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Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, by Karen Britland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. ix + 292. Cloth $96.00. Reviewer: SUZANNE GOSSETT Karen Britland' s Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria is an admirable work, revisionist and yet respectful of previous scholarship, theoretically current while based on a significant amount of primary research. Britland presents a positive reading of Henrietta Maria's intelligence, selfawareness, and political and religious development, in contrast to the usual descriptions of the queen consort, which denigrate her as French, foolish, female, and insidiously Catholic. queen's development is traced through the entertainments associated with her, first in her French girlhood, then during her years in England, and finally in the royalist court in exile. In the tradition of Stephen Orgel, Leah Marcus, and James Knowles, Britland analyzes Henrietta Maria's masques, pastorals, and incidental performances for their political and cultural resonances at specific historical moments. Britland' s work is especially valuable because she brings a European dimension to her analysis, moving fluently between the French and English material. Familiarity with French scholarship and sources like the Gazette de France allows her to show how the imagery of the wedding masques reappeared in the entertainments the queen later sponsored, to identify the author of Fiorimene, and to explicate the continental significance of many details. Britland is part of a generation of younger scholars, largely women, who have reexamined the ways in which women operated in and on the early modern court, stage, and political world. See, for examples, Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590-1619 (2002) and Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (2005); Britland also cites papers from the 1998 conference entitled The Queen's Court: EUte Female Cultural Production and the Cultures of the Early Stuarts (1603-42). Yet Britland avoids imposing a modern feminist reading on the past. For example, she finds Henrietta Maria's iconography femino-centric . . . less because she was fighting the good fight for her sisters than because she was actively promoting her role as an exemplary Catholic princess in an apostate land and interprets her influence on female cultural production as a proto-feminist struggle for the rights of female public speech, but as an aspect of the queen consort's religious and social project (7-8; 14). Nevertheless, Britland's desire to understand Henrietta Maria as more than a gay butterfly passing lightly from flower to flower, in Samuel R. Gardiner's description (1), offers a feminist rehabilitation of this daughter of Henri IV and Marie de Medicis. Indeed, a major thread of Britland's study is its revelation of how tightly bound Henrietta was to her mother, siding with her in various plots and ultimately bringing Marie to England when Louis XIII exiled her from France. Persuasively, Britland argues that the appearance of common cultural images at the European courts was aided by the marital exchange of royal women and by those women's continued patronage of the men and motifs familiar to them (3). Britland's analyses of individual masques are supported with historical details and frequently based on new research. For example, she identifies an entertainment by Henrietta's attendants earlier than Artenice, previously assumed to the queen's first production. When there are alternative possibilities Britland always acknowledges them. For example, she does not deny Erica Veevers's interpretation of Chloridia as representing complementary male and female opposites now reconciled, as Henrietta and Charles were by 1631, but goes on to reread the masque politically: in Chloridia, staged after France and England had signed a peace treaty, the image of two large powers (earth and heaven) coming to an harmonious agreement is more compatible with the Anglo-French peace accord than with the resolution of marital conflict (80). …
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