I found it very odd that marriage is used as a punishment to the male characters in this play. If marriage is a sacrament then why is it being used as a punishment? Throughout the entire play, it seems as though marriage is viewed as something trivial and almost materialistic to the male characters. For example, in Act III, we find out that Angelo broke off his marriage with Mariana because her dowry was lost...
"There she losther marriage dowry; with both, her combinate husband, this well seeming Angelo" (III.1. 216-218)
In Act V, the sacrament of marriage of even further spit upon when the Duke begins giving out punishments to the male characters. For Lucio, he is to marry the prostitute he impregnated. Lucio even says to the Duke, ""Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death" (V.1. 515). For Angelo, he is to marry Mariana, the woman he abandoned when her dowry was lost. Isabella is to marry the Duke, whether she likes to or not.
I have very mixed emotions regarding why Shakespeare would choose to use marriage as a form of punishment in this play. On one hand, I can understand making characters take responsibility for their actions, like Lucio. I can also see how Shakespeare is portraying the harsh reality that marriage is not always a fairy tale. However, this conclusion still leaves me with a feeling of confusion. Maybe it is because I, like the rest of us, am so far removed from the time period that my “independent woman” is kicking in and I’m finding it hard to believe that any woman would accept being married off to a man who dismissed her in the first place. I’m curious to see what the rest of you think of this. Why do you think Shakespeare used marriage as a punishment in this play?
New Paltz Students Blogging about Shakespeare
Monday, February 28, 2011
Marriage as form of punishment...
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6 comments:
Is marriage used as a form of punishment? Or is the Duke using marriage as a way to protect Mariana? It seems, in the case of Mariana, that the Duke is using marriage as a means of protecting her. He tells Angelo to marry her before he puts him to death in order to give her back a dowry so she could marry someone else:
"For his possessions,
Although by confiscation they are ours,
We do enstate and widow you with all,
To buy you a better husband."
In the case of Lucio, I think he's forcing him to take responsibility for his actions. He's talking trash about the "punk," but, obviously, Lucio had no problem with the "punk" when he wanted to bed down with her.
I don't know what it says about me, but I kind of enjoy this "punishment." Especially given that, without this particular form of punishment in this particular time, the women would have been far worse off without it.
I think marriage in these cases is only "punishment" because the men in this play do not want to be tied down. Like Jeff said, they are being forced to take responsibility for the ways in which they have messed up these women's lives. It seems that punishment is in the eye of the beholder here; Shakespeare is not putting down the institution of marriage, per se, he is simply thinking of the best way to scold these reckless men. For them, their nightmare appears to be getting tied down to women for whom they feel nothing.
One could argue that instead of being punished by marriage, the dastardly men of measure to measure are seeking atonement or doing penance by living the life attached to their wives. This really isn't the most romantic notion, but the marriages, especially Angelo and Marianna's seems to be a way for the men to make up for his ill deeds. If we as readers prescribe to the belief that The Duke as orchestrator of this chaos, knows what is best and does so to teach his people, then it is not very far off to say that the end result of marriage is just another learning experience. The Duke seems to be a firm believer in the rehabilitation of man, so maybe it wouldn't be so far fetched to say that marriage is serving this function and through marriage these men will better themselves.
Some nice points everybody. Shakespeare is totally poking fun at the venerable institution of Marriage. Yes, men see Marriage as materialistic. Men are punished with Marriage. It's trivial.
I don't read that Shakespeare is conveying literal meaning here, but through irony he's asking: why the hell are we holding Marriage to be such an unassailable institution when clowns and supposed statesmen alike treat it otherwise.
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