Staging Tudor Royalty: Religious Politics in Stuart Historical Drama (1603-1607)

Staging Tudor Royalty: Religious Politics in Stuart Historical Drama (1603–1607) examines the plays and pageantry about the Tudor royals in the context of three major events: the Hampton Court Conference (1604), the Anglo-Spanish Peace Negotiations (1603–1604) and the Gunpowder Plot (1605). Chapter 1 provides an historical survey of the political and legal controversies concerning religious belief and practice from Henry VIII’s creation of the royal supremacy (1533–1534) to Elizabeth’s final year as queen (1603). Chapters 2 through 5 comprise four case studies, each of which centres on a play or pageant about the Tudor royals and its relationship to one of the aforementioned events. Chapters 2 and 3 examine Thomas Heywood’s If You Knovv Not Me, You Know No Bodie (1604) and Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604), dramatizations of Elizabeth’s years as princess and the later years of Henry VIII’s reign respectively, in light of the puritan campaigns for church reform and religious toleration surrounding the Hampton Court Conference. Chapter 4 examines the uses of the Tudors in Thomas Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment, a detailed account of James’s royal entry of March 1604. In particular, I focus on the London-Dutch community’s celebration of Tudor religious and economic commitments to the Protestant Low Countries in relation to the early Stuart negotiations for an end to the Anglo-Spanish war. Chapter 5 discusses Thomas Dekker’s allegorical rendering of the later decades of Elizabeth’s reign, The VVhore of Babylon (1607), as a commentary on the Stuart government’s response to Jesuit insurgency following the Gunpowder Plot. In order to situate these plays and pageants in their precise contexts, each of the four case studies incorporates a variety of historical evidence ranging from royal proclamations to religious polemics, from stories of martyrdom to state trials. This thesis offers a topical reading of play and pageantry in which the Tudor past engages with the seminal political-religious issues and controversies of early Stuart England.Ph