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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.
audience further afield. The product is multiple representations via many mediums of Anglo-American relations that while at times indistinct or even contradictory, collectively contribute to the public’s general impression of a special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. This proposition is investigated here via contributions made by set-piece pageantry to the special relationship. Three examples are selected knowing their relevant sociohistorical context and on the basis of their being ‘telling’ of Anglo-American relations, 1 namely Anglo
Patriotism and pageantry v 10 v Patriotism and pageantry: representations of Britain’s naval past at the Greenwich Night Pageant, 1933 Emma Hanna Using the grounds of the Royal Naval College as its stage, in June 1933 the Greenwich Night Pageant presented a showcase of English history. Various tableaux, including the christening of Elizabeth I, Drake’s arrival on the Golden Hinde and the funeral of Nelson, were re-enacted by a cast of approximately 2,000 people. Accompanied by sea shanties and Sir Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, ten two
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
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
A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this topic is researched and understood, and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the sociocultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.
develops a new perspective on the perennial question of how far Victor Emmanuel’s imperial throne lay behind the Duce’s authoritarian power. First, though, background on the king’s appointment of Mussolini is essential to both grasping the ambiguities of the political relationship and considering the significance of royal pageantry within a fascist regime. Reconstruction of the tours can then focus on the way they were