Abstract
Along with many texts of this type, Anthony Munday’s earliest-surviving Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show, the 1605 production The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, has received little critical attention to date. On those occasions when Munday’s text is discussed, it is invariably to claim that it celebrated James’s accession in the most enthusiastic and unproblematic fashion: for instance, David Bergeron has argued that the Show would have ‘aid[ed] the political idea of James’s legitimate claim to the English throne’.1 This essay will engage in what James Knowles has called a ‘double reading of civic ritual’ in order to look afresh at the extent to which Munday’s Show would indeed have found favour with the new king.2 Munday’s apparently slight text repays prolonged scrutiny, for it contains a complex negotiation of the implications of the accession, and of the respective glories of the monarchy and the civic oligarchy. Furthermore, it can be seen to signal the way civic attitudes towards the new king were to develop over the remainder of James’s reign. It is perhaps not a coincidence that this — Munday’s most monarchical, and in many respects least typical, Show in terms of its subject matter — is one of the most discussed by critics when they do venture off the well-trodden ground of the stage plays of the period.3 It is also, probably for the same reason, the sole Lord Mayor’s Show selected by Arthur Kinney to sit alongside The Magnificent Entertainment in the recent Renaissance Drama anthology.
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Notes
David Bergeron, ‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 6 (1993), 139–52: p. 142. James Knowles has critiqued such an ‘unsophisticated’ way of understanding civic pageantry: see ‘The Spectacle of the Realm: Civic Consciousness, Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Modern London’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 157–89: p. 157.
David Bergeron, ‘Actors in English Civic Pageants’, Renaissance Papers (1973), 17–28: pp. 21–2. Boy actors from the children’s companies also performed in this entertainment. Revisiting his theatre days, Munday called upon John Lowin, then a well-known actor in the King’s Men and a member of the Goldsmiths himself, to perform the important speaking role of ‘Leofstane’ in the Goldsmiths’ Show of 1611.
See Anthony Munday, Chruso-thriambos. The Triumphs of Gold, ed. J. Pafford (London: J. Pafford, 1962), pp. 13, 54;
Emma Denkinger, ‘Actors’ Names in the Registers of St Botolph Aldgate’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 41 (1926), 91–109: pp. 96–7;
and David Bergeron, ed., Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday: A Critical Edition (New York and London: Garland, 1985), p. 68.
Richard Dutton comments that the influence of the pageants on the professional theatre (and vice versa) ‘has been largely overlooked or ignored’ (Richard Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants [Keele University: Ryburn Publishing, 1995], p. 7).
See also Anne Lancashire, London Civic Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 3.
For a lengthier treatment of this argument, see William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Professional Theatre in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), passim.
Anthony Munday, Londons Love (London, 1610), C4v. See Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 45–51 and passim.
Helen Moore, ‘Jonson, Dekker, and the Discourse of Chivalry’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 12 (1999), 121–65: p. 149.
Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 144;
see also Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 123–4,
and Leah S. Marcus, ‘City Metal and Country Mettle: The Occasion of Ben Jonson’s Golden Age Restored’, in David Bergeron, ed., Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 26–47: p. 28.
Theodore Leinwand, ‘London Triumphing: The Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show’, Clio, 11:2 (1982), 137–53: p. 140.
Gail Kern Paster, ‘The Idea of London in Masque and Pageant’, in David Bergeron, ed., Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 48–64: p. 62.
Ibid., p. xv; see also Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (New York: Arno Press, 1980), vol. 2, pp. 28–9.
See Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon, eds, A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London 1485–1640 (Oxford: The Malone Society, 1954), vol. 3, pp. 61–3. It is unfortunate that Henslowe’s records end in early 1603, for it would be instructive to know whether Munday continued his employment with the Admiral’s Men once they were taken under direct royal patronage as Prince Henry’s Men.
Bergeron, Pageants and Entertainments, p. xiii; Bergeron, ‘Anthony Munday: Pageant Poet to the City of London’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 30 (1967), 345–68: p. 351.
See David Bergeron, ‘Stuart Civic Pageants and Textual Performance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51:1 (1998), 163–83: p. 169.
Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 21. I am grateful to Conrad Russell for this reference.
Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1909), p. 216. I am grateful to Conrad Russell for this reference.
Tom Corns, ‘Literature and London’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, eds, The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 544–64: p. 549.
Andrew Gordon, ‘Performing London: The Map and the City in Ceremony’, in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, eds, Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 69–88: p. 78.
Arthur Kinney, ed., Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 372.
Coincidentally, Leonard Holliday, the new mayor, had a role to play in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot only a few days after his inauguration and Munday’s Show (see M. C. Bradbrook, ‘The Politics of Pageantry’, in Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond, eds, Poetry and Drama 1570–1700 [London: Methuen, 1981], pp. 60–75: p. 68).
See Richard Dutton, ‘King Lear, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia and “The Matter of Britain”’, Literature and History, 12:2 (1986), 139–51: pp. 144–5.
David Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 (London: Arnold, 1971), p. 144.
Anthony Munday, Chruso-thriambos (London, 1611), A3r. See also Lobanov-Rostovsky, ‘The Triumphes of Golde’, p. 881; and Gordon Kipling, ‘Triumphal Drama: Form in English Civic Pageantry’, Renaissance Drama, 7 (1977), 37–56: p. 39.
Stephen Harrison, The Arches of Triumph, cited in Kipling, ‘Triumphal Drama’, p. 41. See also Jonathan Goldberg, fames I and the Politics of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), pp. 33–5, 43–50; and Knowles, ‘Spectacle of the Realm’, p. 167.
Garrett Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 211–12.
Cited in I. J. Doolittle, The City of London and Its Livery Companies (Dorchester: The Gavin Press, 1982), p. 6.
In the 1630s the Privy Council tried to establish the ‘Incorporation of Westminster’, which would have taken over the City Corporation’s previous economic autonomy over freemen and trade, and would also have included the extant liberties. The proposed new system of governance was disputed and more or less defunct by 1640 (see Francis Sheppard, London: A History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 191).
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Hill, T. (2006). ‘Representing the awefull authoritie of soveraigne Majestie’: Monarchs and Mayors in Anthony Munday’s The Triumphes of Re-united Britania. In: Burgess, G., Wymer, R., Lawrence, J. (eds) The Accession of James I. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501584_2
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