SOURCE: “The Queen's Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque,” in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1992, pp. 79-104.

In the following essay, Wynne-Davies discusses gender politics and the masque of the Jacobean court, examining the masques written for Queen Anne and those written by Lady Mary Wroth.

I

At Night we had the Queen's Maske in the Banquetting-House, or rather her Pagent.¹

These are the words Dudley Carleton chose to describe ‘The Masque of Blackness’ (1605) in a letter to his friend Sir Ralph Winwood, who had unfortunately missed the show. Today, a glance through the catalogue of any research library would reveal that this masque is closeted neatly amongst the entries relating to the dramatist Ben Jonson. It does not appear under ‘Queen Anne’, the eponymous monarch of Carleton's epistle. However, closer...