Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens: Female Agency and Subjectivity in Early Modern English Court Drama

This chapter argues that Elizabeth I’s positioning of herself as an agent in dramatic court entertainments, especially tiltyard entertainments, had a significant influence on her immediate successors, the Stuart queens consort Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria, and goes on to explore the ways these early Stuart queens intentionally diverged from Elizabeth I in their own court performances. Tiltyard entertainments often positioned Elizabeth as a figure who had to intervene in the dramatic action in order to effect resolution and their success hinged upon her good-humoured participation. Unlike Elizabeth, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria positioned themselves as performers in increasingly provocative ways directly linked to their gender, but like their predecessor they acted as subjects rather than objects of the drama in which they performed. In examining the circumstances around Anna of Denmark’s masquing in Samuel Daniel’s The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses in 1604 and Henrietta Maria’s acting in Racan’s L’Artenice in 1626, this chapter seeks to examine the structural links between the three queens’ varied roles as actors or agents in court performances, emphasizing, in particular, ways that their positions in these dramatic works challenged previously held notions of performative queenship.