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

Abstract

This study seeks explore how and why representations of motives work changed in poetic speeches for Lord Mayors' Shows. Almost every 29 October during Renaissance, one of liveries staged a civic pageant in streets celebrate a mayoral election in London. In preparation for this event, it hired playwrights produce spectacular devices and poetic speeches for performance in front of thousands of spectators. (1) Previous criticism claims that these speeches were inaudible and irrelevant. But archival research reveals that tradesmen who sponsored shows commissioned speeches with specific requirements. For example, on 7 September 1611, Goldsmiths generated a contract with Anthony Munday that specified which characters in their drama would have speeches: Munday had to make and speeches for expressing of Shew, bothe for Lepston, ffarrington, Kinges, boyes, and all rest. (2) First, 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 same playwrights were writing dramas for civic pageants and for theaters, why did drama written for pageants develop in such contrasting ways, using a wide variety of forms, but predominantly preferring rhyme, while theater favored blank verse? Finally, how can these speeches help us identify, in words of Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, changing relations of economic and ideological production? (3) Using New Economic Criticism and New Historical Formalism focus on the nexus between economic and quantitative language and language of literature, (4) I argue that fitt and apt speeches in form and content were those expressed in a consciously verse, often spoken by laboring characters, using themes that emphasized serious industry. The first half of paper charts significance and progression of this labored form. I analyze contemporary records illustrate audibility of speeches in spectators' experiences and importance of speeches in liveries' practice of ordering and paying for them. The second half of paper examines idea of labor in content of speeches. In particular, these speeches resulted from and shaped cultural conception of motivations work. Because of greater economic demand for laborers' work but lack of an accompanying rise in wages, liveries tried increase incentive of workers work harder by advertising in shows payoffs of work. These motivations, however, varied over time and according economic group in population addressed: those outside livery, such as consumers; and those inside livery at both ends of its hierarchy, such as its elite traders and Lord Mayor, and its laborers and apprentices. Early in period, shows of Thomas Nelson and Anthony Munday draw attention labor as a cycle and aim their message at consumers, whose responsibility was support cycle in England avoid national labor crises. Thomas Middleton's speeches embody personal and community benefits of this cycle livery elite. As depictions of work in later shows of Thomas Dekker and John Taylor increasingly emulate actual working experience of London laborers, they change from a notion of work as a repetitive process, a laboring circle of life, a process with a particular end, namely social mobility. This transformation in concept of work in speeches from cyclical linear deserves notice because it complicates our assumptions about compensation: not only do we realize that motivation--and thus reward--for work varied for different members of society, but also that these rewards changed over time. Scholars have ignored poetry of civic pageants because early critics dismissed speeches with assumption that they took a secondary place visual spectacle and therefore would have been irrelevant and impossible hear. …