Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance

2. Animated Children in Elizabeth’s Coronation Pageant of 1559

AnimatedChildreninElizabeth’s Coronation Pageant of 1559 The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulable, version of experience. —Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection The road ahead was lined with ranking members of civic guilds, dressed for the occasion in their distinctive livery robes. Choruses of little singers had been arranged on either side of the twisting path, their voices rising in lavish praise as the new potentate moved along the preordained path. Further ahead, the mayor stood ready to declare the arrival of this new female savior, primed in his office for all manner of pomp and celebration . Scrolls were unfurled, speeches made. She was being treated to the finest pageantry, a bracing afternoon of dancing, announcing, explaining , exhorting, hailing, marveling, inviting, hushing, thanking, and welcoming . A proper entry indeed. The land, of course, is Oz, and the entry is that of Judy Garland onto a colorful soundstage at MGM studios in 1938. It is hard to say which of the film’s creators planned Dorothy’s plunge into Technicolor, but deliberate or not, the particulars of her arrival in Oz duplicate almost exactly the conventions of Tudor civic pageantry.1 The streets are filled with color and arrayed with members of the local hierarchy—for example, “The Lollipop Guild”—each designated by a particular type of clothing matching his station. (See figure 3.) There is a path scripting the movement of the prime spectator, Dorothy, through a set of positions where formal encounters take place involving recitation and praise. There is music and [2] 1. Useful surveys of English civic pageantry include Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); John B. Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London: John Nichols and Son, 1823); J. B. Nichols, ed., London Pageants: Accounts of Fifty-Five Royal Processions and Entertainments in the City of London (London: J. B. Nichols, 1831); R. Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918–20), and David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971). Page numbers for specific references to these works are supplied in the text. Elizabeth’s Coronation Pageant [59] song (“Ding-Dong –The –Witch –Is Dead”), suggesting that the occasion is suffused and guarded by a kind of choral magic. The actors in the spectacle are conspicuously tiny, their proportions suggesting a world removed, shrunken in scale. In the film, the diminutive crowd of “Munchkins” that greets Dorothy is a troupe of dwarves used to complete the illusion of an entirely other world. In Elizabeth’s coronation pageant, the new queen is welcomed—as almost every English monarch is on such occasions—by the “swete” and tender voices of choristers and scholars, recruited from the choir and grammar schools for the occasion. I do not make this comparison between Hollywood fantasy and Tudor pageantry to parody the relief many Londoners felt on the arrival of their new Protestant monarch. Rather, I want to show how Tudor coronation pageantry—a genre that famously made extensive use of child actors, singers , and orators—served a particular ideological function within Tudor civic life.2 To understand what the critic Harold Hillebrand described as 2. In 1926 the critic Harold Hillebrand was the first modern critic to declare that children were a general feature of early modern civic pageantry, citing the remark in Anthony Munday ’s Camp-bell, or the ironmongers faire field (1609) that pageants “urgently require” the “voices of so many Children.” See Harold Newcomb Hillebrand, The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 28–39, esp. 35. Figure 3. Members of the Lollipop Guild meet Dorothy on her entry into Oz. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming, 1939. [60] Pretty Creatures the child’s “general” and “necessary” presence in such pageants, we must set aside certain assumptions about the deliberately overawing nature of royal power, particularly those that equate the fabulous display of wealth and servants with the psychic domination of the citizenry.3 While many understood that magnificence to be a hallmark of royal power, this medieval tradition of household display did not necessarily require monarchs to embark on a cultural program of shock and awe every time they assumed the throne.4 Moreover, the sacred nature...