SOURCE: Cook, Ann Jennalie. “Wooing and Wedding: Shakespeare's Dramatic Distortion of the Customs of His Time.” In Shakespeare's Art from a Comparative Perspective, edited by Wendell M. Aycock, pp. 83-100. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1981.

In the following essay, Cook illuminates differences between Shakespeare's dramatic representations of marriage and the social customs of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Courtship and marriage are such universal experiences that audiences assume familiarity with the subject when Shakespeare presents scenes of wooing and wedding. Yet in recent years social historians have presented overwhelming evidence to show that the customs and attitudes surrounding the Elizabethans' selection of a mate were vastly different from those now held in England and America. As a consequence, the judgment we make on such lovers as Kate and Petruchio or Portia and Bassanio may be somewhat warped.

Now obviously Shakespeare's plays were not written as true-to-life reflections of the world...