Para1No trace of the pageant book for John Squire’s Tes Irenes Trophaea (1620) appears in the Stationers’ Register. In this respect, it is similar to most other shows of the period: only six of the thirty-one pageant books now extant possess such entries (Hill 229). Although entering a title believed to be particularly saleable into the Register could theoretically help publishers protect their investment by preventing unauthorized imitations of their copy, these low numbers by themselves tell us little about pageant books’ perceived literary or market value either in absolute terms or in relation to other contemporary genres. A significant minority of all texts, whether popular or less so, similarly went unrecorded in the Register during the decades in which submitting entries was not legally required (Blayney 404; Finlayson 79). And, as Tracey Hill observes, while it may be the case that copies of the pageant books were primarily intended for free distribution to members of the performance’s sponsoring company, rather than being advertised and sold more widely, the texts’ potential to celebrate these members’ corporate virtues among broader reading publics would also have provided a powerful incentive for making at least some copies available to them (220).

Para2We can speak with greater certainty about the person responsible for producing Tes Irenes Trophaea: as its title page plainly indicates, the pageant book was [p]rinted by Nicholas Okes (sig. A1r). Okes and his son John were by some measure the most commonly used printers for the Shows, being responsible for seventeen of the thirty-one extant works from this period (Hill 223). Tes Irenes Trophaea exhibits many of the typographical features displayed in earlier pageant books issued by Okes and which, by its appearance in 1620, had become characteristic of the print genre of the mayoral show more generally. Squire’s descriptions of what he calls the show’s various presentments are formatted as prose in roman type, with italics used for emphasis, while the texts of individual speeches (like those of Oceanus or Aeolus) take the form of rhyming couplets in italics, with roman type here conversely used to indicate emphasis. Similar methods of distinguishing between language ostensibly spoken during the show and descriptive accounts of its various elements had previously been deployed by Okes in his pageant books for Thomas Dekker’s Troia-Nova Triumphans (1612) and Anthony Munday’s Sidero-Thriambos (1617). In terms of its appearance, then, Tes Irenes Trophaea should be seen as the continuation of a proven artistic and commercial trend. Two distinctive elements of the pageant book do warrant special consideration that may shed some light on its production, however.

Para3The first is the unusual temporality of its language. Most of Tes Irenes Trophaea consists of descriptions of the show in the past tense, setting it apart from other pageant books like that of Thomas Middleton’s Triumphs of Truth (1613), which use the present tense throughout. To take one example, where Squire’s account recollects at some remove how [t]he first shew, or presentment, on the water, was a Chariot driven by the sea-god Oceanus (sig. A3r), Middleton’s show confronts readers with a more immediate present-tense account of how, just as the Lord Mayor triumphantly steps forth from the doors of the Guildhall, a Trumpet plac’d upon that Scaffold, sounds forth his welcome (969).¹ This past-tense perspective might be taken to indicate that the pageant book of Tes Irenes Trophaea should definitively be understood as a record of performance rather than a plan for (or a parallel to) it, with the potential to function both as a souvenir for those who attended the show and as a commemorative object for those not fortunate enough to do so.

Para4Any conclusion along these lines is complicated, however, by the pageant book’s dedicatory epistle to mayoral honoree Sir Francis Jones, which Hill contends

quite clearly positions itself as a programme through its use of the present tense and in the way in which it represents the relationship between the book and the event. In the dedication the author expresses the wish that the text will add to the ‘pleasure’ he hopes the Lord Mayor ‘will conceiue at view of those reall Tryumphs’ (sig. A2r). It is as if Francis Jones had been handed a copy before the day’s festivities began. (232)

Taken at face value, then, the pageant book seems to present readers with a bafflingly hybrid text: they hold a copy of an address to the new Lord Mayor that will inform his experience of a performance that is yet to occur, while turning forward just a few pages dumps them in the midst of past events that have already assumed their place within the city’s rich history. The apparent incongruity between these two temporal framings in Tes Irenes Trophaea highlights an ongoing question in studies of mayoral shows more generally: were the printed pageant books that are now our fullest sources for understanding them originally intended or actually circulated in advance of their performances, partly in order to serve as a real-time guide to their webs of visual and verbal significance, or were they only made available to readers after these events had concluded?

Para5Any answers to this question are likely to depend on the specific circumstances surrounding a given pageant book and will remain highly speculative in the absence of new documentary evidence. In the case of Tes Irenes Trophaea, for instance, it is entirely possible that Squire did provide Sir Francis Jones with his dedication in manuscript (or even as a public oration) before the performance had begun, and then used the text of that dedication as the basis for the epistle that appears in the printed text to be circulated to a wider readership. But there is at present no way of confirming this or any other hypothetical sequence of events, which in any case would explain little about the distinctive nature of the pageant book itself. Faced with these irresolvable gaps in knowledge, we may recall David M. Bergeron’s influential conclusion that readers must experience the pageant text as an event itself, resembling but differing from the show and that, by the same token, [r]ather than merely re-presenting the dramatic occasion, the dramatist mediates this dramatic performance: he imitates and innovates (167-68). These variations in tense, in other words, may finally tell us more about the creative influence of Squire—and, indeed, that of Okes and the performance’s sponsoring company, the Drapers—than it does about the historical facts of when and how the text’s various elements were actually produced and circulated.

Para6The second remarkable element of Tes Irenes Trophaea’s pageant book is its inclusion of a printed musical score, making it one of only two pre-1640 shows from which this element survives (Finlayson 80). The brief song occupies a single page opening in the text (sig. B1v-B2r); it includes two melodic lines and accompanying lyrics, attributed here to the muses Euterpe and Terpsichore as part of the show’s second and last presentment on the water (sig. A4r). Its unusual presence serves as a valuable reminder that these mayoral shows were a profoundly multimedia art form, combining a rich array of sonic and visual elements in order to furnish a large-scale aesthetic, cultural, and political experience for participants.

Para7The pageant book is one of several from the period that survives in a single copy, now held in the collections of the Guildhall Library, London. Because I have not personally examined it, I will refrain from commenting on any copy-specific details here. The present edition is based instead on the remediated version of the text in the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database; for this reason, the contributions of the present edition could also be further enhanced by a first-hand examination of the printed text. Readers may also wish to consult the facsimile edition of the pageant book edited by J. Caitlin Finlayson in 2015, which provides both a complete bibliographical description of the Guildhall copy and a reconstruction of its known ownership history (79-82).

Para8Finlayson’s is one of two modern editions of the pageant book of Tes Irenes Trophaea, each of which presents an old-spelling version of the text (or at least, as will be discussed below, something approximating it), and each of which is based on the same extant copy now held at the Guildhall Library. The first of these editions was published in The Processes, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First (1828). This four-volume edition of documentary sources relating to the reign of the titular monarch was the culmination of a decades-long enterprise begun by the antiquarian and printer John Nichols and completed posthumously by his grandson, John Gough Nichols. It followed the publication of a similarly expansive collection of Elizabethan sources; the two collections, though they both appeared under John Nichols’s name, were both under development throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, making it functionally impossible to distinguish John Nichols’s own editorial contributions from those of his grandson and his many other collaborators (Goldring et al. 22-23). I will hereafter refer to this edition simply as Nichols’s for the sake of convenience.

Para9In keeping with his antiquarian ambitions, Nichols presents Tes Irenes Trophaea not in relation to other mayoral shows of the period but as a single thread in a monumental tapestry that purports to depict life under James I by collecting (as the title page puts it) Original Manuscripts, Scarce Pamphlets, Corporation Records, Parochial Registers, and other documentary sources (Nichols). Given the showʼs subject matter, its presentation as a specifically Jacobean spectacle works to reinforce Jamesʼs own self-fashioning as a Solomonic peacekeeper. Because these widely varied materials are presented in rough chronological order, the text is sandwiched between reproductions of other documents from 1620 that record, respectively, James’ creation of the Earl of Cork and his calling of a new parliament. One consequence of this collage-like method of organization—albeit probably an unintended one on Nichols’s part—is to remind readers of the complex relationships among different forms of institutional, economic, and political power that animated mayoral shows and other ritual performances in early seventeenth-century London. Though James and his royal authority are referenced only obliquely within Tes Irenes Trophaea, which is generally similar to most mayoral shows in its emphasis on the power of the titular officeholder, the long-running disputes over jurisdiction between Crown and City in this period loom quietly behind many moments of the show in ways that Nichols’s project helps to illuminate, and which I discuss further in the General Introduction to this edition.

Para10As a scholarly edition of the pageant book, though, the text presented in Nichols’s antiquarian compendium falls short in several respects. As Finlayson succinctly puts it in her own apparatus, Nichols’s edition is not reliable, containing numerous transcription errors. Moreover, Nichols’s treatment of spelling is inconsistent within his edition, choosing to modernize the spelling of only select words. Likewise, capitalization is followed in some instances, but not in others, and occasionally added by Nichols. His reasoning for such alterations to the text is neither explained nor immediately apparent (89). At the same time, the longstanding value of Nichols’s collections in making these archival documents available to scholars around the world, particularly in the era before EEBO, has led to a reconsideration of his sometimes haphazard editorial work in recent years (Bergeron 779). Led by the John Nichols Project at the University of Warwick, one product of that reconsideration is a modern edition of The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I (2014), in which the original source documents assembled by Nichols have been re-edited according to an explicit and consistent scholarly standard (Goldring et al. 1-37).

Para11The second modern edition of Tes Irenes Trophaea preceding the present one is that of Finlayson, published by the Malone Society in 2015. Here, Squire’s work is accompanied by the Water Poet John Taylor’s entry in the mayoral show tradition, The Triumphs of Fame and Honour (1634); Finlayson notes in her introductory material that, unlike most of the period’s other pageant books, these two were not authored by figures generally recognized (either in their era or our own) as established professional playwrights, leading to their relative neglect by scholars (77). In addition to a critical introduction that includes the bibliographical description and provenance history noted above, Finlayson’s edition offers readings of several unclear words and phrases in the original text (89-90). The pageant book itself, however, is presented only as a photo-facsimile of the Guildhall copy, and the edition otherwise contains no running commentary on the show’s contents. As such, the most significant contribution of the present edition is to provide, for the first time, a modernized and fully annotated version of the original pageant book.

Para12In preparing this modern text of Tes Irenes Trophaea, I have completed a vertical collation of significant readings from the Nichols and Finlayson editions discussed above. While Finlayson summarily notes of Nichols’s edition that no historical collation is warranted (89), in my view, the fact that his transcription was for more than a century the only version of the text available to readers and scholars not able to view the pageant book in person justifies its inclusion in the present edition, where it can serve as evidence of the long history (however uneven or methodologically flawed) of scholarly and critical engagement with Squire’s work. Because there is only a single surviving copy of the original pageant book, no horizontal collation of early editions has been possible.

Para13In modernizing the text of the pageant book, I have followed the editorial standards of the MoEML Anthology of Mayoral Shows with respect to spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. These guidelines, in turn, are largely based on general principles established by David Bevington and Stanley Wells, which I have also consulted independently (Bevington; Wells). The spellings of virtually all words have been modernized except in those rare cases where there is a significant difference in meaning or where the term possesses no modern equivalent that remains in regular usage. The most notable of these is the obsolete and derogatory term now most commonly rendered as blackamoor, which the pageant book spells blackmoore (sig. A3v); here I have removed the unpronounced terminal e but have otherwise retained Squireʼs usage, given its differing number of syllables and the fact that it was another recognized form in the period. All emphasis capitals have been reduced to lowercase, with the exception of instances where the text refers to the performed personification of an abstract concept rather than the concept itself (e.g., Peace as a speaker in the show rather than the general idea of peace). I have expanded most contractions except where they are required to maintain the meter of verse lines, as in the case of Oceanus’s claim that he has been ʼticed into praising the Thames (sig. A4r). I have made changes to punctuation primarily in cases where doing so is necessary for modern readers to understand the conceptual relationship between clauses. For example, the pageant bookʼs descriptions of each display are often comprised of multiply nested lists, in which a sequence of named figures is each identified by numerous elements of their costume, props, etc. In these cases, I have used semicolons to separate top-level list items and commas to separate entries within subordinate lists. I have otherwise taken a relatively minimalist approach to punctuation that avoids making changes simply in order to bring the rhythm or flow of phrases (rather than their semantic meaning) in line with modern expectations.

Para14The overarching aim of these decisions has been to create a version of the text that is easily comprehensible for modern users but which does not unnecessarily obscure either the frequent strangeness of its language or the historical specificity of its production and content. It is precisely that vexing gap between London circa 1620 and our own moment which will, I hope, inspire readers, students, and scholars to confront this remarkable mayoral show with renewed critical attention.