The Anatomy of Melancholy

Or else he lacks the means to provide for her marriage: he has no money, and though the delay plainly harms the health of her body and soul, he does not care and will take no notice. She must and shall wait.

Many negligent and careless parents, “unjust fathers,” measure their children’s affections by their own. They are now cold and decrepit, past all such youthful thoughts, and therefore mean to starve their children’s natural spirit, to have them “born old men straight from childhood.” They must not marry, “nor have anything to do with the things that youth brings with it. He sets the measure by his own desire as it is now, not as it once was,” as the character says in the comedy. They will stifle nature: their young people must have no share in youth’s pleasures, but suddenly become old like themselves.

And it is a common fault among most parents arranging their children’s marriages: the father considers wealth alone. When his own folly, extravagance and indiscretion have wasted his estate, he tries to recover his position by confining and selling his eldest son’s love and affection to some foolish, old or ugly creature for money.

He will marry Phanareta’s daughter, that red-haired maiden, Grey-eyed, broad-faced, with a hooked nose.

And though his son objects utterly, like Clitipho in the comedy—“I cannot, father”—if she is rich, “Come now,” he replies, “but he is choosy! You would think he had some sense!” He must and shall have her; she is beautiful enough, young enough. If he expects or hopes to inherit his father’s lands, he must marry, not when he wishes or the woman he loves—“this Arconides’s daughter”—but whomever his father orders, when and where his father pleases. His affection must wait upon his father’s wishes.

His daughter, indeed, is in the same predicament: like an empty boat, she must carry what and whom her father wishes, wherever and whenever he pleases. In these affairs the father always seeks the greatest advantage; the mother values good family connections, and the son usually wants a handsome woman.

Livy illustrates all this in the first decade, book 4: a gentleman and a yeoman courted a young woman in Rome, contrary to the statute forbidding marriage between the gentry and common people. The matter was disputed. The mother favoured the gentleman, “wishing the girl to enter the most splendid marriage possible”; the guardians supported the man with the greater wealth, etc.

But parents ought not to be so strict in this matter. Beauty is in itself an entirely sufficient dowry: “A beautiful maiden, though extremely poor, has a dowry in abundance.” Jacob married Rachel on this basis; and Bonaventure, in his commentary on the fourth book of the Sentences, denies that a man commits even a venial sin by marrying a maiden for her physical beauty. Among the Jews, Deuteronomy 21:11, a man who saw a beautiful woman among the captives might take her as his wife after observing certain minor formalities.