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.
3 ‘A day of well Compos’d Variety of Speach and shew’: bringing the Shows to life Given their predominantly visual appeal to the original audiences it is perhaps surprising that relatively little attention has yet been paid within literary and historical scholarship to how the visual and aural spectacle of the Lord Mayors’ Shows would have been experienced on the day of the performance. This is partly down to the general dominance within literary scholarship of printed texts, and it is also, of course, due to the elusive nature of pageantry, which would seem
this book) was also the heyday of the early modern stage, when theatrical modes of celebration and entertainment were ubiquitous in the rapidly expanding city. I will address the lived experience of the Shows in more depth 2 Pageantry and power 1 The route of the Lord Mayor’s Show in the early modern period in Chapter 3, and will discuss the ways in which the ceremonial elements of the day developed over time further below, but it is worth providing at the outset a brief overview of the structure and content of a ‘typical’ Lord Mayor’s Day (one should note that
prioritise expenditure on the procession instead of the pageantry – clothing the ‘poor men’ as well as the mayoral party, for instance – and on forms of visual representations of their power and prestige such as decorated banners, streamers, ensigns and so on. Crucially, the livery company documents help to defamiliarise many preconceptions about authorship and collaboration in this period by revealing the ways in which civic pageantry was brought to life by writers working alongside the artificers and others about whom the printed works are often silent. In particular, as
threats to the City’s peace and stability such as Envy or Ambition. In so doing, they inevitably engaged with political questions in the broadest sense. In this respect, as in others, they contrast to the royal masque, where, as Norbrook has argued, ‘overt religious imagery and overt political comment are kept under strict control’.2 The Shows also displayed the City’s sense of itself, often in implicit or, more rarely, explicit contrast to the values of the court. Mayoral pageantry was therefore a reflection of a civic culture grounded in the values of a local
intended to represent . . . a possible Greek equivalent of “old drapery”, but the form “Poleos” points to confusion with . . . “of the city”’.9 Nevertheless, in the printed text the writer perforce becomes dominant, despite the conventional acknowledgements of the crucial input of the artificer (of whom 216 Pageantry and power more elsewhere). Most of the title pages thus refer to the text as having been ‘invented’ or ‘devised’ by the poet. Indeed, an often overlooked and perhaps unexpected difference between the printed Shows and the equivalent accounts of monarchical
1,400–seat Imperial theatre, the city’s leading extended-run venue, as part of their purchase of the Rothchild chain. 21 Debuting The Pony Express during the Diamond Jubilee would help the studio build fruitful associations (both short and long-term) between cinematic text and historical pageantry, offering patrons a suitable commemorative document as well as evidence of their commitment to Americanism. At the same time
As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. The memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This book is a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. The first section examines the relationship between official and popular history and the constitution of memory narratives in and around the production and consumption of American cinema. The second section examines the politics of memory in a series of chapters that take as their focus three pivotal sites of national conflict in postwar America. This includes the war in Vietnam, American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of marginality in the geographic and cultural borderlands of the US. The book explores the articulation of Vietnam. The final section concentrates on the issue of mediation; it explores how technological and semiotic shifts in the cultural terrain have influenced the coding and experience of memory in contemporary cinema. It considers both the presence of music and colour in nostalgia films of the 1990s and the impact of digital and video technologies on the representational determinants of mediated memory. The book also examines the stakes of cultural remembering in the United States and the means by which memory has been figured through Hollywood cinema.
Dating from as early as 1906, a large number of amateur films commemorate royal visits to Scotland's town halls and schools. They capture- in lise Hayden's terms - the 'minor events' of British royalty where the monarchs' physical presence and symbolic embodiment are balanced on a 'knife's edge' as both their 'ordinariness' and uniqueness must be maintained simultaneously. This tension explains why the choreographing of these events is often (wearily) similar and the films boring. Nonetheless, these amateur films sometimes capture moments of contingency (the look at the camera, the unseemly exuberance of children) that expose the limits of this balancing act and the 'work' that underpins the perfonnance of monarchy. Conversely, in many cities across Scotland these royal encounters have been re-imagined in pageants and gala days also commemorated in amateur films. In these films, children take on royal functions, becoming fleshy 'effigies' of the monarch in ritualistic performances that dramatize the ambiguous origins of royal pageantry, whether the monarchs involved are 'real' or 'fake'.
such as North Sea (1938), sturdy educational films such as Gaumont-British Instructional’s Downlands (1936) and, of course, the Festival films Forward a Century and Family Portrait . 17 Finally, if Festival visitors had not tired of the medium, they could purchase colour 16mm film of Britain’s historic buildings and pageantry and filmstrips of the Festival of Britain and London as souvenirs
