My novel Bedtrick deals with marriage, both in Shakespeare’s plays and in the lives of the characters. An enlightening book on the subject is Daniel Swift’s Shakespeare’s Common Prayers, particularly the two chapters on the solemnization of matrimony.
Swift argues that because the Book of Common Prayer was “the devotional centerpiece of an age that was passionately religious,” its revisions or threatened revisions were of vital importance. Among key controversies were those over marriage rituals, resulting in inconsistency in practice. After Henry VIII broke with Rome, his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, oversaw the first Book of Common Prayer of the Protestant Anglican church, Issued in 1549. Cranmer intended it to be “an ambiguous book,” and subsequent editions compounded the ambiguities. (Swift 24) Church convocations “decided against clarifying the prayer book, precisely because a strategically vague theology allowed a wider range of confessional factions to worship together.” (24).
The Protestant Reformation changed Roman Catholic practice relating to sacraments. Catholics regard matrimony as a sacrament, along with baptism and Holy Communion; Protestants do not. “A sacrament is in the simplest version a sign that confers grace upon men: it is a delivery mechanism and a meeting point between the human and the divine.” (68) Yet even as they “demoted marriage from sacrament to church rite, Protestant thinkers defended the holiness of the state and specifically praised married sex as an act of devotion.”
Sexual consummation became an essential part of marriage, rather than simply a means of “carnal multiplication.” (81) Thus Protestant priests are allowed to marry. Sex, rather than being unclean, is holy. Romeo and Juliet makes this explicit.
Strictures against whoredom were based on the concept that the body itself is holy. “Do ye not know that he, which cleaveth to an whore, is made one body with her?” (Swift, 82, quoting a 1547 homily, which goes on to point out that disease comes of whoredom.)
Shakespeare’s England acknowledged three stages of marriage: spousal (the exchange of consent between the man and woman), church solemnization, and consummation, in that order. First the couple agrees to marry; second they solemnize the union before a priest; third they fulfill their contract with sexual union. In practice, however, consummation might come first. Because sexual congress was the sacred joining of two bodies in one, it represented a marriage contract in itself, so in practice could come before or after spousal and solemnization.
Shakespeare begins As You Like It “ with an apparent opposition between two ways of handling [the marriage rituals in] the Book of Common Prayer: one can mock its rites or follow them. In this play however, both attitudes may simultaneously be true.” (93) In Shakespeare’s source for the play, Thomas Lodge’s pastoral romance Rosalynde, the wedding scene between Orlando and Ganymede, (Rosalind in her boy’s disguise), is initiated by her cousin Celia. In Shakespeare’s story it is Rosalind who says, “Come sister, you shall be the priest and marry us,” and Orlando seconds her: “Pray thee, marry us.” (As You Like It, IV, 1, 106-16)
Swift points out that Rosalind insists Celia use the precise words. When Orlando says, “I will”, he’s agreeing to what is known as a de futuro contract, which is not legally binding. Rosalind pushes him: “Then you must say, I take thee Rosalind for wife.” Swift notes, “As he utters the words, ‘I take thee,’ he enters into a de praesenti contract, which is legally binding as soon as it is reciprocated.” (94). In the next line Rosalind says “I do take thee, Orlando, for my husband.” (IV, 1, 117-118)
“They are now, according to the widely accepted laws of spousals, married. All that is further required is a church solemnization and sexual consummation.” (94) The ceremony between Orlando and Rosalind—note that in the vow Ganymede says the name Rosalind—takes the exact words from the Book of Common Prayer: “the formal liturgy is disguised under a popular declaration of spousal contract. It is both binding and playful, both pretense and true. And it is what the characters wish.” (95)
Underlying many of the jokes in this play is what Swift calls “the inevitability of sexual consummation.” (95) Solemnization comes first, and then, as the final couplet has it, these “rites” will end in “true delights.”
After his commentary on As You Like It, preceded in his book by a fascinating discussion of the liturgical basis of Romeo and Juliet, Swift says: “Shakespeare found drama in the liturgy of the marriage rite, and as he patterned his plays on its forms he inherited also an arena of controversy, for the very words and objects he adopted were fiercely contested.” (95)
The marriage in my novel Bedtrick must follow the Protestant ritual set forth in The Book of Common Prayer, but there’s a difficulty. As the priest says in his opening words, Marriage joins this man and this woman in holy Matrimony. The contemplated marriage in the novel is between two women, one of whom passes as a man. Such a union would be illegal and irreligious. It’s based on a lie.
The next post looks at the bedtrick plot in two of Shakespeare’s plays. The broadest definition of ‘bedtrick’ is a lie about sex, but in Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well, Shakespeare specifies a certain type of lie–not the one in my novel.