more damaging for women than for men… when women had few economic options apart from marriage, such attacks were potentially very damaging” (177). Though McSheffrey’s explanation deals mainly with single women in sexual disrepute not being able to marry (that is, as easily as chaste women), such attacks on betrothed women were as damaging considering ‘fornicatresses’ were not entitled to their husband’s property upon dissolution of marriage. As we have seen, one of the major features of the marriage contract was to ensure proper treatment of spousal property in cases of divorce or desertion, including maintenance for children if the husband (or wife, in some cases) decided to leave the family. A major feature of the contract was to not only help ensure fair and proper exchange of property between the betrothed, but also to help in settling any possible disputes over property if the validity of the marriage was called into question. Thus, Mariana’s story is a classic case of how the marriage contract worked to serve the interest of married women and their rights to property in cases of divorce or desertion. However, the contract is not a mechanism that acts on its own. Rather, Vincentio acts as an enforcer of the contract (with Isabella’s help) as he works to reinstitute a connection between Mariana and Angelo. Vincentio’s reconciliation to Mariana and Angelo thus demonstrates how the law can be used, not only as a mechanism for punishment, but also as a mechanism for resolution.52 Where the law as a mechanism for resolution is important in terms of women’s rights to property is when Mariana is not only awarded Angelo’s material property, but is, per her own request, also restored to Angelo, and thus the marriage bed. Where property resolution culminates in the play is when Vincentio proactively proposes an ‘out of court’ pre-

speak of Mariana, the sister of / Frederick the great soldier who miscarried at sea?” to which Isabella responds, “I have heard of the lady, and good words went with her name” (3.1.231-37). 52 Law as a mechanism for punishment is a more ‘judgmental’ approach to enforcing the law where one measures out a particularly harsh punishment for a crime (and as the play’s title suggests, Measure for Measure, Vincentio seeks to deal out the same harsh punishment with which Angelo sought to punish Claudio). On the other hand, the law as a mechanism for dispute resolution seeks to reconcile or rectify a situation rather than merely dishing out punishment to an offender (such as reconciling Julietta to Claudio as opposed to sentencing Claudio to death). 33 settlement of ‘his-and-her’ property when he proposes to Isabella and says, “What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine” (5.1.611), thus deeming his moveable and real property – his money, and room and board – Isabella’s if she should choose to marry him.

Conclusion While relatively many scholars have written at length about the bed trick within the context of gender and sexuality in the play and in early modern England, an analysis of the role of the physical bed and additional concepts of property highlights and raises an important set of issues and questions surrounding women’s marital property. As we have seen in both plays, these matters range from the amount of autonomy married women truly had over their own persons to questions about their rights to marital property in a society often discussed in relation to coverture. Yet, to address these issues and questions, one must analyze Shakespeare’s treatment of marriage within the wider range of the early modern legal system. Though the legal reality often discussed in terms of women’s marital property is married women’s legal status of coverture, examining Shakespeare’s depiction of Helena’s autonomy over property and Mariana’s rights to property provide us a different reality. As the plays suggest, despite contemporary coverture laws, wives and fiancées were experiencing more autonomy over their persons and more rights to property than is often associated with or discussed in relation to Shakespeare’s time. In Helena’s case, though she is a feme covert by common law, Shakespeare concedes property to her more so reminiscent of a culture governed in part by the Church or by the Chancery. Helena even goes so far as to fulfill a patriarchal role for Diana and the Widow by providing them with financial support (interestingly, none of the characters remark on the demonstration of her relatively high level of patriarchal-like power, which suggests that it was not entirely unusual for the times). In Mariana’s case, based on Vincentio’s own canonical interpretation of the pre-contract, Mariana is entitled to certain marital property, that is, room and board. Essentially, when it came to the power wives and wives in question held over themselves and their property, the plays help us to understand how their experiences extended beyond the restrictive views and practices associated with coverture.

Because of the different governing bodies in the early modern legal culture, it is therefore important to determine what ‘English’ law truly was as it relates to the play. Where an understanding of English law becomes vital to reading All’s Well and Measure for Measure is in understanding the play’s problematizing of not only the difference between common law and something like Chancery law, nor the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, but the differences between canon law and Church regulation. For instance, the questions raised in All’s Well and Measure for Marriage as to what made a marriage valid indicate a culture where many early modern people were confused and contentious about differing and sometimes conflicting marriage laws between canon law and Church regulation. The confusions and contentions are seemingly inevitable since canon law said one thing while the church required another. While I have sought to be careful in how I approach the theoretical or hypothetical, that is, if a couple is actually married, it appears Shakespeare is presenting his audience with just that theoretical question, thus leaving it up to his audience to decipher the legal marital statuses of his characters. Essentially, the audience is called upon to be judge and jury in deciding for themselves whether a person or couple is truly married, including the question of consummation between Helena and Bertram. What deems a marriage valid thus effects how property is conceded to Helena and Mariana. In Helena’s case, she demonstrates a level of autonomy over person and property that suggests an acceptable (if not normal) practice once we study marriage law and practice through the lens of something other than common law. On the other hand, Mariana’s return to the marriage bed too highlights the rights to marital property women had. What I hope to have demonstrated over the course of this thesis is at the center of the questions about marriage and marital status, and the attempts to remedy certain marital dilemmas, is not solely the bed trick, but also the bed. And I contend that the bed is as important to the study of male-female relations in the play and early modern society as the bed trick, for there is no bed trick without the bed (that is, the marriage bed), a prop that requires a social and legal culture to legitimate Helena’s and Mariana’s right to possess it. Due the characters or dramatis personae in All’s Well and Measure for Measure, my analysis of the plays has lead me to the study of mostly upper class people, or people who had access (or tried to in some way gain access) to the lived experiences of the upper class (for instance, when Helena ‘marries up’ in marrying Bertram). It is apparent not only from All’s Well and Measure for Measure, but other Shakespeare plays, that Shakespeare was intrigued by the

35 lives of the upper class. Nonetheless, to gain a broader perspective of the lived experiences of ‘ordinary’ early modern people, as Erickson puts it in Women and Property (4, 14), further research on the lives of the middle to somewhat low class would be beneficial in understanding how the ‘other people’ lived, especially when it comes to marriage and marital property.53 As Ericson points out, when studies investigate some things like marriage settlements and inheritance, the focus is often on very wealthy families (4). Because ordinary people made up perhaps 70-80 per cent of the early modern population at the turn of the seventeenth century (Erickson, 14), consequently, the vast majority of the population is left out of studies of familial property (and we can assume those numbers are even smaller when dealing with marital property). Thus, further inquiry into the lives of ordinary people, families, and specifically women and married women, may provide a more all-encompassing or comprehensive account of the lived experiences of, as Ericson calls them, the ‘unexceptional women in early modern England (14).54

53 Erickson distinguishes ‘ordinary’ people as those who were neither very rich nor very poor (14). 54 In her introduction to Women and Property, Erickson outlines her method of inquiry including her use of certain primary source literature including diaries from well-known women of the time (such as Lady Ann Clifford’s diaries). According to Erickson, the most important documents for the study of early modern women’s property are Probate documents, which were records of the ecclesiastical courts (15-16). 36

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