Shakespeare does not put asunder when he puts us under a magnifying glass.

Shakespeare’s preoccupation with all things marital leads us, inevitably, to ponder why he placed such emphasis on the hymeneal state. From a purely biographical perspective, we might be surprised that Shakespeare would return again and again to marriage themes, given the murkiness – by most accounts – of his own marital relationship, e.g., the significant age difference between Shakespeare (18) and his bride, Anne Hathaway (26); the truncated reading of the banns prior to his wedding; the arrival of baby Susanna a mere six months following the nuptials; the pursuit of a career (sans the presence of his spouse) in London, (a formidable distance from his "home" in Stratford); and – murkier still – the ambivalent bequest in his Last Will and Testament of the "second best bed" to Anne.

Shakespeare’s marital fidelity was certainly suspect. If Richard Burbage can be believed, as related in the contemporary diary entry of John Manningham, Shakespeare was not above enjoying the bodily treasures of courtesans during his protracted stays in London. Moreover, there is the unsubstantiated – but (barely) plausible – rumor that a minor poet/playwright, Sir William Davenant, was the Bard’s illegitimate son.

Perhaps it was an ever-lingering sting of conscience, or an evolving wistfulness to eventually retire into domesticity, or a concern for the future of the respective marriages of his surviving children, that drove him to repeat a marital theme. Whatever the impetus, Shakespeare’s works persistently demonstrate a concentrated focus on the institution of marriage and on its participants, its characteristics, its implications, and, above all, its importance.

For example, Shakespeare’s most celebrated play – Hamlet – is replete with references to marital relationships. From a broad view, we see Hamlet tormented by the "o’er hasty marriage" [III. ii. 57] of his mother and uncle, (with allusions to the biblical proscription against the perceived incestuousness of a union between a widow and her husband’s brother); the hollow protestations of constancy by the prospective widow in the prologue of the play-within-the play, contrasting with an unnamed actor’s earlier rendition of the aged Hecuba’s anguish when witnessing the slaughter of her husband, Priam, by the rage of Pyrrhus; the aborted pre-marital courtship between Hamlet and Ophelia (who, according to Gertrude, "shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife" [V. ii. 243]).

And from a closer view, we glimpse oblique references to the marriage ceremony. In the midst of the salacious repartee between Hamlet and Ophelia during the Mousetrap scene, we hear multifaceted allusions to wedding vows:

OPHELIA: You are keen, my lord, you are keen.
HAMLET: It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.
OPHELIA: Still better, and worse.
HAMLET: So you mis-take your husbands. [III, ii, 250-253]

Hamlet’s punning reference here to the wedding ceremony’s "taking" of a spouse, for better or worse, as a "mis-take" should make us wince when remembering again that marital murkiness of Shakespeare's biographical background.

Perhaps, too, there is some punning allusion to marriage in the infamous "Get thee to a nunnery" line in Hamlet. [III, i, 121] Frequently noted by exegetes is the Elizabethan ambivalence of the term "nunnery," referring to a cloistered sanctuary for religious sisters of the church on the one hand, and to a brothel on the other. But the possible allusion to marriage in the term has been overlooked. A clue to this allusion might be discerned in the later exchange between the supposedly delusional Hamlet and his throne-usurping uncle, King Claudius, where Hamlet seems to mistake his step-father for his mother following the murder of Polonius by Hamlet:

KING: Hamlet, this deed, for thine especial safety –
Which we do tender, as we dearly grieve
For that which thou hast done – must send thee hence
With fiery quickness. Therefore prepare thyself.
The bark is ready, and the wind at help,
Th’ associates tend, and everything is bent
For England.
HAMLET: For England?
KING: Ay, Hamlet.
HAMLET: Good.
KING: So is it, if thou knew’st our purposes.
HAMLET: I see a cherub that sees them. But come, for England. Farewell, dear mother.
KING: Thy loving father, Hamlet.
HAMLET: My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; so my mother. Come for England. [IV, iii, 40-55]

The "oneness" of the flesh of man and wife in marriage alluded to by Hamlet here expressly harkens to the biblical account in Genesis 2:21-24. And when Hamlet refers to "oneness" in marriage, then we can faintly hear the full significance of the contrasting "none-ery" in his earlier break with Ophelia in the nunnery scene, where their anticipated "oneness" is reduced to "none" by the rupture of their relationship. Indeed, to buttress this allusion, Hamlet shortly follows the nunnery line with the conditional, "If thou dost marry..." [III, ii, 136] (This allusion, too, to "none" in "nunnery" dovetails neatly into the obscene "nothing" in Hamlet’s banter with Ophelia immediately prior to the play-within-the-play.)

We see this theme of "oneness" in marriage, also, in King Lear in Cordelia’s criticisms of her sisters’ vacuous declarations of adoration for their father, when marital "oneness" is divided into two:

CORDELIA:

...Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters
To love my father all. [I, i, 99-104]

Shakespeare sublimely has Cordelia suggesting that she will halve her affections between her father and her husband, while she inquires why her sisters have husbands, all attenuating the oneness that anticipates a stable marriage relationship.

We see this oneness confounded, too, in Sonnet 42 when Shakespeare (or, at least, the narrator of the Sonnets) must deal with the triad created with the Young Man, the Dark Lady, and the Narrator:

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
****
****
But here’s the joy: my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone.

The "alone" in the last line can mean not only "singularly," but can also be read "all one" on the one hand, or refer to that other "oneness"– utter loneliness. The concept resounds in Sonnet 144 in the famous "Two loves I have," when we can again hear the pun of "Two loves I halve."

Shakespeare’s earlier metaphysical forays into the unitary relationships between lovers (whether spousal or not) give way to sociological observations of such in his As You Like It. The play is riddled with coupling and decoupling and then coupling anew, culminating in an exquisite encomium of marriage as the ultimate societal union. The importance of marriage – essential to orderly mating – is underscored by a reference to Noah’s ark when Touchstone and Audrey come traipsing into the congregational final scene of the play. Jaques says of them:

There is sure another flood toward, and these
couples are coming to the ark. Here comes a pair of very
strange beasts, which in all tongues are called fools. [V. iv. 35-37]

The ever-earthy Touchstone informs everyone the purpose of his arrival:

...I press in here, sir, amongst the rest of the country copulatives, to swear and to forswear, according as marriage binds and blood breaks. [V. iv. 54-56]

We cannot read As You Like It without appreciating Touchstone’s uncanny wisdom. But perhaps it is easy to miss his distillation of the play’s theme here when he refers to the manner that "marriage binds and blood breaks." The Elizabethan idiom "blood breaks" refers to the outbreak of lust. Touchstone’s lines here seem ostensibly in character, given his horny disposition and his persistent references to the ardor of sexual desire. But the phrase can hold a deeper sense in the context of the matchmaking of the drama.

As You Like It opens with a fraternal fracture -- another kind of blood breaking -- as the brothers Orlando and Oliver resort to physical aggression toward one another, and the violent divisions don’t stop there. We quickly learn that other brothers, Duke Senior and Duke Frederick, have crossed swords – with Duke Frederick usurping the elder Duke’s authority and banishing him from courtly dominions to the wildness of the Forest of Arden. Other seemingly unnatural breaks are also on display at the beginning of the play: youthful Oliver shows disdain and repudiates elderly Adam; the Wrestler Charles breaks the ribs of an old man’s son; Duke Frederick breaks from propriety in scorning Orlando as the wrestling victor over Charles (because he disliked Orlando’s deceased father); Rosalind is suddenly, along with a flimsy justification, banished by her uncle Duke Frederick.

The uncomfortable unnaturalness of these breaks is clearly intended to contrast with other unusual unions that deepen as a consequence. With respect to Rosalind and Celia, it is said that "never two ladies loved as they do." [I. i. 108-109] Celia describes their relationship in terms that hint at something more than mere adolescent friendship:

...We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together,
And whereso’er we went, like Juno’s swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable. [I. iii. 70-73]

More discomfiting is Celia’s admonishment of Rosalind, invoking St. Mark’s biblical description of the oneness and inseparability reserved to marriage:

...Rosalind lacks then the love
Which teacheth thee that thou and I am one.
Shall we be sunder’d? [I. iii. 93-95]

Arden Forest is not the only unknown wilderness into which Rosalind ventures. Shakespeare underscores – nay, trumpets – Rosalind’s sojourn into the realm of homo-erotica. Her assumption of the pseudonym "Gannymede," along with her disguise as a man, facilitates her escape to Arden and her excursion into a realm where she is free to express her views and her psychical independence, so as to eventually come to grips with her sociological and sexual dependence upon her selected male partner. In classical myth, Gannymede was the name of a fair youth who was so becoming that Jove, the king of the gods, conscripted him as his cupbearer. The name was also slang for a young male who sold his body to an older man. The profound irony with which Rosalind assumes the name, the gender, and the valence that such an identity embodies, presents an ever-widening chasm of instability that her coupling with Orlando neatly fills with the institutional cement of marriage and its foundational consummation. As a disguised man named Gannymede, then, Rosalind plays at (though never commits to) both sides of same-sex experimentation. The intercession of Hymen, the god of marriage, at the conclusion of the play keys the overarching message of the play: that, despite the centrifugal force of other relationships or influences, the centripetal relationship and influence of heterosexual marriage is imperative and paramount.

But note, too, that in Shakespeare's day the word hymen was also associated with the vaginal membrane (as it more commonly is today than as a reference to the god of marriage). Thus, Touchstone's "according as marriage binds and blood breaks" takes on additional significance. "Blood breaks" becomes not only a reference to the wanton lustfulness that can rupture a marital relationship, but alternately can allude to the Old Testament rite of proving a bride's virginity by displaying the blood from her ruptured hymen to the elders of a city. Deuteronomy 22:13-19. Uncannily, Shakespeare evokes such a ritual, but in reverse (just as Rosalind, disguised as a man, reverses the ordinary heterosexual relationships that beg for development in Arden Forest). Oliver -- Orlando's elder brother -- delivers a bloody napkin to Rosalind/Gannymede, as an emblem of Orlando's loyalty: but for his injurious encounter with a "lioness, with udders all drawn dry" [IV, iii, 114], Orlando would have made the pre-arranged liaison with Rosalind/Gannymede. Tellingly, the bloody handkerchief demonstrates not only his fealty, but also exposes, exquisitely, Rosalind's feminine essence (inasmuch as she is unable to control her faintheartedness at the sight of her lover's blood). This off-stage scenario ritualistically and archetypically provides the catalyst to bring the lovers together, and -- in their wake -- to compel the other couples into matrimonial union. And thus, as Touchstone intones the notion that "according as marriage binds and blood breaks," the blood breaking becomes less about indiscreet lustfulness, and more about the ceremonious coupling of "copulatives" that becomes necessary so as to underscore that -- as the Song at the end of this play declares -- "'Tis Hymen peoples every town." [V, iv, 141].