‘As Well by the English as by the Strangers’: Performing a Multicultural London in The Magnificent Entertainment

Abstract

The pageantry marking James VI & I’s royal entry into London in 1604 featured the participation of Italian and Dutch immigrants who contributed two of the entry’s triumphal arches. This article examines the role of these immigrant communities within the production, and textual reproduction, of James’s royal entry. The pageant records present contrasting approaches to the multiculturalism of early modern London. The first, represented by Thomas Dekker’s official pageant text The Magnificent Entertainment, divides the city into ‘the English’ and ‘the strangers’, whose presence is celebrated for the symbolic possibilities of creating unity out of multiplicity. In the second approach, recoverable within the Italian and Dutch arches, immigrant populations maintain their distinct identities as unified communities possessing the historical and cultural right to welcome James to their city.

KEYWORDS:

• Thomas Dekker
• Immigration
• Hospitality
• Pageantry
• Anglo-Italian Relations
• Multiculturalism

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Andrew Gordon, Tracey Hill, Heather C. Easterling, and Mark Kaethler for their invaluable feedback and support both during and after the 2019 Shakespeare Association of America seminar, ‘London as Theatrical Space’. Thanks as well to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and generous suggestions and comments.

Notes

1 T. Dekker and B. Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, in R. Dutton (ed.), Jacobean Civic Pageants (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 32–33. All quotations are from this edition.

2 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 29.

3 Ibid., 36, 32.

4 Ibid., 26.

5 M. Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 85, 140–43.

6 See: O.P. Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1996), 1–5. Grell’s description of the planning behind the Dutch pageants is based on a valuable study of the records of the consistory of the Dutch church in London.

7 See: M. Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 162–88; and N.J. Kay, ‘The Unspoken Language of Aliens, or the Spectacular Conversation between Visiting English and Dutch That Transcended Time and Space’, in J.C. Finlayson and A. Sen (eds.), Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (New York: Routledge, 2020), 70–90.

8 See, for example: T. Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 6, 53.

9 H.C. Easterling, ‘Reading the Royal Entry (1604) in/as Print’, Early Theatre, 20:1 (2017), 43–76.

10 Publications by the architect for the City, Stephen Harrison, and the architect for the Dutch, Conraet Jansen, followed. On Harrison’s text, see: Easterling, ‘Reading’, 52–53 and J. Caitlin Finlayson, ‘Stephen Harrison’s The Arches of Triumph (1604) and James I’s Royal Entry in the London Literary Marketplace’, in Finlayson and Sen (eds.), Civic Performance, 176–99. On Jansen, see: Rubright, ‘London as Palimpsest’, 177; and C. Joby, The Dutch Language in Britain (1550–1702): A Social History of the Use of Dutch in Early Modern Britain (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 256.

11 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 30.

12 Ibid., 93.

13 R. Malcom Smuts (ed.), The Whole Royal and Magnificent Entertainment, in G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 223.

14 S.K. Oldenburg, Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 103. For an earlier claim of Dekker’s authorship, see: J. Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36–40.

15 Grell, Calvinist Exiles, 165–6. Jacob Cool, or Cole, is often referred to by his Latinised name, Jacobus Colius Ortelianus, which he used in humanist circles. On the Dutch and Flemish designers and painters, see: Kay, ‘The Unspoken Language of Aliens’, 78–79. On Cool and Ruytinck, see: Joby, The Dutch Language in Britain, 289–92 and 325–27.

16 Grell, Calvinist Exiles, 177.

17 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 76–77.

18 For a summary of the various motivations behind inclusion, see: R. Esser, ‘Immigrant Cultures in Tudor and Stuart England’, in N. Goose and L. Luu (ed.), Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 166.

19 M. Wiggins and C.T. Richardson (eds.), British Drama, 1533–1642, Volume 5: 1603–1608 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 88.

20 Grell, Calvinist Exiles, 176.

21 On Jansen, see: Rubright, ‘London as Palimpsest’, 177.

22 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 29.

23 The device thus imagines a dramatic shift: as Rubright argues, ‘for Londoners, James’s Scotland was in practice farther away than the Low Countries’. For Rubright, the Dutch arch and the opening device illustrate ‘the city’s history of making neighbours of strangers’ (‘London as Palimpsest’, 180). I suggest, however, that the text simultaneously estranges some neighbours even as it welcomes others.

24 S. Waurechen, ‘Imagined Polities, Failed Dreams, and the Beginnings of an Unacknowledged Britain: English Responses to James VI and I’s Vision of Perfect Union’, Journal of British Studies 52:3 (2013), 577.

25 On England’s ongoing reluctance to directly address its relationship to Scotland, see: Waurechen, ‘Imagined Polities’, 582 and throughout. As Waurechen observes, despite James’s personal lobbying for British union, even a moderate step like Scottish naturalization did not occur until Calvin’s Case in 1608, and then only in a limited form.

26 Overall, the diversity represented in early modern royal entries did not equal what we would today call diversity. Civic pageantry had an overwhelmingly Eurocentric bias and pageants’ depictions of people of color deployed overtly racist tropes. See: I. Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 137–38.

27 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 52.

28 Ibid., 52 n.4.

29 On population sizes, see: Wyatt, The Italian Encounter, 137–38; and L. Luu, Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500–1700 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 99.

30 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 52.

31 See Grell, Calvinist Exiles, 167–68; and D.M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642, 2nd ed. (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 78.

32 That is, the arcade.

33 G. Dugdale, The Time Triumphant (London, 1604), B1v.

34 Ibid., B2r.

35 ‘Diverse and sundry’ in ‘sundry, Adj. and Pron.’, 5c., 6a., Oxford English Dictionary.

36 K.J. Stage, Producing Early Modern London: A Comedy of Urban Space, 1598–1616 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 44.

37 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 52.

38 Ibid., 72.

39 Ibid., 73.

40 Ibid., 74.

41 Ibid., 73.

42 Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 5–6.

43 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 58.

44 Ibid., 63 n.2. The Latin original reads ‘Quod celebret hoc emporium prudenti industria suos, / Quovis terrarum negotiatores emittat, exteros / Humaniter admittat, foris famam, domi divitias augeat.’

45 C. Dalechamp, Christian Hospitalitie Handled Common-Place-Wise (Cambridge, 1632), 11.

46 Rubright, ‘London as Palimpsest’, 164.

47 Ibid., 179, 183.

48 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 58.

49 Rubright ultimately suggests that it was ‘not Anglo-Dutch difference that … agitated and threatened to unravel the production of an Englished Royal Exchange’, but rather the sense of ‘sameness’, the presence of a palimpsest of shared cultural influences (184). However, I view the arch’s assertion of Dutchness not in the sole context of the ‘sameness’ of the long Anglo-Dutch relationship but rather as one example from The Magnificent Entertainment of strangers maintaining communal identity while asserting their belonging, in conjunction with Italian efforts to do the same.

50 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 65 n.1. The Latin text reads ‘patriis gens exul ab oris / Quos fovit tenero mater Eliza sinu, / Matri sacratum, Patri duplicamus amorem, / Poscimus et simili posse favore frui. / Sic diu Panthaici tibi proferat alitis oevum’.

51 Ibid., 65. Kay reads this moment as one of the ‘Dutch community abandoning their Dutchness’ (80). I agree that in hailing James as a father, the Dutch show their ‘willingness to become British subjects’ (80), but I argue that the arch itself speaks to the immigrants’ belief that doing so does not mean relinquishing Dutchness. Indeed, as Astrid Stilma has shown, the speech and the arch’s imagery can be read as a political call to James, asking him to recommit to Elizabeth’s alliance with the Netherlands: A. Stilma, A King Translated: The Writings of King James VI & I and Their Interpretation in the Low Countries, 1593–1603 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 2–4.

52 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 65. The Latin original reads ‘Nam regere imperiis populum faelicibus unum, / Ardua res, magnis res tamen apta viris. / At non unanimes nutu compescere gentes, / Non hominis pensum, sed labor ille Dei.’

53 Ibid., 64.

54 C. Barron, C. Coleman, and C. Gobbi (eds. and trans.), ‘The London Journal of Alessandro Magno 1562’, The London Journal, 9:2 (1983), 146–47.

55 Ibid., 147.

56 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 54.

57 John Stow cites the source of this myth, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and develops it in A Survay of London (London, 1598), 1–2. On uses of the myth in this and other pageants, see: M. Ullyot, ‘The Fall of Troynovant: Exemplarity after the Death of Henry, Prince of Wales’, in A. Shepard and S.D. Powell (eds.), Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: CRRS, 2004), 269–90.

58 L. Manley, ‘Fictions of Settlement: London 1590’, Studies in Philology 88:2 (1991), 209.

59 See: R.A. Mason, ‘“Scotching The Brut”: The Early History of Britain’, History Today, 35:1 (January 1985), 26. Notably, the English themselves, anxious about protecting their legal apparatus and reluctant to enfranchise Scots, were not eager for unification with Scotland.

60 James I, ‘A Speech, as it was Delivered in the Upper House of the Parliament … on Munday the XIX Day of March, 1603’, in J Marshall, J Richards, and N Rhodes (eds.), King James VI and I: Selected Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 296.

61 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 56.

62 Ibid.

63 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 57.

64 Ibid.

65 G.F. Commendone, ‘Events of the Kingdom of England Beginning with King Edward VI’, in C.V. Malfatti (ed. and trans.), The Accession, Coronation and Marriage of Mary Tudor as Related in Four Manuscripts of the Escorial (Barcelona: C.V. Malfatti, 1956), 31–32.

66 Grell, Calvinist Exiles, 183–85.

67 Dekker and Jonson, ‘The Magnificent Entertainment’, 59.

68 For illustration, see: S. Harrison, The Arch’s of Triumph (London, 1604), sig. E1v.

69 Stilma, A King Translated, 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Blankenau

Katherine Blankenau is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on intersections of ethics, class, and hospitality within the print and theatre industries of early modern England.