ABSTRACT
Royal marriage in Tudor England was unquestionably the subject of intense debate, above all during Henry VIII’s “Great Matter” and Elizabeth I’s early years on the throne. That court interludes constituted a vital medium for interventionist advocacy about matrimony is a more disputable claim. In the comprehensive neoplatonic version of this monograph, the spotlight on Tudor marriage plays would have been supplemented with more background on religion, Renaissance humanism, and the behind-the-scenes patronage system. During the contentious reign of the Stuarts, dramatizations of their predecessors on the English throne were never politically neutral, and marriage continued to be pivotal. For instance, Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei and several other Jacobean wedding masques by Thomas Campion played up the synthesis of York and Lancaster in the person of King James. The world of dramatic Tudor marriages and Tudor nuptial dramas may seem arcane nowadays: fit for Ivory Tower lucubrations but fundamentally foreign to our real-world concerns.
