Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

Marriage, Performance, and Politics in the Jacobean Court constitutes the first full-length study of Jacobean nuptial performance, a hitherto unexplored branch of drama consisting of masques and entertainments written 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. Through these readings, the study shows how nuptial performance played a key role in the development of early Stuart monarchical rhetoric, establishing a vocabulary of tropes and symbols that would remain at the heart of debates over nationhood for decades to come.Marriage, Performance, and Politics in the Jacobean Court investigates how, collectively, wedding entertainments turned the idea of union into a politically versatile category of national representation. By mediating artistically between these nuptial events and their elite audiences, nuptial performance offered ways of imagining an early Stuart national identity.