Simon Rodberg                                                                                    Due July 17, 2006

Teaching Shakespeare Institute                                                 Research Essay

 

The State of Marriage

            In The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, Russ McDonald writes of “the familiar analogy [in Shakespeare’s time] between the marriage relationship and the social order.”[1] Three books of advice from this time offer insight to English thought about the importance of marriage and its relevance to social and political order. Read in conjunction with Julius Caesar and Macbeth, these texts suggest that Shakespeare’s characters’ marriages both parallel and affect the characters’ political situations. Portia, in Julius Caesar, and Lady Macbeth contradict these books’ views of the role of wives, and, in the plays, their husbands are punished for it.

            In Basilikon Doron, a book of advice on kingship for his son, James I includes a section on marriage which highlights the importance of the wife for men in Jacobean England: “Mariage is the greatest earthly felicity or miserie, that can comme to a man, according as it plesaeth god to bles or cursse the same…”[2] James also repeats a common view of marriage as a true unity of husband and wife: “shee must bee nearer unto you then anie other companie, being flesh of your fleshe and bone of your bone…”[3] The specifics of the relationship as described by James, however, dispel any suggestion of equality:

for your behaviour to your Wife, the Scripture can best give you Counsell therein? Treate her as your owne flesh: Commande her as her Lorde: Cheerish her as your helper: Rule her as your pupil: Please her in all things reasonable; but teach her not to bee curious in thinges that belongeth her not: ye are the head, shee is your bodie: it is your office to command and hers to obey; but yet with such a sweete harmony, as shee should bee readie to obeye as ye to commande, as willing to follow as ye to goe before, your love being wholie knit unto her, and all her affections lovingly bente to follow your will. And to conclude, keepe specially three rules with your Wife: First, suffer her never to meddle with the Politick governemente of the common-weale, but hold her at the Oeconomicke rule of the house, and yet all to bee subjecte to your direction…[4]

 

Several points deserve attention: masculine command and rule; the man as the almost-more-than-metaphoric head of the family; and the specific injunction that the wife should keep out of government.

To modern eyes, the injunction of closeness and the injunction to separate family from politics seem contradictory. This tension exists as well in Julius Caesar 2.1, where Portia demands that Brutus act on the nearness James prescribes:

You have some sick offense within your mind

Which by the right and virtue of my place

I ought to know of…

…

By all your vows of love, and that great vow

Which did incorporate and make us one,

That you unfold to me, your self, your half,

Why you are heavy… (2.1.292-296)[5]

 

Portia goes on to respond to James’s advice to “teach her not to bee curious in thinges that belongeth her not”: “Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus, / Is it excepted I should know no secrets / That appertain to you? Am I your self / But, as it were, in sort or limitation…” (2.1.302-305) If James’s views were the standard – as, given his kingship, they may well have been – Portia’s request would have seemed out of line, even unnatural. Yet Brutus does not respond to it as such, instead giving in: “by and by thy bosom shall partake / The secrets of my heart” (2.1.329-30). (Shakespeare does not show us this scene, perhaps because the Brutus-Portia subplot is not worth the dramatic impact such a husband-and-wife council might have had on Elizabethan audiences.)

            The extremity of Portia’s attempt to leave her wifely place is emphasized by her wounding herself in the thigh, as proof, in context, that she is more than womanly: “I grant that I am a woman, but withal…Think you I am no stronger than my sex?” (2.1.315-319) As a woman “stronger than [her] sex,” Portia acknowledges but repudiates the kind of static roles that James I prescribes. This may have been seen by audiences, or intended by Shakespeare, of symbolic of the breakdown of social order enacted by Brutus and his companions. In Counsel to the Husband: To the Wife Instruction, a 1608 guide to marriage, the analogy between the breakdown of marital roles and the breakdown of government is first suggested in language and then made explicit:

It standeth not in what man and wife shal conclude upon, that there may be peace & quietness, but what order God hath prescribed them, to bee obeyed in their places: so that they must looke unto Gods wisedom, order, & polity for oeconomical government, and not what may seem right and good in their owne eies. And that, if the man may not wear womans apparel, nor the woman mans, how much lesse may the one usurpe the others dignitie, or the other (to wit the husband) resigne or give over his soveraigntie unto his wife? but each must keepe their place, their order, and heavenly politie, whereto God hath called them. The husband is made the head, and the wife resembled to the bodie: May the head of a bodie (naturall) bee turned downeward? can the whole person so continue, & live well in that state? how unseemly is it? no more can the bodie politique bee in peacable or blessed condition, if order be inverted.[6]

 

The first usage of the phrase “body politic” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Henry VIII, in 1532-3, who also analogized the king to a head.[7] Both this phrase and the word “polity” were coming into use at this time, in a system of interlocking metaphors of family, physicality, and social order which Julius Caesar actualizes.

            The connection between an un-Jacobean marriage and a breakdown of social order is, of course, far more central in Macbeth. That play dramatizes the worst nightmare of Counsel to the Husband: To the Wife Instruction: not only that the husband “resigne or give over his soveraigntie unto his wife,” but that the “order be inverted” so
“no more can the bodie politique bee in peacable or blessed condition.” Lady Macbeth refuses to “look unto God’s wisedom, order, & polity,” but rather, looks to “spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to “unsex me here…make thick my blood, / Stop up th’access and passage to remorse…Come to my woman’s breasts / And take my milk for gall…” (1.5.38-46[8]) To ready herself for unnatural acts, Lady Macbeth looks to deny nature in a specifically gendered way. May the milk of a breast (naturall) bee turned into gall? Yes, says Lady Macbeth, and Macbeth: such is the interaction of femininity and the body politic. The unnatural has broad reach, as Lennox reports:

The night has been unruly: where we lay,

Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,

Lamentings heard i'the’air, strange screams of death

And prophesying with accents terrible

Of dire combustion and confused events,

New hatched to th’woeful time. The obscure bird

Clamoured the livelong night. Some say, the earth

Was feverous and did shake. (2.3.46-53)

 

Russ McDonald writes that “"The analogy between a well-ordered society and a healthy body was a commonplace in English political and social thought”[9]; when the body, as metaphor for both marriage and society, becomes “unsexed,” all order breaks down.

            A final book of marriage advice, “The Crowne Conjugall,” details the analogy between kingly and husbandly sovereignty as the basis for order. Starting with the comparison of the wife to the “Royall ornament,” and noting that “Metaphorically, or, in a borrowed sense, a Crowne comprehendeth within the compasse thereof, whatsoever extraordinary dignity or praehemnince, God doth bestow upon a man to make him glorious in any good,” Rev. John Wing describes the various effects that wives may have on their husband (the Royal of the metaphor).[10] Wing pays particular attention to the ill that comes from a non-crown-like woman: “A Wife that is not gratious, but god-lesse, not vertuous, but un-holy, and vitious, is the heaviest, yea, the hellish-est crosse, that can come to a man, no plague, no woe, to an impious woman, a more pestilent, pernicious, miserable, insufferable, evill, cannot (among temporall mischiefs) be imagined…he hath found such a woman more bitter then death.”[11] There is a solution, or a preventative, for this bitterness:

if the wife be the CROWNE, it followeth in all good reason that the Husband is the KING, whome she must acknowledg, and obey in all matrimoniall Loyalty and love...All sence consent’s to this, as right and good: I being the Crowne, my Husband is the King; he must rule, I must obey; he teach, I learne; he dispose, I submit; there must be in me a wise mixture of love and feare, my Submission and my affection  must be both free and faithfull unto him, who is my mattrimoniall Lord and Souveraigne, and unto whome, I ought to stoope in all seemely service, & obedience.[12]

 

            Macbeth can be read as dramatizing the negative side of this metaphor in a simultaneous and interconnected rebellion against husbandly and kingly authority, in Lady Macbeth’s strident advocacy of regicide. Rather than he teaching and she submitting, Lady Macbeth says, of Macbeth, “Hie thee hither / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear / And chastise with the valour of my tongue.” (1.5.23-25) In particular, Lady Macbeth does not let her husband’s misgivings rule, but berates him for his lack of manliness in a particularly unladylike image:

        I have given suck and know

How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn

As you have done to this. (1.7.54-59)

 

In all her “unnaturall” visions, Lady Macbeth rejects both her mattrimoniall and her governmental Lord and Souveraigne.

            In Julius Caesar and Macbeth, then, Shakespeare dramatizes the marital anxieties of his time. While advice writers reminded husbands of their unity with their wives, they also warned that breakdown of roles and rule was the equivalent of the breakdown of regal authority. Shakespeare played on that metaphoric equivalency by paralleling relationships which contradicted the conventional wisdom with regicide. We cannot know whether he shared the attitudes of these writers, but he does seem to have used these common attitudes as he constructed his tragic political marriages.