![]() Shakespeare brings this home in the first line-and-a-half of Sonnet 116 by using the word ‘marriage’ but also the word ‘impediments’, conjuring up the part of the Christian wedding ceremony when the priest asks if anyone knows of any impediments why the bride and groom might not be joined in holy matrimony: ‘I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it.’ As we remarked above, Sonnet 116 is often analysed as a poem about a ‘marriage of minds’ between any two people – but the specific context of the poem (in a sequence of Sonnets addressed to, or about, a young man: the first 126 poems in Shakespeare’s Sonnets focus on the Fair Youth) gives such an interpretation a twist: it is marriage of minds, a Platonic love, which can never be recognised in the way that heterosexual love can be recognised through the solemn and binding covenant of marriage.
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