University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Pages: 278
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-1-61147-666-8 • Hardback • July 2014 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
978-1-61147-736-8 • Paperback • May 2016 • $54.99 • (£42.00)
978-1-61147-667-5 • eBook • July 2014 • $52.00 • (£40.00)
Nancy Bunker is associate professor of English at Middle Georgia State College.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Patriarchal Marriage, Companionate Marriage
Chapter 1: Thwarting the Enterprising Patriarch: The Taming of the Shrew and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Chapter 2: Absent Patriarchs and Present Guardians: All’s Well That Ends Well and A Trick To Catch the Old One
Chapter 3: Marriage Against the Grain of Social Order: Measure for Measure and A Mad World, My Masters
Chapter 4: Assertive Women Broker Themselves: The Merchant of Venice and The Roaring Girl
Chapter 5: Companionate Marriage: Much Ado About Nothing and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
The impressive number of plays examined combined with the author’s thorough knowledge of early modern land law and marital contracts makes this book a useful addition to any early modern scholar’s library and an indispensable guide for a course devoted to the two playwrights. . . .This book’s exploration of Middleton’s and Shakespeare’s comedies in thematic pairs, its analysis of understudied plays with overstudied ones, is a valuable and much-needed scholarly endeavor.
— Renaissance Quarterly
Bunker enriches these plays by showing the inseparability of marriage from land law. Her expertise in the subtleties of Renaissance marriage and finance is manifest, and her sustained focus on the precarious role of women in premarital property negotiations is particularly insightful. . . .This volume is . . . a valuable resource that emphasizes with conviction and specificity the intractable economic consequences of English Renaissance marriage.
— The Sixteenth Century Journal