Meaning & Analysis
A man’s earthly happiness or misery largely depends on how wisely or poorly he chooses his wife.
Insights
Keystone choice
Marriage is cast as the load-bearing decision of a life; select well and the whole structure holds, select poorly and the house saggs.
Fate through agency
What looks like luck (‘best or worst’) is attributed to choice: by choosing a partner, one effectively chooses a future—fortune is self-authored.
Domestic economy
The spouse is the engine of household prosperity or waste; prudence, thrift, and cooperation (or their opposites) determine long-run well-being.
Moral crucible
Marriage is a workshop for character—patience, fidelity, and care either flourish with the right partner or corrode with the wrong one.
Social alliance
Beyond affection, marriage links kin, credit, and reputation; a wise match expands social capital, an unwise one narrows or stains it.
Legal–economic backdrop
In early modern England the household was an economic unit; under coverture a wife’s management affected a husband’s estates and credit. Hence proverbs weight marital choice as a first-order determinant of livelihood, not merely of sentiment.
Conduct-book chorus
The rhyme stands with a long advisory tradition—from biblical ‘virtuous woman’ ideals to courtesy manuals—urging sober, self-made choice (cf. the kin maxim, ‘In choosing a wife and buying a sword we ought not to trust another’), since a bad marriage ‘is a spring of ill fortune.’
Gendered lens
The line is male-centered and heteronormative, reducing the woman to the cause of a man’s fate and sidestepping mutual responsibility. It reflects a patriarchal economy in which women were judged for husbandry of goods and men for the wisdom of choosing them.
Psychology of spillover
Close-partner effects are pervasive: marital climate spills into health, work, and friendship networks. Because losses loom larger than gains, a bad union can harm more than a good one helps—captured by the proverb’s ‘best or worst’ asymmetry.
Rhyme as rule
By making ‘life’ rhyme with ‘wife’ and cycling ‘good/ill,’ the couplet converts prudential counsel into a mnemonic law: the ear remembers, and the memory governs choice.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
The repeated ‘good or ill’ and ‘best or worst’ sharpen a binary moral landscape, dramatizing the stakes of choice.
Parallelism / Isocolon
Balanced phrases (‘good or ill choosing his good or ill wife’) march in symmetry, giving the sentence aphoristic authority.
Polyptoton
Recycling ‘good/ill’ across different syntactic roles hammers home evaluative judgment as the axis of fortune.
Rhyme
‘Life’ / ‘wife’ seals the maxim musically, aiding recall and implying a tight coupling between the two.
Hyperbole
Calling marriage the ‘best or worst thing’ overstates to warn: this choice eclipses others in shaping one’s lot.
Transcription
Quotations
The good or ill Hap of a good or ill Life, Is the good or ill Choice, of a good or ill Wife.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.