"To kindle an industrious desire": The Poetry of Work in Lord Mayors' Shows

This study seeks to explore how and why representations of motives to work changed in the poetic speeches for Lord Mayors' Shows. Almost every 29 October during the Renaissance, one of the liveries staged a civic pageant in the streets to celebrate a mayoral election in London. In preparation for this event, it hired playwrights to produce spectacular devices and poetic speeches for performance in front of thousands of spectators. ¹Previous criticism claims that these speeches were inaudible and irrelevant. But archival research reveals that the tradesmen who sponsored the shows commissioned speeches with specific requirements. For example, on 7 September 1611, the Goldsmiths generated a contract with Anthony Munday that specified which characters in their drama would have speeches: Munday had "to make fitt and apt speeches for expressing of the Shew, bothe for Lepston, ffarrington, the Kinges, the boyes, and all the rest." ²First, what form and content did everyday people such as craftsmen consider "fitt and apt" for poetic speeches for a public, political event? Second, since many of the same playwrights were writing dramas for civic pageants and for the theaters, why did drama written for pageants develop in such contrasting ways, using a wide variety of forms, but predominantly preferring rhyme, while the theater favored blank verse? Finally, how can these speeches help us identify, in the words of Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, the "changing relations of economic and ideological production"? ³

Using New Economic Criticism and New Historical Formalism to focus on "the nexus between economic and quantitative language and the language of literature," ⁴I argue that "fitt and apt" speeches in form and content were those expressed in a consciously "labored" verse, often spoken by laboring characters, using themes that emphasized serious industry. The first half of the paper charts the significance and progression of this labored form. I analyze contemporary records to illustrate the audibility of the speeches in spectators' experiences and the importance of the speeches in the liveries' practice of ordering and paying for them.

The second half of the paper examines the idea of labor in the content of the speeches. In particular, these speeches resulted from and shaped the cultural conception of motivations to work. Because of greater economic demand for laborers' work but the lack of an accompanying rise in wages, the liveries tried to increase the incentive of workers to work harder by advertising in the shows the payoffs of work. These motivations, however, varied over time and according to the economic group in the population addressed: those outside the livery, such as consumers; and those inside the livery at both ends of its hierarchy, such as its elite traders and Lord Mayor, and its laborers and apprentices. Early in the period, the shows of Thomas Nelson and Anthony Munday draw attention to labor as a cycle and aim their message at consumers, whose responsibility was to support the cycle in England to avoid national labor crises. Thomas Middleton's speeches embody the personal and community benefits of this cycle to the livery elite. As the depictions of work in the later shows of Thomas Dekker and John Taylor increasingly emulate the actual working experience of London laborers, they change from a notion of work as a repetitive process, a laboring circle of life, to a process with a particular end, namely social mobility. This transformation in the concept of work in the speeches from cyclical to linear deserves notice because it complicates our assumptions about compensation: not only do we realize that the motivation—and thus reward—for work varied for different members of society, but also that these rewards changed over time.

Scholars have ignored the poetry of civic pageants because early critics dismissed the speeches with the assumption that they took a secondary place to the visual spectacle and therefore would have been irrelevant and impossible to hear. In 1933, R. C. Bald commented that "Lavish display was the prime requisite in these processions; the speeches were an elegant decoration palatable to the City Fathers, but inaudible to...