Drama at the Courts of Henrietta Maria (review)

{brt}Karen Britland's analysis of Henrietta Maria's shaping of the iconography of her courts, both in England and in exile in France, illuminates the complexities of court drama and anatomizes the queen consort's negotiations of continental politics. Britland counters previous critical views of Henrietta Maria that see her as politically heedless and ineffectual, governed by her emotions and manipulated by male advisers. According to Britland, the damaging stereotype that she seeks to overturn, that Henrietta Maria was "an under-educated and frivolous woman governed by her emotions" (11), infects the analyses of even her more sympathetic critics.

Britland's stance "complicates" rather than overthrows or simply rejects ear-lier critical views. She describes her project as one of looking at the "wider contexts" in which Henrietta Maria's cultural productions are situated, especially with respect to Henrietta Maria's "conversionary mission" in the English court, a role shaped by the early French cultural influences of her upbringing and her mother's — Maria de Medici's — powerful presence. Britland begins by demonstrating how Henrietta Maria introduced French elements into her masques — particularly the early wedding masques — and so initiated a cross-cultural conversation with the Continent. Henrietta Maria found her models in the five earlier French princesses who had become queens of England as well as in her female Medici ancestors and, on her father's side, Marguerite de Navarre. Britland describes the early vocabulary, explicit in French texts from the mid 1620s, that locates Henrietta Maria as "the purveyor of religious illumination in Britain . . . as the divinely ordained saviour of Catholicism" (9). Eventually, Henrietta Maria was able to synthesize English and French imagery into a uniquely personal iconography that communicated her religio-political "conversionary mission."

Britland follows a roughly chronological view of the entertainments associated with Henrietta Maria, often under her direct patronage and participated in by her. Britland's multilayered chapters are subdivided into sections on religion, politics and history, literary sources, and social codes and female roles; they also provide exhaustive information about persons taking part in the masques and the details of their production. The first three chapters trace the imagery associated with Henrietta Maria in France and its influence on her early theatrical productions at the Caroline court. These chapters also address the process through which the members of her French entourage achieved a rapprochement with Buckingham that shaped her political affiliations throughout the 1630s. The next three chapters (4, 5, and 6) look at the early 1630s to show how Henrietta Maria's court entertainments "shadowed" current affairs on the Continent; they also address her involvement in an international plot against the ministers of France and England. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 take up her situation following the failure of the plot and focus on the ways in which her Catholicism continued to inform her court productions. Finally, the last chapter (10) explores her position during the civil wars and the ways in which she continued to exploit theatrical display for political ends; it also describes the construction of royal identities from earlier Caroline influences. Of great interest, the "Epilogue" takes up the now-widowed queen consort's exile in France, her efforts to reclaim the English throne for her son, and her continued commitment to Catholic spirituality through the establishment of a convent that may also have served as the venue for her political enterprises.

While Britland focuses throughout on Henrietta Maria's influence on female cultural production, she is at pains to reject the contamination of either her own or Henrietta Maria's projects by the specter of "feminism." She notes, for instance, that "If Henrietta Maria's iconography was femino-centric, it was less because she was fighting the good fight for her sisters than because she was actively promoting her role as an exemplary Catholic princess in an apostate land" (8). Perhaps because of this limiting perspective, Britland fails to draw the obvious conclusion from her own observations...