The Masque | Marion Wynne-Davies (essay date 1992)
Marion Wynne-Davies (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: “The Queen's Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque,” in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1992, pp. 79-104.
[In the following essay, Wynne-Davies discusses gender politics and the masque of the Jacobean court, examining the masques written for Queen Anne and those written by Lady Mary Wroth.]
I
At Night we had the Queen's Maske in the Banquetting-House, or rather her Pagent.1
These are the words Dudley Carleton chose to describe ‘The Masque of Blackness’ (1605) in a letter to his friend Sir Ralph Winwood, who had unfortunately missed the show. Today, a glance through the catalogue of any research library would reveal that this masque is closeted neatly amongst the entries relating to the...
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