The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainment of Queen Elizabeth I (review)

Throughout her forty-five year reign, Queen Elizabeth I was in the habit of uprooting her court and taking it on progresses. These elaborate royal road shows were expensive for both the queen's household and her private, civic, and academic hosts; they disrupted court business; and they were of uncertain benefit to the individuals, towns, and universities they visited. They have fascinated historians of the period since at least the eighteenth century.

Whereas the progresses of Elizabeth's father and grandfather were displays of royal strength meant to unite a country divided by dynastic and religious conflict, the Virgin Queen's progresses were much more circumspect. She never traveled more than 150 miles from London and so never visited the most troubled and impoverished parts of her realm. "Elizabeth did not use progresses to pacify troubled regions; instead, her progresses took her into secure areas where her presence validated her authority and social stability where they already existed" (43). And her trips often took place exactly when court business was at its most demanding. This drove her councilors mad, but, according to Mary Hill Cole, was part of their point: "By creating chaos, by altering the patterns of royal access, and by highlighting gender amidst convention, the progresses offered Elizabeth a way to rule and to thrive" (28).

Many of the essays in this valuable collection discuss the entertainments that were staged for Elizabeth during her visits. These entertainments, often allegorical and spectacular, could address immediate political issues, solicit for civic funds, plead for religious tolerance, or even advance the cases of young women in need of good husbands. The symbolic complexity of these entertainments is hard to overstate. Hester Lees-Jeffries demonstrates that during Elizabeth's first progress, her coronation entry into London, the city became "a palimpsestic conglomeration of landscape and monuments inscribed and re-inscribed with the 'texts' of historical association, communal memory, and accumulated civic pride and idealism" (66). Part of this reinscription included having the water conduits of the city literally run with wine in a reification of the "commonplace humanist image for the operation of monarchical government" (79). Elizabeth was the fountain.

This book contains thirteen essays and an introductory essay by two of the editors. The essays are divided into four categories: patterns, themes, and contexts; civic and academic receptions; private receptions; and Caroline and antiquarian perspectives. The essays complement each other nicely. So, for example, Elizabeth Goldring demonstrates how Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, used the display of portraiture at Kenilworth during the 1575 visit of Elizabeth to further his matrimonial designs on the queen while, in a later essay, James Knowles discusses the cultural memory of that entertainment and its appropriation by William Cavendish during a visit by Charles I. He had the tropes of Dudley's entertainments —"the zenith of Elizabethan aristocratic progress entertainments" (257) —rewritten for the Caroline age.

That Cavendish could restage some of the entertainments of a progress that took place almost sixty years previous is testament to the textual record of those entertainments. Elizabeth "made eighty-three visits to fifty-one towns and cities (London excluded) over the course of her reign, but scripts of the dramatic devices prepared to receive and entertain her survive for only two, Bristol in 1574 and Norwich in 1578" (106). On the other hand, multiple (and sometimes conflicting) accounts of some of her visits to the universities exist and private entertainments, depending on their size and prominence, might be recorded in print or, as Gabriel Heaton demonstrates, in "manuscript separates": "three or four sheets of paper folded into bifolia, the final page usually left blank" (227).

This volume is a valuable collection for both literary scholars and historians and contains a very helpful bibliography of secondary sources. It will, no doubt, become the go-to book for anyone interested in Elizabeth's progresses for...