“took the bride about the neck
And kiss’d her lips with such a clamorous smack
That, at the parting, all the church did echo.”
Again, in “Richard II.” (v. 1), where the Duke of Northumberland announces to the king that he is to be sent to Pomfret, and his wife to be banished to France, the king exclaims:
“Doubly divorc’d!—Bad men, ye violate
A twofold marriage,—’twixt my crown and me,
And then, betwixt me and my married wife.—
Let me unkiss the oath twixt thee and me;
And yet not so, for with a kiss ’twas made.”
Marston, too, in his “Insatiate Countess,” mentions it:
“The kisse thou gav’st me in the church, here take.”
The practice is still kept up among the poor; and Brand[716] says it is “still customary among persons of middling rank as well as the vulgar, in most parts of England, for the young men present at the marriage ceremony to salute the bride, one by one, the moment it is concluded.”
Music was the universal accompaniment of weddings in olden times.[717] The allusions to wedding music that may be found in the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Elizabethan dramatists, testify, as Mr. Jeaffreson points out, that, in the opinion of their contemporaries, a wedding without the braying of trumpets and beating of drums and clashing of cymbals was a poor affair. In “As You Like It” (v. 4), Hymen says:
“Whiles a wedlock-hymn we sing.”
And in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 5), Capulet says:
“Our wedding cheer, to a sad burial feast;
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change.”