Para1The mayoral show followed a standard route. We know the route from the detailed accounts in the pageant books, especially Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth, which MoEML has used as its visual companion for several years (see Introduction to Mayoral Shows: The Route). Each Stuart mayoral show begins with the mayor taking a journey to Whitehall and back via the Thames. During the journey, he and his barge typically come across the first pageant or waterwork related to commerce or the governance of waters of the Thames and the oceans to which it connects London. At Whitehall, the mayor swears an oath of allegiance to the monarch and receives a knighthood if he does not already possess this title. Following this ceremony, the mayor travels back to the city via the Thames, arriving near St Paul’s where he would typically witness the first land pageant before or after hearing a sermon. Following this event, a number of pageants at Paul’s, the Cross in Cheapside, the Standard, and/or the Guildhall would take place before a feast at the Guildhall. Eventually, it becomes part of the genre for the mayor to receive a final goodnight pageant near his home in London at the close of the day.

Para2We can gather some information about the performance from the pageant books. Their prose descriptions regularly provide insight regarding dramatic intention, and speeches frequently include embedded cues for gestures, movements, and other stage business. But we must treat the pageant book as one account among many. It is no different from any other eye-witness account in authority, especially given their completion (at least in some instances) after the day’s events and reflection of the dramatist’s vision for the show rather than what actually transpired. David M. Bergeron has identified the retrospective, idealized qualities of the pageant books in his article arguing for the commemorative nature of these texts (168). In other words, it is a perspective on or idea of the event that provides necessary context but should not be treated as a perfect record.

Para3The dramatist’s account, likely composed and printed for the livery company members (see Printing), thus represents a record of dramatic production from the perspective of the inventor, but we can look to the few attendees’ recordings in journals that survive for reflections upon what occurred that day. Many visitors to London, some of whom bore the title of diplomats or were affiliated with nobility, wrote accounts of having seen the shows. Such accounts provide us with an understanding of what was attractive to visitors, but they also offer glimpses into England’s history of presenting itself as superior in relation to other nations. Like other eye-witness accounts, these accounts are partial and capture only one perspective on a part of the day’s events. As Tracey Hill identifies, accounts like that of Orazio Busino in 1617 offer a fuller sense of how the man playing a Spaniard drew attention to the Spanish ambassador, but Abram Booth’s 1629 account of Dekker’s show contains sketches that do not match the content he describes (122-124). Like the pageant maker’s book, the accounts from dignataries are not necessarily comprehensive or entirely accurate.

Para4The livery company records offer more concrete details of what a given show entailed. While they are typically less elaborate in detail due to their nature being more akin to Henslowe’s diary than to a typical theatrical account of performance, like Henslowe’s diary they contain a wealth of information concerning the event, given the companies’ punctilious ledgers on what was purchased and distributed. Given that preparations often began quite early for these massive entertainments and financial issues remained unresolved at times until months after the event had concluded, it is often worthwhile examining the full records of a company in the given year.

Para5The crowds in attendance who witnessed these events represent the largest dramatic audiences in early modern performance history. While Middleton’s A Game at Chess can inform us about the number of people who could fit into the Globe theatre, his mayoral shows had no limitations with respect to space or admission. London was stage and auditorium. The chaos that this sizeable group generated is something that the civic authorities managed by having greenmen throw fireworks to clear a path for the mayor and his train, but it was also something that pageant writers needed to consider in their drama. Ian Munro points out in his study of the early modern crowd that the shows of pageant writers like Middleton and Dekker attempt to place the chaotic scene that surrounds them inside the frame of the pageant, to co-opt the actual city into a redemptive narrative of the ideal city (65). The religious and moral imagery of these pageants therefore had the purpose of crowd control in addition to perpetuating the dominant habits of thought that pervaded early modern London.

Para6Given the sheer size of this crowd, the ability for anyone to hear the various speeches the pageant writer composed for that day is questionable at best. Gail Kern Paster initially pointed out that the show’s pageants can only have been intelligible to the members of the procession, not to the outer audience stationed throughout the city (139). Even for the immediate spectators of the mayor’s train, it is possible that the immense and potentially rowdy crowd made it difficult to hear or comprehend everything that an actor recited at a given pageant. However, as Kaethler has recently argued, pageant writers like Middleton might draw attention to how the procession creates a physical drama witnessed only by the crowd. Focusing on the spectators who would have seen the show from windows or roofs, Kaethler shows that Middleton’s effort to signal that the mayor travels with Truth in front of him and Error close behind physically stages the Lord Mayor as an Everyman in a moral drama to Londoners (85). The pageant writers would not have been oblivious to the fact that not everyone could hear the speeches, so they crafted visual events that showed the thematic content for those who could spectate.

Para7To present these impressive sights, pageant writers depended upon artificers as well as the various sites of the city to enhance and realize their vision. In examining the body and what he calls the soul of mayoral shows, Bergeron observes that the artificers were essential to causing the word to take on flesh (238). Carvings and edifices were sculpted and erected at the London locations of the regular route; these creations augmented the artistic vision of the imagined dramatic action, spoken verses, and songs. The sites at which individual pageants were staged contributed to their invention and staging as well. As J. Caitlin Finlayson and Amrita Sen point out in their volume on civic performance, regular dramatic events, including mayoral shows, contributed to London as a festive, performative site and played an indispensible role in formulating, articulating, and often transforming civic identity (2). The environments and features of the specific London locations have also been shown to play into the ways in which civic identity was established and revised based upon differences and nuances between a given year and past productions, with the physical space playing an increasingly important role in the dramatic messaging (Kaethler). With mayoral shows, the City of London is not only a frequently personified character in their pageants, but also an actor itself in the drama, as its buildings, streets, people, and places.