Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama looks at court dramas from Tudor England (1485 - 1603) to put together a historical account on political theatre. Winkelman argues that “court interludes constituted a vital medium for interventionist advocacy about matrimony.” (201) He takes Tudor marriages as his main point of study to discern the role of court productions in influencing politics. Winkelman believes that theatrical productions correspond with the political concerns of the time so the sources he uses to examine this idea are: cavalcades, court interludes, neoclassical university tragedies, and late Elizabethan theater. (1) Throughout the monograph, Winkelman demonstrates how political counsel for monarchs are communicated through the use of allegories in the plays presented to them. Although
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Winkleman’s use of the word “drama” is sometimes confusing as it is not clear whether he is referring to a play or to an emotional circumstance. This could be seen just from the title: Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama. Without knowing the content of the book, theatre would not necessarily come to mind. In addition, it does not make it any easier to understand the book when Winkelman drops in a lot of ideas that are strong arguments on their own and could have been their own topic for research. For example there is the topics of how Henry VIII’s “Great Matter” affected his daughters’ future political and nuptial endeavors or how allegories were used as the standard idiom for communicating political counsel. Instead, what we have is a mixture of topics, that are relevant to each other but together, do not supplement a main thesis. This is either because they are significant topics on their own, and they either hinder each other or they pile up and end up covering the main
Winkleman’s use of the word “drama” is sometimes confusing as it is not clear whether he is referring to a play or to an emotional circumstance. This could be seen just from the title: Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama. Without knowing the content of the book, theatre would not necessarily come to mind. In addition, it does not make it any easier to understand the book when Winkelman drops in a lot of ideas that are strong arguments on their own and could have been their own topic for research. For example there is the topics of how Henry VIII’s “Great Matter” affected his daughters’ future political and nuptial endeavors or how allegories were used as the standard idiom for communicating political counsel. Instead, what we have is a mixture of topics, that are relevant to each other but together, do not supplement a main thesis. This is either because they are significant topics on their own, and they either hinder each other or they pile up and end up covering the main