Text/Events in Early Modern England

Poetics of History

Sandra Logan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351148061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Engaging with a range of events-historical moments, theatrical performances, public presentations, and courtly intrigues - and the texts that record them, this book explores representational practice as a component of Elizabethan political culture. Considering the inscriptive production of mediated, indirect experience as an authorial challenge to the value of the immediate, direct experience of events, and conversely, recognizing the multi-valent impact of theatrical performance and performativity as a reinvigoration of the immediate, this study traces the emergence of 'realness' as a textual effect and a mode of political intervention. This interactive, refractive nexus of experience and inscription comprises what Sandra Logan calls the 'text/event'. The four primary foci of this investigation - the 1558 coronation entry; the 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth; the 1590s dramatizations of the reign of Richard II; and the Essex trial of 1601 - serve as exempla of four moments in the reign of Elizabeth I which suggest an increasingly complex interaction between events and texts developing in the last half of the sixteenth century. Logan argues that, in representing England's recent and distant past, a wide range of social subjects engaged in a struggle for intellectual credibility and social viability, and in the process generated a contingent public sphere within which history, framed as a coherent narrative shaped by causal relationships, was brought to bear on the concerns of the Elizabethan present and future. Assessing how these chronicles, short prose histories, and historical dramas each made use of the materials and techniques of the others, blurring the distinctions between historiography and poetry, as well as between past and present, Logan considers the conjunctions between the development of new genres and perceptions about inscription and experience, and changing socioeconomic institutions and practices.

PART 1
Contemporary Elizabethan Events and Accounts

Chapter 1
“Writing Doth Remain”: Accounts of the Coronation Entry of Elizabeth I

On January 14, 1558/9, Elizabeth Tudor emerged from the Tower of London into the chilly winter afternoon air to begin the traditional courtly procession through the city of London to Westminster that preceded the coronation of a new monarch.¹ In the coronation ceremony on the following day she would be anointed and crowned in a sacred ritual that was understood to join her mortal royal body with the eternal body of political power. The coronation itself was the culmination of a series of events, all ritualized, celebratory, and public, through which the various aspects of monarchical identity and authority were taken up: the initial approach to and arrival at the Tower of London, of which the monarch took ceremonial possession as a signal of her claim to the crown; a period of prayer and fasting that purified her and symbolized her submission to and guidance by God; the making of new knights, which exercised the sociopolitical power of the new queen; and the charismatic display of monarchical glory in the passage from the Tower to Westminster through the city of London, past the city’s key religious, political, and economic landmarks.²

Thus, although it followed a route through civic space, the coronation entry had not traditionally been merely a secular supplement to the sacred ritual of coronation; it formed a part of the ritual of transformation from subject into monarch, in which the political function of the city itself and the social roles of the participants—courtly and civic—were articulated. Separated from the vast body of subjects of which, technically, he or she would be a part until the coronation actually united the temporal body with the eternal body politic, the unanointed monarch moved through the space of the city in the liminal condition necessary to his or her eventual ritual reconstitution through the rites of coronation.³ The magnificence of the entourage emphasized the social right of accession and the actual social status through which the monarch demonstrably outranked each individual observer and participant. The colors and the fabrics of the clothing and livery, coupled with the ostentatious display of other forms of wealth and status, as well as the monarch’s position of importance in the procession, announce this.⁴

Movement itself was symbolic as well, since monarchs were not destined to play out their role among their subjects as one of them, but were instead to be imagined as passing through this space of the city on the way to their new status as the representative and embodiment of divine will, in which the uniting of the mortal body with the divine authority of monarchy would soon remove them, for as long as they remained monarch, from the position of subjection that they had occupied.⁵ Even in a largely secular procession like that of James VI/I, the coronation entries embody a sense of ritual negotiation and commitment, and prepare the way for the binding of monarch and subjects in the culminating coronation ceremony, which strongly resembles the ritual of marriage. The coronation entry procession thus constituted the monarch’s preparation toward a transformation that conjoined the temporal and eternal, physical and spiritual within the being of the sovereign, but which nevertheless took much of its force from the spiritual, political, and providential bond between monarch and subjects.⁶

The procession from the Tower of the various monarchs, the lengthiest public spectacle of this ritual series, has become available to later audiences through visual and written representations. In either form, such representations tend to offer only a general overview of the larger event, focusing mainly on formal elements and relationships. The visual images we have of this period’s coronation entries focus less on the grandeur of the spectacle than on its scale, with the processors stretching along the entire route, and the city itself packed with observers looking on from various vantage points. While no known visual image of Elizabeth’s passage remains—and probably none was produced—an image of the procession of Edward VI depicts the courtly entourage filling the streets of London from one end to the other, and accounts reveal that it took more than four hours for his monarchical litter to make its way from its point of departure to its destination.⁷ Inscribed from a slightly elevated and spatially distorted perspective that emphasizes the linear trajectory and centrality of the monarchical entourage, such images present the coronation entry from afar, as an event of display with a momentum and order of its own, but lacking any sense of direct interaction, intimacy, or even of the individual identities of the various participants.⁸ Such representations, which visually individuate the audience and participants but enmesh them anonymously within the processional moment, seem to suggest that political or social tensions of the populace might be temporarily suspended as the procession unifies the sociopolitical space of London through the shared experience of its presence and impact.⁹ Thus, the visual artist holds a privileged position with respect to the procession, choosing the moment of representation, the spatial relationships of the city, the entourage, and the spectators, and the breadth, depth, and detail of the image, while obscuring his own compositional interventions.

Generally similar to the paintings or etchings of the coronation procession, written accounts, when they exist at all, tend to offer only general descriptions of the tableaux and self-presentation by the city, with the main focus being on the monarchical entourage. The presence of the procession stretching through the city is the significant aspect of both visual and written accounts, although it was not unusual to record and publish accounts of the general structure of the tableaux and poetic recitations as evidence of the citizen’s efforts and expenditure, as well as of the support of foreign guilds and cities for the new monarch, implying the hope for continued good relations between their interests and those of the new regime.¹⁰ Elizabeth I’s coronation entry, which scholars typically have understood as an unusually elaborate and coherent event, was, I shall argue, no more elaborate or coherent than other examples of the genre, but it was represented in the primary written account in such a way that the text/event, with its particular interests and agenda, has displaced and come to stand in for the event itself.

As part of an extensive enactment of order and relative status, the entry procession revealed the politically sensitive social structure of the apparatus of government in its current configuration: where one rode with relation to the monarch and one’s fellow courtiers was of pointed significance, signaling the favor of the monarch and possibly indicating one’s potential influence on her as well. A procession could thus both authorize the monarch’s position and reveal the internal structure of the court through which the complex interactions of actual political control were to be carried out. In short, the coronation entry procession involved the presentation of the structure of court authority through which the crown’s representative apparatus was grounded, both in the divine status of the monarch and in the social relations of those who surrounded her. It substitutes the horizontal/spatial for the hierarchical/relational, offering a visual presentation of the court’s structural relationships that represents the court’s functional relationships.¹¹

A description of the 1553 procession of Mary I indicates that it “proceeded through a broad street more than a mile and a half long.”¹² In his letter to Sabino Calendra, Castellan of Mantova, Aloisio Schivenoglia described the visual impact of Elizabeth’s procession, noting “the whole court so sparkled with jewels and gold collars that they cleared the air, though it snowed a little.”¹³ This dispatch goes on to provide specific details of accoutrement and order which suggest that scale and grandeur of Elizabeth’s procession were similar to, though perhaps somewhat less ostentatious than, those that preceded it. Schivenoglia observes that

The number of horses was in all 1,000, and last of all came her Majesty in an open litter, trimmed down to the ground with gold brocade with a raised pile, and carried by two very handsome mules covered with the same material, and surrounded by a multitude of footmen in crimson velvet jerkins, all studded with massive silver gilt, with the arms of a white and red rose on their breasts and backs. . . .

Her Majesty was dressed in a very rich royal mantle of gold with a double-raised stiff pile, and on her head over a coif of cloth of gold, beneath which was her hair, she wore a plain gold crown of a princess, without lace but covered with jewels, and nothing in her hands but gloves.¹⁴

She was followed by the Master of the Horse, the Lord Chamberlain, the members of her Privy Chamber, four carriages of ladies and forty more following on foot, and nine pages in crimson satin, riding horses “richly caparisoned.”¹⁵

In the face of this display of courtly grandeur, the city did not function merely as a receptive audience, however.¹⁶ Although visual images inevitably invoke a static moment, with onlookers fixed in their positions and with the courtly entourage as the center of attention, the written accounts of Elizabeth’s coronation emphasize, in various ways, the relational, reciprocal nature of the event. Schivenoglia, whose dispatch pays consistent attention to the spectacular aspects of the event series, describes a display by London’s citizens and guildmembers parallel to that of the court, noting that “The houses on the way were all decorated; there being on both sides of the street, from Blackfriars to St. Paul’s, wooden barricades, on which the merchants and artisans of every trade leant in long black gowns lined with hoods of red and black cloth, such as are usually worn by the rectors of universities in Italy, with all their ensigns, banners, and standards, which were innumerable, and made a very fine show” (12). His framing of the event through the impact of both courtly and civic display, combined with the mention he makes of the deep mud on the streets owing to weather and traffic, offers a sense of contrast between the glory of the courtly procession and the quotidian condition of London; however it also helps to establish the visually dialogic character of the event by emphasizing the city’s self-aggrandizement, which also emerges in the descriptions of decorative displays and various forms of pageantry as the account unfolds. These presentations of London’s wealth and economic power were simultaneously a demonstration of respect for the queen and an assertion of the city’s independence from and capacity to shape as well as support monarchical authority.¹⁷

Beyond the decoration of the city and the magnificence of the courtly entourage, Tudor coronation entries, like other civic entry events, appear consistently to have involved allegorical, biblical, and mythological tableaux, poetic recitations, and gifts presented by the city to the monarch, at least from Henry VIII’s coronation forward through the sixteenth century.¹⁸ Especially elaborate pageantry is evident in the later Tudor coronations entries—those of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. In the case of Elizabeth’s procession, not only is it clear that such pageantry was expected, but a sense of compensatory expenditure and display emerges from the documents associated with the preparations. A brief note in the Corporation of London records from December 7, 1558 establishes that a specified group of “Commyners” of the city was directed by the court to “trym and deck” the traditional locations along the procession route “for the honor of the Cyty . . . with pageants fine payntyngte and riche clothes of arras sylver and golde in suche and lyke mannr and sorte as they were trymyd against the coming of our late Sovrangne lady Quene Mary to her Coronacon and muche better if it conveynyently may be done.”¹⁹ On March 4, 1559, the court ordered the reward of 40 shillings to Richard Mulcaster for the “making of the boke conteynynge and declaryng the historyes set furth in and by the Cyties pageants,” a copy of which was given to the queen.²⁰

Several aspects of the event and its inscription invite consideration. It is clear that the city was responsible for bearing the cost of the pageants and presentations, that it was considered important for the city’s image to make a good show if it, that there was a sense of competition with the wealth and devotion displayed in the entry procession of Mary I, and that the official published account, available in London on January 23, 1558/9, just nine days after the event, was produced with remarkable rapidity. As the primary extant record of the event, the impact of Mulcaster’s pamphlet has been profound. Based on this account, historical and literary scholars have consistently asserted the special nature of Elizabeth Tudor’s coronation entry, declaring it to have been significantly different from and often superior to most other English passages and entries. However, to a great extent this assertion of the uniqueness of Elizabeth’s procession is based on the textually produced impression of the cohesive narrative structure and effective use of allegory in the procession’s pageantry and recitations.²¹

Historical records show that while such pageantry in association with royal events arose and developed later in England than on the Continent, it was well established by the time Elizabeth made her entry in 1558/9. Further, micro-histories documenting such events provide a spotty but consistent record of pamphlet publication that, for current scholars, evinces the Tudor appreciation for printing as a supplement to the ideological impact of spectacular events.²² Given that both the pageantry of the event and the account describing this event were in fact part of a fairly long-standing English tradition, we are left with the task of determining what, if anything, is unique to or unusual about this entry and its official account. Scholarly responses invoke the contemporary evaluative criteria of cohesion and coherence, identifying this procession as the strongest in narrative structure and overall unity—aspects for which Mulcaster’s account is largely responsible.

I agree that Elizabeth’s coronation entry was different in quite interesting ways from those of her predecessors, but its differences do not lie in the coherence of its general structure, which I will argue is primarily an effect of the inscription; nor does it differ in its use of pageantry, in its inscription in a short account, or in that account’s exclusion of the coronation ceremony itself. However, it was unique in its complete reliance on domestic funding for the pageantry and overall display of wealth in the city, and for the degree to which the account produced by Mulcaster, commissioned by the Aldermen and paid for (at least in part) by the crown, actively shapes the sense of the event for its readers. Finally, it is reported that Elizabeth paused and listened to all the presentations of the city, and interacted throughout with her subjects—an element of the event that is difficult to evaluate, because it is unclear to what degree Mulcaster’s narrative constructs this impression of cooperation.²³ Despite some difficulties in determining the boundary between event and text, however, I contend in the following analysis that the language, structure, and ideological values of the publication, rather than the event itself, are what distinguish this entry event from others of its kind, as well as from those staged in the regions beyond London where foreign participation was generally not present. The account takes a relatively generic event, and one that was, I will argue, religiously ambiguous, and transforms it into a strongly Protestant, meaningfully coherent and cohesive display of and admonition toward unity, civic virtue, legitimation, and stability.

To assume that the eventual Protestant direction of this monarchy was in place from the accession is to miss the drama of political and diplomatic negotiation in the months preceding the coronation and the first Parliament—negotiations that we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Contemporary Elizabethan Events and Accounts
• Part 2 Invocations of the Past
• Bibliography
• Index