In olden times torches were used at weddings—a practice, indeed, dating as far back as the time of the Romans. From the following lines in Herrick’s “Hesperides,” it has been suggested that the custom once existed in this country:
“Upon a maid that dyed the day she was marryed.
That morne which saw me made a bride,
The ev’ning witnest that I dy’d.
Those holy lights, wherewith they guide
Unto the bed the bashful bride,
Serv’d but as tapers for to burne
And light my reliques to their urne.
This epitaph which here you see,
Supply’d the Epithalamie.”[723]
Shakespeare alludes to this custom in “1 Henry VI.” (iii. 2), where Joan of Arc, thrusting out a burning torch on the top of the tower at Rouen, exclaims:
“Behold, this is the happy wedding torch,
That joineth Rouen unto her countrymen.”
In “The Tempest,” too (iv. 1), Iris says:
“no bed-right shall be paid
Till Hymen’s torch be lighted.”
According to a Roman marriage custom, the bride, on her entry into her husband’s house, was prohibited from treading over his threshold, and lest she should even so much as touch it, she was always lifted over it. Shakespeare seems inadvertently to have overlooked this usage in “Coriolanus” (iv. 5), where he represents Aufidius as saying:
“I lov’d the maid I married; never man
Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart,
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.”
Lucan in his “Pharsalia” (lib. ii. 1. 359), says: