Includes bibliographical references (p. 322-328) and index.
"Those whom god hath joined together": bondage metaphors and marital advice in early modern England / Sid Ray -- "Bisket of love, which crumbles all away": the failure of domestic metaphor in Margaret Cavendish's poetic fancies / Katharine Capshaw Smith -- The "undividable incorporate": householding in The comedy of errors / Jessica Slights -- "That dead commodity, a wife": sexual and domestic economy in Aphra Behn's comedies / Pilar Cuder-Domâinguez -- Bloody relations: murderous wives in the street literature of seventeenth century England / Susan C. Staub -- "The infant of your care": guardianship in Shakespeare's Richard III and early modern England / Heather Dubrow -- "She is herself a dowry": King Lear and the problem of female entitlement in early modern England / Stephanie Chamberlain -- Multiple parenting in Shakespeare's romances / Marianne Novy -- Profitable children: children as commodities in early modern England / Claire M. Busse -- Cockering mothers and humanist pedagogy in two Tudor school plays / Ursula Potter.