Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Labyrinthine Baroque
- 2 The Female Baroque
- 3 Catholic Female Baroque
- 4 Protestant Baroque
- 5 The Female Baroque in Court and Country
- 6 Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
- 7 From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
- Postscript
- About the Author
- Index
5 - The Female Baroque in Court and Country
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Labyrinthine Baroque
- 2 The Female Baroque
- 3 Catholic Female Baroque
- 4 Protestant Baroque
- 5 The Female Baroque in Court and Country
- 6 Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
- 7 From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
- Postscript
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The Courtly Baroque focuses on the place of women in the Jacobean and Caroline courts. The discussion centres on James I's and Charles I's Catholic queens and the entertainments over which they presided, first before the exile of the English court and then following the Restoration. These include masques, poems, plays, stories, and treatises in the Court, and other works on the fringes of the royal court, in ‘little courts’ like the Sidneys’ Penshurst, or the Cavendish residences (in both the English ‘country’ and in exile in Antwerp). I conclude with a discussion of Hester Pulter, whose writings exemplify the courtly Baroque even in an isolated country home amid increasing suspicion of the morals of the royal court.
Key words: women actors; Court and Civil War Women writers; Baroque culture; Mary Wroth; Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley; Hester Pulter
People tell each other fictions and it makes them feel better, period.
‒ Julia KristevaIn his account of the English Civil War, looking back at his youth and attempting to make sense of the years we now acknowledge as one of the cataclysmic eras of English history, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, focused on the institution that had dominated his public life. The Court, he wrote, like ‘a mirror’, ‘measured the temper and affection of the country’. ‘Court’ was a powerful word as well as a powerful institution in the Baroque era; it accumulated around itself ideas and feelings that were often contradictory, but were always compelling. Men and women ‘swarmed’ to the Court (the hyperbolic metaphor is a favourite one) for power, gain, gossip, titles, rewards, and entertainment. The Court is Gabriel Harvey's ‘only mart of preferment and honour’; it is Donne's ‘bladder of Vanitie’; it is one of the places of ‘wickedness and vice’ for inhabiting which Raleigh in his execution speech prays he will be forgiven; it is the precarious place in which Mary Wroth was accused of ‘dancing in a net’.
What powers, real or imputed, did the Court have over the destinies and allegiances of men and women? How did this dominant cultural apparatus control the specifics of living? What underlying and recurring anxieties and affirmations are associated with the Court?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary CultureFrom Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, pp. 163 - 204Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020