From Bourgeois Wife to Renaissance Monarch: The royal entertainments and imperial ambition of Mary Stuart (1561-1566)

Attention to entertainments staged at Mary Stuart's court show them to be hybrid and provisional in comparison to similar events scripted and staged at the court of Elizabeth I by professional writers and performers. The article argues that Mary imported forms of entertainment from elsewhere, such as English Hocking, while also exploiting native Scottish customs of guising and the domestic masque to further her domestic and foreign policies. The culmination of Mary's deployment of courtly display and ceremony was the festival staged at Stirling Castle to celebrate the baptism of Prince James in 1566. Here representations of Highland culture are co-opted by the Scottish state, to display of a newly cohesive national identity for an international audience.