Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society.

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-JUL-93

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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press

As the subtitle indicates, the scope of Anne Jennalie Cook's new book is broad. Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society examines the cultural assumptions governing marriage negotiations and actual courtship practice in early modern England as well as the representation of match making throughout the Shakespearean dramatic canon. Organized in eight chapters on such topics as age, social status, and financial arrangements, in addition to brief introductory and concluding chapters, this well-researched and amply documented book elucidates the economic, political, social, and religious bases and implications of the complex process of making marriages.

Although Cook understands that the theater was a constitutive part of culture, her goal is not so much to read the plays for insight into the society that produced them as to understand the social context in order to illuminate the plays. Her usual procedure is to...

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