This chapter will concern itself in part with the court theatricals of Charles I's wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. I want to move against the easy dismissal of the significance of these entertainments by a number of recent historians of the period, and to suggest for them a deep importance in the culture of the time – social, political, and religious – while arguing in addition for their strong influence on plays by the Caroline public-theatre dramatists under consideration here, in particular James Shirley and John Ford.

The historian Kevin Sharpe may suggest that Henrietta Maria only holds a backstage significance, at least in political terms, in the decade of the 1630s in his book The Personal Rule of Charles I (Sharpe, 173), but I want to stress the impact of her theatrical innovations at the Caroline court and to reinstate her ‘playing’, her commissioning of and performing in masques and entertainments throughout this period, at the centre stage of events.

In 1633, after all, William Prynne, the extremist writer of Puritan tracts and pamphlets inveighing against Papist threats to the nation, would have his ears removed in public by the public hangman for attacking court theatricals at length and in print, in particular the female theatricals of Henrietta Maria and her ladies-in-waiting. He did so in his 1,000-page tract Histriomastix, in which he famously equated women actresses with ‘Notorious Whores’ (the equation is evident in the index alone – Prynne was not afraid to nail his colours to the mast).

Play, plays, and playing were, then, highly political and politicized issues in the late 1620s and 1630s, and it is the nature and significance of that politicized play that I want to explore here by considering the court entertainments of Henrietta Maria and why they caused such moral and political controversy. In doing so I want to argue that these spectacular events had a relevance and resonance far beyond the confines of the court; Prynne's text is itself firm evidence of this, but so too is the debate that raged about women and theatre on the public stages of the Caroline era. I want then to consider some of those plays engaged with questions of gender and performance from that time, in particular James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage (1633).