ELH

Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei.
The Triumphes of Golde: Economic Authority in the Jacobean Lord Mayor's Show
ELH - Volume 60, Number 4, Winter 1993, pp. 879-898

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky - The Triumphes of Golde: Economic Authority in the Jacobean Lord Mayor's Show - ELH 60:4 ELH 60.4 (1993) 879-898 ; THE TRIUMPHES OF GOLDE: ECONOMIC AUTHORITY IN THE JACOBEAN LORD MAYOR'S SHOW Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky In 1613, Thomas Middleton prefaced the published record of his Lord Mayor's Show, The Triumphs of Truth, with an attack upon a rival city poet, Anthony Munday. Middleton declared his pageant to have been "directed, written and redeem'd into forme, from the ignorance of some former times, and their common writer." Not satisfied with distinguishing his own efforts from those of this yet unnamed "common writer," Middleton insisted that the art and knowledge displayed in these annual pageants should be worthy of the magnificence with which the Lord Mayor is received into office. He resumed his attack by noting the miserable want of both which in the impudent common writer hath often forced from me much pity and sorrow: and it would heartily grieve any understanding spirit to behold, many times, so glorious a fire in bounty and goodnesse offering to match itselfe with freezing art, sitting in darkeness with the candle out, looking like the picture of Blacke Monday. (TM, 5:219) Middleton's allusion to his rival contains an implicit warning to his patrons, the twelve dominant trade guilds that elected the Lord Mayor and financed the pageants in his honor. The uninspired pageants of this "common writer," Middleton...