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James I and fictional authority at the Palatine wedding celebrations
Author(s) -
Curran Kevin
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
renaissance studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1477-4658
pISSN - 0269-1213
DOI - 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2006.00113.x
Subject(s) - ethos , rhetoric , ideology , power (physics) , protestantism , monarchy , politics , militant , history , religious studies , sociology , gender studies , law , political science , theology , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The 1613 marriage of James I's daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick the Elector Palatine linked two of Europe's strongest Protestant nations. The union presented the possibility of tilting the balance of power away from the Catholic Habsburgs and allowed fervent Protestants in England to imagine themselves taking a leading role in this endeavour. The present essay is concerned with the festivities, public and private, mounted in London to celebrate this wedding. Focusing on textual accounts of the civic entertainments and Thomas Campion's wedding‐night masque, the essay shows how the Palatine marriage problematised the vision of Jacobean nationhood promulgated by the King. While James was envisioning the marriage as one step in a larger process of religious reconciliation, many were using the occasion to voice hopes for a return to a more militant cultural ethos. By highlighting this rift in political perception, this essay departs from received readings of the nuptials as an ideologically uniform event. It draws attention instead to disparities in the panegyrical rhetoric used at the wedding and explores the kinds of representational strategies that were deployed to conceal these disparities in an attempt to recast the marriage as an exclusively monarchical event.