The Law Against Lovers: Dramatizing Civil Union in Restoration England

To recover the centrality of gender institutions in seventeenth-century England’s
emergent discourse of civil society, I suggest that William Davenant’s The Law Against Lovers (1662), a Restoration adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure that seems politically anodyne, becomes clearly topical once marriage is recognized as its driving concern. Davenant’s “Law” against lovers takes in the entire history of Commonwealth marriage legislation that, between 1641 and 1653, attempted to replace the Anglican marriage ceremony with a civil ceremony. By staging the failure of state control over matrimony, the play imagines marriage as a civil association nonetheless still tied, by public preference, to the Anglican rite. For readers today, the play offers a reminder—as modern states attempt to redefine the political conditions of lifelong partnership—that the institutions of gender are always under construction, for better and for worse.