Endogamy and Exogamy in the Mediterranean Basin: William Shakespeare’s selected works and Germaine Tillion’s Le Harem et Les Cousins, a Case of Study.

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study between some Shakespeare’s North Mediterranean plays: Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and the Tempest, and South Mediterranean Germaine Tillion’s Le Harem et Les Cousins. Our aim in this dissertation is to show that the above cited works complete each other by proving that the whole Mediterranean Basin shares the preference towards endogamous matrimony. In order to achieve our aim we have borrowed some concepts from Raymond Williams’s and Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism theory and Northrop Frye’s medieval romance. Throughout our study we have divided the work into two chapters, the first deals with Shakespeare’s preference of endogamy in Northern Mediterranean societies, and his motivation to defend this type of alliance in Europe. We deduce that it lies behind the desire of limiting the cultural space of Europe and preserving peace. The second chapter examines the work of Tillion around her investigation about the South Mediterranean world, and the culture of marriage that characterizes the Southern societies .This chapter reveals that endogamy is a typical phenomenon in the Maghreb too. Her findings seem to be identical to the European strategy of alliance which prefers endogamy. At the end of our study we have reached the conclusion that Endogamy is not only specific to either the North or to the South, but it can be generalized to the whole Mediterranean basin