Marriage
Notes on Marriage
Shakespeare and the Casting Couch
Read the NoteStories about women summoned as supplicants to the portals of men with the power to grant their wishes, for a price, are common across professions, across countries, across millennia. Shakespeare dramatized the dilemmas some of these women faced in more than one of his plays.
In both Henry VI Part 3 and Measure for Measure, for example,
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Wives and Troubled Husbands
Read the NoteLady Percy’s plea to Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1, is similar to Portia’s plea to Brutus in Julius Caesar. In both a wife is pleading with her husband to disclose the thoughts that seem to trouble him deeply. A difference, however, is that some psychologists consider Lady Percy’s speech a clinical description of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
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Seduction or Harassment?
Read the NoteShakespeare delights in the seduction ceremonies of bright men with even brighter women. These dialogues, whether between adolescents like Romeo and Juliet, more mature characters like Henry V and Princess Katherine, or seasoned adults like the widow Lady Grey and the sexual harasser King Edward, in this scene (3HenryVI 3.2.36), give Shakespeare opportunities to employ dazzling webworks of rhetorical exchanges.
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Quotes including the Theme Marriage
Kneel not, gentle Portia
Read the QuoteBrutus
Kneel not, gentle Portia.
Portia
I should not need, if you were gentle Brutus.Antanaclesis
Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus,
Is it excepted I should know no secrets
That appertain to you? Am I yourself
But, as it were, in sort or limitation,
To keep with you at meals,
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So smile the heavens upon this holy act
Read the QuoteFriar Lawrence
So smile the heavens upon this holy act
That after-hours with sorrow chide us not.
Romeo
Amen, amen. But come what sorrow can,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die,
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Let me choose, For as I am, I live upon the rack
Read the QuoteBassanio
Let me choose,
For as I am, I live upon the rack.
Portia
Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess
What treason there is mingled with your love.
Bassanio
None but that ugly treason of mistrust,
Which makes me fear th’ enjoying of my love.
There may as well be amity and life
‘Tween snow and fire,
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Now tell me, madam, do you love your children?
Read the QuoteKing Edward
Now tell me, madam, do you love your children?
Lady Grey
Ay, full as dearly as I love myself.
Anadiplosis & EpistropheKing Edward
And would you not do much to do them good?
Lady Grey
To do them good I would sustain some harm.
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Well, well, thou hast a careful father, child
Read the QuoteLady Capulet
Well, well, thou hast a careful father, child,
One who, to put thee from thy heaviness,
Hath sorted out a sudden day of joy
That thou expects not, nor I looked not for.
Juliet
Madam, in happy time! What day is that?
I would the fool were married to her grave.
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Tomorrow is the joyful day, Audrey
Read the QuoteTouchstone
Tomorrow is the joyful day, Audrey. Tomorrow
will we be married.
Audrey
I do desire it with all my heart, and I hope it is
no dishonest desire to desire to be a woman of the world.
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no
Enter two Pages.
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I’ll have no father, if you be not he
Read the QuoteRosalind, to Duke
I’ll have no father, if you be not he.
To Orlando.
I’ll have no husband, if you be not he,
To Phoebe.
Nor ne’er wed woman, if you be not she.
Whiles a wedlock hymn we sing,
Feed yourselves with questioning,
That reason wonder may diminish
How thus we met,
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