Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court constitutes the first full-length study of Jacobean nuptial performance, a hitherto unexplored branch of early modern theater consisting of masques and entertainments performed for high-profile weddings. Scripted by such writers as Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont, these entertainments were mounted for some of the most significant political events of James's English reign. Here Kevin Curran analyzes all six of the elite weddings celebrated at the Jacobean court, reading the masques and entertainments that headlined these events alongside contemporaneously produced panegyrics, festival books, sermons, parliamentary speeches, and other sources. The study shows how, collectively, wedding entertainments turned the idea of union into a politically versatile category of national representation and offered new ways of imagining a specifically Jacobean form of national identity by doing so.

Introduction; Chapter 1 Inventing a Language of Union; Chapter 2 Erotic Policy: The Rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish Marriage; Chapter 3 Competing Fictions and Fictional Authority at the Palatine Wedding Celebrations; Chapter 4 Relocating Monarchical Rhetoric: The Entertainments for Robert Carr and Frances Howard; Chapter 101 Afterword;

Kevin Curran is Assistant Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of North Texas.