Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre

The influence of Charles I's French consort, Queen Henrietta Maria, and in particular her neo-Catholic, neo-Platonic theatrical experimentations at the English court, on the political and aesthetic climate of the late 1620s and 1630s is only now beginning to receive the full register of attention it requires.1 Henrietta Maria's commissioning of, and performance in, a whole series of court masques, pastorals and dramatic entertain ments contributed to, and to a certain extent initiated, a widespread debate in the period about the virtues and morality of female theatrical performance.2 The Puritan pamphleteer William Prynne's infamous outburst against women actors as "notorious whores" in his one thousand-page tract Histriomastix (1633) was assumed by contempo raries to be making direct reference to the Queen's rehearsals for the court performance of Walter Montagu's specially-written pastoral The Shepherd's Paradise in 1632.3

[1]  Carol L. Barash.  English Women's Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority , 2000 .

[2]  Hero Chalmers.  The politics of feminine retreat in Margaret Cavendish's the female academy and the convent of pleasure , 1999 .

[3]  A. Leggatt.  Introduction to English Renaissance comedy , 1999 .

[4]  J. Sanders.  Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, Brome , 1999 .

[5]  John H. Astington,et al.  English Court Theatre 1558-1642 , 1999 .

[6]  J. Klein,et al.  Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England , 1999 .

[7]  J. Sanders,et al.  Refashioning Ben Jonson : gender, politics and the Jonsonian Canon , 1998 .

[8]  Peter Stallybrass.,et al.  Subject and object in Renaissance culture , 1998 .

[9]  J. Sanders.  "The Day's Sports Devised in the Inn": Jonson's "The New Inn" and Theatrical Politics , 1996 .

[10]  L. L. Peck,et al.  The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. , 1995 .

[11]  N. Korda,et al.  Erotic politics : desire on the Renaissance stage , 1993 .

[12]  S. P. Cerasano,et al.  Gloriana's face : women, public and private, in the English Renaissance , 1993 .

[13]  Tracy C. Davis,et al.  The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700@@@Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture@@@The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850-1914 , 1993 .

[14]  K. Sharpe.  The Personal Rule of Charles I , 1992 .

[15]  I. Clark.  Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome , 1992 .

[16]  K. Walker.  New Prison: Representing the Female Actor in Shirley's The Bird in a Cage (1633) , 1991, English Literary Renaissance.

[17]  R. Marshall.  Henrietta Maria: The Intrepid Queen , 1990 .

[18]  K. Sharpe,et al.  Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England , 1989 .

[19]  R. Smuts.  Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England , 1987 .

[20]  J. Watts.  Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford , 1985 .

[21]  M. Hattaway,et al.  The new inn , 1984 .

[22]  R. Smuts.  The Puritan followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s , 1978 .

[23]  Carolyn C. Lougee,et al.  Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France , 1977 .

[24]  Q. Bone.  Henrietta Maria: Queen of the Cavaliers , 1972 .

[25]  C. Kingsford,et al.  A survey of London , 2019 .