Abstract
Anna’s masques, which at times weave Catholicism into their symbolic economy even as they deploy subversive representations of female power, played into societal fears at a particularly unstable and potentially dangerous time in terms of Jacobean religious politics. This chapter examines five of Anna’s significant early masques (A Vision of Twelve Goddesses, The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Beauty, The Masque of Queens, and Tethys’ Festival), considering the ways in which these masques depict female power, the female body and, ultimately, the queen herself. In addition, the chapter considers how the combined threat of the powerful female and the Catholic sovereign elide in Anna’s court entertainments.
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Dunn-Hensley, S. (2017). Performing Power: Gender, Authority and Catholicism in Anna’s English Masques. In: Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63227-8_4
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