In 1625 Charles I succeeded his late father, James I, as King of England. The intended ceremony and celebrations to mark Charles's coronation did not, however, take place in 1625. They were postponed, partly due to plague, but largely due to financial difficulties, until the following year. Charles's first opportunity as king for self-presentation was temporarily thwarted, and the belated and therefore rather anachronistic nature of the coronation ceremony when it did occur (it was considerably downscaled) seemed to colour popular attitudes towards his subsequent court theatricals and artistic and aesthetic pursuits during the rest of the reign. The popular perception was of their vast, and by implication unnecessary, expense (a single performance could cost as much as £3,000), their detachment from the concerns of Charles's subjects and the realm, and their innate élitism. In some respects they were all viewed, like that delayed and downsized coronation, as being far from timely occurrences.

Charles was a great collector of art and sculpture, a tendency which had asserted itself as early as 1626. Among the artists he favoured were Rubens, Van Dyck, and Mantegna, all of whom created pictures that celebrated absolute power and concepts of divine monarchy. Charles's belief in the divine sanctioning of monarchy clearly influenced his taste in art and aesthetics. He made major investments in courtly depictions and self-representations, in pictures to be read in terms of power or at least the ‘illusion of power’. One of his most significant purchases for his collection was Andrea Mantegna's visual paean to absolutism, ‘The Triumphs of Caesar’, and in 1632 Charles himself performed as Caesar, leading captive kings (an image familiar from the Mantegna paintings) in Aurelian Townshend's Roman masque, Albion's Triumph.

In terms of theatre proper, the most obvious ways in which Charles and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, the sister of the French monarch, used theatre at the court to reinforce and perpetuate their power was through the genre of the court masque, a form that had been employed to similar purpose by Charles's father and his late brother (Prince Henry, the initial heir to James's throne, who had died so suddenly in 1612).