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This work reassesses women's relationship to performance in early modern England. It investigates the staging conditions, practices and gendering of Anna of Denmark's performances, bringing current critical theorisations of race, class, gender, space and performance to bear on the female courtly body in dance, staging, scenery, costume and make-up in the Jacobean court.
The study establishes a tradition of early seventeenth-century female performance which constitutes a trajectory for the emergence of the professional Restoration female actor. Anna of Denmark, wife of James VI of Scotland/James I, was a great patron of Ben Johnson, among others.
Introduction: An early modern female stage
1. Dance, gender and the politics of aristocratic performance in the early Stuart court masque
2. Marriage and the performance of the romance quest – the role of the queen consort in the early modern European court
3. ‘Spectacles of strangeness’ – the performance of the female body in the major Jacobean masques
4. Disputed marriages – the female courtier as spectator
5. The contested masquing stage – ‘The Somerset masque’, ‘Cupid's banishment’ and the space of the female court
Conclusion: The legacy of Anna of Denmark – female performance in the Caroline court and beyond
Notes
Bibliography
Index