Marriage manuals appeared frequently during the early modem Period and were an efficient means of promoting and legitimizing power, namely, the husband's power over his wife and the monarch's power over the people. The marriage manuals draw analogies between domestic hierarchies and political ones, frequently figuring the husbands as the king or, “head" of the commonwealth and the wife as his subordinate or "body." While the analogy between marriage and monarchy lessened the autonomy of the individual, doubly subjugating women and diminishing men as wives or children to the monarch, it was also a site of dissidence.

Holy Estates focuses on how a female prose writer, Mary Wroth, and the playwrights Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and John Webster literalize the metaphors of early modem marriage manuals to engage their subversive possibilities, each of the authors presenting scenes in which female or feminized characters are at the mercy of some liters form of bondage or torture.

In Wroth's prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania , Limena is tied to a pillar, gagged, stripped, and whipped; in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew , Katherine is taken to the "taming school" for obedience training; in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy , Evadne is forced into marriage to protect the reputation of the king, her lover; in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus , Lavinia is raped and maimed; in Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi , the Duchess is given what she believes to be the severed hand of her husband and then subjected to a torturous spectacle of madmen; in Othello , Desdemona is first beaten, then murdered for wifely insubordination; and in The Tempest , Caliban, the heir of the powerful Sycorax, has become Prospero's slave.

Though these characters undergo spectacular punishments, their rebellions against marital restrictions enable audiences to imagine social change. Limena's ordeal demonstrates the inhumanity of arranged marriage; Katherine's transformation suggests that the act of taming the shrew involves a deviance from the norm that exceeds the deviance of the shrew herself; Evadne's act of regicide opens the debate about the subject's right to resist the monarch's tyranny; Lavinia's rape and mutilation underscore the importance of marital and political consent to the health of the state; the Duchess of Malfi's belief that her ruling power makes her equal to her brothers validates the authority of married queens; and Desdemona's vision of a marriage that dispenses with traditional hierarchies envisages, by analogy, a more horizontally structured government, an ideal that has echoes in The Tempest.