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Abstract
Despite a legacy of critical misapprehension, the study of early modern civic pageantry reveals a vital and wide-ranging performance culture that animated the city and its inhabitants. Investigation of the place of pageantry in the early modern imagination illustrates the potent accessibility of the forms it encompassed. Placing the diverse experiences and competences of pageant consumers, from the urban spectator in the crowd to the readers of printed pageant books, alongside the skilled work of the cast of collaborators involved in pageant design and performance, illustrates the multi-layered fabric of pageant culture in early modern London as well as the possibilities for critical engagement exemplified by the contributors to this special issue.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the contribution of all those who participated in the SAA2019 seminar, ‘London as a theatrical space’. We are immensely grateful to all the contributors to this special issue for their work on this project through such a difficult time. This special issue would not have been possible without the labour of the anonymous reviewers and the immense help of Charlie Turpie at The London Journal who saw this project through its formative stages, and of Aidan Norrie who came on board near the end.
Notes
1 R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Volume 1 (London: Verso, 1994), 6.
2 On civic colonial engagements see especially L. Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). With reference to pageantry see, for example: A. Loomba ‘Introduction to The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue’, in G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1714–1718; and A. Sen, ‘Locating the Rhinoceros and the Indian: Strangers, trade and the East India Company in Thomas Heywood's Porta Pietatis’, in J. Caitlin Finlayson and A. Sen (eds.), Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (New York: Routledge, 2020), 32–49.
3 For more on the critical contexts of civic pageantry, see the individual articles in this issue.
4 John Day, Lawe-trickes (London, 1608), B1r; [Samuel Harsnett], A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603), A2v.
5 William Drummond of Hawthornden, ‘Hyme to the Fairest Fair’, in Flowres of Sion (Edinburgh, 1623), 34.
6 Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), k4v; V. Scherb, ‘Assimilating Giants: The Appropriation of Gog and Magog in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32:1 (2002), 73; K. Gilchrist, Staging Britain’s Past: Pre-Roman Britain in Early Modern Drama (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 91–93. Not one but two pairs of Gog and Magog figures still reside in Guildhall.
7 [Barnabe Rich], Opinion diefied [sic]. Discovering the ingins, traps, and traynes, that are set in this age, whereby to catch opinon. Neither florished with art, nor smoothed with flatterie (London, 1613), 17–18.
8 Henry Peacham, The Art of Drawing with the Pen (London, 1606), 28.
9 Peacham, Art of Drawing, 28. On Peacham’s work as a conduit of north European art theory and his construction of a practical programme in art education, see: L. E. Semler, ‘Breaking the Ice to Invention: Henry Peacham’s “The Art of Drawing” (1606)’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 35:3 (2004), 735–50.
10 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), 345.
11 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 343.
12 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 343.
13 Entry for 29.10.1553. A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 1550–1563, by Henry Machyn: Manuscript, Transcription, and Modernization, Richard W. Bailey. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/machyn/5076866.0001.001/1:8.4.96/--london-provisioners-chronicle-1550-1563?rgn=div3;sort=occur;subview=detail;type=simple;view=fulltext;q1=Lord±mayor [accessed 14 April 2021].
14 Thomas Heywood, Londini Sinus Salutis (London, 1635), A7r.
15 See: K. Northway, ‘“[H]urt in that service”: The Norwich Affray and Early Modern Reactions to Injuries during Dramatic Performances’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 26:4 (2008), 25–52.
16 Pewterers’ Company Audit Book, 1530-72: LMA: CLC/L/PE/D/002/MS07086/002, f. 325r.
17 T. Hill, ‘Owners and Collectors of the Printed Books of the Early Modern Lord Mayor's Shows’, Library and Information History 30:3 (2014), 151–71.
18 On the broader context of Middleton’s Honorable Entertainments, see: A. Gordon, Writing Early Modern London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 192–99; and T. Hill, ‘“Euer Obedient in His Studies”: Thomas Middleton and the City, 1620–1622’, The London Journal, 42:2 (2017), 137–50.
19 Thomas Middleton, Honorable Entertainments (London, 1621), B4v.
20 A. Parr, ‘Introduction to Honorable Entertainments and an Invention’, in G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino (eds.), Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1433. On the influence of Ascham, see: M. Woodcock, ‘Shooting for England: Configuring the Book and the Bow in Roger Ascham’s “Toxophilus”’, Sixteenth Century Journal 41:4 (2010), 1017–38.
21 Middleton, Honorable Entertainments, B4v-B5v.
22 Middleton, Honorable Entertainments, B4v.
23 Middleton, Honorable Entertainments, B5v.
24 REED has published some forty collections to date, some of which are accessible online at https://ereed.library.utoronto.ca/. Civic London 1558-1642, the REED collection most closely associated with the subject matter of this special issue, is underway and some of its findings are also online at https://civiclondon.wordpress.com/.
25 Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Truth (London, 1613), D2v-D3r.
26 Grocers’ Company Charges of Triumphs Account Book, 1613-41: LMA: CLC/L/GH/D/036/MS11590, fols. 6r-6v.
27 Jonson lays out his opinion of the relative status of the ‘soul’ versus the ‘body’ of art in a satirical poem directed towards his erstwhile creative collaborator, ‘An expostulation with Inigo Jones’.
28 Ben Jonson, B. Jon: his part of King James his royall and magnificent entertainement (London, 1604), B2v.
29 The Sunne in Aries was reconstructed by Beyond Shakespeare and Passamezzo, with most of the speaking roles in the pageant devices taken, in an authentic fashion, by child actors. The Becket Pageant will be a musical re-imagining of a 1519 Midsummer Watch Pageant recorded in the account books of the Skinners' Company. These dry ledgers of expense provide tantalising glimpses into a major community event that combined a message of civic authority, homage to a local-born saint (who brought the City fame, wealth, and a degree of political freedom from the Crown) with a cast of characters including crusader knights, a Jewish princess, and giants.
30 Records of Early English Drama: Civic London to 1558, ed. Anne Lancashire (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), xxxiv.
31 P. Seaver, Wallington’s World (London: Methuen, 1985), 53; A. Gordon, ‘The Ghost of Pasquill: The Comic Afterlife and the Afterlife of Comedy on the Early Modern Stage’, in A. Gordon and T. Rist (eds.), The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 229–46. See also: Gordon, Writing Early Modern London, 86–91, 170–76.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew Gordon
Andrew Gordon is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Culture at the University of Aberdeen. His publications include Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community (2013), various co-edited collections including Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (2016), with James Daybell; The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England (2013), with Thomas Rist, and Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (2001/2011), with Bernhard Klein, and numerous articles and essays.
Tracey Hill
Tracey Hill is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Bath Spa University. She is the author of two books — Anthony Munday and Civic Culture (2004) and Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show (2010) — as well as a number of articles in journals and chapters in edited collections. She is editor-in-chief of the Records of Early English Drama project Civic London 1558–1642, a Freeman of the City of London, and a member of the Worshipful Company of Founders.