SOURCE: Desens, Marliss C. “Marrying Down: Negotiating a More Equal Marriage on the English Renaissance Stage.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 227-55.

In the following excerpt, Desens remarks on the efforts of women in such works as The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, Cymbeline, and Othello to create an equal union between husband and wife by selecting men outside their own social rank.

Much of the feminist criticism in the last decades of the twentieth century has focused on the ways in which female characters in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are bound by their society's male-constructed paradigms. A wealth of historical and legal evidence from the society that produced this drama suggests that these arguments are also relevant to life in the “real” world as well as to the fictional world depicted on stage. However, acknowledging the legal and social...