Royal Marriage and the Politics of Transition in Stuart Drama 1603-1630

This dissertation discusses the Stuart stage's participation in an ongoing reflection on royal marriage in the early modern period. I focus on the taxonomies of otherness, religion, foreign policy, gender politics, and race that Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII (1613), Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621), and Massinger's The Roman Actor (1626) stage in order to understand how dramatic texts incorporated the vocabulary of dynasticism into their fabric. Taken collectively, these plays suggest that the belief in the efficacy of royal marriage is illusory at a historical juncture when matrimonial politics occupied center stage. My analysis starts with the competing Spanish, French, and Savoyard marriage proposals for the Prince of Wales (1612-14), which were intended to balance Princess Elizabeth's marriage to the militant Protestant prince, Frederick V of the Rhine, where I argue that Henry VIII breaks the prescriptive binary of "foreign" and "domestic." I then propose a new way of reading the drama surrounding the famous Spanish match (1621-1624) by showing how The Island Princess invokes the interlocking themes of "virtuous pagans" and imperial expansion to stage a successful but qualified dynastic marriage that can only be achieved after the use of military force. This study ends with the aftermath of the Anglo-French marriage between Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria (1625) and examines how The Roman Actor's treatment of its queen foreshadows the demonizing scripts that targeted Henrietta Maria in the 1630s. The main object of this study is to show how the drama of the period allows us to see the larger picture of the problems of royal marriage across time, and to appreciate the stage's contribution to a pivotal conversation that would dominate subsequent decades.