Sexuality and Religion
The bawdy tone of the play, notably different from Killigrew's earlier tragicomedies The Prisoners and Claricilla and The Princess, may have been a reaction to the highly artificial cult of Platonic love favored at the Caroline era court of Queen Henrietta Maria. Biographers have also speculated that the play's dark outlook on sexuality and marriage may have been part of Killigrew's reaction to the 1638 death of his first wife, Celia Crofts.
Many plays in English Renaissance drama exploit bawdy humor and risqué subject matter; but they normally maintain at least a formal commitment to the established morality of the social order. Westward Ho and Northward Ho, two early Jacobean comedies by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, and the city comedies of Thomas Middleton, provide good examples of this tendency, as do many other dramas of the era. In The Parson's Wedding, Killigrew abandons even a lip-service acceptance of socially-approved morality; he is overtly and even gleefully cynical about the moral claims and sexual mores of society — especially in regard to marriage.
The two characters in the play who come closest to representing the established order, Lady Loveall and the Parson, are the biggest hypocrites, and fare the worst. Without being heavy-handed, Killigrew expresses the hostility toward the Puritans that is typical of the drama of the age. The minor character Crop is a Brownist who is given rough treatment; and the thoroughly-humiliated Parson is compared to leading Presbyterian divines like Stephen Marshall.
Read more about this topic: The Parson's Wedding
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