Courtly Comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women’s Stage Plays in France and England

Henrietta Maria, queen consort of Charles I of England, is known to literary and performance scholars primarily for her sponsorship of court masques and plays, spectacles through which she functioned as an “exigent mediatrix of her native culture”. In London prior to Henrietta Maria’s arrival in May 1625, women’s voices had rarely been heard on the stage. The chapter offers new evidence proving that Henrietta Maria did, in fact, act on the French court stage before she crossed the channel to become queen of England. French and English scholars to date have provided little concrete information regarding Henrietta Maria’s acting activities in France. Similar skill in amateur female performance in the French provinces had been attested to earlier by at least one contemporary commentator, and in ways that suggest a relationship between an unmarried woman’s theatrical virtuosity and her class mobility.