Performing marriage in early modern England: Wooing and wedding in 'The Shoemaker's Holiday', 'The Taming of the Shrew', 'The Spanish Tragedy', and 'Titus Andronicus' (Thomas Dekker, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare)

This dissertation investigates how marriage gets performed, disrupted and reconfigured on the stage and how such performances challenge early modern gender, class, and national ideologies. Historicizing and particularizing Judith Butler's theory that performance can resignify institutions from within, I study cultural and dramatic wooings and weddings as performances with the potential to reiterate marriage with a difference. I concentrate on drama, arguing that because it cites and re-cites culture, it revisits the ideological contests in real weddings, often framing them in ways that real weddings do not. Moving beyond the critical commonplace that marriages at the end of comedies ensure social harmony while those at the beginning of tragedies doom the rebellious woman character, I argue that stage weddings in both genres allow women to negotiate the competing familial, economic, and social interests often assumed to contain or destroy them. My readings of the wildly variant performances of wooings and weddings in letters, court cases and dramas by Kyd, Shakespeare, and Dekker reveal that the institution of marriage allowed and even fostered maneuverability.; In Chapter One I draw on and rethink social history and performance theory to investigate drama's unique and self-conscious role in reshaping marital ideologies. Chapter Two argues that The Shoemaker's Holiday's clandestine wedding allows Rose to work against her father's demands, against class endogamy, and toward a choice which provides her with economic and emotional benefits. Chapter Three argues that The Taming of the Shrew challenges the notion that early modern marriage merely indoctrinated couples into dominant/submissive gender roles, suggesting that Kate deftly works from within marriage to incorporate her wit and sexuality even into her performances of subjection. Chapter Four argues that The Spanish Tragedy's Bel-Imperia only appears to acquiesce in her dynastic arranged marriage so that she can use its very rituals to rebel against familial, political and social order. Chapter Five argues that Titus Andronicus' Lavinia and Tamora disruptively enact the wooing and wedding rituals which reiterate dynastic marriage; their exchanges, betrothals, and marriages thus emphasize that marriage can make the state vulnerable rather than secure.