Authoring the Environment: Landscapes, Crowds and Communality in Louis Napoleon Parker’s Edwardian Pageants

Known in his time as an accomplished playwright and composer, Louis Napoleon Parker (1852–1944) is today best known as the originator of the Edwardian New Pageantry movement, which sought to inspire experiences of communal feeling by engaging thousands of amateurs in performances of local British history.¹ Unlike his idol, Richard Wagner, Parker never came close to securing a Festspielhaus for his massive folk-historical dramas.² Instead, the six pageants he wrote and directed between 1905 and 1909 were performed in the open air with neither stages nor fixed scenery.³ Despite the lack of architecture to support his artistic vision, Parker ardently upheld Wagner’s theory, as expressed in The Art-Work of the Future, that theatre’s ability to evoke “corporeal experiences of organic communality” depended to a great extent upon the director’s understanding of the visual art of landscape (Koepnick 69).⁴

Whether working on indoor stages or outdoor arenas, any theatre director hoping to establish strongly felt social bonds between actors and audiences was, in Parker’s view, obliged to pay careful attention to the task of designing landscapes within which ideal versions of collective life could be seen and sensed. Parker’s meticulous approach to the design of his pageant landscapes was one aspect of the New Pageantry’s broader plan to restore a sense of collective purpose to the theatre and to modern life in general. The strategies he adopted in composing the purportedly natural and authentic landscapes of his pageants served the primary illusion upon which they all depended: that the rural, amateur actors who appeared in them were likewise more natural, authentic and closer in type to the storied folk of Britain’s medieval and early modern past than to the sophisticated but affected London audiences who watched them from the grandstands.

This essay discusses the composition of landscape in Parker’s first two pageants, The Sherborne Pageant (1905) and The Warwick Pageant (1906), to demonstrate the extent to which what we may call ‘authored’ landscapes were essential to their efforts to evoke experiences of communality that contemporary intellectuals often found lacking in urban society and that many dramatists, like Parker, found lacking on the stages and in the audiences of London playhouses. The landscapes of the New Pageantry encouraged urban spectators to recognize themselves in the premodern folk communities represented in them. Moreover, they inspired eclectic expressions of collective life that re-contextualized pageantry as a thoroughly modern genre commingling past and present, city and country, nature and artifice, modernity and antimodernity.

Figure 1.

Episode I of The Sherborne Pageant. Photograph, Dorset History Centre.

The Sherborne Pageant and The Warwick Pageant were the first of more than a hundred pageants of their kind performed throughout Great Britain during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Though later pageants would cater to imperial, commercial, reformist and other agendas, the earliest examples of the New Pageantry concerned the histories of the villages in which they were performed (Withington 202). Pageantry was one among many Edwardian invented traditions. As Eric Hobsbawm has argued, the slow but widespread progress of electoral democracy throughout Great Britain in the half-century before the First World War led to a gradual restructuring of social relations that in turn necessitated the invention of new cultural practices (267). As increasing numbers of Britons earned the right to vote, and as the authority of unelected officials began to wane, enthusiasm and curiosity about the lives of ordinary people also grew. Linking past and present, pageantry sought to forge connections between more recent democratic virtues associated with enfranchisement and the virtues of communalism associated with preindustrial England.

Early on, Parker laid out the primary features of the genre he had invented in Sherborne so that others might follow his example. Although the use of the word pageant suggests continuity with medieval and early modern forms of theatrical spectacle, Parker did not see his pageants as a revival of these. Rather, he saw them as a fundamentally new...