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A Happier Eden maps the largely unexplored terrain of the Stuart epithalamium, or wedding poem, focusing in particular on the complex attitudes toward marriage it reflects. Heather Dubrow examines responses to marriage, sexuality, and gender in the works of such seventeenth-century poets as Donne, Jonson, and Herrick, and traces the interplay between generic conventions and the dynamics of marriage. Shedding light on the tensions associated with wedlock in Stuart England, she also considers how they are variously repressed or resolved over a wide range of epithalamia.

Dubrow's analysis of Stuart marriage departs from earlier accounts in emphasizing the coexistence of competing and conflicting ideologies. Rather than assuming, for example, that Protestant England privileged marriage over celibacy, she demonstrates that an older respect of both celibacy and virginity survived in many reaches of Stuart society. She also charts the interaction between generic traditions and cultural influences. The nature of marriage in Stuart England, she shows, influenced not only which generic norms poets emphasized but also how those norms were interpreted by contemporary readers.

Although concerned specifically with lyric and narrative poetry that celebrates weddings, A Happier Eden also traces parallels between that tradition and other types of drama and poetry. Comparing the epithalamia of Herrick and Jonson, she seeks to redefine the critical relationship between the two. Of special interest is an appendix containing Jackson Bryce's annotated translation-the first in English-of Julius Caesar Scaliger's sixteenth-century essay on the epithalamium (Book III, chapter 101 of his Poetics).