SOURCE: "Secret Promises and Elopements, Broken Contracts and Divorces," in Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 185-233.

In the following essay, Cook discusses many of the particulars of Elizabethan marriage laws and customs and then explores the way in which Shakespeare's plays address or correspond to real-life contemporary matrimonial issues. Cook concludes that Shakespeare represents courtship and marriage in a variety of positive and negative ways and that there is no easy way to determine what his own views on the subject were.

Errour, condition, parentage, and vow,
 Adultery (the law will not allow
 Disparitie in divine worship) and
 Violence or force, or where we understand;
 In priesthood, there's profaneness, or else where,
 False faiths profest, wee likewise must forebeare,
 When there is precontract, for honesty,
 Affinitie, and disability:
 These twelve from present marriage us disswade,
 Or can retract from wedlock...