The London Lord Mayors' Shows were high-profile and lavish entertainments that were at the centre of the cultural life of the City of London in the early modern period. The Show was staged annually to celebrate the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor. The London mayoralty was not simply an entity of civic power, but always had its ritual and ceremonial dimensions. Pageantry was a feature of the day's entertainment. This book focuses on the social, cultural and economic contexts, in which the Shows were designed, presented and experienced, and explores the Shows in textual, historical, bibliographical, and archival and other contexts. It highlights the often-overlooked roles of the artificer and those other craftsmen who contributed so valuably to the day's entertainment. The Show was the concern of the Great Twelve livery companies from the ranks of one of which the Lord Mayor was elected. The book discusses, inter alia, the actors' roles, the props, music and costumes used during the Show and looks at how important emblems and imagery were to these productions. Pageant writers and artificers took advantage of the space available to them just as dramatists did on the professional stage. From 1585 onwards the Lord Mayor's Show was with increasing frequency transmitted from event to text in the form of short pamphlets produced in print runs ranging from 200 to 800 copies. The book also demonstrates the ways in which the Shows engaged with the changing socio-economic scene of London and with court and city politics.
2 ‘Our devices for that solemne and Iouiall daye’: the writers, the artificers and the livery companies Planning the look and content of the Shows was a complex and expensive business. Such events, Mulryne has written, ‘represent a remarkable coming-together of organisational and management skills . . . [including] the task of harnessing and co-ordinating the talents of writers, musicians, scenographers, choreographers’, as well as performers.1 In addition, being the creator of a Lord Mayor’s Show was often (although not always) a contested position, where
important aspects of the Shows. The fundamental question to be considered is, when we talk of the Lord Mayor’s Show, what entity do we actually mean? The performance, the printed text or some ambiguous combination of the two? Building on the large and growing body of knowledge about the London book trade, this chapter will explore who the printers and The Show from street to print 215 publishers of the texts were and what connections they may have had with the writers, artificers and/or the livery companies.4 I will also address the questions of where and by whom the
. 24 ‘A Soldier’s Letter from Korti’, Dover Express , 30 January 1885, p. 5. 25 ‘Camp Life at Korti’, Bradford Daily Telegraph , 28 February 1885, p. 2. 26 ‘An Engine-Room Artificer’s Experiences’, Western Morning
events, also survive – in a more complex way than one might assume – in the printed texts often produced as part of the event. These texts were produced by a body of professional writers, including Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Thomas Heywood, John Taylor and John Webster, who worked in collaboration with artificers and others to design and stage the entertainment. The Shows have a presence elsewhere in early modern culture too, featuring, often satirically, in a wide range of other dramatic and prose works. Their heyday (and the period covered by
, as Paster comments, that, unlike masques, Shows were not presented in entirely appropriate venues: ‘with all the visual and acoustical difficulties of an open-air procession’, she writes, ‘the pageant poet faced severe handicaps’.5 The dimensions and acoustics of the locations of the pageant stations varied too, from open spaces like Paul’s Churchyard to narrow streets like Soper Lane, off Cheapside, to cramped conditions like the river banks. Pageant writers and artificers took advantage of the space available to them just as dramatists did on the professional stage
Girouard, Life in the English country house: a social and architectural history (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 33. For the sacral borrowings of Westminster Hall, see Christopher Wilson, ‘Rulers, artificers, and shoppers: Richard II’s remodelling of Westminster Hall, 1393–99’, in The regal image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas, and Caroline Elam (Coventry: Harvey Miller, 1997), 33–59. (In contrast, the now-destroyed Archbishop’s Palace at Canterbury, itself the location of significant feasts, measured 126 by 42 feet – half
goods, and supply the needs of labourers. Consequently, a statesman had two important functions to fulfil. First, he needed to lure manufacturers who were masters of ‘Art and cunning’.115 This could be achieved if he bring out of other countries excellent artificers, & give them enterteinment & convenient seate to dwell upon: if he reckon of good witts, and esteeme of singular and rare inventions and workmanship: if other while also he doe reward perfection and excellency in things of Art and cunning.116 Second, he had to prevent ‘rude & unwrought things’, such as
not only the national and religious elites of king and pope, ladies and abbesses, but also the civic and familial members of society, from mayors to artificers and servants.56 The architecture of the space functions with the text to create a landing site that elicits such connections, even as the environment of St Paul’s – audible to those in the Pardon Churchyard to view Poulys Daunce, and known to those familiar with the city – still furthered readers making such connections. As readers confronted the Poulys Daunce, these details of the landing site of cloister
emerging from Adam’s side into the light of a blazing Tetragrammaton situated directly behind the pair. The use of the Tetragrammaton in the portrayal of divine creation acutely highlights the difficulties attendant on visual depictions of acts of ‘making’ in this period. God is frequently referred to as an ‘artificer’, ‘workman’, he who ‘framed’ the earth, and yet even this originary creator