6 - Wedding Is Great Juno's Crown

Summary

Comedies usually conclude with a wedding, or at least the announcement of one (or more). Biron in Love's Labour 's Lost is one of many characters in Shakespeare's comedies who speaks for the author's consciousness of the rules of the genre he is working in:

Our wooing doth not end like an old play.

Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy

Might well have made our sport a comedy.

(LLL, 5. 2. 860–62)

Love's Labour 's Lost, however, ends with weddings postponed, disrupting the audience's easy romantic expectations and recognizing the need for further reflection (and, in the case of the men, growing up) before the ‘world-without-end bargain’ of marriage is made. As You Like It undertakes its defamiliarizing of the wedding conclusion by offering the audience three variations on the ceremony, placed at strategic moments during the play. It 's as if to say, we cannot avoid the imperatives of genre – this is a romantic comedy and we all know that Rosalind and Orlando will end up blissfully together – but what is the relation between the euphoric ritual of the wedding and the realities of the social world to which a marriage ties two lovers?

In Shakespeare's Comic Rites Edward Berry argues that

if Shakespeare lived in a ritualistic culture, in which ceremony gave conscious shape even to the reflexes of daily life, he also lived in a culture in which the role of ritual was becoming increasingly problematic, even to the point of fragmenting the very community it should have sustained.

The issue was part of the wider debate between Puritans and traditional Anglicans which was ultimately to result in civil war in the early part of the seventeenth century. Puritans disapproved of ceremony, associating it not only with the potential for rioting and drunkenness (like theatre), but also with the practices of the Catholic church, from which England had been painfully weaning itself throughout the sixteenth century. The belief that a priest was the only authoritative expounder of the word of God, and the quasi-magical notion that the Christian's spiritual life could be regulated through the seven sacraments: such ideas were examined, critiqued, and reinscribed in a very limited way as the Anglican church became the ‘reformed’ Church of England, with the monarch as its head.