Royal Marriage and the Politics of Transition in Stuart Drama 1603-1630 Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of The
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Royal Marriage and the Politics of Transition in Stuart Drama 1603-1630 Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Mira Assaf Kafantaris, B.A., M.A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Christopher Highley, Advisor Richard Dutton Alan B. Farmer Jennifer Higginbotham Copyright by Mira Assaf Kafantaris 2014 Abstract This dissertation discusses the Stuart stage’s participation in an ongoing reflection on royal marriage in the early modern period. I focus on the taxonomies of otherness, religion, foreign policy, gender politics, and race that Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII (1613), Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621), and Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) stage in order to understand how dramatic texts incorporated the vocabulary of dynasticism into their fabric. Taken collectively, these plays suggest that the belief in the efficacy of royal marriage is illusory at a historical juncture when matrimonial politics occupied center stage. My analysis starts with the competing Spanish, French, and Savoyard marriage proposals for the Prince of Wales (1612-14), which were intended to balance Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to the militant Protestant prince, Frederick V of the Rhine, where I argue that Henry VIII breaks the prescriptive binary of “foreign” and “domestic.” I then propose a new way of reading the drama surrounding the famous Spanish match (1621-1624) by showing how The Island Princess invokes the interlocking themes of “virtuous pagans” and imperial expansion to stage a successful but qualified dynastic marriage that can only be achieved after the use of military force. This study ends with the aftermath of the Anglo-French marriage between Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria (1625) and examines how The Roman Actor’s treatment of its queen foreshadows the demonizing scripts that targeted Henrietta Maria in the 1630s. The main object of this study is to show how the drama of the period allows us to see the larger picture of the problems of royal marriage across time, and to appreciate the stage’s contribution to a pivotal conversation that would dominate subsequent decades. ii For my parents Charbel and Zoubeida Assaf with love iii Acknowledgments I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Chris Highley, who supervised my work with such knowledge, patience, and generosity of spirit. I also thank my committee members, Richard Dutton, Alan B. Farmer, and Jennifer Higginbotham, whose guidance and advice helped bring this dissertation to fruition. The suggestions of Martin Butler, Peter Lake, Luke Wilson, and Hannibal Hamlin were instrumental in forming this dissertation. The Dissertation Seminar at the Ohio State University and the Folger Shakespeare Library were a lively space for stimulating discussion and much-needed camaraderie. I wish to thank May Maalouf, my mentor at the Lebanese University, who has been a constant source of inspiration; and Mark Bayer, my former adviser at the American University of Beirut, who provided the earliest analytical tools to navigate the early modern period. Special thanks go to Danielle Dani, Elizabeth Nixon, Kathleen Griffin, and Brenda Staley for their invaluable friendship. My siblings, Rima and Tarek, have been a gushing source of strength. More than anyone, I thank my husband Mark for sharing this journey with me, and for his continued support and love. This work would not have been possible without my parents’ unstinting faith in me. I dedicate it to them. iv Vita 2004................................................................B.A. English, Lebanese University 2007................................................................M.A. English, American University of Beirut 2013 to present ..............................................Presidential Fellow, Department of English, The Ohio State University Publications “Stage History of Volpone.” With Richard Dutton. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. Ed. David M. Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Online Edition. Fields of Study Major Field: English v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... II Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. IV Vita ..................................................................................................................................... V List Of Figures ................................................................................................................. VII Chapter 1: Introduction: Match.Com for Early Modern Royalty ....................................... 1 Chapter 2: Dynastic Marriage in Shakespeare And Fletcher’s Henry VIII (1613) .......... 44 Chapter 3: The Spanish Match in John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621) .............. 112 Chapter 4: The French Connection in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) ..... 165 Coda ................................................................................................................................ 226 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 230 vi List of Figures Figure 1. Philip II of Spain’s Genealogy in A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of England (1595) .......................................................................................... 35 Figure 2. T2v-T3r in William Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) ...................................... 62 Figure 3. Argensola’s Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609), title page ...................... 119 Figure 4. Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza in Pierre de Cardonnel’s Complementum Fortunatarum Insularum (1662), frontispiece ................. 229 vii Chapter 1: Introduction: Match.com for Early Modern Royalty “What God hath conjoined then,” King James VI of Scotland and James I of England famously told his first English Parliament in 1604, “let no man separate. I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head and it is my Body; I am the Shepherd and it is my flocke.”1 A commonplace in the rhetoric of monarchy, the image of a monarch wedded to the commonweal acquired special gravitas in post- Reformation England, particularly after the failure of the French match between Queen Elizabeth I and the Duke of Anjou in the early 1580s, and the sanctification of the image of Elizabeth as a Virgin Queen thereafter. For the “cult of Elizabeth” ensured that the monarch’s marriage to the realm always superseded his or her dynastic politics. Upon his accession to the English throne in 1603, the new Stuart king drew on his Tudor predecessor’s marital iconography to legitimate and mobilize his cherished dream of uniting his two kingdoms into one strong Great Britain; to efface his stark foreignness beneath a grand project of union; to emphasize the dynastic stability and continuity that his wholesome family—most importantly, two legitimate Protestant sons—embodied; and to distance himself from a long history of Anglo-Scottish enmity, which had culminated with the controversial execution of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, by her English cousin, Elizabeth I, in 1587. By incorporating his unification project within the framework of dynastic marriage, James I, the self-appointed rex pacificus, rewrote an earlier “marriage” project 1 “Speech to Parliament” (19 March 1604). King James VI and I: Political Writings. ed. Johann P. Sommerville. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 132-146. 136. 1 between England and Scotland in the nuanced vocabulary of the via media. A few generations earlier, Henry VIII had also dreamed of “the Empire of Great Britain,” where England would subdue Scotland, Ireland, and other territories, and firmly occupy “the only supreme seat.”2 In what came to be known as the “rough wooing” of Scotland, King Henry VIII had relentlessly attempted to force a marriage between James’s then infant mother Mary Stuart and Prince Edward, the future King Edward VI of England from 1547, for dynastic marriage and military conquest were the warp and weft of international power politics in the late medieval and early modern periods.3 Mirroring Henry’s unfulfilled desire for supremacy via marriage was that of the rival Houses of Habsburg and Valois; most successful of the triad was the Habsburg dynasty, whose famous motto, “Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube,”4 emblematized its complex web of matrimonial alliances that ultimately established its Spanish branch as the most powerful player on the European stage.5 I. This dissertation investigates dynastic marriage in the early Stuart period, and assesses the theatre’s contribution to the more widespread and diverse discussion of 2 Nicholas Bodrugan, A Epitome of a Title. London, 1548. A5v. 3 See Marcus Merriman, The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542-1551. East Linton: Tuckwell P, 2000. Esp. 8-15; and Alec Ryrie, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006. Esp. 72-94. 4 “Let others wage war; thou, happy Austria, marry.” 5 See Paula Sutter Fichtner, “Dynastic Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Habsburg Diplomacy and Statecraft: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” The American Historical Review 81.2 (1976): 243-265. 2 dynasticism beyond the