Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage. .

Kathryn Jacobs. Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage.

Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001. viii + 182 pp. index. bibl. $59.95. ISBN: 0-8130-2102-2.

In her Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage, Kathryn Jacobs offers a brief but elegant analysis of selected literary representations of marriage as a legal contract during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, focusing on the consequences that might occur when affective relationships are defined within such a rigid framework. In the texts she examines from the earlier period (several of The Canterbury Tales and a few mystery plays), authors understand that the abstract structure of contract law does not always rake into account the unpredictability of the married couple as human agents, and the authors thus create situations that either exploit the weaknesses of this paradigm or show solutions that solve some of the inherent problems. For example, Jacobs argues that, because the wife's adultery in Chaucer's The Ship man's Tale cures a sick marriage, the sexual exclusivity demanded of married partners is called into question, a fundamental challenge to church law. In her most interesting ana lysis, she shows that Chaucer extends the metaphor of a contract beyond that of the relationship between husband and wife to that of participants in extralegal affective relationships. In her final discussion of Chaucer's representation of the marital contract, she argues that Chaucer's overall sympathetic depiction of widows, a singular contrast to the pro forma stereotype of the libidinous widow, deliberately challenges Paul's "monopolistic supply model [of marriage]" (70). Before Jacobs leaves the medieval period, she shows how the "dislocation" experienced by Noah's wife and by Joseph as the spouse NOT provided divine favor is a dramatic tool that allows the mystery play's audience to empathize with these very human biblical characters and thus to better understand their own human condition.

In her discussion of early modern drama, Jacobs points out that, whereas the effects of the marriage contract is the focus of the Chaucerian and dramatic texts, early modern plays, such as Measure for Measure and The Alchemist, rather examine the validity of the marriage contract itself. She posits that the cause for this shift in attention is the increased political and social reliance on the church marriage as the single legitimate form of marriage and the concurrent cultural awareness of the uncertainty of the verbal contract.

The strengths and weaknesses of this book arise from the author's courage in looking at the literary expression of her topic over several centuries. Braving the critic who would call the book slight rather than comprehensive, Jacobs provides a selective rather than comprehensive analysis of her topic and thus advances a coherent and global picture of a culture grappling with intrinsic values and beliefs. Noting that further examination of literary representations of the marriage contract is necessary, Jacobs shows by example how such comparative analysis illuminates both text and context.

However, Jacobs' overall analysis falters in three specific areas. First, making a rather naive mistake, she fails to differentiate her own awareness of how certain plots challenge received custom from authorial awareness. Specifically, she argues that Chaucer self-consciously creates sympathetic characterizations of widows to deliberately refute the stereotype of the libidinous widow, when there is no evidence for such intentionality. Second, I am disturbed by the absence of discussion regarding the different cultural production and reception for the various texts Jacobs examines. The three unlike kinds of texts--Chaucerian tale, late medieval mystery play, and early modern urban dramatic text--each have different reasons for coming into being, different attitudes towards their composition by both author and audience, different relationships with their audiences, different attitudes towards issues of class, etc. Jacobs' lack of acknowledgment about these diverse kinds of production and reception compromises the credibility of her analysis. Finally, this absence accentuates the fragile theoretical threads that link the texts that are discussed. Although the subject of marital contracts is the focus of each chapter, it is ultimately not clear why these particular texts are discussed or what overall thesis ties them together. That one aspect of the marital contract seems to be at issue at one time and another at another time is rather a tenuous thread upon which to hang an entire book.

In spite of these weaknesses, Marriage Contracts provides useful individual discussions of the chosen texts and challenges scholars to take on the problem of examining important cultural practices on literary expression over time.