The nine chapters in B. J. and Mary Sokol's Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage consider the process of marriage. The first four chapters discuss making a match: “Making a Valid Marriage: The Consensual Model,” “Arranging Marriages,” “Wardship and Marriages Enforced by Law,” and “Financing a Marriage: Provision of Dowries or Marriage Portions.” While chapters 5 and 6 concentrate on the forms of marriage themselves—“The Solemnisation of Marriage” and “Clandestine Marriage, Elopement, Abduction, and Rape: Irregular Marriage Formation”—chapter 7 considers “The Effects of Marriage on Legal Status.” The final two chapters examine the dissolutions of marriage: “Marriage Breakdown: Separation, Divorce, Illegitimacy” and “`Til Death Do Us Part.”

This book will be valuable to people working on the letter of early modern English marriage laws, since the chapters concentrate on the statutes proposed and enacted in relation to marriage. It will also be helpful to people interested in legal issues in Shakespeare's plays, since part of each chapter includes a discussion of the plays in which the section topic arises.

Their conclusion contains the authors' aim “to approach the study of law in history in the archaeological spirit, as much as we can manage, of unblinkered, and not pre-directed, empiricism” (185). Given their “aim,” the book, as presented, missed its mark. In terms of early modern English marriage, the Sokols focus mainly on the letter of marriage law rather than on social practices. They do point to a few well-known examples of actual social practices in the courtships and marriages of Bess of Hardwick, Sir Edmund Coke, Lady Elizabeth Hatton, and Lady Margaret Hoby. Yet, these examples require contextualization regarding how representative they were. In addition, discussion of the courtship and marriage behaviors of couples from middle- and lower-class standings would help a reader understand better the complicated circumstances surrounding marriage in this period.

In terms of supplying contemporary attitudes and behaviors, they cite passages from a few conduct books when discussing specific laws, with Of Domesticall Duties and The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights appearing most often. Given the suspicious authorship and context of production of the latter, how are we to read its content? Unlike many scholars of this period, the authors accept its content at face value without explaining why they do so. But to what extent can we accept these and other printed conduct books as evidence of attitudes and practices? How are we to understand the prescriptive certainty of many of these books in relation to people's varied attitudes and practices? For an examination of conduct books in regard to courtship and marriage in this period, readers would be better served by Ann Jennalie Cook's thorough study of these texts in Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society (Princeton, NJ, 1991).

In addition to providing more context by including attitudes and behaviors of people from a range of social standings and a more nuanced consideration of conduct books, more specificity in particular parts of the book would strengthen it. To cite one of two examples, in regard to the regulations concerning seasons and times of marrying, the Sokols note that “the ceremony was to be held in the morning, and certain days and seasons (Sundays, Lent) were to be avoided” (75). Yet, according to ecclesiastical legislation, the three forbidden seasons of marriage were Lent, Rogationtide, and Advent. As David Cressy notes, “Altogether the Anglican ecclesiastical calendar, inherited from Roman Catholicism, marked 144 days as unsuitable for marriage ceremonies. Formal inhibitions against marriage affected almost 40 percent of the year” (“The Seasonality of Marriage in Old and New England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16, no. 1 [1985]: 2). Likewise, when discussing clandestine marriage in Shakespeare's plays, the Sokols write that “most often Shakespeare's stage closely mirrored prevailing Elizabethan attitudes in which mere clandestinity was far more tolerated than the allied issues of rape, abduction, and elopement” (105). When they then proceed to discuss Cymbeline, commonly dated as being written in 1608, it seems as if they are setting up a disjunction between Elizabethan and Jacobean attitudes. Yet, they do not explain what those Jacobean attitudes are.

To understand marriage in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, we must explore the complex relationships among the letter of the law, literary texts, and the actual attitudes and behaviors of people from a variety of social standings.