The Politics of Happiness in Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-81
Author(s):  
Lena Steveker

In this article, I discuss Richard Brome’s tragicomedy The Queen and Concubine (1635–1636), focusing on how the play reflects the iconography of Charles I as well as Stuart ideals of statecraft. I argue that the play’s representation of a royal ruler in a pastoral setting draws on Van Dyck’s portraiture and on Charles I’s masques, as well as on Lipsius’s political concept of ‘love’. I claim that the play promotes a ‘politics of happiness’ which affirms the Caroline ideology of royal rule. My reading of Brome’s play aims at furthering the critical understanding of the cultural and political concerns shared by court drama and drama written for the commercial theatre in the Caroline period.

1998 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 59-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean MacIntyre
Keyword(s):  
James I ◽  

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), favorite of James I and of Charles I as both prince and king, used skill in dancing, especially in masques, to compete for and retain royal favor. Masques in which he danced and masques he commissioned displayed his power with the rulers he ostensibly served. His example and teaching taught Prince Charles that through masque dancing he might win his father's favor, and probably made Charles believe that his appearance in court masques of the 1630s would similarly win his subjects' favor.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agenagn Kebede Dagnew

AbstractThis paper focuses on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)’s political philosophy of state and individuals. In this paper , we will see the political concept of state and state’s relation with individuals.


Author(s):  
David Hardiman

Much of the recent surge in writing about the practice of nonviolent forms of resistance has focused on movements that occurred after the end of the Second World War, many of which have been extremely successful. Although the fact that such a method of civil resistance was developed in its modern form by Indians is acknowledged in this writing, there has not until now been an authoritative history of the role of Indians in the evolution of the phenomenon.The book argues that while nonviolence is associated above all with the towering figure of Mahatma Gandhi, 'passive resistance' was already being practiced as a form of civil protest by nationalists in British-ruled India, though there was no principled commitment to nonviolence as such. The emphasis was on efficacy, rather than the ethics of such protest. It was Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, who evolved a technique that he called 'satyagraha'. He envisaged this as primarily a moral stance, though it had a highly practical impact. From 1915 onwards, he sought to root his practice in terms of the concept of ahimsa, a Sanskrit term that he translated as ‘nonviolence’. His endeavors saw 'nonviolence' forged as both a new word in the English language, and as a new political concept. This book conveys in vivid detail exactly what such nonviolence entailed, and the formidable difficulties that the pioneers of such resistance encountered in the years 1905-19.


Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell

News of the war from both sides’ perspectives was printed In the inexpensive pamphlets called mercuries or newsbooks, which also carried an account of the trial of Charles I. Prominent newsbook editors and authors such as Marchamont Nedham offered national news and political commentary mixed with entertaining verse, stories of wonders, and accounts of foreign dignitaries and customs.


Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates

Tobie Matthew (c.1544–1628) lived through the most turbulent times of the English Church. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, he saw Edward VI introduce Protestantism, and then watched as Mary I violently reversed her brother’s changes. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, Matthew rejected his family’s Catholicism to join the fledgling Protestant regime. Over the next sixty years, he helped build a Protestant Church in England under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Rising through the ranks of the Church, he was Archbishop of York in the charged decades leading up to the British Civil Wars. Here was a man who played a pivotal role in the religious politics of Tudor and Stuart England, and nurtured a powerful strain of Puritanism at the heart of the established Church....


Author(s):  
Siobhan Keenan

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625–1642 is the first book-length study of the history, and the political and cultural significance, of the progresses, public processions, and royal entries of Charles I. As well as offering a much fuller account of the king’s progresses and progress entertainments than currently exists, this study throws new light on one of the most vexed topics in early Stuart historiography—the question of Charles I’s accessibility to his subjects and their concerns, and the part that this may, or may not, have played in the conflicts which culminated in the English civil wars and Charles’s overthrow. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book opens with an introduction to the early modern culture of royal progresses and public ceremonial as inherited and practised by Charles I. Part I explores the question of the king’s accessibility and engagement with his subjects further through case studies of Charles’s ‘great’ progresses in 1633, 1634, and 1636. Part II turns attention to royal public ceremonial culture in Caroline London, focusing on Charles’s royal entry on 25 November 1641. More widely travelled than his ancestors, Progresses reveals a monarch who was only too well aware of the value of public ceremonial and who did not eschew it, even if he was not always willing to engage in ceremonial dialogue with his people or able to deploy the power of public display to curry support for his policies as successfully as his Tudor and Stuart predecessors.


Author(s):  
James B. Bell

In step with the gradually unfolding imperial policies of the successive governments of King Charles I and later monarchs, the Church of England was extended to the northern part of the Western hemisphere between 1662 and 1829. Under the supervision of the Board of Trade and Plantations until 1701, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts from that year, decade after decade an increasing number of men of differing origins and places of collegiate education in Britain came to serve missions of the Church in early America. The ranks included natives of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies, who were supported by the SPG or the legislatures of the provinces in which the Church was established. Development was shaped by imperial policies and administration over 160 years amid rising populations, changing political situations, and the consequences of war and diplomacy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document