Pageant By Joan FitzPatrick Dean (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Pageant By Joan FitzPatrick Dean
• David J. Eshelman

PAGEANT. By Joan FitzPatrick Dean. Forms of Drama Series. London: Methuen, 2021; pp. 177.

Pageants are large-scale scripted events designed to appeal to, include, and build communities. Joan FitzPatrick Dean’s book serves as an introduction to the pageant form, with three detailed analyses of pageants in history. This historical study focuses on British and US examples. Dean’s exploration spans centuries, with key examples including the Noah pageants of the Middle Ages, A Pageant of Great Women and other suffrage pageants of the early 1900s, and the Isles of Wonder that opened the 2012 Olympic Games in London. In each case, she provides abundant description and situates performances within the larger context of pageant history and theory, studying language, structure, and production elements. This book is important because it brings attention to a theatrical form that [End Page 250] has been largely ignored by critics since the early twentieth century. Pageant is a welcome addition to the sparse number of recent studies such as David Glassberg’s American Historical Pageantry (1990) and Dean’s own All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry (2014). Dean’s published work makes her the expert in the field. Pageant differs from her previous publication in that it discusses the form more broadly, but this broadness goes perhaps too far. While she makes apt use of the categories of “hegemonic” and “counterhegemonic,” I would have preferred a stronger argumentative thrust. However, I am intensely grateful for her work.

Among Pageant’s strengths is the introduction, which details the form. Dean lays out features that separate the pageant from traditional stage plays: qualities such as “short shelf life” and the tendency to be “performed outside purpose-built theaters” (2); “straightforward” plotting, presentational style, and its emphasis on amateur performance (4); and a dependence on singing (7). These traits are tantalizing and point to innovative ways of doing performance. Dean’s representative performances cover key historical points typically cited in pageant studies—the medieval period and the turn of the twentieth century—along with the more recent Olympics example. Medieval pageants, or Corpus Christi plays, were religious dramas commonly performed at festivals by working-class laymen. The turn of the twentieth century is significant because it marked a spike in popularity of the pageant. Dean begins her analysis of this period with a discussion of British dramatist Louis Napoleon Parker and US playwright Percy MacKaye. Both were established “pageant-masters,” meaning that they toured their respective countries helping communities put shows together. Both emphasized and glorified the past, commemorating events that political leaders found important to the myths of the founding and development of their respective nations. In this way, Parker and MacKaye created hegemonic performances that bolstered current political leadership. Dean quotes MacKaye, who advocated pageants to build national identity “to create an appropriate national ritual of American Citizenship” (24).

The hegemonic/counterhegemonic thread appears at intervals throughout the book. For example, in her discussion of medieval Noah plays, Dean foregrounds the figure of Noah’s wife, written as a comic character. She points both to the counterhegemonic uses of this figure—as a clown in an otherwise serious religious story—and to more recent understandings of her as a hegemonic reinforcement of prevailing gender stereotypes (57). Dean later highlights counterhegemony in her discussion of the women’s suffrage pageants of the early twentieth century aimed at societal change—specifically gaining women the right to vote. A key contributor to this movement was British activist Cicely Mary Hamilton (1872-1952), who championed the “New Woman” (77). In contrast to Parker’s and MacKaye’s pageants, which reinforce cultural norms through a rosy look at history, the suffrage performances used pageant conventions to empower women. Specifically, they used tableaux vivants, including scenes of famous women from history, with community members cast as actors (93).

In the last chapter of Pageant, Dean extends her look at pageantry into the current century by examining the “mega-events” of the Olympic Games opening ceremonies. After an overview of the ceremonies of the 1936 Berlin Games, the 1984 Los Angeles Games, and others, Dean focuses on The Isles of...