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‘Love is proved in the letting go’

Maintaining the focus on the role of the child in relation to figures of authority, and the thresholds between dependence and independence outlined in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 analyses some of Shakespeare’s comic children. Turning to the relationship between socialization and marriage and the institutional structures through which the young people of these plays are ushered, it explores the role of marriage in the stratification of emotional authority. Concentrating on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing, Chapter 4 examines the tensions between the sociable and gendered body. Analysing contemporary attitudes to marriage as transference of power from the father to the husband, it explores the status of the woman between child and wife. Thinking about the terms of agency that these plays deploy, the spaces in which women are shown to ‘grow up’, and the extent to which Shakespeare’s comedies complicate the representation of marriage as socialization, this chapter positions its focus on the child as social commodity.