Fictionalized, respectively, during the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and the beginning of James I’s rule, Shakespeare’s Queen Tamora and Cary’s Queen Mariam speak to evolving legal conceptions of sexual consent, as well as to the changing legal statutes that restricted and/or empowered English consorts. Tamora challenges the idea that marital consent and reproductive consent are inseparable from sexual consent, choosing to pursue an adulterous affair and appropriating the Roman male prerogative of vitae necisque potestas to dispose of her child. She exposes gender double standards that assume it is not treasonous for male consorts to pursue sexual affairs, and that perpetrators of infanticide are always female. Mariam too challenges marital consent and raises the question of the degree to which temporal limits can be placed on a queen’s sexual consent. In confronting her tyrannical husband’s attempts to restrict her sexuality, even after his death, Mariam might also confront Henry VIII’s treason acts, which in effect made it illegal for a consort to not disclose of, or have, a past sexual history. Tamora and Mariam not only speak to sexual consent in the early modern period, but also to debates surrounding consent that are still ongoing.