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.
