Abstract

In masques in which Queen Anna and her ladies performed, such as Samuel Daniel's "Tethys Festival" and "The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses," the dancing female body comes to represent the soul visually and thematically. This bodily representation of the soul constitutes a political statement about women's exclusion from affairs of government. It transgresses assumptions about gender roles without hinging on an aggressive display of sexuality, a topic that past feminist masque criticism has foregrounded. To support this argument, I draw on seventeenth-century concepts of the soul-body divide and early modern theories of dance.

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