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c h a p t e r 6 Edible Theater The most formally odd and thoroughly material of the theatrical spectacles to which Lydgate contributed were the subtleties for the coronation banquet of Henry VI. The feast itself was a carefully designed piece of political drama in the form of ceremonies and entertainments that ushered Henry to the throne. Its stage was the hall at Westminster and its audience important members of court, city, and church, many of whom would have seen or heard the other coronation events as well. In the banquet hall at Westminster, they not only watched and listened but also consumed three subtleties, decorative confections that were served between courses and that featured three ballades written by Lydgate on themes important for the occasion. In the subtleties, spectatorship slides into feasting, visual encounters with words and images become alimentary, and writing enters not only literary and civic but also food history. The subtleties present, in short, an extreme version of the media mixing and sensory blending that characterized late medieval culture and that I have been arguing Lydgate’s performance texts utilized, as the taste for performance is embodied in the act of eating. The subtleties and the banquet came at the end of a long day of coronation events and were to all appearances designed with that larger context in mind. On 4 November 1429, Henry rode with his lords from Kingston over the London Bridge to the Tower. On the following Saturday, Henry’s entourage was joined by priests, the mayor, and aldermen who rode with Henry to Westminster; en route, Henry was entertained by a “toure full of Angels” and a “mimic queen” with maidens and pages at London Bridge, the conduits in Cheapside running with wine, and a “riall castell” at the cross in Cheapside. On Sunday, the 6th, Henry was crowned at Westminster, in the company of ecclesiastics and lords temporal, as well as his mother Catherine, “a grete 148 chapter 6 noumbre of ladis and gentill-wemmen rially arayed,” and a surprise visitor— the son of the king of Portugal. The coronation ceremony involved elaborate rituals of dressing and undressing, anointing, presentation of scepter and sword, and finally the costuming of Henry as a bishop and the setting of the crown of St. Edward on his head, all accompanied by the saying of mass. His bishop’s garments were then removed and he was dressed in royal garb and crowned with the crown Richard II had made for himself. Afterward, Henry was led in a retinue through the palace to the hall where he sat at his coronation banquet, surrounded by people of note, who were seated by rank. At the first course, the king’s heralds ushered in Sir Philip Dymmock, who on the council’s orders rode into the hall costumed as St. George and proclaimed that Henry was the rightful heir to the crown of England and that he, Dymmock , was ready to defend him as his knight and champion. Presumably commissioned by a member of the royal household, perhaps the same controller’s deputy John Brice who Shirley says asked Lydgate for the Disguising at Hertford, the three ballades Lydgate wrote to accompany the subtleties featured scenes close to the concerns of the members of the council and the household. The first showed Sts. Edward and Louis with Henry VI between them, the second featured Henry VI kneeling before Emperor Sigismund and Henry V, and the third depicted the Virgin with child, holding a crown in her hand, flanked by Sts. George and Denis presenting the king to her. Lydgate’s verses explain the meaning of each image, developing and intensifying the themes of kingship that the images conveyed. While the occasion was royal, the audience was broad and presumably the themes of the subtleties were widely endorsed, given the degree to which they meshed with other entertainments for the king made in the same period but not directly sponsored by the court, such as the 1432 entry. Civic and religious leaders were present, including the mayor, aldermen, archbishops, and other leading members of the church, including, most likely, the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, who was in London for parliament. Lower-ranking citizens would also have crowded in, as at Queen Catherine’s coronation banquet in 1421, which according to one chronicler was “opyn to alle pepull.” Parliament was in session at the time of the young king’s English coronation, and important people from...

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