Abstract

This essay outlines how Caroline court drama not only reflects or comments on events, but also served courtiers as an arena for intervention. It considers the affordances, constraints, and agency of form in networks of courtly drama in the 1620s and 1630s, exploring repertory revivals of inherited plays; interchange among public stage, court theatre, and print; and the performance and printing of court masques. In particular, Caroline deployments of romance elements, both pastoral and chivalric, work as a self-conscious and dynamic medium of historical action. Incorporating copious visual and heuristic elements of previous texts, masques like Chloridia (Jonson), Coelum Britannicum (Carew), The Temple of Love (Davenant), The Triumph of Peace (Shirley), the Mask performed at Ludlow Castle (Milton), and Salmacida Spolia (Davenant) display the spoils of their producers' quests into the archives of romance.

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