MoEML Mayoral Shows: The Device of the Pageant

The Device of the Pageant

Device

Something artistically devised or framed; a fancifully conceived design or figure (OED, device n.8).

Device also meant an emblematic figure or design, esp. one borne or adopted by a particular person, family, etc. (OED n.9.a), such as the coats of arms that appear near the end of this show. George Peele’s 1585 and 1591 title pages contain with the same phrase (The Device of the Pageant and The Device of a Pageant) suggesting that show writers used device to reference the shows themselves as well as the emblems appearing within them.

Fishmongers

See Para8.

Allot

See Para8 and MoEML.

Staple

See Para8.

fell

The skin or hide of an animal along with the hair, wool, etc. (OED n.1.a).

Nelson is indicating a fish’s skin behind the figure.

Sabbath

Sabbath and its variants are capitalized irregularly throughout the period; the BL copy has it in lowercase (sabboth). I capitalize it here to signify a day of religious observation (OED n.1) rather than a general period of rest (OED n.2).

shape,

Comma added to emphasize the phrase so strange and thus highlight the merman’s shape, important to the speaker’s larger point about strange individuals who disregard fish days.

godly magistrates

The godly magistrates here are the worthy City’s aldermen, over which the lord mayor presides.

England’s Peace

England’s Peace stands for Queen Elizabeth I, regnant from 1558 until her death in 1603.

thirty-two years’ space

The length of Elizabeth’s reign from her accession in 1558 to the date of the performance (1590).

pretence:

an expressed aim or object; an intention, purpose, or design (OED, n.6).

Q comma changed to colon to introduce the intention immediately following.

Both … Peace.

Here the word Both, according to Meagher, may be a misinterpreted speech heading that directs the final two lines to be spoken in unison (99, n. 57-66). Because treating this word as part of the speech keeps that line and the following line at ten syllables apiece (no other line in the Wisdom/Policy passage has fewer than ten), I am treating it as part of the speech. The figures may speak the last two lines in unison; for more on this possibility, see Performance.

Peace

I capitalize Peace here as Wisdom and Policy stand on either side and may gesture toward the figure. Both speaking in unison may draw further attention to Peace as well.

Peace

I capitalize Peace here because God’s Truth may be speaking of Peace of England who spoke previously; Peace of England also may still be present in the continuing pageant.

Prudence and virtue

Meagher states that Prudence and Virtue are simply alternative names for Policy and Wisdom who here, like Wisdom and Policy, shade an enthroned Peace with a cloth-of-state canopy (99, n. 57-66 and 100, n. 67-79). Although there indeed may be two figures here who literally shade Peace, the lack of speaking roles makes their existence as characters, rather than abstract qualities, uncertain; therefore I leave them in lowercase, as does Meagher.

Peace

At this point, Nelson has separated Peace from Elizabeth, as the latter is now she who will hopefully live to maintain the former. I capitalize peace here to emphasize the distinction.

Lord … increase

Elizabeth never married nor did she have children. For more on the implications of Elizabeth’s chastity for continued peace and prosperity at the end of her reign, see Historical Context.

Upon … feet

Plenty may gesture here to a bundle of wool, situated at the feet of Peace, signifying the fleece. For more on what the wool may signify, see Historical Context.

senate’s

Senate could refer to an assembly or counsel of citizens charged with governance (OED, n.1); Meagher comments that Senate is a not infrequent affectation for the City Council during this period (102, n. 107-13). Since London had no body officially titled Senate, I have changed the word to lowercase as a general reference to the body of civic magistrates.

means this Peace

i.e., means by which this peace.

Help, Walworth, now,

Commas are added here to emphasize the king’s direct request to Walworth. The king may also have made this exclamation in response to a threatening advance from Straw (Meagher 103, n. 121-3).

Hob … Miller too

Two other rebels who also will appear in the anonymous history play The Life and Death of Jack Straw (c. 1593-4).

Richard the Second:

King Richard II, regnant from 1377 until his deposition in 1399.

mayor

Mayor means lord mayor here.

place

Commonwealth has assumed Walworth’s place with this speech. See Lancashire, Comedy 17 and Meagher 103, n. 124-43.

Fishmonger

Although the BL copy has this word in lowercase, I capitalize it to emphasize Walworth’s civic identity and kinship with the sponsoring company.

dagger

The dagger Walworth used to kill Tyler.

adore

To display profound reverence or respect (OED, v.2).

No space exists between this passage and the previous speech in Nelson’s pageant book. I have separated this portion to distinguish it as a stage direction or prose account. I have preserved Q’s line breaks except in cases footnoted below.

near about him

Meagher observes that notable personages in lord mayor’s shows often stood surrounded by identifying furniture (104, n. 144-6).

dagger given … London

The London seal of 1381 features a dagger in the upper quadrant of a cross. By popular belief, this is the dagger with which Walworth killed Tyler. However, the seal was executed prior to that event and the sword likely represents the sword of St. Paul instead (Fairholt 117).

impossible

The BL copy uses unpossible, a word that the OED treats as synonymous with impossible. Uses of each word as recorded in LEME also appear interchangeable in meaning, thus the modernization here.

Time:

I have treated this line as a heading introducing a personified figure named Time. For more on the epilogue as it appears in the original text, see The Pageant Book.

Attend,

Comma added to suggest direct address to Allott, as the shows’ pageantry conventionally addressed the lord mayor as both the show’s subject and its ideal audience (Lobanov-Rostovsky 881).

in such wise

I.e., in a such a way.

now,

Comma added to emphasize direct exhortation to Allott.

A variant on ay, with both pronounced similarly to the modern may or day. For ay: for ever, to all eternity (OED, n.3.a).

Goldsmiths’

I place the apostrophe after the s to indicate the plural possessive.

state

Bullough capitalizes State here, presumably in keeping with the above speech prefix as it appears in Q. Q leaves it in lowercase, as have I given that there is no speaking character named State.

Policy, … state, saith:

Typically Bullough does not punctuate the end of the speech prefixes; here, however, he adds a period.

Let them be still:

I have substituted a colon for the comma in Q so that the first clause in the line serves to dramatically introduce the second clause.

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Laurie Ellinghausen

Laurie Ellinghausen is Professor of English at the University of Missouri—Kansas City, where she teaches courses on early modern English literature and drama. She is the author of Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates: Renegade Identities in Early Modern English Writing (U of Toronto P, 2018) and Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567-1667 (Ashgate, 2008). She is also the editor of Approaches to Teaching Shakespeareʼs Early Modern English History Plays (MLA Publications, 2017). Her current project is a monograph on representations of seafaring labour in proto-imperial British writing.

Mark Kaethler

Mark Kaethler is Department Chair, Arts, at Medicine Hat College; Assistant Director, Mayoral Shows, with MoEML; and Assistant Director for LEMDO. They are the author of Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama (De Gruyter, 2021) and a co-editor with Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Janelle Jenstad of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge, 2018). Their work has appeared in The London Journal, Early Theatre, Literature Compass, Digital Studies/Le Champe Numérique, and Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, as well as in several edited collections. Mark’s research interests include early modern literature’s intersections with politics; digital media and humanities; textual editing; game studies; cognitive science; and ecocriticism.

Molly Rothwell

MoEML Project Manager, 2022-present. Research Assistant, 2020-2022. Molly Rothwell was an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria, with a double major in English and History. During her time at LEMDO, Molly primarily worked on encoding the MoEML Mayoral Shows.

Navarra Houldin

Project manager 2022-present. Textual remediator 2021-present. Navarra Houldin completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Rylyn Christensen

Rylyn Christensen is an English major at the University of Victoria.

Thomas Nelson

Bookseller and ballad-writer. See ODNB.

Bibliography

Anonymous. The Life and Death of Iacke Straw, A notable Rebell in England: Who was kild in Smithfield by the Lord Maior of London. London. 1593. STC 23356. DEEP 166. ESTC S111285.

Fairholt, Frederick W., ed. Lord Mayorsʼ Pageants: Being Collections Towards a History of These Annual Celebrations. 2 vols. Percy Society, 1843.

Lancashire, Anne. The Comedy of Love and the London Lord Mayor’s Show. Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love: Essays in Honour of Alexander Leggatt. Ed. Karen Bamford and Ric Knowles. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. 3–29. Print.

Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei. The Triumphs of Golde: Economic Authority in the Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show. ELH 60.4 (1993): 879–898. doi: 10.1353/elh.1993.0006.

Meagher, John C. The London Lord Mayor’s Show of 1590. English Literary Renaissance 3.1 (1973): 94-104.

OED: The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

MoEML Mayoral Shows (MOMS1)

The MoMS General Editors are Mark Kaethler and Janelle Jenstad. The team includes SSHRC-funded research assistants. Peer review is coordinated by the General Editors but conducted by other editors and external scholars.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

http://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title	The Device of the Pageant
Type of text	Annotation
Short title	DEVI3: Annotations
Publisher	The Map of Early Modern London on the LEMDO Platform
Series	MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology
Source	Anotations written by Laurie Ellinghausen
Editorial declaration	Prepared according to the MoMS Editorial Guidelines
Edition	Released with MoEML Mayoral Shows 1.0
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	published, peer-reviewed
Licence/availability	Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, Laurie Ellinghausen. The critical paratexts, including the annotations, are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the editor, MoMS, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of MoMS, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom.