Para1In the history of scholarship on early modern English drama, Tes Irenes Trophaea, or The Triumphs of Peace (1620) has long been treated as doubly marginal: an outlier even among outliers. As an example of the mayoral show genre, the work belongs to a theatrical tradition that has been viewed by many commentators as concerned more with commercial gain and political flattery than with literary or aesthetic value. Likewise, the relative unfamiliarity of the text’s author, John Squire, has tended to invite less interest in his work than in that of his pageant-writing contemporaries—a group populated by such comparatively well-known playwrights for the public stage as John Webster, George Peele, and Thomases Heywood, Dekker, and Middleton. For these reasons, Squire’s pageant book has typically received only glancing attention from scholars, even in more recent studies that trace the development of the mayoral show over time and that argue for its importance to early modern London’s civic and theatrical cultures. This critical introduction aims to counter that trend by presenting a new perspective on Squire’s show, one that sees it not as an errant data point in an otherwise tidy scatter plot but as a tellingly singular literary and dramatic achievement. Precisely because it complicates existing scholarly narratives about mayoral shows during this period, Tes Irenes Trophaea can serve as an illuminating foil for both its broader genre and its historical moment.

Para2As Tracey Hill has shown in her comprehensive study Pageantry and Power, performances celebrating the investiture of London’s new Lord Mayor date from the medieval era, but these mayoral shows assumed greater regularity and social importance in the 1580s as the city’s major livery companies competed to fund and design lavish spectacles that glorified both their own authority and that of the City at large. The same period also witnessed a shift toward the more regular production of pageant books describing these performances, which combined detailed accounts of the elaborately decorated pageant floats with transcriptions of the speeches that had been delivered by their various allegorical or mythological personages and even, in a few cases, the music that had been performed for the occasion.¹ By the time of Tes Irenes Trophaea in 1620, the basic features of such pageants and the route they took through London’s streets and major sites had become relatively standardized.Far from fostering a sense of stale repetition, though, the tendency of mayoral shows to revisit the same locations year after year served to transform London’s various sites, in the apt words of Mark Beatrice Kaethler, into living and active participants in the dramatic action, with common features like the Thames river, the Guildhall, and the incumbent Lord Mayor’s own house accumulating rich layers of aesthetic and cultural significance through this annual sequence of performative rituals (68).

Para3At the same time, Tes Irenes Trophaea is a relatively distinctive entry in this mayoral show tradition, in part because neither its author nor its dedicatee appears to have been a typical or ideal participant in what was rapidly becoming a mutually rewarding collaboration between London’s dramatic authors and the members of its wealthy guilds. The Io. Squire named on the text’s title page was, as J. Caitlin Finlayson argues, probably best known by his contemporaries not as an accomplished playwright but as a priest in the London suburb of Shoreditch (531-39). And Hill similarly observes that the show’s subject, the Haberdasher Francis Jones, eventually found the cost of bearing the mayoralty too great, with one contemporary source describing how, before even finishing out his term, he convey[ed] all of worth out of his house, and he and his wife into some secret corner of the countrie (64). Rather than taking these details as exceptions that prove the rule of how the mayoral show functioned in this period, this introduction will suggest that Tes Irenes Trophaea should prompt us to rewrite the rule altogether.

Para4This General Introduction begins by outlining some broad trends in the previous scholarship that deals in any way (however glancing) with Squire’s mayoral show. It then turns to review the case for the unusual authorship of Tes Irenes Trophaea and considers what this attribution can (and cannot) tell us about the show and its production. And, finally, it explores how Squire’s mayoral show develops its own distinctive vision of peace—and of the difficult work of cultivating and maintaining it. Although the personified figure of Peace (alongside its counterpart in War) appears regularly in mayoral shows of the period, Squire’s work advances a more expansive, ambivalent vision of peace than that found in other pageants—one defined not merely by the absence of armed conflict but by regulated and controlled forms of violence in defense of a socioeconomic order that may have its origins in the familiar streets of London but which, ultimately, is imagined as extending its reach across the entire globe. By attending closely to this fraught concept of peace that animates the show, this introduction (and the edition as a whole) aims to resituate Tes Irenes Trophaea in relation not only to the mayoral show genre but also to the long histories of diplomacy, trade, and colonialism that inform it.

Para5Like most other works in the genre of the mayoral show, Tes Irenes Trophaea received brief and obligatory mentions in standard reference texts on early modern English drama, including W. Carew Hazlitt’s A Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays (1892), G. E. Bentley’s The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1946), and W. W. Greg’s A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (1951). And, also like most other works of its genre, it only received more sustained attention in its own right as part of a broader critical turn in the later twentieth century toward exploring how the period’s theatrical practices extended far beyond previous scholarship’s focus almost exclusively on the purpose-built London playhouses. Squire’s own work still remains relatively under-examined, however, because even this partial reappraisal has tended to prioritize those mayoral shows composed by playwrights who also wrote for the professional stage, and to frame their significance in terms of how they can help us better understand the arc of those authors’ lives and careers.

Para6To take one prominent example of this phenomenon, Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s 2007 Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works reflects the new scholarly status of mayoral shows by placing the titular playwright’s contributions to the genre on equal footing with his plays for the professional stage; his first pageant book The Triumphs of Truth is here immediately followed by his first collaboration with William Rowley, Wit At Several Weapons, and both texts receive the same degree of editorial care and attention. But even as Triumphs of Truth editor David M. Bergeron begins his introduction by wryly lamenting how many scholars of English drama still cross to the other side of the street when they see a civic pageant approaching, he later muses that it is only [i]n the hands of Munday, Dekker, and Middleton that the Jacobean Lord Mayor’s show gains a complexity unknown in the previous reign (Bergeron 963-65).

Para7Moreover, even those studies not organized around an individual author’s corpus frequently tend to privilege the contributions of professional playwrights in the mold of Middleton, as evidenced by Bergeron’s own comments on Squire’s Tes Irenes Trophaea in his 1971 English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642:

John Squire (1620) and John Webster (1624) interrupted Middleton’s monopoly on the Lord Mayor’s Show of the closing years of the Jacobean period. And in the next decade John Taylor in 1634 broke the string of successive mayoral pageants written by Thomas Heywood, the subject of the next chapter… these three men became the only dramatists to write only one pageant each. In a sense these three authors stand out for their non-involvement in civic drama. (199)

Bergeron goes on to offer what was, especially for its time, a relatively generous assessment of the show itself, attending closely to its layered allegorical significance and its embeddedness in the civic politics of early seventeenth-century London before equably concluding that Squire maintains good control of his diverse material… he sustains a high level of interest throughout (204). But the larger framing of that discussion nevertheless figures Squire’s work as an almost unfortunate spoiler on an otherwise unbroken streak of achievements by more notable literary worthies.

Para8Tes Irenes Trophaea features more neutrally in Hill’s Pageantry and Power, where it is briefly mentioned in a larger discussion of how the preparation of each year’s mayoral show also served as a business opportunity in which fees and services constantly changed hands. Hill notes that, in addition to John Squire’s commission for composing the show (for which he and the pageants’ artificer, Francis Tipsley, were jointly paid £180), his possible relations William Squire and Francis Squire received various payments in 1620, although the Haberdashers’ records do not say what for (94). Arguably the only sustained discussion of the show’s themes to date is a 2013 article by J. Caitlin Finlayson, which contends that Squire’s work is distinctive within its genre for its emphasis on monarchical rather than mayoral authority (587). While the final section of this introduction will suggest that the vision of peace (and of the political power wielded to achieve it) in Tes Irenes Trophaea is more multifaceted and ambivalent than these comments might suggest, Finlayson’s article nevertheless provides a serious critical engagement with its content that is long overdue, and on which the present edition seeks to build.

Para9As noted above, it is also largely thanks to Finlayson that we can attribute Tes Irenes Trophaea to a particular John Squire at all. As she compellingly argues in a 2010 study, the most likely candidate for the show’s authorship is the John Squire (1587-1653) probably best known to his contemporaries as vicar of the parish of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, where he served from 1612 until 1643 (536-37). Finlayson’s provisional attribution helps resolve a question that has dogged the show since its first publication: the title page of the pageant book itself names only Io. Squire as its author, leading most early commentators to follow the example of the antiquarian and editor John Nichols when he concluded in 1828 that [o]f Squire nothing is recorded. The present is his only known production (619). Though the attribution to Finlayson’s candidate of choice had previously been ventured by the editors of the Short Title Catalogue (STC), scholars like G. E. Bentley had responded to such claims by skeptically noting that while [i]n the S.T.C. this pageant and several sermons printed 1618-37 are all listed under one John Squire… it does not seem likely that a lord mayor’s pageant would have been written by a clergyman; it is apparently this assumption that theatrical writing was de facto unsuitable for a priest that leads Bentley instead to assign it to the only university-educated John Squire alive in 1620 who did not join the clergy, John Squyrs of St. Alban Hall, whose biography is otherwise incomplete (1185).

Para10Finlayson’s convincing claim that Tes Irenes Trophaea was authored not by a secular dramatist otherwise completely unknown to historians but by a working priest—and one who was also, importantly, the author of several published sermons—can enrich our understanding of the show’s production and reception even as it also raises additional questions. As virtually every scholar of mayoral shows has observed, the typical pageant book author of this period was an established professional playwright who participated in creating several shows for different sponsoring companies over a number of years. As a pageant author best known for his work in another genre, Squire was not the first of his kind; his onetime foray into dramatic writing was preceded by that of the balladeer Thomas Nelson, who had furnished the Device of the Pageant (edited by Laurie Ellinghausen in this anthology) for the Fishmongersʼs Company in 1590. But it nevertheless remains to ask: why would the wealthy and well-connected Haberdashers’ Company have selected a London priest to commemorate the appointment of their company member Francis Jones as the Lord Mayor in 1620? In her effort to answer this question (and, in so doing, to strengthen the case for her attribution), Finlayson notes that John Squire, vicar had introduced one of his printed sermons with a dedication to SIR Francis Iones; Alderman of London that effusively praised the latter’s generosity and virtue (536); this sermon, delivered in 1619 and published in 1621, suggests a relatively close relationship between the two men at precisely the moment when Tes Irenes Trophaea was being prepared and staged. In light of that fact, it may simply have been that the Haberdashers were seeking above all a writer willing to toe the company line, one who could furnish a straightforward celebration of their peer of just the kind that Squire had willingly offered up to parishioners and readers not long before.

Para11Other potential connections between Squire’s clerical career and his dramatic work may also repay further consideration. Most circumstantially, his parish of St Leonard’s in Shoreditch was known among contemporaries as the Actors’ church; located near the Theatre and Curtain playhouses, in this period it also became the burial place for theatrical luminaries like James (d. 1597), Richard (d. 1619), and Cuthbert (d. 1636) Burbage, among others. Such proximity alone may have inclined Squire toward relative attentiveness to the professional London stage as compared with other members of the clergy.

Para12Even more significant and suggestive are the thematic, linguistic, and devotional affinities between Tes Irenes Trophaea and Squire’s published sermons, all of which display a persistent fascination with the living fabric of the city itself. As scholars like Hill have argued, the prototypical mayoral show is best understood not as a one-off piece of ephemeral entertainment but as a profoundly ceremonial ritual that invited Londoners to cultivate a distinct civic identity and that reinforced their relationships to the urban environments that surrounded and sustained them; that ceremonialism often extended (both literally and figuratively) into explicitly devotional territory, with sacred stopping points like St Paul’s Cathedral and frequent invocations of divine support for the mayor’s office lending the entire performance a faintly holy sheen (10). If the mayoral show can be said in some sense to sanctify the entire City through such associations, so too do Squire’s published sermons imagine London as a glittering constellation of officially sanctioned sites of worship, each of them rooted in place by faithful congregations like his own.

Para13For example, in his Whitsunday Sermon Appointed for the New-Churchyard, by London (1621)—the same text in which he praised Francis Jones’s munificence—Squire expounds at length on how the Lord seemeth to preserve a perpetual Pentecost unto your City, an unending ritual in which an abundance of Hearers is keenly attuned to the miraculously speaking tongues of no contemptible Preachers as they gather together in the publike place of Devotion (5-6). Squire’s case for the spiritual and moral rewards of communal worship is undoubtedly a response to the budding anti-clericalism of the early 1620s, but it is also strikingly germane to the collective experiences furnished by his own and others’ mayoral shows in the same period. Even more notably, the concept and person of Peace that reigns triumphantly over Squire’s mayoral show also makes numerous appearances in these published sermons. The 1621 text seems almost to provide a parallel prose narrative to the progress staged by Tes Irenes Trophaea, particularly in its discussion of how Poore peace… is not a Soiourner in our Land, but a stranger in our nation (10). And a collection of three sermons published in 1637 (itself dedicated to then-Lord Mayor Edward Bromfield) similarly invokes Peace in the Church, and Conformitie to the Discipline of the Church as a virtue modeled by the citizens of London for the benefit of all other subjects in the realm—even as Squire pre-emptively notes, if I exhort the Countrie to write after that Copie which is set them by this Citie, and to imitate the workes of charity and piety performed by many worthy Londoners, others would condemne me for as pernicious Popularitie (2). As Finlayson observes in her entry on Squire for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, this model of virtue radiating outward from court and city and penetrating the furthest reaches of the realm conforms nicely with a mayoral show containing a representation of a cohesive and harmonious social structure that depicts the Respublica Beata (Finlayson).

Para14Squire’s praise for Conformitie with the established Church of England in this sermon anticipates the very dissension and conflict that would see him removed from office just a few years later. In 1641, he was accused in Parliament of harbouring Popish sympathies, and in 1643 he was arrested and imprisoned along with other clergy who had declared their support for the king and bishops and had thereby taken the losing side in the burgeoning English Civil War (Finlayson). Although the strong association between Royalism and support for (or at least tacit acceptance of) theatregoing reinforced by the events of the 1640s was by no means fully formed when Tes Irenes Trophaea was staged twenty years prior, these events of Squire’s later life may nevertheless indicate that he took a more thoughtful and engaged stance toward London performance cultures—both sacred and secular—than was presumed possible by earlier generations of critics.

Para15The following sections of this introduction take the conceit of Peace that sits at the centre of Squire’s show as a guide for traversing some of its major elements and themes, with the aim of illuminating a few of the many facets of the text that have been neglected in previous scholarship. Although the personification of Peace does not speak in her own voice until near the end of Squire’s show, the idea for which she stands structures the text from the very beginning. The title page prominently features an epigraph from Virgil’s Georgics, a collection of poems which (in contrast with The Aeneid’s epic treatment of arms and the man) features the regular rhythms of a peaceful, rural life.² Indeed, the literary scholar Melissa Schoenberger has gone so far as to suggest that the Georgics helped to introduce into early modern English culture a new notion of peace as a cultivated and mutable state, one defined not as the simple absence or binary opposite of war, but rather as the result of taking the same materials of human thought and activity that might ordinarily lead to war and orienting them toward more fruitful ends (11).

Para16When the embodiment of Peace does first appear in the show, she does so as an inhabitant of its third presentment or pageant: a quadrangle that mounted by ascents to the form of an Egyptian pyramid. But Peace remains silent for now, with the printed description of this structure going on instead to highlight how on the top sat a princely Majesty accoutred in a robe of purple velvet furred with ermines, on his head he wore an imperial crown, and in his right hand a sceptre. The distinctly royal imagery here, itself somewhat unusual in a show that was nominally intended to celebrate the mayoralty rather than the monarchy, is further elaborated by

four persons, that seemed as it were to underprop the ponderous burden of the pyramid; the first was the City, presented in a scarlet gown guarded with black velvet, like a lady mayoress, and in her hand two golden keys; the other the Country in a rustic habit; the third the Law, habited like a judge, and a scroll in his hand; the fourth Religion in a rochet like a bishop, and in his hand a book.

Taken together, the component parts of this pyramid seem to present Squire’s spectators with a harmonious vision of national unity. Where most surviving mayoral shows figure London as a jurisdiction with its own history, laws, communities, and duly appointed leaders (who did not always work hand-in-glove with royal authorities), this display instead positions the City as just one of four pillars in support of the Crown, no more important or worthy of praise than the abstract entities of Law and Religion. Finlayson’s 2013 article on the show cites these details in order to argue that Tes Irenes Trophaea is concerned primarily with the king, the present state of the realm, and the policy crisis of 1620—not the celebration of the city as an economic power or the instruction of the mayor in the ideals of municipal government. For Finlayson, the anomalous foregrounding of this figure of imperial majesty appeals directly to King James I’s well-known image as a peacemaker and pleads for a continuation of James’s active peacemaking policy against the immediate threat of continental religious wars (587, 585).

Para17While Finlaysonʼs reading usefully illuminates how even resolutely local performances like this one could comment on matters of national or royal policy, I would also like to suggest that the model of peace at the heart of Squireʼs show is not envisioned as the exclusive province of the Crown, especially when considered alongside other conceptions of peacekeeping that were current in this era. In an extended study of this term’s manifold seventeenth-century significations, Phil Withington notes that texts of the period collectively articulate a complicated and enriched sense of peace which encapsulated material, social, political and spiritual well-being and freedom; in a case of bitter irony, the flurry of pamphlets that preceded the outbreak of Civil War in the early 1640s tended to advance an active and intrinsically civic conception of peace… alongside notions of liberties, laws, freedoms and estates, as a fundamental attribute of the subject, making the defense of such peace a valuable justification for war among both Royalists and Parliamentarians (149). Similarly, the editors of a recent collection on early modern European practices of peacemaking observe that such practices are fundamentally about mitigating and regulating violence in ways that promote a given ideal of social order—and which, crucially, do not preclude the targeted use of violence against colonial subjects or those marginalized by the period’s raced and gendered hierarchies (Goode and Smolenski 5). It is this mutually sustaining relationship between peace, war, and the business of the city to which the final two sections of this introduction will turn.

Para18Most significantly, the show’s vision of peace can only fully be understood in relation to its depiction of European commerce and colonial mastery—a depiction no less potent for its being relatively conventional in mayoral shows of the period. It is thus worth quoting and analyzing at length the first presentment of Tes Irenes Trophaea, which would have taken place on the waters of the Thames, and which consists of

a stately well-built ship, bearing full sail, figuring the traffic or trade of the (worthy to be esteemed noble) company of the Haberdashers… at each corner of the ship sat (upon small islands) the four parts of the world, Asia, Africa, America, and Europa, each of them inviting their trade unto their coasts.

Such displays amply bear out Ania Loomba’s claim that mayoral shows do not limit their horizon to the City of London but are also keenly aware of the colonial possibilities of trade and commerce around the world (1714). Here, the Thames is both the literal foundation of Squire’s theatrical performance and a figurative gateway to a maritime environment that seamlessly links London to the globe’s known continents and all their riches. Moreover, in bringing together visual emblems of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the display underscores the often-overlooked dynamic, recently highlighted by historian Lisa Lowe in The Intimacies of Four Continents, between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades (1)

Para19Indeed, those interconnections or intimacies are only further elaborated as the playtext continues its description:

Asia was attired in an antique habit of peach coloured satin, and buskins of the same, a coronet on her head, and a censer in her hand reeking with Panchaian spices; Africa a blackmoore in a naked shape, adorned with beads, and in her hand the branch of a nutmeg tree; America a tawny moor, upon her head a crown of feathers, and bases of the same, at her back a quiver of shafts, and in her hand a Parthian bow; Europa in a robe of crimson taffeta, on her head an imperial crown conferred on her by the other three as empress of the earth, and holding in her hand a cluster of grapes, to signify her full swollen plenty.

The materials that attend and adorn each of these figures are of course, on one level, a celebration of the wealth and skill of the Haberdashers Company that had sponsored Squire’s show. The conspicuous mention of rich fabrics like satin and taffeta invokes the contemporary association between the Haberdashers and the importing of foreign materials like silk and velvet; that association is further reinforced by a note at the end of the text, which extends the credit of this workmanship (curiously exceeding many former shows, and far more rich than any, in regard no metal was used to adorn it but gold and silver) to Francis Tipsley, Citizen and Haberdasher of London. At the same time, the deliberate comprehensiveness and conventionality of these representations suggest an investment not merely in specific patterns of exchange between London and colonial ports but in an all-encompassing system of peaceful labour and trade—one that results in Europe assuming her rightful place as empress of the earth, her grapes swollen to bursting with the acquisition of Panchaian spices or the products of a nutmeg tree.

Para20In particular, the pageant’s depictions of Africa as a blackmoor in a naked shape and of the Americas as a tawny moor treat the spectacle of a female black figure as an object of exotic voyeurism—a tendency that Philip Robinson has also observed at work in Thomas Middleton’s mayoral show The Triumphs of Honour and Virtue (1622), which contains a similar figure (par. 11). Squire’s show may initially appear to be less directly concerned with English colonial endeavours than other mayoral shows, several of which make explicit reference to the then-rapidly expanding East India Company.³ As recent work by Noémie Ndiaye in the field of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) reminds us, however, the representation of racial difference as part of a growing network of colonial fantasies among European powers can function independently of the success or failure of their actual colonial enterprises—a fact amply evidenced by the profusion of racial discourse in countries like England and France well before their first serious attempts to exploit or settle in non-European lands (46). These depictions, that is, may tell us little about the realities of London’s role in the history of colonialism circa 1620, but they can reveal much about the history of racialization in English drama and culture during this same historical moment. These distant coasts are connected to London itself in a neat economic circuit through the ensuing appearance of a fourth presentment, being the main pageant, in which the Haberdashers’ patron saint, Katherine, is attended by

her servants at work, some carding wool, some spinning, others knitting caps; with her feltmakers, one bowed, one basoned, and another blocked; and behind the mount sat a shepherd keeping his sheep

The scene described here functions as a direct counterpart to the personifications of the continents discussed above, contrasting the passive and exploitable riches of these foreign regions with the active labour of honest English people even as their proximity and structural resemblance suggests that both phenomena are intertwined within a larger world system.

Para21It is only in the wake of this and the show’s other displays that Tes Irenes Trophaea finally unveils its title character, who now emerges from the previously examined third presentment or pageant float to address the incumbent Lord Mayor as the procession reaches its conclusion. The speech sees Peace wearily describing how her long pilgrimage did never cease; she was hurled / Out of each region by rebellious War before ultimately receiving safe haven from an England that was itself not yet, at that time, fully pacified:

To this (then troubled) state, which did embrace

Me with such joy, that nobles flocked apace,

To entertain me, and the poor did stand,

To crave my blessing, to oʼerflow their land;

And jointly all of them delivered War,

Fettered in chains to be my prisoner.

As Peace reveals here, it has been precisely the social harmony created by this very mayoral show that allows tranquility to o’erflow England. Viewed in this light, the peace envisioned by Squire’s show appears less like the simple absence of armed conflict along religious lines and more like a state of total economic and political concord that may begin within England but that will radiate across the globe. If Tes Irenes Trophaea can partly be read as a topical plea for the sovereign James to maintain peace within and beyond his kingdoms, as Finlayson has claimed, the show also invokes that royal power in support of an enterprise that is, ultimately, economic and colonial.

Para22How does Squire suggest that peace is to be maintained? The answer, at least as indicated by the conclusion of his show, involves a sword. The final speaker in Tes Irenes Trophaea is not Peace but War, who similarly announces her intentions from her place within the pyramid that formed the third display in the procession. War explains,

I bear

Captivity about me; yet like one

That renders servitude for love, nor fear,

Employing his devotion to be shown,

As free as if his mind could captivate

His will, I yield to sacred Peace

At the behest of Peace and her patrons (in the form of the Lord Mayor and all of London’s citizens), War has willingly entered into voluntary, loving servitude—a seemingly paradoxical state which, as Urvashi Chakravarty has recently shown, was the subject of fierce and fractured cultural attention in early modern England (3-4).

Para23As the speech continues, it becomes clear that Peace cannot flourish in the absence of War; rather, the two are mutually sustaining and enabling:

should it chance

That any foreign arms from out this throne

Strive to enforce her, I will then advance

My ensigns to her aid, and make it known

That this is her inheritance, and place,

Which heaven hath pointed out to be her rest;

And therefore worthy Lord follow the trace

Of noble precedents, and in thy breast,

Resolve of future hazards, and prepare

Me such provisions that if times should cease,

To be unto this land as now they are,

War might restore again the palm to Peace.

A triumphant celebration of commercial peace here shades effortlessly into an accompanying scene of the Lord Mayor stockpiling weapons and other commodities in support of a just war. And were this effect not striking enough for Squire’s spectators and readers, the printed text concludes with a description of how Peace and War dismounted from under the pyramid, Peace conducted the Lord Mayor into his house, and War stood with fire and sword to defend his gates.

Para24It is not unusual in the literature of the period to describe England as a kind of Eden—we need look no further than John of Gaunt’s famous description of his country in William Shakespeare’s Richard II. But it is considerably less common to explicitly invoke the flaming sword planted there in the biblical account as a stark reminder of what would, after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden, be denied to them forever. Read in this flickering and fearsome light, John Squire’s Tes Irenes Trophaea reminds us that its titular triumphs are ultimately those that remain possible in a fallen world: a contingent, watchful peace only made possible by the threat of future war. It also reminds us that, while the show is profoundly shaped by the generic, economic, and political contexts of its specific historical moment, the larger questions that animate it—questions of whether state power can or should be marshalled to promote economic enterprise, or of whether peace can truly be cultivated through the omnipresent threat of violence—are no less urgent in our own era of nuclear mutual assured destruction, trade embargoes that condemn millions to privation, and peacekeeping programs enforced at the barrel of a gun.