What were the attitudes and ideas of love in the elizabethan times?
Th eTudors mistrusted passionate love, feeling that hot love soon cooled. The best marriages were those made thoughtfully and carefully, but with consideration to the couple’s compatability as well as the business arrangements. Most people believed that love alone was not a sound basis for marriage. Among the upper classes, arranged marriages were quite common, with the fathers of the prospective bride and groom arranging matters between them. Although the great majority of marriages among the propertied classes were ‘arranged’, the church insisted on ‘full and free consent’ of both parties as an essential pre-condition for entering into the holy estate of matrimony, and all writers were agreed upon this point. One authority described forced marriage as ‘the extremist bondage there is’, while the playwright Thomas Heywood stressed that such marriages were bound to be self-defeating. “How often” he inquired “have forced contracts been made to add land to land, not love to love? And to u
