Politics
The masque was significant in the internal politics of the Stuart Court, in that it marked a major step in the ascension of George Villiers as the new favorite of King James. For several years, Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset had held that wholly unofficial but very powerful position, as well as rising to major official posts such as Lord Chamberlain; but Somerset's role in the 1613 murder of Sir Thomas Overbury was becoming a major scandal. A Court faction opposed to Somerset — which included Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, the patroness of John Donne and other poets, including Ben Jonson—was actively promoting Villiers as a replacement for Robert Carr. To the date of the masque, their promotion of Villiers has not been enormously successful; Mercury Vindicated was staged, at least in the estimation of some contemporaries, with the "principal motive" of "the gracing of young Villiers and to bring him on the stage." The plan was eventually successful, and Villiers, as the new Duke of Buckingham, replaced Somerset as the royal favorite, not merely through the remainder of James's reign but into the reign of his son and successor Charles I.
Read more about this topic: Mercury Vindicated From The Alchemists
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The will to change begins in the body not in the mind
My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every act of resistance and each of my failures.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)