ABSTRACT
The specific political and cultural tensions caused by the Robert Carr–Howard nuptials have, however, been overshadowed by later events – notably the sensational trial in 1615 of the Earl and Countess of Somerset for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. This chapter suggests that some of the tensions in these nuptial masques register widely expressed sensitivities over the bridegroom and the means of his ascendancy and that the invocations of fertility which characterise these texts stem less from epithalamic convention than the urgent need to contain Carr’s potentially disruptive desires. Strikingly, the masques and the final pendant text, Daniel’s Hymen’s Triumph, debate sexual mores through differing representations of Hymen and Cupid, but also in the forms of the masque in which the King’s ‘newborn creatures’ are contrasted with the female recreations of the Queen’s court. Hymen’s intervention sanctions desire just as the text absorbs the bawdy of the libels and translates it into a more courtly setting and marriage.
