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This thesis contends that the monarch-centred view of the masque, which has prevailed since the publication in the 1960s and 1970s of Stephen Orgel's seminal works on the genre, needs to be challenged in the light of recent scholarship on the cultural agency of other members of the royal family. In my introduction I argue that while the New Historicism has been crucial in elucidating the theatricalization of power in the early Stuart court, its insistence on the inevitability of the collusion between art and sovereign power needs to be questioned. The masque has long been seen as a monolithic and univocal celebration of monarchical power, despite the fact that it was promoted at court not by King James but by other members of the royal family. Adopting a loosely chronological approach, this thesis retells the story of the 'Jacobean' court masque by recovering the role played in the commissioning and performance of masques by James's wife, his children, and his male favourites. The chapters set out to hear voices other than that of the King, and discover that, while panegyric was part of each masque, it was rarely as unequivocal as traditional criticism has suggested. On the contrary, the annual masques were frequently appropriated to express the oppositional agendas of factions at court, and above all, of members of James's own family. I argue that Queen Anne set a precedent for the disruptive use of the masque which she exploited to present herself as independent from the King, and to emphasise her importance as the mother of the royal children. Prince Henry, and later Prince Charles, both used the masque to contest the pacifist policies of the King, while Buckingham's success as a favourite was linked to his skilful exploitation of the masques as an integral part of his self-fashioning. Above all by shifting the focus away from King James to consider the more active participation in the masque of other members of the royal family, this thesis offers a possibility of moving beyond the current impasse of the subversion / containment debate to a more nuanced reading of the culture of the early Stuart court which recognises the delicate process of negotiation and accommodation in which the masquers and their audiences were engaged.

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This thesis is situated in three fields of academic research. The first is the on-going reconceptualization of early modern political history conducted under the title of ‘post-revisionism’. Within this field of research, Jurgen Habermas’s notion of an emergent public sphere has proven a key, if contested, heuristic in the production of a more expansive and inclusive political field. The next field is Restoration studies. Whilst this period has enjoyed a much-heralded renaissance of interest in the past quarter century, this has largely bypassed its opening decade, the focus of this study. Finally, this thesis is an intervention in the field of Pepys studies: an extensive corpus of work spanning the academic-popular divide, and extending across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Despite this continued interest in Pepys, there has been no recent study focusing on his participation in the public sphere identified by recent research. This thesis then brings these fields of inquiry together in an attempt to raise questions about all three. In particular it examines questions of space and practice, agency and publicity, and identity and identification. Whilst this study confirms the post-revisionist notion of an expansive field of political discourse, it emphasizes different features of this space than those that have dominated recent research. First it suggests the need for a reconfiguration of public space, alternative modes of publicity and a more hierarchical understanding of interactions within it. Next, in the place of an inclusive and anonymous public, it emphasizes the exclusionary and disciplinary nature of the public and operation of the public sphere. Finally it emphasizes Pepys’ position as not merely spectator of, or participant in this public space/public, but also, increasingly, as its object or effect.