Renaissance Forum: Volume 3, Number 2, 1998: Anita Pacheco

Lisa Hopkins. 1998. The Shakespearean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands. Basingstoke: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press. 219pp. ISBN 0-312-17748-8. Ł42.50.

In the opening chapter of The Shakespearean Marriage, Lisa Hopkins takes issue with what she sees as the all-too-prevalent critical assumption that Shakespeare's plays endorse a recognisably Protestant view of marriage, which valorised it as a natural, God-given state, an essential component of human happiness which should be based on mutual affection and consent rather than dynastic imperatives or parental coercion. Hopkins offers what is perhaps a less comforting view of the bard's attitude to marriage. Her central argument is that throughout his career Shakespeare aligned himself with an aristocratic rather than a Puritan or bourgeois concept of marriage, insofar as the plays consistently emphasise the social function of marriage while remaining sceptical of its capacity to generate personal happiness and fulfilment. In her discussion of the representation of marriage in most of Shakespeare's plays (the Henry VI plays, Richard II and the two parts of Henry IV receive only brief mention), Hopkins argues, largely convincingly, that the dramatist validates marriage as the means for the production of legitimate offspring and the consolidation of social (including homosocial) bonds. But this conviction that marriage serves as an indispensable guarantor of social stability co-exists in the plays with a sombre recognition of the heavy toll it takes on individual identity and personal freedom.
That Shakespeare's plays take a largely negative view of marriages based solely in romantic attraction is by now something of a critical commonplace. Critics may continue to argue about the meaning of Petruchio's 'taming' of Kate, but few would claim that the romantic union of Lucentio and Bianca offers more than the most meagre hopes of future happiness. Much of the best Shakespearean criticism of the last twenty years has worked to complicate our response to Shakespeare's 'happy comedies', in part by alerting us to the ways in which the plays insist on the personal difficulties of marriage as well as its pleasures. Perhaps the chief strength of Hopkins's book is that it supplements this fairly well-established view of Shakespearean marriage with a complementary sense of the vital importance the plays attach to marriage as a tool of social cohesion. Her reading of The Taming of the Shrew reminds us that the marriage of Lucentio and Bianca is criticised as much for its social disruptiveness as for its unreliable basis in romantic love and that Petruchio, a stranger in Padua, finds in marriage a secure and respected position in male Paduan society. Hopkins offers a persuasive account of the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick as a 'socially engineered' one (72), whose success works to point up the weakness of the freely chosen affective relationship of Claudio and Hero. Twelfth Night, in Hopkins's view, marks a rare but significant exception to the rule, for if marriage in the play is clearly the means for achieving 'full and successful integration into the community' (40), this is a community able to accommodate an unusual diversity of marriages, even, in the case of Sir Toby and Maria, one that crosses class boundaries. (Malvolio fares considerably less well on this level, of course.) It is the flexibility of marriage in the play which, for Hopkins, opens up a real possibility that social integration will be accompanied by romantic and personal fulfilment.
In her chapter on the tragedies, Hopkins provides a thorough and insightful analysis of the marriage in Othello as one that fails both personally and socially. Her discussion of Hamlet – a clear case of a marriage which is personally significant but socially deeply problematic – makes an entirely commendable effort to approach the difficult relationship between the prince and his mother from Gertrude's perspective. Unfortunately, this leads to the omission of two passages that seem highly pertinent to any discussion of marriage in the play and especially to the question of Hamlet's attitude towards his mother and women in general: the prince's first soliloquy and the Ghost's own embittered account of what he sees as Gertrude's marital failure. The section on Macbeth focuses, quite rightly, on the destructive impact of rigid and polarised gender roles on Macbeth's marriage. But doesn't this suggest that Shakespeare was at times concerned to explore the damage which social values can inflict on personal relationships? There are other occasions in the book when Hopkins arguably underestimates the degree of criticism which the play levels at dominant patriarchal values: is it Shakespeare or Prospero who fetishises female chastity in The Tempest?
In a book which offers this breadth of coverage, there is an inevitable tendency to keep a sharp focus on the subject of marriage. Yet it is not always possible to consider that subject independently of related dramatic concerns. Hopkins locates in Julius Caesar, and indeed in the other Roman plays, a distinctly Roman concept of marriage which gives primacy to the institution's role in the formation of political kinship alliances to the neglect of its private, personal dimension. Yet the play's portrayal of marriage is part of a larger critique of a masculine patrician culture which is rooted in emulation and shown to lead logically to Caesarism and civil war. Shakespeare fully reveals the disturbing cultural dominance of this heroic ethic in Portia's 'voluntary wound' in the thigh: she can legitimate her appeal to be Brutus's confidante only by associating herself with ideals of manliness – that is, by claiming to exceed her sex.
In her longer discussion of Coriolanus, Hopkins places the patrician marginalisation of marriage and women at the heart of the play's social crisis. Yet it seems curious, given her criticism of Coriolanus for neglecting his wife in his resolute attempt to 'suppress and conceal the feminine' (114), that Hopkins should give Virgilia less attention than either the play's author or its protagonist. After all, Virgilia, in her admittedly quiet way, embodies a powerful critique of Roman martial values. This is most evident, of course, in Act One, Scene Three, when she refuses to bow to her mother-in-law's celebratory view of war as the site of individual heroism and deflates her ecstatic reminiscence of sending her young, 'tender-bodied' only son to war with the pointed question, 'But had he died in the business, madam, how then?' And the married couple's greeting after the separation of exile – 'O, a kiss / Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!' – evokes a more emotionally charged marital relationship than Hopkins suggests. Of course, Hopkins is right to see repression as a central problem in the play, but what Caius Martius has been taught to repress in his path to greatness is not simply the feminine but, more broadly, the natural: the ordinary instinctual drives and natural ties which the ethic of aristocratic honour always strives to conquer. Hence the play's central contradiction that a society which conceives of itself as the foundation of natural order creates a martial hero who so fully embodies the unnaturalness required of the honour ethic that he becomes a destructive, anti-social force. This is dramatised most fully in the play's climactic encounter between mother and son which is not, as Hopkins claims, a private scene (the presence of Valeria shows that this is not simply a family affair), but one in which the city ('our dear nurse') and the family are indissolubly linked within a natural social order which now has to unmake the son it made. The marginalisation of marriage that Hopkins identifies as the cause of social crisis seems more like a symptom of the internal contradictions of the Roman world of the play.
Hopkins has a sharp eye for syntactic slipperiness and discursive complexity which she uses to good effect throughout the book, but with especially fruitful results in her study of Richard III. Her book as a whole presents an interesting and valuable reading of a subject of central importance to the Shakespeare canon. It is also refreshing, at a time when Renaissance literary studies have been so preoccupied with the emergence of bourgeois subjectivity during the early modern period, to encounter a book which reminds us of the enduring cultural appeal of aristocratic values, even in the plays of a glover's son from Stratford.

ANITA PACHECO
UNIVERSITY OF HULL