Holy Estates...: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Marriage manuals of the early modern period frequently likened the husband's power over his wife to that of a king over his subjects. In this study, Ray (English, Pace U.) examines how prose writer Mary Wroth and several early modern male dramatists contended with marital and political ideologies that promoted the subjugation of women and commoners. Her analysis focuses on literary scenes in which a feminine or feminized character is at the mercy of some literal form of bondage or torture. Distributed in the U.S. by Associated University Presses. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR