Marriage features to a greater or lesser extent in virtually every play
Shakespeare wrote - as the festive end of comedy, as the link across the
cycles of the history plays, as a marker of the difference between his
own society and that depicted in the Roman plays, and, all too often, as
the starting-point for the tragedies. Situating his representations of
marriage firmly within the ideologies and practices of Renaissance
culture, Lisa Hopkins argues that Shakespeare anatomises marriage much
as he does kingship, and finds it similarly indispensable to the
underpinning of society, however problematic it may be as a guarantor of
personal happiness.