Abstract
In 1591 Elizabeth I paid a visit to Edward Seymour, at the earl of Hertford’s small estate at Elvetham in the course of her progress to Portsmouth. During her stay, he produced an entertainment that staged a pastoral neverwhere — a concept I will develop later in this chapter — that rivalled that of Kenilworth for expense and sophistication. Anxious to impress her, Hertford constructed an artificial lake in the shape of a half-moon, containing three separate grounds for performance, and an elaborately carved wood and canvas palace. Before the eyes of courtier and commoner, Elizabeth was feted with elaborate visual displays (wildfire, monsters, mock battles), sumptuous costumes, gifts of costly jewels and tantalizing banquets. The scale of Hertford’s entertainment necessitated perhaps the greatest public involvement of any of the royal entertainments for Elizabeth hosted on private estates, boasting feasts that required 200 servants just to serve them. Hertford’s intention was to placate a monarch who had every reason to distrust him, but his spectacle had two incidental repercussions that together make the Elvetham event particularly relevant to the matters of performance and site-specificity under consideration in this volume.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The natural entry points for any work on Elizabethan progress pageants are John Nichols’s compilation of state papers in The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (London: John Nichols & Son, 1823); and E. K. Chambers’s The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923); followed by David Bergeron and Sydney Anglo’s examinations of pageantry and its political agendas. See David Moore Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642, rev. edn, vol. 267 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2003) and Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
It has been variously argued that Elizabeth intended to convey appeasement, reward or threat in her visits. See particularly, Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980); Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999; Curt Breight, ‘Realpolitik and Elizabethan Ceremony: The Earl of Hertford’s Entertainment of Elizabeth at Elvetham, 1591’, Rennaisance Quarterly 45.1 (Spring 1992): 20–48.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 144.
See Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jan de Vries, ‘Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993) 85–132; Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Paul Yachnin, ‘The Populux Theatre’, in Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin (eds), The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 38–65.
See B. Carpenter Turner, A History of Hampshire (1963; Shopwyke Hall, Chichester: Phillimore, 1988) 70–1.
See Turner, History of Hampshire, 145, 23, 27. The original inventory, or even a transcribed copy in its entirety has proven difficult to locate, but Chute’s book detailing the history of The Vyne records a fair sampling of the items listed in the original inventory. See Chaloner William Chute, A history of the Vyne in Hampshire; being a short account of the building & antiquities of that house, situate in the parish of Sherborne, St. John co., Hants, & of persons who have at some time lived there (Winchester: Jacob & Johnson, 1888).
Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Norton, 2002) 1297–1369. All further references are given within parentheses in the text.
Copyright information
© 2014 Sarah Crover
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Crover, S. (2014). A Taste of High Life at Elvetham: Elizabethan Progresses and the Rural Consumption of Royal Neverwheres. In: Performing Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45765-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-32017-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)