There was a time when scarcely a week went by without my discussing the differences between ‘kinship‘ and ‘companionate’ marriages with an A-Level group. Parts of Gayle Rubin’s ‘The Traffic in Women’ (1975) were almost as familiar to me as ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow‘.¹

Nowadays, perhaps less so.

Not because my ideas about marriage in Shakespeare have changed dramatically, or because I believe Rubin to be less relevant. Probably it’s simply a reflection of being a full-time tutor now, not a classroom teacher who also did tuition, of the wider spread of texts I’m dealing with now, and how long I spend on each.

So, it’s great to be reminded of her ideas.

But in 2019, my eldest son’s wedding gave me a chance to think about Shakespeare’s witty, intelligent, and strong-minded heroines, and the contextual framework for marriage, with some help from Germaine Greer and Brinda Charry.

Why would the church consider marriage a ‘second-rate’ solution, then?

Perhaps it was because the medieval Church was, for all intents and purposes, the Catholic Church: an institution which elevated virginity, forbade its clergy from marrying, and viewed marriage through a very different theological lens from our own.

The more I stare at this today, the more I find intertextual links to the way dystopian fiction seeks to regulate relationships between men and women.

Again and again, control of society begins with control of intimacy.

My main thought in 2026, though, is how quickly time has passed: seven years married already. Thankfully, their marriage has survived far more successfully than my hairline.

QotW (#80): 24 June 2019

1. Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex’ (1975), in Literary Theory: An Anthology edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) ↩︎