Print Culture and Elizabethan Visions of Marriage
Mary Purnell
As print culture settled into its place as a normalized feature of English society, the literary market began to swell with variety. It revolutionized the way people talked about marriage, transforming the subject into a large social discussion that virtually anyone could write or read about. The private affairs of conjugal relationships, while perhaps no more or less blissful than those of medieval England, were now publically discussed on a very broad level.
A product of this cultural conversation is the genre of the marriage handbook. Manuals like The honourable state of matrimony made comfortable (1685) began to appear, which offers advice for achieving marital bliss. Like most domestic conduct manuals, The honourable state grounds its values in Christian teachings. One exemplary piece of advice urges man and wife to “press much after a clearer knolwedg [sic] and fuller discovery of God. The more you do converse with God, the more humble you will be, and the more will the pride of your hearts be mortified” (104).
However, these books gravitate towards instructing the woman alone, and in that relationship we witness the “women as the weaker sex” mentality that dominates Renaissance literature. Authors of domestic conduct manuals did not hold back on reinforcing the “naturally” submissive role of the female, emphasizing the fact that it was specifically her choice of words and actions that often caused strife in the household. The honourable state dedicates the majority of its text to addressing the couple as a unit. But towards the end of the treatise, it speaks to the man and woman individually, with the instructions for the wife vastly outnumbering those meant for her spouse. Some authors wrote entire manuals meant only for women, like Juan Luis Vives’ The Instruction of the Christen Woman (1529). This book offers step-by-step advice for a woman’s entire life – from what she must read as a child to how to bury her husband correctly. Most importantly, it instructs her in how to remain a virgin, and there’s “nothynge that our lorde delyteth more in than virgins” (“Of virginitie,” F3). According to Vives, the best precautions a woman can take in order to remain a virgin are to avoid meat, wine, “oyntment,” spices, talking, and sight of men (“Of the ordryng of the body in a virgin,” H5).
Another emergent genre featured short, humorous ditties about marriage, published in print form but written to the tune of commonly known songs. For instance, consider a stanza from “The Batchelor’s Delight”:
A product of this cultural conversation is the genre of the marriage handbook. Manuals like The honourable state of matrimony made comfortable (1685) began to appear, which offers advice for achieving marital bliss. Like most domestic conduct manuals, The honourable state grounds its values in Christian teachings. One exemplary piece of advice urges man and wife to “press much after a clearer knolwedg [sic] and fuller discovery of God. The more you do converse with God, the more humble you will be, and the more will the pride of your hearts be mortified” (104).
However, these books gravitate towards instructing the woman alone, and in that relationship we witness the “women as the weaker sex” mentality that dominates Renaissance literature. Authors of domestic conduct manuals did not hold back on reinforcing the “naturally” submissive role of the female, emphasizing the fact that it was specifically her choice of words and actions that often caused strife in the household. The honourable state dedicates the majority of its text to addressing the couple as a unit. But towards the end of the treatise, it speaks to the man and woman individually, with the instructions for the wife vastly outnumbering those meant for her spouse. Some authors wrote entire manuals meant only for women, like Juan Luis Vives’ The Instruction of the Christen Woman (1529). This book offers step-by-step advice for a woman’s entire life – from what she must read as a child to how to bury her husband correctly. Most importantly, it instructs her in how to remain a virgin, and there’s “nothynge that our lorde delyteth more in than virgins” (“Of virginitie,” F3). According to Vives, the best precautions a woman can take in order to remain a virgin are to avoid meat, wine, “oyntment,” spices, talking, and sight of men (“Of the ordryng of the body in a virgin,” H5).
Another emergent genre featured short, humorous ditties about marriage, published in print form but written to the tune of commonly known songs. For instance, consider a stanza from “The Batchelor’s Delight”:
Whilst Adam was a Batchelor,
in Eden he did tarry,
It is an Eden upon earth,
to live and never marry.
(Anonymous, ca. 1650)
Another entitled “Any thing for a quiet life” can sympathize:
A warning fit for him which thus,
himselfe to marriage snares.
The onely hell upon this earth,
to have an angry wife:
To make us say both night and day,
any thing for a quiet life.
(Anonymous, 1620)
These ditties go on to describe the woes of marriage from the perspective of the husband, who is at the perpetual beck and call of his wife. We see in them images of women who resemble, for lack of a batter term, slave-drivers. In “Any thing for a quiet life,” the woman does nothing more than lie in bed and spend all of her husband’s money on clothes and fine foods. As soon as she wants for anything,
Then his purse [her husband] must yeeld up
to his commanding wife:
While he must say, Good woman pay
any thing for a quiet life.
These two ditties, published in the mid 17th century, were written anonymously, probably on good advice.
Though they are written in jest, there does appear to have been a certain disconnect between men and women, counteracted by a profound relatability between members of the same sex. In his popular essay Of friendship, Michel de Montaige describes a fraternal love that exists between male friends as “spirituall,” as being “nourished by communication,” as a love so intimate that the writer believes “nothing [is] so neere unto us, as one unto anothes [sic]” (90-92).
And yet, that love is limited to men. “Women . . . cannot answer this conference and communication,” he writes, “nor seeme their minds strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable” (91). Montaigne dismisses the sex as entirely incapable of exercising this kind of love, as though it can't understand it. His claims suggest a behavioral incompatibility between men and women that Frances E. Dolan echoes in her essay, “Shakespeare and Marriage,” though she posits that this cross-gender incompatibility was something more of a two-way street. Marriage, as Montaigne suggests, would seem to have occupied a completely separate emotional and spiritual sphere from friendship: “To compare the affection toward women unto [this fraternal bond], although it proceed from our owne free choice, a man cannot, nor may it be placed in this ranke (91).”
Montaigne's essay was written in earnest; his words describe his unwavering beliefs about love at the time. The ditties were humorous and hyperbole-laden, probably regarded as highly as the Sunday funnies are today. But humor often stems from a grain of truth, and satire almost always hits near the mark of reality. When we consider the wacky marriages in these ditties alongside Michel de Montaigne's honest description of the disconnect between the sexes, the picture of Elizabethan gender relations grows a bit clearer. Elizabethan Englishmen and women, it would seem, did not embrace the current model of the ideal marriage where lovers and best friends are one and the same.
Though they are written in jest, there does appear to have been a certain disconnect between men and women, counteracted by a profound relatability between members of the same sex. In his popular essay Of friendship, Michel de Montaige describes a fraternal love that exists between male friends as “spirituall,” as being “nourished by communication,” as a love so intimate that the writer believes “nothing [is] so neere unto us, as one unto anothes [sic]” (90-92).
And yet, that love is limited to men. “Women . . . cannot answer this conference and communication,” he writes, “nor seeme their minds strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable” (91). Montaigne dismisses the sex as entirely incapable of exercising this kind of love, as though it can't understand it. His claims suggest a behavioral incompatibility between men and women that Frances E. Dolan echoes in her essay, “Shakespeare and Marriage,” though she posits that this cross-gender incompatibility was something more of a two-way street. Marriage, as Montaigne suggests, would seem to have occupied a completely separate emotional and spiritual sphere from friendship: “To compare the affection toward women unto [this fraternal bond], although it proceed from our owne free choice, a man cannot, nor may it be placed in this ranke (91).”
Montaigne's essay was written in earnest; his words describe his unwavering beliefs about love at the time. The ditties were humorous and hyperbole-laden, probably regarded as highly as the Sunday funnies are today. But humor often stems from a grain of truth, and satire almost always hits near the mark of reality. When we consider the wacky marriages in these ditties alongside Michel de Montaigne's honest description of the disconnect between the sexes, the picture of Elizabethan gender relations grows a bit clearer. Elizabethan Englishmen and women, it would seem, did not embrace the current model of the ideal marriage where lovers and best friends are one and the same.