The Masque Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Gary Waller

Critical Essay by Gary Waller

SOURCE: “‘Like One in a Gay Masque’: The Sidney Cousins in the Theaters of Court and Country,” in Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594-1998, edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, Routledge, 1998, pp. 234-45.

In the following essay, Waller, a noted scholar on Jacobean playwright Mary Wroth, offers a detailed analysis of the gender politics in her work.

As a woman in the Jacobean court, as a lady-in-waiting and occasional dancer, Mary Wroth played an appropriately decorative and silent part in the margins of the spectacle of the court; her primary role was simply to be seen, as a graceful, minor contributor to the dazzling visual display that mirrored for its participants the gloriousness that was a central part of the court's self-image. Like one of her characters in her prose romance, Urania, she ‘both saw those sports the Court affects, and are necessary...
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