The disastrous
step to marriage as the end of the story, and the assumption
of ‘living happily ever after’ had not yet been taken. One of the most
significant apologists of marriage as a way of life and a road to salvation
was Shakespeare. It is still to be proved how much we owe
of what is good in the ideal of exclusive love and cohabitation to
Shakespeare, but one thing is clear — he was as much concerned in
his newfangled comedies to clear away the detritus of romance,
ritual, perversity and obsession as he was to achieve happy endings,
and many of the difficulties in his plays are resolved when we can
discern this principle at work. Transvestism is a frequently discussed
Shakespearean motif, but it is rarely considered as a mode of revelation
as well as a convention productive of the occasional frisson.

There are enough women prepared to boast of having got
a man in a million to persuade other women that their failure to find
a man rich enough, handsome enough, skilled enough as a lover,
considerate enough, is a reflection of their inferior deserts or powers
of attraction. More than half the housewives in this country work
outside the home as well as inside it because their husbands do not
earn enough money to support them and their children at a decent
living standard. Still more know that their husbands are paunchy,
short, unathletic, and snore or smell or leave their clothes lying
around. A very high proportion do not find bliss in the conjugal
embrace and most complain that their husbands forget the little
things that count. And yet the myth is not invalidated as a myth

The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.