Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2022.1992210
Andrew M. Gordon, T. Hill
Despite a legacy of critical misapprehension, the study of early modern civic pageantry reveals a vital and wide-ranging performance culture that animated the city and its inhabitants. Investigation of the place of pageantry in the early modern imagination illustrates the potent accessibility of the forms it encompassed. Placing the diverse experiences and competences of pageant consumers, from the urban spectator in the crowd to the readers of printed pageant books, alongside the skilled work of the cast of collaborators involved in pageant design and performance, illustrates the multi-layered fabric of pageant culture in early modern London as well as the possibilities for critical engagement exemplified by the contributors to this special issue.
{"title":"Moving London: Pageantry and Performance in the Early Modern City","authors":"Andrew M. Gordon, T. Hill","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2022.1992210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2022.1992210","url":null,"abstract":"Despite a legacy of critical misapprehension, the study of early modern civic pageantry reveals a vital and wide-ranging performance culture that animated the city and its inhabitants. Investigation of the place of pageantry in the early modern imagination illustrates the potent accessibility of the forms it encompassed. Placing the diverse experiences and competences of pageant consumers, from the urban spectator in the crowd to the readers of printed pageant books, alongside the skilled work of the cast of collaborators involved in pageant design and performance, illustrates the multi-layered fabric of pageant culture in early modern London as well as the possibilities for critical engagement exemplified by the contributors to this special issue.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"1 - 12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44748526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-29DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.2001966
R. McWilliam
{"title":"Palaces of Power: The Birth and Evolution of London’s Clubland","authors":"R. McWilliam","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2021.2001966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.2001966","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"335 - 336"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47896817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-17DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1991605
Mark Kaethler
This article expands on previous studies of repetition in mayoral shows by examining the manner by which the genre regularly brings London sites to life. As forms of environmental theatre that fashion civic sites into dramatic participants, the shows repeatedly represent London and its places as recurring characters, or actants, in the civic dramatic events. London locations take on a protean quality by addressing changing and topical circumstances in relation to their functions and topography, despite their seemingly fixed nature. The later shows of Thomas Middleton in particular are explored for the ways in which they blend person and place by merging space and speech through an anonymous speaker in a specific locale. In these instances, place — and by extension the city of London fully — becomes a living part of the drama that speaks and participates in the environmental theatre of the day and year ahead.
{"title":"The Triumphs of Repetition: Living Places in Early Modern Mayoral Shows","authors":"Mark Kaethler","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2021.1991605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1991605","url":null,"abstract":"This article expands on previous studies of repetition in mayoral shows by examining the manner by which the genre regularly brings London sites to life. As forms of environmental theatre that fashion civic sites into dramatic participants, the shows repeatedly represent London and its places as recurring characters, or actants, in the civic dramatic events. London locations take on a protean quality by addressing changing and topical circumstances in relation to their functions and topography, despite their seemingly fixed nature. The later shows of Thomas Middleton in particular are explored for the ways in which they blend person and place by merging space and speech through an anonymous speaker in a specific locale. In these instances, place — and by extension the city of London fully — becomes a living part of the drama that speaks and participates in the environmental theatre of the day and year ahead.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"66 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41670948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-16DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1992828
Christine Hannigan
‘How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative’ is the latest exhibition of the Barbican’s Level G Programme, ‘an experimental platform for projects that ask crucial social and cultural questions’. The question asked here is who creates the built environment, and for whom; the answer is provided through a focus on the work of Matrix, a pioneering architectural co-operative founded in 1981. In their 13 years of operation, the group worked solely on state-funded, social building projects, typically with women and children’s groups as clientele. Feminist design collective Edit created the physical structures of the exhibit to reflect Matrix’s concern with the informal use of space. Architectural drawings and photographs chronicling Matrix’s work are fastened to plywood frames, alluding to a construction site. Curtains made by Cawley Studio hang from a metal rail snaking through the exhibit to subdivide the space (Figure 1). Parting them to enter, the viewer is transported back to 1980s England. Panels display adverts for cars and household consumables with copy and images demeaning women, bizarrely irrelevant to the product advertised. Heather Powell’s film Paradise Circus (1988) plays on a large television, cataloguing the hostility of Birmingham’s built environment: its thoughtlessly designed housing, unsafe and creepy tunnel network, and labyrinthine road layout that prioritised motorists and polluted the air. The film examines the government’s decades of post-war slum clearances and replacement Garden City neighbourhoods. These suburban prototypes were planned and designed by men who failed to properly consider the needs of anyone unlike them. The house was not viewed as a place of work, and accommodation for people moving through the city with disabilities, or children, or without cars, was nearly non-existent. This scene-setting brings Matrix’s radical approach, and the wave of feminism of which it was a part, into full relief. Juxtaposed to these lazy, sexist banalities is Matrix’s manifesto, a single sheet of unadorned paper which sets out:
{"title":"How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative","authors":"Christine Hannigan","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2021.1992828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1992828","url":null,"abstract":"‘How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative’ is the latest exhibition of the Barbican’s Level G Programme, ‘an experimental platform for projects that ask crucial social and cultural questions’. The question asked here is who creates the built environment, and for whom; the answer is provided through a focus on the work of Matrix, a pioneering architectural co-operative founded in 1981. In their 13 years of operation, the group worked solely on state-funded, social building projects, typically with women and children’s groups as clientele. Feminist design collective Edit created the physical structures of the exhibit to reflect Matrix’s concern with the informal use of space. Architectural drawings and photographs chronicling Matrix’s work are fastened to plywood frames, alluding to a construction site. Curtains made by Cawley Studio hang from a metal rail snaking through the exhibit to subdivide the space (Figure 1). Parting them to enter, the viewer is transported back to 1980s England. Panels display adverts for cars and household consumables with copy and images demeaning women, bizarrely irrelevant to the product advertised. Heather Powell’s film Paradise Circus (1988) plays on a large television, cataloguing the hostility of Birmingham’s built environment: its thoughtlessly designed housing, unsafe and creepy tunnel network, and labyrinthine road layout that prioritised motorists and polluted the air. The film examines the government’s decades of post-war slum clearances and replacement Garden City neighbourhoods. These suburban prototypes were planned and designed by men who failed to properly consider the needs of anyone unlike them. The house was not viewed as a place of work, and accommodation for people moving through the city with disabilities, or children, or without cars, was nearly non-existent. This scene-setting brings Matrix’s radical approach, and the wave of feminism of which it was a part, into full relief. Juxtaposed to these lazy, sexist banalities is Matrix’s manifesto, a single sheet of unadorned paper which sets out:","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"223 - 227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41992120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-28DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1985821
A. Zucker
This article serves as a postscript for the ‘London as Theatrical Space’ special issue of The London Journal. It reads the early modern English jest book archive for its illustrations of common sense attitudes towards individual street performances by pedestrians. The variety of topics the article considers includes feathers, gallants, disabled bodies, and the generality of display in public urban space.
{"title":"Postscript: The Open Street","authors":"A. Zucker","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2021.1985821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1985821","url":null,"abstract":"This article serves as a postscript for the ‘London as Theatrical Space’ special issue of The London Journal. It reads the early modern English jest book archive for its illustrations of common sense attitudes towards individual street performances by pedestrians. The variety of topics the article considers includes feathers, gallants, disabled bodies, and the generality of display in public urban space.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"127 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47058965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-11DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1978764
Hillary Burlock
The politics of the 1780s, including the Westminster election of 1784 and Regency Crisis of 1789, has been extensively analysed but critical investigation into the role of balls and dancing has been overlooked in the theatre of electoral and parliamentary politics. Balls hosted by political hostesses of the Opposition, headed by the Prince of Wales, in the eighteenth century formed a substantial extra-Parliamentary space for political dialogue and party cohesion. This article demonstrates that the ballroom was a space in which social dance was used to win political adherents, building and signalling collective party identities, and indicating divisions within society.
{"title":"Party Politics: Dancing in London’s West End, 1780–9","authors":"Hillary Burlock","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2021.1978764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1978764","url":null,"abstract":"The politics of the 1780s, including the Westminster election of 1784 and Regency Crisis of 1789, has been extensively analysed but critical investigation into the role of balls and dancing has been overlooked in the theatre of electoral and parliamentary politics. Balls hosted by political hostesses of the Opposition, headed by the Prince of Wales, in the eighteenth century formed a substantial extra-Parliamentary space for political dialogue and party cohesion. This article demonstrates that the ballroom was a space in which social dance was used to win political adherents, building and signalling collective party identities, and indicating divisions within society.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"181 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43137808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-03DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1972537
Kathleen Lynch
At the height of the Exclusion Crisis, an annual ‘solemn mock procession’ of the pope marched ‘through the City of London’ to a large bonfire into which an effigy of the pope was dumped. These processions took place on the accession day of Elizabeth I. They reportedly attracted as many as two hundred thousand spectators. This article reads these processions through the lens of civic ceremony, taking the performance of civic identity on the streets of London as the foundation of the threatening power of these cultural events. It demonstrates the significance of the trajectory of the march to Temple Bar, marking London’s boundary with Westminster and the court. This article also analyses the satiric broadside engravings that bolster the credibility of the processions’ central claim: that Englishness and Protestantism were inseparable and united against the foreign threat of Catholicism. With a variety of contemporary witnesses, this article challenges the claims that Protestantism had a united front at the time or that the purported statue of Elizabeth at Temple Bar was even a likeness of her. Working with the vocabulary of civic ceremony, the ‘Solemn Mock Processions’ of the Pope revive an old prejudice to coerce a unified national identity based on the exclusion of religious others.
{"title":"‘We Protestants in Masquerade’: Burning the Pope in London","authors":"Kathleen Lynch","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2021.1972537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1972537","url":null,"abstract":"At the height of the Exclusion Crisis, an annual ‘solemn mock procession’ of the pope marched ‘through the City of London’ to a large bonfire into which an effigy of the pope was dumped. These processions took place on the accession day of Elizabeth I. They reportedly attracted as many as two hundred thousand spectators. This article reads these processions through the lens of civic ceremony, taking the performance of civic identity on the streets of London as the foundation of the threatening power of these cultural events. It demonstrates the significance of the trajectory of the march to Temple Bar, marking London’s boundary with Westminster and the court. This article also analyses the satiric broadside engravings that bolster the credibility of the processions’ central claim: that Englishness and Protestantism were inseparable and united against the foreign threat of Catholicism. With a variety of contemporary witnesses, this article challenges the claims that Protestantism had a united front at the time or that the purported statue of Elizabeth at Temple Bar was even a likeness of her. Working with the vocabulary of civic ceremony, the ‘Solemn Mock Processions’ of the Pope revive an old prejudice to coerce a unified national identity based on the exclusion of religious others.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"103 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47006203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-03DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1978765
Maria Shmygol
This article explores mock sea-fights performed on the Thames in 1610 and 1613, which marshalled civic and naval vessels and personnel to offer spectators a realistic representation of the noise and magnitude of maritime combat. These nautical performances are a unique and important form of civic theatricality that offered Londoners an alternative means of visualizing the kinds of nautical combat they would have encountered in stage plays and news pamphlets. My analysis of printed accounts and eye-witness reports of these mock sea-fights explicates their complex negotiation of artifice and feigning on the one hand and realism on the other, whereby the grim realities of naval combat manifested themselves in the process of performance. The article likewise considers how this unique form of entertainment was presented to book-buyers and readers in pamphlets that feature paratextual woodcut illustrations of ships, which align the publications with other genres of ‘maritime’ print. Ultimately, what follows demonstrates the rich contributions that the mock sea-fight as a form of riverine theatricality can make to our understanding of performance culture in Jacobean London.
{"title":"Jacobean Mock Sea-Fights on the River Thames: Nautical Theatricality in Performance and Print","authors":"Maria Shmygol","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2021.1978765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1978765","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores mock sea-fights performed on the Thames in 1610 and 1613, which marshalled civic and naval vessels and personnel to offer spectators a realistic representation of the noise and magnitude of maritime combat. These nautical performances are a unique and important form of civic theatricality that offered Londoners an alternative means of visualizing the kinds of nautical combat they would have encountered in stage plays and news pamphlets. My analysis of printed accounts and eye-witness reports of these mock sea-fights explicates their complex negotiation of artifice and feigning on the one hand and realism on the other, whereby the grim realities of naval combat manifested themselves in the process of performance. The article likewise considers how this unique form of entertainment was presented to book-buyers and readers in pamphlets that feature paratextual woodcut illustrations of ships, which align the publications with other genres of ‘maritime’ print. Ultimately, what follows demonstrates the rich contributions that the mock sea-fight as a form of riverine theatricality can make to our understanding of performance culture in Jacobean London.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"13 - 35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47510258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-19DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1975087
Heather C. Easterling
Many texts of early modern London are fascinated with crowds. The city’s growth and resulting crowdedness were essential to the city’s theatrical spaces, as the presence of crowds ‘turn[ed] London into a theater’. But even as it is celebrated as a symbol of civic life, evocations of the urban crowd brim with anxiety over its illegibility and unsettling of the very performance space it helps to create. This article re-assesses the London crowd as just such an essential but essentially unstable spatial and rhetorical phenomenon. Working with an array of period texts, this article reads their figuring of the urban crowd specifically in terms of Soja’s socio-spatial theory of Thirdspace and the improvisational power of urban spatial relations.
{"title":"‘Surging Like the Sea’: Re-Thinking the Spectacle of the Crowd in Early Modern London","authors":"Heather C. Easterling","doi":"10.1080/03058034.2021.1975087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1975087","url":null,"abstract":"Many texts of early modern London are fascinated with crowds. The city’s growth and resulting crowdedness were essential to the city’s theatrical spaces, as the presence of crowds ‘turn[ed] London into a theater’. But even as it is celebrated as a symbol of civic life, evocations of the urban crowd brim with anxiety over its illegibility and unsettling of the very performance space it helps to create. This article re-assesses the London crowd as just such an essential but essentially unstable spatial and rhetorical phenomenon. Working with an array of period texts, this article reads their figuring of the urban crowd specifically in terms of Soja’s socio-spatial theory of Thirdspace and the improvisational power of urban spatial relations.","PeriodicalId":43904,"journal":{"name":"London Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"36 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45146337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}