Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

Kevin Curran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754663515
• eBook ISBN: 9781317100232
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Chapter 1
Inventing a Language of Union

In 1603 King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as King James I. The new monarch was determined to implement a series of administrative and political changes that would allow his two kingdoms to be merged into one united Great Britain. Some of these, like the reorganization of the privy council to include both Scots and Englishmen, were immediately realized. Others, like the reconciliation of the legal systems of the two kingdoms, never became a reality.1 What will be of primary interest to us in this study are the new pressures measures like these placed on monarchical rhetoric. The Union that James’s accession to the English throne ushered in changed the terms in which national propaganda was set. As one historian put it, “Soon after the Union of the Crowns James VI and I began to speak the language of national union.”2

This statement raises some important questions. What was the nature of this language of national union? Did it exist before James used it? Was anyone else speaking this language, and if so where did they learn it? In this chapter it will be argued that the language of union was not available to Jacobean England in an established form. Rather, it was improvised through the appropriation and reconfiguration of preexisting rhetorical paradigms. This process may be observed not only in the arbitrary (and at times even contradictory) nature of the images in James’s own early speeches and proclamations (1603–1607), but also in the literature which sought to project the new political space of Britain into the imaginations and vocabularies of its audiences. Marriage masques provide some of the most suggestive examples of such literary engagement. Coalescing at the beginning of the Union debates in Parliament and tapering out as those debates became less urgent, the marriage masques developed directly out of a need to solve the representational challenges posed by the Jacobean Union. Marriage masques were also, of course, commissioned for the event of a personal union, lending them a metaphorical auspiciousness that was not missed out on in the opening years of James’s reign.

James’s early speeches and proclamations highlight many of the verbal problems that attend celebrating union. The political rhetoric that James inherited from Elizabeth’s reign promoted an England that was closed and inviolable, an England characterized by a singleness reflected in the queen herself. The most frequently recurring metaphors in late Elizabethan encomia drew on the theme of chastity or the bodily state of virginity, and could not, therefore, be easily mapped onto the idea of union—political or personal. In her final address to Parliament, 19 December 1601, Elizabeth attributed the survival and strength of England to a constant and coterminous defense of both her kingdom and her body from intruders:

The strange devices, practices, and strategems (never heard nor written of before) that have been attempted not only against my own person, in which so many as acknowledge themselves beholding to my care and happy in my government have a interest, but by invasion of the state itself by those that did not only threaten to come, but came at the very last in very deed with their whole fleet, have been in number many and by preparation dangerous. Though it hath pleased God, to whose honor it is spoken without arrogation of any praise of merit to myself, by many hard escapes and hazards both of diverse and strange natures, to make me an instrument in His holy will in delivering the state from danger and myself from dishonor, all that I challenge to myself is that I have been studious and industrious, in confidence of His grace and goodness, as a careful head to defend the body, which I would have you receive from my own mouth for the better acknowledging and recognizing of so great a benefit.3

In announcing to Parliament after 43 years of rule that she has kept “the state from danger and [herself] from dishonor,” Elizabeth proves the mystical synchronism between the purity of her body and the purity of her nation. The two are emphatically fused when she describes her service to England “as a careful head to defend the body.” Later in the speech, reference to the continued threat of a Spanish “penetration” of England hovers somewhere between sexual advance and military assault when Elizabeth complains of “that potent prince the king of Spain ... that hath so many ways assailed both my realm and me.”4 Spain, for England, is the archetypal enemy, not only in military terms but in terms simultaneously religious and sexual, as well. As the preeminent Catholic nation, a successful invasion of England by Spain would translate Elizabeth from the chaste bride of Christ, virgin defender of the Church of England, to tainted papal whore.5

In the Elizabethan political imagination, corporeality was a field in which both the fear of invasion and the successful resistance of invasion could be played out. Thomas Heywood’s very popular and very nostalgic Jacobean play, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 (c. 1606) revisits this idea in a dramatization of England’s 1588 Armada victory. Don Pedro, the Spanish admiral, declares mockingly:

I thinke in stead of military men,
Garnish’d with Armes and martiall Discipline,
She [Elizabeth] with a feminine Traine
Of her bright Ladyes beautifull’st and best,
Will meete us in their smocks, willing to pay
Their Maiden-heads for Ransome. (2579–84)6

Don Pedro’s military venture degenerates into a fantasy of sexual assault and, in doing so, clearly figures English national security and purity through the female body of the queen. Within this system of signification, any threat to the political and cultural borders of England becomes tantamount to rape. Unfortunately for Don Pedro, Elizabeth does finally arrive on stage, not with “a feminine Traine,” but with an armed retinue of soldiers. Rapidly becoming the victim of his own sexual metaphor, Don Pedro’s defeat takes on the characteristics of a symbolic castration.

Elizabethan political propaganda of this sort described the unity of the interior, the defensive exclusion of the exterior: nation and queen were, as one poem put it, “All and whole, and ever alone, / Single, sans peere, simple, and one.”7 This was not a language through which the Jacobean Union’s dissolution of English borders could be lauded. And yet despite the discrepancies between Elizabethan rhetoric and Jacobean policy, James did, during the first few years of his reign, use the images of nationhood that he had inherited from his predecessor. Like Elizabeth, he consistently fashioned his body as a figuration of the nation, as “the head wherein that great Body [Britain] is united.”8 In addition, James often cast the relationship between himself and his kingdom in familial or specifically maternal terms. As early as 1559, Elizabeth is recorded to have told Parliament, “Reproach me so no more ... that I have no children: for every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children and kinsfolk, of whom, so long as I am not deprived and God shall preserve me, you cannot charge me, without offense, to be destitute.”9 Along similar lines, James had advised his son, Prince Henry, in Basilicon Doron that a king should act as “a loving nourish-father.”10 Perceptive panegyrists like Lady Anne Southwell duplicated the image of masculine nurturance, praising James as “the nursing father of all pietye” (21).11

Of course, this form of monarchical self-presentation did not begin with Elizabeth. The use of the body and its regenerative functions was common throughout the rhetoric of early modern kingship and has deeper roots in the Bible and in classical writing from Plato to Seneca.12 A transvestite portrait of Francois I (c. 1545) by Niccolò Bellin da Modena, for instance, shows the French king with female anatomy and dress from the neck down. The poem beneath the image explains that while Francois is a Mars in war, he is a Minerva or Diana during peacetime, providing bounty and sustenance to his subjects.13 We find the same kind of message being conveyed on a sixteenth-century medal bearing a similarly cross-dressed image of Francois’s son, Henri II.14 Underpinning these Renaissance motifs of royal nurturance is the Medieval religious concept of the corpus mysticum Christi, a principle which imagined the Church as a mystical body with a nurturing, pelican-like Christ as the head.15 Queen Elizabeth, however, having the rather uncommon status of being a single female monarch, brought quite specific cultural meanings to these conventional royal tropes. James’s adoption of this language could not escape its local resonances. The images that he used in his early speeches and proclamations referred his audience to the very different reign and cultural ethos of his immediate predecessor, not to a wider tradition of European kingship. As a result, James’s recital of inherited forms of self-presentation, while familiar, ultimately highlighted the new and potentially threatening nature of his accession, rather than smoothing out the transition between him and Elizabeth. The entertainments that are dealt with in this chapter begin to offer solutions to these linguistic problems. Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605), Hymenaei (1606), and Barriers (1606), grapple with the same categories of national and sexual representation as James does in his speeches. The three performances stand as the first examples in the king’s English court of sustained fictions of union. The first section of this chapter concentrates on some of James’s early discourses on the Great Britain project, paying particular attention to how the king reproduces corporeal and familial images that are normally associated with Elizabeth. Moving on to the entertainments, The Masque of Blackness is examined for the way it delineates a new paradigm through which Britain as a nation and James as a British king could be endorsed. Blackness calls attention to the necessity of pushing beyond Elizabethan formulations of nationhood and asserts the key role that the masque may play in this project. My reading of Hymenaei focuses more specifically on the representational crux presented by the sexual body. Hymenaei provides an excellent view into the tension that existed between the residual rhetoric of virginity and the emergent rhetoric of union.16 Jonson’s masque splits between a desire to exorcize virginity from the performance and, conversely, to incorporate it somehow into a language of union. The Barriers externalizes the conflict that underpins Hymenaei, approaching it through a debate format. Taken together, these three entertainments direct us towards some of the key issues that emerged from theatrical mythmaking in the early Jacobean court.

Introducing British Union: James I and Verbal Reconfiguration

Critics will argue over the level of success that James had in instilling a British consciousness amongst his subjects. However, most would agree that he demonstrated a firm belief in the political and psychological power of language to enact this consciousness, regardless of how correct in this belief he proved to be.17 As the editors of a recent collection of King James’s writings put it, “James was always a compulsive communicator, and sought endlessly for new ways to articulate his understanding of his position.”18 The verbal dimension of James’s method of governance can be traced in the early speeches and proclamations through which the new king sought to introduce the idea of Great Britain to the nation. One of the first steps James took in his project to unite England and Scotland was performed at the linguistic level: he changed his title, or “Stile,” to “King of Great Britaine.”19 This was conceived of as a critical stage in the political process of Union, “Unitie in name being so fit a meanes to imprint in the hearts of people, a Character and memoriall of that Unitie, which ought to be amongst them indeede.”20 This kind of verbal re-coding played a crucial role in the early stages of James’s new British policy. While the administrative and legal aspects of the Union consistently turned into political stalemates between king and Parliament, the linguistic aspect of the project appeared to be moving relentlessly forward.

In addition to changing his own title, James performed naming acts that sought to undo current geopolitical realities and replace them with an imagined cultural geography of Britishness.21 About a year before the king’s official announcement of the change in royal style, for example, a proclamation was delivered at Greenwich which undertook a verbal conquest of the border that divided James’s island into England and Scotland:

The bounds possest by those rebellious people, being in fertilitie and all other benefits nothing inferiour to many of the best parts of the whole Ile, shall be no more the extremities, but the middle, and the Inhabitants thereof reduced to perfect obedience.22

This proclamation announces James’s measure to change the name of the Borderlands—those areas in both England and Scotland that clustered around the Anglo-Scottish border—to the Middle-shires.23 The change in name is carried out under the conviction that it will effect a larger change in the political space of the island, from England and Scotland to Great Britain, “Border” to “Middle.” Moreover, James asserts that as a result of this shift in spatial organization “the inhabitants” of the former Borderlands will inevitably be “reduced to perfect obedience.” The change in name, like the change in royal style, exemplifies the central role played by representation in the Great Britain project. Amending the way northern England and southern Scotland collectively signify is deemed a sufficient means to replace the skirmishing and disorder on the Anglo-Scottish border with a pol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Texts
• Introduction
• 1 Inventing a Language of Union
• 2 Erotic Policy: The Rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish Marriage
• 3 Competing Fictions and Fictional Authority at the Palatine Wedding Celebrations
• 4 Relocating Monarchical Rhetoric:The Entertainments for Robert Carr and Frances Howard
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index