The Masque | Gary Waller (essay date 1998)
Gary Waller (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: “‘Like One in a Gay Masque’: The Sidney Cousins in the Theaters of Court and Country,” in Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594-1998, edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, Routledge, 1998, pp. 234-45.
[In the following essay, Waller, a noted scholar on Jacobean playwright Mary Wroth, offers a detailed analysis of the gender politics in her work.]
As a woman in the Jacobean court, as a lady-in-waiting and occasional dancer, Mary Wroth played an appropriately decorative and silent part in the margins of the spectacle of the court; her primary role was simply to be seen, as a graceful, minor contributor to the dazzling visual display that mirrored for its participants the gloriousness that was a central part of the court's self-image. Like one of her characters in her prose romance, Urania, she ‘both saw those sports the Court...
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