The importance of Queen Henrietta Maria to the cultural life of the court of Charles I has been much explored, her Catholicism in particular influencing not just the circle of courtiers she drew about her, but the political fortunes of the monarchy, especially in the 1630s and 1640s. Rebecca Bailey challengingly takes the impact of the queen a stage further. Her contention is that the young French princess, even before her arrival in England, was determined to serve the Catholic cause. Urged on by papal authorities and members of her entourage, her ambition was at least to allay the hardships endured by English recusants, and at most to manoeuvre for the return of the English to the old religion. In the event, that ambition was furthered primarily by the example she set and her support of the arts, particularly of theatrical entertainment, of which she was to become both patron and practitioner.

In six tightly argued chapters Bailey sets out the case for Henrietta Maria's effectiveness, directly and indirectly, in pursuing her religious goals. While paying some attention to the Caroline masques, the main thrust of the argument is centred on plays. In the court sphere, highlighted are Henrietta Maria's first ambitious staging of the old faith with Racan's L'Artenice (1626), and a production of Walter Montague's lengthy and elaborately mounted The Shepherd's Paradise (1635), in both of which the queen herself performed. Examination of work in the public theatre is explored in select plays of William Davenant and, particularly, of James Shirley. After dealing briefly but compellingly with the question of Shirley's 1624 apostasy and Catholic allegiance, Bailey examines the ways in which pieces as diverse as The Witty Fair One and The Traitor engage with issues of concern not just to Catholics but also to many of various allegiance, demonstrating how the Caroline stage was an arena for serious religious and, inevitably, political debate.

Not all will agree with all of Bailey's readings, and there are times when she seems to overstate her case. Was the time of Henrietta Maria's arrival in England one ‘peculiarly vulnerable to the continued, insidious threat of the old faith’ (p. 18)? One doubts Francis Walsingham would have thought it anything like as vulnerable as the 1570s and 1580s. Again, while Henrietta Maria may have sought to make a Catholic impact with L'Artenice and her capricious personal defiance in 1626 of all shades of Protestantism and English ceremony, her court influence from then on until the 1630s seems to have been firmly curbed by King Charles. Yet again, would Shirley's ‘reclamation of recusant language’ (p. 65) have seemed quite as overtly Catholic to most private theatre spectators as is proposed? At least one Catholic court and public theatre dramatist or his publisher seems to have been distinctly sensitive to manifestly Catholic wording, or so the cancellans in Habington's The Queen of Aragon suggests. But these are quibbles, and no future discussion of Caroline drama, particularly that of Shirley and of the 1630s, should ignore this finely written and innovative study.