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.

This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors.

Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque considers the interconnections of the masque and political culture. It examines how masques responded to political forces and voices beyond the court, and how masques explored the limits of political speech in the Jacobean and Caroline periods.

An important re-evaluation of Elizabethan politics and Elizabeth's queenship in sixteenth-century England, Wales and Ireland.

A 1998 collection which takes an alternative look at the courtly masque in early seventeenth-century England.

[headline]Argues for the social and ethical importance of judgment in politics, law, art and everyday life, taking Shakespeare as a guide and travel companion Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment delves deep into the intellectual culture of Renaissance England and the dynamics of Shakespearean theatre to recover a positive, collaborative and future-oriented understanding of judgment, something largely lacking in contemporary social and philosophical discourse. Presenting a series of chapters organized around single keywords, the book enlists the help of Shakespeare to assemble a new lexicon for judgment, one that allows us to think and talk about our capacity for discernment in cooperative and community-making terms. Readers of Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment will come away with a clear and urgent sense of why judgment is an indispensable component of public life, and why theater offers a particularly powerful locale for cultivating it. [bio]Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and General Editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy series. His books include Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies (2017), Renaissance Personhood (2020), and Shakespeare and Judgment (2017).