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Page 43 the matter of marriage—sets the notion of an abstract, computed, and codified “law’’ against an inherited tradition of specific local custom and practice, which claims equal, if alternative, validity.6 In short, it pits “law” against what might be termed “lore.” In this case, it sets marriage as legally authenticated by a church ceremony against marriage as validated in terms of the traditional “lore” surrounding the ceremony of “troth-plight.” Still valid in early modern Britain, “troth-plight” involved a joint declaration of intent before witnesses and took the specific form either of sponsalia per verba de futuro (when the parties promise each other that they will at some future time become husband and wife) or of sponsalia per verba de praesenti (when they commit themselves to take each other as husband and wife on the spot, at this present moment).7 The church withheld wholesale approval of the practice and expected its subsequent blessing of the union to be solicited. Nevertheless, it remained firmly established, is referred to elsewhere by Shakespeare (e.g., in Measure for Measure) and may indeed have been the initial mode of the Bard’s own marriage. Certainly the issue comes to the fore at the ending of As You Like It. The scenes involving Sir Oliver Martext obviously raise the matter, particularly when that peculiar priest’s evident readiness to marry Touchstone and Audrey “under this tree” (3.3.59) (despite his concern that the ceremony should be “lawful” [63–64]) is set against Jacques’ scornful dismissal: And will you, being a man of your breeding, be married under a bush like a beggar? Get you to church, and have a good priest that can tell you what marriage is. This fellow will but join you together as they join wainscot; then one of you will prove a shrunk panel, and like green timber, warp, warp. (3.3.78–83) Nonetheless, another troth-plight marriage virtually takes place in 4.1 when Orlando and Rosalind/Ganymede enact a sponsalia per verba de praesenti ceremony in the presence of Celia: Orlando: Pray thee marry us. Celia: I cannot say the words. Rosalind: You must begin, “Will you Orlando—” Celia: Go to. Will you Orlando have to wife this Rosalind? Orlando: I will. Rosalind: Ay, but when? |
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