Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama : Routledge : 9781138356498 : 1138356492 : 30 Sep 2021 : Originally published in 2005. While several recent studies have investigated the political dimensions of sixteenth-century English drama, until now there has not been a monograph that tells the story of how and why royal marital selection was examined. By linking court interludes, neoclassical university tragedies, and popular plays by late Elizabethan dramatists Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, and William Shakespeare to the inflammatory topic of Tudor marriage, Michael Winkelman demonstrates their cultural centrality. This new work interrogates the symbolic, allusive, and mimetic aspects of marital relationships in such plays. Winkelman argues that they were crucial battlegrounds for a series of consequential debates about the future of the monarchy, especially during the reigns of the oft-married King Henry VIII and his unmarried daughter, the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I.