SOURCE: Adelman, Janet. “Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.” In Shakespeare's Personality, edited by Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris, pp. 151-74. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Adelman centers on Shakespeare's handling of the bed tricks in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure and examines the plays' depictions of marriage as a socialized legitimation of sexuality.

In the midst of Hamlet's attack on deceptive female sexuality, he cries out to Ophelia, “I say we will have no moe marriage” (3.1.147). Hamlet begins with the disrupted marriage of Hamlet's mother and father; by the end of the play both the potential marriage of Hamlet and Ophelia and the actual marriage of Claudius and Gertrude have been destroyed. This disruption of marriage is enacted again in the tragedies...