Clandestine marriage played a significant role in the English marriage plot’s development. Before being suppressed by the Marriage Act, it had spawned its own popular culture, whose history helps to explain what was at stake in the division of ‘proper’ from ‘improper’ ceremony that was so important to the new genre. This chapter outlines the conditions for the rise of clandestine marriage before taking account of its cultural profile centred on London’s so-called Fleet marriage market, a hub of the city’s boisterous commercial street life and tavern culture and a focus of its stage entertainments. If the marriage debate appealed to erudite theories in the halls of power, clandestine marriage and its representations belonged to more unruly and demotic spaces. In a remarkable feat of reconfiguration, however, by the century’s second half clandestine marriage had become an element of respectable (and sentimental) culture.