The Lord Mayor's Show for 1621 and 2021: Reconstructing a Triumph

King John, when he allowed London to have its own charter and a mayor, elected annually, also required each new mayor to swear fealty to him in Westminster. The journey, from London to Westminster by water and back again by land, became the occasion for lavish spectacle, devised and paid for by the company to which the Lord Mayor belonged. Next to a (rare) royal entry, it was the most important public event in early modern London, a celebration of the City, its merchants and craftsmen, and its links with famous figures of the past. Tracey Hill's landmark book, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Lord Mayors’ Shows (Manchester University Press, 2010), rightly argues that these shows rarely get the emphasis they deserve in accounts of early modern culture. She and Robert Crighton, whose internet Beyond Shakespeare platform is committed to testing out the theatrical viability of the entire pre-1642 dramatic corpus, joined forces in October 2021 in a recreation of Thomas Middleton's 1621 pageant, The Sun in Aries.

It had to be a very small-scale recreation. The printed texts of these shows convey very little of the spectacular effect that the pageants and processions must have created. The best way to appreciate their visual splendour is to look at Denys van Alsloot's painting of a comparable event, the Brussels Ommegang of May 1615; the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it resides, has created a video that gives some sense of what it must have been like. There are plenty of online photos and videos of recent Lord Mayor's Shows (though not from 2020: the event was cancelled that year, for the first time since 1862, when it was preempted by the Duke of Wellington's funeral). Though much has changed, the processions of the livery companies look much the same as in the Jacobean era. The crowds watching these modern events always look happy and sympathetic, but in 1617 an Italian spectator wrote that some of them threw mud and firecrackers at each other. ¹

Far more people saw Middleton's Lord Mayor's Shows than ever saw his plays, but most of them amount for only a small part of his total word count. His contribution to The Sun in Aries takes up only 313 lines (much of it description for the benefit of the reader) in the Gary Taylor-John Lavagnino 2007 edition of his complete works. Although his plays abound in topical references, The Witch and The Changeling can be enjoyed without knowledge of Frances Howard's high-profile divorce and virginity test, and A Game at Chess has entertained audiences with only the haziest knowledge of the Spanish marriage negotiations. The Shows, however, are embedded in topicality.

The rather odd title of The Sun in Aries alludes to the ram on the crest of the coat of arms of the Drapers’ Company. It is the oldest of the livery companies and before the Reformation its arms depicted the Virgin Mary flanked by angels, and three triple crowns, whose symbolism is uncertain. All this was later reworked: the Virgin was replaced by the ram, or golden fleece (alluding to the wool so crucial to the company's work) and the three crowns, which looked too much like an allusion to the papacy, were now reinterpreted as clouds through which sunbeams pointed downward. The sun is not in Aries in October, but Middleton was equating the reign of a new Lord Mayor to the springtime of the year. Since it was common to pun on the name of the new Lord Mayor (Middleton had depicted a cock in his show for Sir William Cockayne in 1619) Edward Barkham was given the image of the ship of state (or bark).

Anthony Munday, who is really the co-author of the triumph, devised the celebrations on the Thames that accompanied the journey to Westminster, where the new Mayor took his oath. Middleton dismisses this part of the show in one phrase (‘after his Honour's return from Westminster, having received some service upon the water’). ² Middleton's land entertainment began at St Paul's Churchyard, where the Mayor was greeted by the Chariot of Honour, filled with mythical figures. That the first speaker represented Jason, the Argonaut who won the Golden Fleece, was doubly appropriate, since Barkham was a charter member of both the East India and the Levant Companies. The new Mayor moved on to Cheapside, where he heard a speech by a personification of the Standard, who expressed its delight in seeing itself so splendidly attired (this was a famous landmark, a public fountain crowned with a statue of Fame, which had recently been rebuilt). There was another speech from Fame in the Tower of Virtue, drawing attention to the famous figures from the past who had been members of the Drapers (Munday belonged to the company). At St Lawrence Lane, near the Guildhall, Aries himself spoke from a mountain: Phoebus (the sun) broke through the heraldic clouds to shine on all the signs of the zodiac and on a number of happily grazing sheep. All these speakers, and presumably the sheep as well, were children in costume. The pageants were followed by a banquet in the Guildhall and a service in the Cathedral, allowing the pageant organizers to move their structures to the Mayor's house in time for his arrival at the end of this long day. Fame again addressed him, reminding him of the qualities a Mayor should possess (embodied in the many allegorical figures around him). Assuring him of the love and support of his Company, she drew the proceedings to a close:

The time of rest draws near, triumph must cease,

Joy to thy heart, to all a blessed peace. (318–19)

In context, some of this language may have seemed ironic. It had been only in early October – ‘in the nick of time’, as Tracey Hill puts it – that Edward Barkham had finally been incorporated into the Drapers’ Company. ³ As a member of the smaller Leathersellers’ Company, he had petitioned them in the summer for this status, because membership of one of the 12 main livery companies was a prerequisite for becoming Lord Mayor. To his indignation, they had refused, and it took pressure from the Court of Aldermen and the Privy Council to bring them round. Their reason seems to have been purely due to worries about expenses. The Lord Mayor was expected to entertain lavishly and perform charitable actions (charity is the main activity of many modern livery companies). His company also had to pay for the Show, with senior members assessed for particularly large amounts. The Drapers, who initially tried to get out of presenting any show at all, were a contrast to the companies for which Middleton had previously written, especially the Grocers, who spent £1295 on The Triumph of Truth in 1613 and £882 on The Triumphs of Honor and Industry in 1617. To them, he wrote enthusiastically, ‘cost appears but as a shadow, so there be fullness of content in the performance of the solemnity’. ⁴ The Drapers may also have heard rumours about the financial situation of the current Lord Mayor, Sir Francis Jones. Middleton had not written the 1620 pageant, given by the Haberdashers, but he probably knew that they had spent £750.82.6d, well over budget. The author, John Squire, brags that it was ‘curiously exceeding many former shewes, and far more ritch then any, in regard no mettall was vsed to adorne it but gold and siluer’. ⁵ How the company felt about it can be inferred from the fact that neither he nor his deviser was ever commissioned again. As for Jones, on the morning of 29 October 1621, when he was supposed to accompany the new Mayor on his journey, he was nowhere to be found. It turned out that on the previous night he had fled into the country, leaving his creditors with mountains of unpaid debts. ⁶ By contrast, the total cost of the Drapers’ triumph was £548.4s (slightly under budget) – which, Michael Berlin suggests, explains Middleton's tactful references in the final speech to ‘a care that has been comely and a cost / That has been decent’ (279–80). ⁷

Cost was equally important in 2021. As Crighton later said, putting on the show was the easy part; the real difficulty was financing it and performing it without endangering any performers or spectators, a problem that early modern impresarios did not have. Hill, who dealt with the fundraising, found that some civic groups (the SRS Public Engagement Scheme and Cheapside Business Alliance) shared their predecessors’ enthusiasm for events that celebrated the City. Funding also came from Bath Spa University and Beyond Shakespeare, but the Drapers’ Company was no more forthcoming than they had been 400 years earlier. Once it became clear that the show could go ahead, a general announcement was sent around, with advice ‘How to Triumph’ and links to websites where would-be participants could find instructions for making various kinds of gear. Thanks to the kindness of St Mary-le-Bow Church, the team were able to set up a small platform in its courtyard, with room for one small setting, a mini-Tower of Virtue, a helpful diagram in the background that showed the processional route, and a band of costumed musicians (Passamezzo, led by Tamsin Lewis). The budget allowed for excellent costumes for the speakers and for the Lord Mayor (Gregory Musson, who read his oath of office but otherwise was a mute spectator); a single knight in shining armour carried a sign that read ‘x6’ to represent the six knights guarding the Tower of Virtue. Other actors provided their own costumes (disclosure: in my academic regalia, I represented all the members of the Drapers’ Company) and some carried icons indicating the various pageant stations. The sheep were stuffed animals, waved around by the musicians.

Since the all-day Show had been condensed to about half an hour, description of what we were missing was supplied by the two presenters, Aliki Chapple and Alexandra Kataigida. Billed as, respectively, the Crier and Thomas Middleton, they read, or paraphrased, or explained, the author's own account and were largely responsible for the high level of energy that prevailed throughout. Middleton's speeches were engagingly delivered by children from Chesterton Community College in Cambridge (Charlie Beer as Jason, Holly Bartlett Giles as Fame, and Quinn Scott as Aries), directed by Sam Plumb, a professional specialist in training young actors. Holly, who had had the most to memorise, was particularly impressive. Daniel Yabut, an adult professional who had come from Montpellier, played the Standard, emerging from under a tarpaulin in splendid dress, and made the most of the character's feigned astonishment at having recently been renovated.

Over three performances, the show was watched by perhaps a hundred people in all, some of whom turned up in costume. Answers to the feedback questionnaire were predictably polite; people particularly liked the music. Although some costumed volunteers were playing non-speaking roles as ‘whifflers’, crowd control was not really needed. Those who stood through the whole thing were, inevitably, going to be sympathetic spectators; some even had an academic interest in the history of civic entertainments. Someone reported hearing a passer-by mutter, ‘Bloody Shakespeare’, on the usual assumption that only one person ever wrote plays before this century.

Crighton and Hill recognise that their small-scale, small-cast, one-site reconstruction was completely different from the 1621 event (Crighton thought that the ratio of 2021 to 1621 was something like 1 to 30). It did nevertheless help toward answering some questions that have been asked about the original Shows. There has, for instance, been considerable speculation about how many people could actually hear the elegantly written speeches. Though the children spoke very well, Crighton, watching from the back of the crowd, thought it likely that very few people apart from the Lord Mayor heard enough of the Show to judge anything apart from the sets and costumes. The music was, as usual, considerably more audible than the spoken word, as both the trumpets and the ensemble pieces (none of which were from the original show) enabled the transitions from one section to another. While the pre-show broadside ballad (‘Late as I walked through Cheapside’) could never have been sung at an important public event, Richard de Winter's minstrel-like performance brought in the rowdy popular element that would have been part of the experience.

I would add that my own discovery was the extent to which the author had taken account of the unpredictable weather. The 1605 Show had to be performed two days late, after its sodden pageants had dried out; it is surprising that this didn’t happen more often. Probably the usual practice would have been the one outlined in ‘How to Triumph’: ‘so long as it's a light drizzle or a bit above we’re going on. We currently will only cancel or adjust the timings of the show in the event of torrential rain or lightning’. In the first speech of this Show, Jason expresses what must have been everyone's wish:

Be favourable, fates, and a fair sky

Smile on this expedition … (46–7)

And later he admits, with both literal and metaphorical significance:

There is no voyage set forth to renown

That does not sometimes meet with skies that frown. (65–6)

Fame notes that ‘men set their watches by the sun’ (164), while Aries refers to the image of the sun breaking through clouds and wishes that ‘The beams of all clear comforts shine upon you’ (246). 29 October 2021 was overcast, with predictions of showers all day, though the only real downpour came during the third performance. The speakers consistently accompanied references to the sky or the sun with quizzical upward glances, making the most of the irony, as probably happened in the seventeenth century. But I doubt that much else in the speeches was intelligible to a modern audience. Much of their content is explication of visual effects which were not present in the reconstruction.

What we saw in October 2021 was only a very preliminary experiment. In preparing the script, Crighton had increasingly realised how difficult it is to convey information or encourage audience participation in an outdoor setting. Ideally, future reconstructions might alternate outdoor productions with indoor shows (perhaps in a livery company hall?) that would allow the inclusion of more explanatory and illustrative material. The backstory about the behaviour of the Drapers’ Company and Sir Francis Jones would surely have interested a modern audience – though it would, of course, have turned The Sun in Aries into a play within a play.