Renaissance drama is full of men and women with an uncertain and indeterminate marital status. Their numerous articulations of bewilderment or loss convey a sense of complex overlap between this specific indeterminacy and their personal identities. Katherine is, to William Scarborrow, in The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), ‘She that I am married to, but not my wife’; to herself, ‘tho married’, she is ‘reputed not a wife’ (1004); Clare Harcop, meanwhile, occupies that peculiar position common to unlucky women in Renaissance England – ‘a Troth-plight-Virgin’ (785), wife enough to ‘be made a strumpet gainst [her] will’ (827) if she marries anyone but Scarborrow, yet not wife enough to be a legal impediment to his later, arranged marriage to Katherine. In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Mariana is ‘neither maid, widow, nor wife’ (V.i.177–8); Juliet is, as Claudio claims, ‘fast [his] wife’ (I.ii.128), but equally, the ‘fornicatress’ (II.ii.24) of Angelo's rigorous legal description.

The historical counterparts of figures such as these are to be met in surviving records of spousal litigation conducted in English church courts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In May 1622 at Stratford, ‘Michael Palmer and his wife’ – acknowledged as a married couple even in the citation – are required to obtain ‘dismission … for … unlawful marriage and … enioyned penance … for incontinency before marriage’.