Para4The final edition of Civitatis Amor will include two texts: 1) a semi-diplomatic transcription of the first and only quarto (Q1, 1616); and 2) a modernized text¹ based on Q1. There are six extant copies of Q1, and both the semi-diplomatic transcription and the modern text are based on the copy located at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. While there is a short editorial history of Civitatis Amor, this edition acknowledges the weight of that history, and marks any changes in a collation or annotation. The open-source digital platform (LEMDO) ensures that both senior undergraduate and scholarly readers can access the text and engage easily with the critical paratexts and apparatuses.

Para5This edition collates readings from the only four editions of the work: John Nichols (1828), Alexander Dyce (1840), A. H. Bullen (1886; reprint 1964), and David Bergeron (2010). Bergeron’s is the single scholarly edition in the editorial history of this text. Nichols, Dyce, and Bullen do not provide commentary on their editorial practices, and they are inconsistent in their interventions, which leaves many questions for an editor taking up the mantle.

Para6Nichols takes liberties by modern standards, such as interpolating first-person accounts of the event into his transcription of the 1616 pageant book. Nichols’ edition introduces additions from William Camden’s manuscript account of the creation of honours, John Chamberlain’s letters to Dudley Carleton, and Records of the Corporation of London.

Para7Dyce accepts most of what Nichols sets out but is far less liberal in his editorial interventions and even disagrees with Nichols at times (see The Editorial and Encoding Textual Crux). Bullen rarely deviates from Dyce.

Para8Bergeron takes the editorial history into account but, in keeping with the Anglo-American editorial tradition that post-dates the nineteenth-century editors, he returns to Q1, which reminds us of the importance of Q1 as the only possible copytext.

Para9Civic pageantry is a capacious genre of performances written for public events. Scholar Mark Kaethler compares civic pageantry to modern day parades in that both types of events were held for celebratory purposes (Kaethler, forthcoming). Because they were performed on city streets, pageants drew massive crowds that were larger than any theatre audience; people flocked to view the processions (Kaethler, forthcoming). The genre comprises the annual Lord Mayor Shows, coronation processions, royal entries and visits, and other occasions (e.g., the opening of the New River project). Surviving pageant books include speeches, dialogic exchanges in verse that function like a theatrical vignette or mini play within a larger performance, prose that may or may not have been spoken aloud, allegorical characters, and fantastical creatures.

Para10Civitatis Amor is a civic water pageant. Water pageants are a subtype of civic pageants that were performances designed to take place on barges and boats. Civitatis Amor would have been quite the spectacle, with onlookers trying to listen over the roar of the crowd and sounds of the tidal river–if it had been performed in this fashion. But, as Chamberlain’s letters disclose, the event was moved to Whitehall with all solemnitie and within doores (Chamberlain 31).

Para11We cannot properly analyze Civitatis Amor without an understanding of the civic pageant The Order and Solemnity (1610) as its base text and as historical context. The narrative aspects of The Order and Solemnity form the foundation of the narrative aspects of Civitatis Amor; specifically, the introductory paragraph more or less switches Henry out for Charles, to the point of insult. As the research stands, it is thought that the prose narrative of Civitatis Amor derives from The Order and Solemnity while the verse and speeches are original to Civitatis Amor.

Para12The question of the authorship of Civitatis Amor is two-fold: Nichols suggests that, because of the placement of Tho. Middleton. (B2v) after the verse sections, Middleton wrote the verse and not the prose (Nichols 257); therefore, if The Order and Solemnity serves as the base for the prose in Civitatis Amor, then the author of that text is partially responsible for and deserves credit for Civitatis Amor. According to the Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP), The Order and Solemnity was authored by Samuel Daniel. Based on Nichols’ assertion and the overlap between the two texts, there is a high likelihood that the prose of Civitatis Amor is directly copied from Daniel’s The Order and Solemnity. Bergeron suggests in his textual essay that it was Middleton who copied almost verbatim from the 1610 Order and Solemnity (1203). But whether the copying was done by Middleton or by Nicholas Okes (the printer of Civitatis Amor) and whether it was done to create a more robust documentation of the event to sell at or just after the event, or for some other reason, the question of authorship is beyond the scope of this proto-edition.

Para13Challenges arise in editing and encoding civic pageants generally because of the lack of standardized practices for the genre, and specifically in Civitatis Amor due to its complex prose. The broadness of the genre, which includes both dialogic and narrative sections, creates an issue that does not occur in early modern plays. Because Civitatis Amor is being prepared for publication on the LEMDO platform which specializes in editing and encoding early modern drama, I am working with editorial and encoding practices that derive from early modern plays. While plays and civic pageants share certain similarities, there are distinct and vexing differences between the genres. In plays, the text is primarily dialogic (except for paratexts such as stage directions, speaker prefixes, and act and scene divisions); in civic pageants, prose descriptions of the event and other matters frame dramatic dialogic entertainments. Furthermore, in early modern drama, the main textual distinction is between verse and prose; in civic pageants, the main distinction is between dialogic and non-dialogic text, either of which might be prose or verse. Ultimately, the pageant book is a readerly description or a souvenir to commemorate an event that happens to include performance. The dialogic and narrative sections are interdependent as they cover the same event, but they are distinct in almost every other way².

Para14The prose of Civitatis Amor is poorly adapted from The Order and Solemnity. Therefore, reading and comprehending Civitatis Amor is a serious undertaking because long sentences with multiple clauses make the prose dense and difficult to parse. Names, titles, and details are switched from Henry’s to Charles’s installation without regard for the original sentence structure. The following table shows how a slight variation in the prose results in a more adjective-heavy and difficult sentence:

The Order and Solemnity (A4v)	Civitatis Amor (A3v)
shewing rare proofes of heroicall vertue	shewing the rare proofes of promising heroicall vertues

This minor example is one of many in the first prose paragraph that simultaneously emphasize the connection to The Order and Solemnity and highlight the impersonality of the prose in Civitatis Amor. Given how much of The Order and Solemnity is repurposed with minor variations for Civitatis Amor, it should be treated as a base text and included in the collation³.

Para15Civitatis Amor is divided into three sections: a prose introduction to the pageant, a verse section that contains two sub-sections (entertainments), and a concluding prose piece that describes the celebrations that took place after the entertainments.

Para16The sub-sections entitled The Entertainment by Water at Chelsea and Whitehall and The Entertainment at Whitehall include several labels or headings that provide non-dialogic information to the reader. The labels (e.g., Neptune gives action toward Thamesis and speaks:) give non-dialogic information about which character is speaking and their actions or movements. At first glance, these labels appear to provide the same content as dramatic stage directions, despite looking different on the page and containing more information than stage directions in early modern playbooks. Typically, stage directions in early modern playbooks are italicized while character names appear in roman type. Stage directions are usually centred or aligned right depending on whether they are an entrance or an exit. In this pageant book, some of the labels are printed in a larger font and appear centred, while others are printed in the same size font as the dialogue and appear with a hanging indent. The labels are often in roman type while the character names appear italicized–the opposite of what we see with early modern stage directions. Just when there seems to be consistency in the size and placement of these labels, the next one breaks the pattern.

Para17Scholar Tiffany Stern argues that stage directions are non-dialogue paratext (20), which means that they fall into a category of other paratextual material such as speaker prefixes, dumbshows, and act and scene divisions, that provide readerly information to accompany the crucial dialogue of the play. The text can function without stage directions because of dialogic clues (which can be referred to as dialogic or implied stage directions). Most of the labels in the first entertainment in Civitatis Amor align with what Stern has referred to as the blanket term ‘stage directionʼ (37) because they provide contextual information that could be gleaned from the dialogic exchanges. The first label (At Chelsea) in The Entertainment by Water at Chelsea and Whitehall is not vital because the previous prose section conveys the same information (Near Chelsea). This At Chelsea label easily becomes a stage direction in my modern text. Stage directions are inherently paratextual (Stern 20), and in most ways they are the closest analogue for these labels in civic pageantry.

Para18The textual crux of Civitatis Amor relates to a label that appears in Q1 as the last line in The Entertainment by Water at Chelsea and Whitehall as shown in this image:

London’s speech ends with a rhyming couplet Fame … / … Name and then, below a space equal to two compositorial lines, there is an unusual label: Neptune ------ Sound ----- On -----. This is the only label in the quarto that appears with words separated by a series of dashes; this label might be unique in the corpus of civic pageantry and might even be unique across Okes’ printed output. The centring of the label suggests that this could be a stage direction that indicates that Neptune should gesture to his Tritons to both sound their instruments and carry on; however, the editorial history suggests something else. For approaches to this crux, we turn to Nichols, Dyce, Bullen, and Bergeron before making an editorial and encoding decision.

Para19Nichols has a heavy editorial hand in Civitatis Amor. He makes Neptune ------ Sound ----- On ----- into the last line of London’s speech as a command to Neptune⁴. There are three problems with this decision: 1) Nichols ignores what seems to be a semantically significant compositorial space on the page, 2) Nichols misrepresents the relationship between the allegorical characters of London and Neptune; London, the city, does not have authority to command Neptune, the sea god, and 3) Nichols ignores the regular metrical pattern of London’s speech which carries an alternating rhyme scheme for an impressive 30 lines that concludes with a rhyming couplet Fame … / … Name. By adding Neptune, sound on. — Nichols disregards the integrity of the speech.

Para20Dyce departs from Nichols’ integration of the line into London’s speech. Instead of making Neptune ------ Sound ----- On ----- the final line in London’s speech, Dyce turns Neptune into a speaker prefix and sound on into a speech. Dyce’s decision is a more conservative and ultimately better resolution of the crux, for both textual and performance reasons. Dyce retains the rhyming couplet at the end of London’s speech. He is also considerate of London’s usurpation of Neptune’s authority when London says Sound, Tritons. (Sp4). London does not have the power to command Neptune’s Tritons, any more than London has the power to command Neptune. Neptune corrects London by reappropriating his power and reissuing the command to the Tritons through saying Sound—On— in effect giving two imperatives: to make noise and to move. This reading of the text flags a performance opportunity for the actors playing the Tritons to remain silent when London commands them to sound earlier in the entertainment. In a staging of this, the Tritons might look at Neptune to await his command. Given the longstanding power struggle between the city and the crown, this moment is a flattering acknowledgement of monarchical power taking precedence over civic power. Both Bullen and Bergeron adopt Dyce’s decision in their respective editions.

Para21My work on this textual crux relies on my previous research on approaches to encoding early modern stage directions for my Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award (2023) and my work as a research assistant on the LEMDO project (2021–present). The labels in Civitatis Amor often share a similar font and placement on the page which indicates that they are meant to be grouped together or function in a similar way. There is a possibility that these labels are meant to be stage directions, regardless of their dissimilarity to stage directions in early modern playbooks. Based on Stern’s definition, this phrase does not qualify as a stage direction because it is integral to the text. The dialogue does not provide this information in a secondary way.

Para22Neptune ------ Sound ----- On ----- looks vaguely like the other labels in Civitatis Amor that do qualify as stage directions, but the punctuation, content, and phrasing make it far from a stage direction. Evidence against the reading of this label as a stage direction appears in scholar Claire M. L. Bourne’s book Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England. Bourne posits that

In the first decade of the seventeenth century, dashes began appearing with notable frequency in the quartos of ‘published comediesʼ to assist readers in registering what might be called the fleshiness of performance–at first, excessive action and, later, more refined, moderate gesturing. They originated in the early quartos of Ben Jonson’s comical satires and persisted through the seventeenth century as a conventional feature of dramatic mise–en–page. (78)

Bourne’s assertion makes it clear that the dashes in this label imply that Sound ----- On ----- is a spoken command from Neptune to his Tritons. The semantically significant dashes and authoritative content indicate to the reader that Neptune speaks this command as well as gestures to his Tritons to both make noise and move forward. Furthermore, stage directions are consistently written in the present tense; therefore, this passage would need to be Neptune ------ Sounds ----- On ----- to reflect the phrasing of stage directions. If this textual crux were to be remedied through a stage direction, this edition would go against a significant editorial history. This edition opts to follow Dyce’s reading of the text; however, it does so with lengthy consideration of the editorial and encoding possibilities. The edition includes a thorough annotation to guide readers through the crux in real time. A case could be made for Neptune ------ Sound ----- On ----- as a stage direction, but with Bourne’s evidence, it is not a strong one.

Para23This edition has not yet taken The Order and Solemnity as a witness and collated it as such; however, it acknowledges the significance of The Order and Solemnity, without which Civitatis Amor would not exist in the same state. The Order and Solemnity will need to be extensively collated in a further iteration of this edition. I have started the preliminary collation work, and, when my collation is complete, this edition will be the only one to collate The Order and Solemnity as a base text, rather than just alluding to its significance in an introduction or footnotes.

Para24Future work on this project will also focus on collating and annotating the lists and names, as well as encoding and potentially interpolating other eyewitness accounts of the event. While Nichols’ additions are significant and interesting, these additions came to light over the course of the project. Therefore, managing Nichols’ additions falls beyond the scope of my 499 project and lends itself to further research. Long–term goals for this edition include expanding beyond Q1 to look at the intertextuality between Civitatis Amor and other early modern texts and pageants, such as The Order and Solemnity, excerpts from Chamberlain’s letters to Carleton, John Stow’s Annals of England, and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen and Amoretti. This future work will be completed during my summer 2024 research assistant work with LEMDO and/or in collaboration with Dr. Jenstad.