Abstract
The Beauchamp Pageant, an illustrated biography of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (1382–1439), is a uniquely useful yet neglected resource for the study of late medieval drama. The basic facts about the Pageant have been established. It is made up of 53 line drawings with brief accompanying comments describing each drawing, all part of a standalone work of 28 leaves (British Library MS Cotton Julius E. iv, reproduced in facsimile three times).1 It dates to the reign of Richard III, and was probably commissioned somewhere between 1483 and 1492 by the earl’s daughter Anne Beauchamp, who may have envisioned it as a chivalric exemplar for Prince Edward, her grandson.2 The content and structure of the Pageant revolve around her father, the fifth earl, whose life from birth to death it recounts, with an emphasis on events and actions that set him up as a model of pious and chivalrous behaviour.
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Notes
The Pageant has been printed three times. See William, Earl of Carysfort (ed.), The Pageants of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, reproduced in facsimile form from the Cottonian ms Julius EIV in the British Museum (Roxburghe Club, 1908)
Pageant of the Birth, Life, and Death of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick KG, 1389–1439 (London, 1914); and Alexandra Sinclair, The Beauchamp Pageant (Donington: The Richard III and Yorkist History Trust in association with Paul Watkins, 2003).
For the date and attribution of the Pageant, see E. M. Thompson, ‘The Pageant of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, commonly called the “Warwick Manuscript”’, Burlington Magazine 1.2 (1903): 151–64; and Sinclair, Beauchamp Pageant, 22–3.
See Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) 16–19, for Lollardy and the suppression of images in manuscripts.
Thomas Chaundler, Liber Apologeticus de Omni Statu Humanae Naturae, ed. Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri (London and New York: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1974) 12–15.
Thomas Meacham, ‘Exchanging Performative Words: Epistolary Performance and University Drama in Late Medieval England’, Medieval English Theatre 32 (2010): 12–25 (22).
Montague Rhodes James, The Chaundler MSS (London: J. B. Nichols, 1916) 24.
See Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Carol Symes, ‘The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theatre’, Speculum 77 (2002): 778–831.
Jeffrey Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Visual Language of Drama: Principles of Composition’, in Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey (eds), Contexts for Early English Drama (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989) 173–91.
Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 130.
As V. A. Kolve noted in The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966) 13.
Meg Twycross, ‘Books for the Unlearned’, Drama and Religion, Themes in Drama 5, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 89.
See Margaret J. Rickert, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1954) 200.
See Kathleen L. Scott, The Caxton Master and His Patrons (Cambridge: The Bibliographical Society, 1976) 55–9, for discussion of the techniques of the artist of the Pageant.
C. E. Wright, ‘The Rous Roll: The English Version’, British Museum Quarterly 20 (1955–56): 77–80.
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© 2014 Claire Sponsler
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Sponsler, C. (2014). What the Beauchamp Pageant Says about Medieval Plays. In: Jenkins, J., Sanders, J. (eds) Editing, Performance, Texts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320117_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320117_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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