Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature by Katharine Cleland (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature by Katharine Cleland
• Patrick Ball

Cleland, Katharine, Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature, Ithaca, NY, and London, Cornell University Press, 2021; ebook; pp. x, 196; R.R.P. free download; ISBN 9781501753480.

Katharine Cleland's monograph concerns a topic fundamental to everyday life as well as fiction: marriage. It contextualises its literary marriages admirably against history and historiography, and so it will be of value to historians, not just literature scholars. Critical to Cleland's study is the fact that, unlike other Protestant states, England did not abandon Roman canon law when breaking with Rome. Roman law permitted couples to marry by private consent, without a ceremony or even witnesses. That remained the case. Until 1753 marriage needed no betrothal, banns, or formal wedding, permitting clandestine marriages that carried risks to the principals, their families, and the community. Moreover, couples who omitted the specifically English rites of the Book of Common Prayer risked suspicion of religious heterodoxy. Cleland explores how writers around 1600 responded to these circumstances.

Every chapter examines one work or compares two. Cleland focuses on previously neglected or unrecognised clandestine marriages—her findings can therefore be usefully applied to better known cases, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure for instance, the marriage contracts in which have provoked dispute and confusion. Chapter 1 discusses Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, arguing that whereas scholars treat the Redcrosse Knight's relationship with the shady Duessa in Book 1 as a 'dalliance' (p. 24), contemporaries would have understood [End Page 342] it as clandestine marriage. Realising that fact changes one's perspective on both the story and the complications the liaison brings the Knight—hence Cleland's argument for close attention to clandestine marriages and their implications. Spenser, she argues, whose leanings were Calvinist and who notably wrote about marriage, certainly knew Calvin opposed Roman canon law. Using the Redcrosse Knight's dilemma, Spenser urged England to follow other states in abandoning Roman law.

Other chapters scrutinise other works similarly. Chapter 2 features Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander and George Chapman's continuation of the poem: Marlowe rejected Elizabethan love poetry's Petrarchan tendencies, which glorified distant, unconsummated love, in favour of clandestine marriage sealed by sex; Chapman warned against the dangers, especially for women, since clandestine marriages could later be disavowed. In Chapter 3, Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint is an 'easily overlooked fiction of clandestine marriage' (p. 63), whose forsaken heroine counterpoints the publicly married bride of Spenser's Epithalamion. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with clandestine marriage's role in Shakespeare's interracial unions. In The Merchant of Venice, a comedy, ill effects are averted because Lorenzo's Jewish wife Jessica is given the opportunity to keep house at Belmont while its owners are away, signifying her acceptance into Christian society: clandestine marriage prevented couples setting up house together, the action by which husband and wife demonstrably joined the married community. In Othello, tragedy ensues when the lovers must marry secretly, without pledging faith before the community; this leaves Othello susceptible to insinuation his wife is unfaithful. The monograph concludes by examining the incestuous betrothal pact in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

Cleland's scholarship is nuanced, more than can be summarised here. Sometimes (for example, in Chapter 3) she possibly attributes more significance to a relationship than it deserves: is the author genuinely arguing a case about clandestine marriage or simply using this particular marriage as a plot device? Perhaps English works with clandestine marriages should be compared with analogous works from Catholic states or Protestant ones that did abolish Roman law. How are things different? In general, though, the monograph is insightful, thought-provoking, and likely to apply to texts it does not itself examine.

Patrick Ball Hobart, Tasmania Copyright © 2024 Patrick Ball ...