ELIZABETH ZEMAN KOLKOVICH. The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender

Abstract

Identifying a clearly defined subset of ‘country house’ entertainments from the innumerable events included in Nichols’s Progresses, and catalogued in Mary Hill Cole’s The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (1999), is by no means unproblematic, but Kolkovich’s principle of selection is largely dictated by her interest in the conflicted relationships between the court and the provinces (p. 21). For her, the defining characteristics of the country house form are ‘its provincial landscape setting, episodic and mobile structure, characters and tropes from courtly and popular literature, collaborative authorship, and interactive and somewhat improvised performance’ (p. 7). The word ‘entertainment’ was seldom used in the Elizabethan period with quite the passive overtones it has since acquired; then, it was the sense of mutuality inherent in its etymology that was generally to the fore. ‘We princes’, Elizabeth I famously remarked, ‘are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world…The eyes of many behold our actions’. Progress was performance and she travelled to ‘entertain’ as much as to be entertained. At Elvetham in 1591, for example, she alighted from her horse, raised the Countess of Hertford from her knees and kissed her, ‘using manie comfortable and princely speeches, as wel to hir, as to the Earle of Hertford standing hard by, to the great rejoysing of manie beholders’ (p. 100). Hertford had mounted ‘the grandest country house entertainment since Kenilworth’ in an attempt to regain the royal favour forfeited early in the reign through his ill-advised marriage to Catherine Grey, a great grand-daughter of Henry VII with a claim to the throne (p. 92). His second wife, the recipient of Elizabeth’s very publicly staged courtesy, was Frances Howard, a former maid of honour, whose role in the affair was to act as mediatrix for her husband. In this, according to the printed accounts—two distinct editions in 1591—she was singularly successful, yet Elvetham marked no significant rise in Hertford’s fortunes. The favours Elizabeth displayed on such occasions were often dramatic but ephemeral, not unlike the paraphernalia of the pageants that supplied their backdrop.