The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment
Print, Performance and Gender

This book analyses how country house entertainments facilitated political negotiations, rethought gender roles, and crafted identities.

Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (Author)

9781107594920, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 January 2019

259 pages, 10 b/w illus. 1 map
23 x 15 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

'Recent interdisciplinary studies have done much to deepen our understanding of the significance of such entertainments, yet there remains room for a work that synthesizes and expands on such studies and explores the entertainments in the context of broader academic debates. Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich's detailed critical study of Elizabethan country house entertainment achieves this by exploring how the entertainments staged for the Queen functioned in the formation and negotiation of religious, gender, regional, and national identities.' Susan Flavin, Sixteenth Century Journal

This is the first full-length critical study of country house entertainment, a genre central to late Elizabethan politics. It shows how the short plays staged for the Queen at country estates like Kenilworth Castle and Elvetham shaped literary trends and intervened in political debates, including whether women made good politicians and what roles the church and local culture should play in definitions of England. In performance and print, country house entertainments facilitated political negotiations, rethought gender roles, and crafted regional and national identities. In its investigation of how the hosts used performances to negotiate local and national politics, the book also sheds light on how and why such entertainments enabled female performance and authorship at a time when English women did not write or perform commercial plays. Written in a lively and accessible style, this is fascinating reading for scholars and students of early modern literature, theatre, and women's history.

Introduction
Part I. Performance: 1. Negotiating in a 'strange Country': Theobalds, Kenilworth, and the local politics of country house performance
2. 'Your Majesty on my knees will I followe': performing gender and the courtier-monarch relationship
3. An 'abundance of dainties': hospitality and housewifery at Elvetham, Mitcham, and Harefield
Part II. Print: 4. 'Pleasures by a profitable publication': publishers and readers of printed entertainment
5. 'Set this downe in English': Cowdray, Elvetham, and printed pageantry as national news
6. 'This paper, which carieth so base names': the Sidneys, authorship, and printed pageantry as literature
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]