'Not Barren of Invention': Texts, Contexts and Intertexts of The

‘Not barren of invention’: Texts, Contexts and Intertexts of the London Lord Mayors’ Shows, 1614-1619 Emma Kennedy PhD University of York English October 2014 2 Abstract This thesis analyses the printed texts of six London Lord Mayors’ Shows, of the years 1614-1619, demonstrating how the two authors – Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday – innovated textually within this genre. Its methodology is original in two ways. Firstly, it examines the Shows as whole entities, analysing how they function as individual texts. This helps to identify the development of textual strategies across the genre, differentiating the strategies within each Show. Secondly, and most importantly, the thesis examines the Shows as texts, applying textual and literary analysis to identify authorial strategies in each work. This textual perspective allows the thesis to identify three principal strategies in the Shows examined. Firstly, it shows that writers used the Show’s ‘occasionality’ – that is, proximity to a real event – in innovative ways, utilising a variety of strategies to respond to the works’ historical and cultural context. ‘Occasionality’ is thus demonstrated to be more variable than scholars have previously assumed. So too, the thesis identifies diverse ways in which authors use strategies of intertextuality, showing that this concept, too, is unstable as used in this genre. Finally, two of the Shows are shown to challenge and complicate the relationship between the printed text and the event of performance which it supposedly commemorated – that is, the actual procession of the newly-elected Lord Mayor with Company and City dignitaries through London after signing his oath to the King on October 29th. The thesis uses close analysis of historical and textual detail to outline the nuanced and different ways in which Shows responded to their immediate context, utilised other textual sources and interrogated the then-vexed issue of print’s relationship to an event of performance. The thesis thus shows that in these three textual areas, Lord Mayors’ Shows are much more variable and complex than scholars have previously acknowledged. 3 Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................... 2 Contents.......................................................................................................................3 Note on Textual Practice and Referencing .............................................................. 4 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... 5 Author’s Declaration ................................................................................................. 6 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 7 Chapter 1. Responsive Occasionality: Anthony Munday and the Mutable Politics of the Cockayne Project. ............................................................................ 41 Chapter 2. ‘Your Charracter, Office and place’: Responsibility and Just Reward in Anthony Munday’s Chrysanaleia. ........................................................ 81 Chapter 3. A ‘labourer in the cause’: ‘free love’ and the Work of the Virtuous Magistrate in Thomas Middleton’s Triumphs of Love and Antiquity. ............... 122 Chapter 4. ‘Impossible Performance’? Negotiating text-event relationships in Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honour and Industry and Munday’s Sidero- Thriambos. ............................................................................................................... 153 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 198 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 208 Manuscript Primary Sources ................................................................................ 208 Printed Primary Sources ....................................................................................... 210 Printed Secondary Sources ................................................................................... 220 4 Note on Textual Practice and Referencing Modern editions of early modern primary texts have been used where reliable editions exist: David Bergeron’s edition of Munday’s Pageants and Entertainments has not been used owing to the typographical issues of the book, as it lacks even italic font and thus does not represent Munday’s text adequately. Bergeron’s valuable editorial comments have been cited, however, as a secondary source. Line numbers are used for modern editions of Shows (that is, those from the Oxford Complete Works of Thomas Middleton), but signature numbers are used for the quotations from Munday’s Shows, which are from the original seventeenth-century editions. Where Lord Mayors’ Shows have been quoted, italics have been reproduced as they are included in the original printed text. I have deviated from the Chicago Manual of Style in two ways, both in the interests of textual accuracy. The first is that I include square brackets around parentheses ( ‘[...]’), in order to differentiate those which I have used to shorten quotations from parentheses originating in the quotations themselves. The second deviation is that I end quotations with a punctuation mark outside the quotation marks, rather than within it. Again, this is to clarify the distinction between my own punctuation and that of the original quotation. 5 Acknowledgements The study and much of the travel for this PhD was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to whom I am especially grateful. Thanks also go to Santander, whose International Connections Award part-funded a research trip to the Huntington Library. The English Department at the University of York also funded research and conference travel through the Graduate Research Support Fund and the Leavis Fund. I am grateful to the Department and its staff, academic and administrative, for providing such a congenial research environment and many wonderful opportunities during the past three years. The Humanities Research Centre at York also provided wonderful opportunities and a valuable space to work. Individuals at York to whom I owe particular thanks include Henrice Altink, Judith Buchanan, Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, Bill Sherman and Mark Jenner. Thanks also to Kevin Killeen and Tracey Hill for examining the thesis. Richard Rowland has been a stellar supervisor, offering immeasurable support through bad times and good. Beyond York, Katherine Heavey, Tracey Hill, Andy Kesson, Jenny Richards and Sara Trevisan provided valuable advice and support. On a less academic note, Claire Canavan, Lucy Davies, Alison Harper, Matilda Marshall, Rhian McLaughlin and Katherine Rollo provided much-needed fun throughout. Craig Farrell only saw the project in its later stages, but its existence still owes much to him. Finally, my family’s unwavering support has been, in this as always, invaluable. Much of the good in this thesis is owed to the people mentioned above; mistakes, however, are mine. 6 Author’s Declaration The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. 7 Introduction [...] establishing the validity of work on popular texts as an aspect of literary criticism rather than social history.1 The Lord Mayor’s Show hardly qualifies as ‘popular’ in print, given its limited distribution and specialised readership (though of course it was seen by many thousands more in performance). Nevertheless, John Simons’ statement captures usefully the project to which I wish to contribute. One of the most vexed issues that crop up in scholarship on this genre is its value (or lack thereof) in literary terms, and likewise the value of literary-critical approaches. While Tracey Hill mounts a spirited defence of the genre’s value, she does so in terms more reminiscent of social history, ‘[u]tilising a diverse methodology that includes textual, historical, bibliographical and archival material’ to ‘explore the Shows in all their manifold contexts’.2 In challenging us to expand our concept of worth beyond the literary, Hill has done much to move the critical field beyond Bergeron’s apologetic ‘one would never choose a Lord Mayor’s Show over, say, King Lear’.3 Acknowledging the Shows’ importance beyond the archaic ideal of ‘literary’ and indeed beyond the text itself is a useful step. Nevertheless, by dismissing literary value as an issue we lose the opportunity to affirm the Shows’ worth as texts – and, more importantly, to allow them to expand our sense of what constitutes literary quality. As the collection in which Simons is quoted shows, criticism has been greatly enriched by expanding its reach to texts previously excluded from the ’literary’ canon. I hope that a similar benefit can be obtained from attending to the Lord Mayor’s Show in these terms. 1 John Simons, ‘Open and Closed Books: a semiotic approach to the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean popular romance,’ in Clive Bloom, ed. Jacobean Poetry and Prose: Rhetoric, Representation and the Popular Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 22. Quoted in Andy Kesson and Emma Smith, ‘Introduction: Towards a Definition of Print Popularity,’ in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, ed. Andy

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