Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780754663515)

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.

Author: Kevin Curran
ISBN-10: 0754663515
ISBN-13: 9780754663515
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 09/28/2009
Pages: 198
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 10/30/2009 pg. 21
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2010 pg. 274