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 …