‘On the most Eminent seate thereof is Gouernement Illustrated’: Staging Power in the Lord Mayor’s Show

Abstract

The most spectacular London stage in the early modern period was not the Globe or the Blackfriars, nor even the Banqueting House at Whitehall, but the annual Lord Mayor’s Show. The Show was the City’s celebration of the inauguration of the most important commoner in the country and it was noted across Europe for its splendour. As one of the multiple dramatic modes that thrived in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London the Lord Mayor’s Show was high-profile street theatre. The mayoral Show also serves to challenge the still-prevalent notion that civic authorities were uniformly hostile to all forms of theatricality in this period.¹ Rather, the Lord Mayor’s Show reveals the City’s government at times to be an enabler rather than an oppressor of theatre. Moreover, the Shows amply demonstrate what this volume calls the ‘innate theatricality’of the governing practices of the early modern metropolis.² It is this juxtaposition of theatricality and modes of power that this chapter will explore.