Rethinking royal spectacle in Elizabethan and Jacobean England

This thesis focuses on the outdoor entertainments staged before Queen Elizabeth, King James Stuart and his wife, Queen Anne, over a period of fifty years. This was a time when different pageant shows were mounted to celebrate and entertain the monarchs, both inside and outside the court. The aim of this study is to trace the development of royal pageantry in Elizabethan and Jacobean England by investigating the complex text/stage relationship pertaining to such multifaceted forms of spectacle. Special attention will be paid to civic ceremonies, entertainments on progress, at the Universities and at aristocratic country houses. Although these performances took place within a broader entertainment culture and were organized for diverse occasions, they were set up as ‘shows in progress’ which had at their centre a royal guest who often figured as both spectator and performer. The focus is on a variety of ceremonial events, whose analysis first aims at shedding light on the structure of their textual accounts in order to understand how these ‘shows’ were staged and identify their performative features. By gathering together different textual accounts, such as printed publications of urban processions, outdoor shows and court masques, as well as dispatches, letters, and historical records, each chapter undertakes a close reading of one particular royal spectacle with the aim to reconstruct its staging by drawing attention to its performative context. Since these ‘royal triumphals’ are especially concerned with the notion of sovereign power, special emphasis will be laid on the type of iconography which is textually inscribed in the entertainment script and visually displayed through its performance by concentrating on the relationship between of verbal text and visual display. A focus on these issues allows to build up a picture of the staging of these outdoor performances in the transition from Elizabethan to Jacobean entertaining culture, by highlighting their different or equivalent stage practices.