Lord Mayor Research Articles

:Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor's Show 1585–1639

:<i>Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor's Show 1585–1639</i>

‘A Most Exquisite Dilemma’: Conscience, Dissent and the Limits of Civic Authority in London’s Sheriffs Case

In 1754, the City of London Corporation began legal proceedings against Allen Evans and Alexander Sheafe to enforce payment of their fines for failing to act as the City’s sheriffs. This article argues that this was not a simple case of debt collection, or even of the City’s need to enforce the performance of such roles. Rather, it explores contemporary accusations that the City authorities were exploiting the legal and moral dilemmas faced by its dissenting liverymen to raise the necessary capital for the construction of the Lord Mayor’s Mansion House. More broadly, it argues that the matter offers a specific London context for understanding eighteenth-century discord concerning the validity — and indeed the existence — of England’s ancient constitution. London, whose cherished semi-autonomy from the fiat of the monarch relied on the performance of its own ancient liberties in its civic, commercial and municipal domains, proved a compelling arena for this debate.

The Aborigines' Protection Society: humanitarian imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909

For more than seventy years, a select group of the great and the good fought for the natives of the British Empire. Anti-Slavery campaigner Thomas Fowell Buxton, medical pioneer Thomas Hodgkin, London Mayor Robert Fowler, the 'Zulu' Harriette Colenso, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Shaftesbury were just some of the men and women who campaigned on behalf of the Aborigines' Protection Society. The Society shaped the British Empire, and fought against the tide of white supremacy to defend the interests of aboriginal peoples everywhere. Active on four continents, the Aborigines' Protection Society brought the Zulu King Cetshwayo to meet Queen Victoria, and Maori rebels to the Lord Mayor's banqueting hall. The Society's supporters were denounced by senior British Army officers and white settlers as Zulu-lovers, 'so-called friends of the Aborigines', and even traitors. The book tells the story of the three-cornered fight among the Colonial Office, the settlers and the natives that shaped the Empire and the pivotal role that the Society played, persuading the authorities to limit settlers' claims in the name of native interests. Against expectations, the policy of native protection turns out to be one of the most important reasons for the growth of Imperial rule. James Heartfield's comparative study of native protection policies in Southern Africa, the Congo, New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, and Canada - and how those with the best of intentions ended up championing colonisation. Pointing to the wreckage of humanitarian imperialism today, Heartfield sets out to understand its roots in the beliefs and practices of its nineteenth-century equivalents.

Hawthorne and the Gender of Jewishness: Anti‐Semitism, Aesthetics, and Sexual Politics in The Marble Faun

On Sunday, April 13 of 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne attended banquet in London at the Mansion House, to which he was invited by David Salomons, the Lord Mayor of London. Salomons was honoring Hawthorne in his capacity as U.S. Consul in Liverpool. The United States President Franklin Pierce, of whom Hawthorne had written campaign biography, had appointed Hawthorne, one of his best friends since their days as college classmates at Bowdoin College, to this position in 1853, at the time an extremely important one given Liverpool's centrality in transatlantic trade and commerce between England and the United States. (The position no longer exists.) Hawthorne may or may not have been aware that Salomons was pioneering activist for Jewish rights in the simultaneously tolerant and deeply anti-Semitic culture of Victorian England.1 The American author's account of his dinner at the Lord Mayor's Mansion has been central to many discussions of the Hawthorne's representation of Jewish people, nakedly revealing, as it does, both his deep-seated anti-Semitism and his intense fascination with the figure of the Jewess. From the description he provides in The English Notebooks, Hawthorne and David Salomons did not exactly hit it off: He said little to Hawthorne notes, except that I must hold myself in readiness to respond to toast which he meant to give; and though I hinted that I would much rather be spared, he showed no signs of mercy (21: 480). Hawthorne also observed that his lordship tall, hard-looking, white-headed old Jew, of plain deportment, but rather hearty than otherwise in his address. Sneakily availing himself of the privacy ostensibly afforded him by his notebook, Hawthorne deemed Salomons' wife a short and ugly old Jewess (CE 21: 479). As if reenacting the movement from the scornful apprehension of the tough old Puritan dames who regard Hester Prynne with such violent contempt in the opening scenes of The Scarlet Letter to his languorously sensual descriptions of that famous, marked heroine, Hawthorne transitions from his harsh description of Salomons' wife to much more rapturous one of woman he beholds sitting nearly opposite me, across the table. His description of this woman and the description of the man at her side need to be quoted at length, and as parts of the one continuous paragraph in which they appear: She was, I suppose, dark and yet not dark, but rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white; but the purest and finest complexion (without shade of color in it, yet anything but sallow or sickly) that I ever beheld. Her hair was wonderful deep, raven black, black as night, black as death; not raven black, for that has shiny gloss, and her's [sic] had not; but it was hair never to be painted, nor described - wonderful hair, Jewish hair. Her nose had beautiful outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too; and that, and all her features, were so fine that sculpture seemed despicable art beside her; and certainly my pen is good for nothing. If any likeness of her could be given, it must be by sculpture, not painting. She was slender, and youthful, but yet had stately and cold, though soft and womanly grace; and, looking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old patriarchs, in their maiden or early married days - what Rachel was, when Jacob wooed her seven years, and seven more - what Judith was; for, womanly as she looked, I doubt not she could have slain man, in good cause - what Bathsheba was; only she seemed to have no sin in her - perhaps what Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to eat the apple. I never should have thought of touching her, nor desired to touch her; for, whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was Jewess, or whatever else, I felt sort of repugnance, simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature. But, at the right hand of this miraculous Jewess, there sat the very Jew of Jews; the distilled essence of all the Jews that have been born since Jacob's time; he was Judas Iscariot; he was the Wandering Jew; he was the worst, and at the same time, the truest type of his race, and contained within himself, I have no doubt, every old prophet and every old clothesman, that ever the tribes produced; and he must have been circumcised as much as 10 times over. …

&lt;i&gt;Richard III&lt;/i&gt;, and: &lt;i&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Richard III, and: Twelfth Night Justin Shaltz Richard III Presented by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival at the Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. June 2-September 25, 2011. Directed by Miles Potter. Designed by Peter Hartwell. Lighting by Kevin Fraser. Compositions by Marc Desormeaux. Sound by Peter McBoyle. With David Ferry (Edward IV), Yanna McIntosh (Elizabeth), Michael Spencer-Davis (Clarence), Seana McKenna (Richard III), Bethany Jillard (Anne), Martha Henry (Margaret), Wayne Best (Buckingham), Sean Arbuckle (Catesby), and Gareth Potter (Richmond). Twelfth Night Presented by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival at the Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. July 15-October 28, 2011. Directed by Des McAnuff. Designed by Debra Hanson. Lights by Michael Walton. Compositions by Des McAnuff and Michael Roth. Musical direction by Michael Roth. Sound by Todd Charlton. With Brian Dennehy (Toby Belch), Stephen Ouimette (Andrew Aguecheek), Tom Rooney (Malvolio), Andrea Runge (Viola), Sara Topham (Olivia), Ben Carlson (Feste), Mike Shara (Orsino), and Juan Chioran (Fabian). The Stratford Shakespeare Festival's Richard III was staged within the black-box Tom Patterson Theatre, the upstage space blocked by a crimson curtain and red-and-white drapery. Director Miles Potter began with the echoes from choral chanting as the audience took its seats, then a celebratory dumb show from 3 Henry VI showing Edward winning the crown and disparaging a blonde-haired doll of Margaret. A spotlight found Seana McKenna's Richard 1.1 with long stringy black hair, bald spots apparent on her skull. McKenna's Richard was far from feminine—dressed in black, limping and hunchbacked, favoring a withered arm—and more an androgynous embodiment of evil, something like the Penguin in Batman comic books, diseased and distempered, red blotches upon her face. The lights rose at her proclamation to "be a villain" and she ended her soliloquy—"dive, thoughts"—to give her brother a reptilian embrace. McKenna's performance built slowly, better at first in two-faced interaction than in confessional soliloquy. The improbable wooing of Princess [End Page 195] Anne in 1.2 provided a contrast: Anne, a gracefully tall blonde, as if McKenna's Richard in opposite, wore an ivory gown, her soft color and fragile beauty juxtaposed with Richard's misshapen darkness. A stately Elizabeth, wearing a green-trimmed red robe that evoked Christian holidays, and her allies were racially cast—she and Rivers, Dorset, and Grey all dark-skinned —in a choice that indicated some bigotry in Richard's motivations. The first scene of act two revealed Edward as something akin to Richard in hideous disease: a syphilitic King with long gray hair obscuring his face, his body hunched with pain. McKenna's Richard was obviously abhorrent to others: the Duchess begrudgingly blessed her son in 2.2 but could not bear to touch him, and when the young Prince arrived, he mocked Richard by acting like a manic monkey, leaping onto Richard's hunched back only to be spilled to the stage when Richard twisted away. The interval came after 3.3 with Dorset and Grey baring their necks before hooded guards and Ratcliffe brandishing a sword. The blows fell before a blackout, with Richard appearing to observe from upstage. The second half moved quickly to the showdown at Bosworth Field. Potter used the leading scenes to create memorable stage images, such as McKenna's Richard bending to study the bloody sack that contained Hastings's head, poking at it like a curious child before dropping it with a thud at the feet of the Lord Mayor. Richard's malevolence became more physical: McKenna seized the hesitating Buckingham by the arm in 3.4, snapped impatient fingers at Ratcliffe in 4.2, took the murderous Tyrrel by the chin in 4.3, and pecked Elizabeth's cheek gently in 4.4 before grabbing her and kissing her full on the mouth. Potter cut 4.5 and used a brief 5.2 to introduce the handsome hero Richmond as Richard's Lancastrian rival. The armies assembled, Richard's men in black downstage, Richmond's army in gray chainmail upstage. Richmond knelt to pray as McKenna's Richard writhed in nightmare upon a scarlet sleeping mat. The ghosts of Richard's victims swarmed from the gutters...

Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (review)

Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (review)

The Multiple Meanings of Troy in Early Modern London's Mayoral Show

Troy and London go together. Such, at least, is the argument of many an early modern Lord Mayor's Show. Of twenty-seven extant mayoral texts from the period 1605-1639, nearly all invoke the model of New Troy, directly or indirectly, at some point.1 Quite why the link should be made is, perhaps, less clear. It is my argument here that this figure, invoked variously as Troia Nova, Troynovant or simply New Troy, operated in the mayoral pageants and civic writing in general as a shorthand signifier - a large finger pointing in the direction of a whole ream of civic discourse. The possible usefulness of such a signifier is not hard to imagine, and not simply in terms of a timesaver. Certain things about London cannot easily be said, especially when writing for the mayor, for a range of city aldermen with divergent interests, sometimes with a royal or foreign presence, and always with a large and diverse London crowd. As I shall demonstrate, by invoking the matter of Troy the mayoral pageants could conjure up equivocal or even subversive images while appearing to do just the opposite. By writing in the single word Troynovant, the pageant could draw on a range of themes and meanings built up outside of the particular text, allowing the suggestion of alternative ways of viewing and understanding the city. I begin, however, by outlining how and why the shows took up the idea of New Troy.How do you define a city? At the beginning of Thomas Dekker's Britannia's Honor, his mayoral pageant of 1628, the writer attempts to do just that, spending a good amount of time explaining early modern London.2 Somewhat stubbornly, Dekker moves through various iterations of the city - chamber royal, mistress of science, mother of Westminster, home of parliament, nurse to the country, admiral of the navy - at some length. She is a 'Golden-Key', a 'Store-house', a 'Magazine of Merchandize' (10). Amongst the many metaphorical means of understanding the city, however, one stands out. Dekker, it seems, does not forget the clear importance of ancient Troy to seventeenth-century London, confidently averring of the city that 'Troy has leap'd out of her own Cinders, to build Her Wals' (12-13). Quite what this particular metaphor accomplishes is unclear. On the one hand, the ancient ancestry of London points to her present magnificence. On the other, the mention of cinders might speak less of phoenix-like rebirth for the burnt city of Troy, than of the looming threat for London of a fiery repetition. Perhaps the oddest thing, though, and the main subject of the opening portion of this article, is that the connection is made at all.That Dekker, in late 1628, could so glibly refer to the ancient city of Troy as a direct antecedent of London demands at least a little explanation. The idea was simple enough: Brutus, descendant of Aeneas, had after numerous adventures and misadventures through Europe arrived at the isle of Albion, renaming it Britain and founding the beginnings of present civilisation. While doing so, he had also founded the greatest jewel of that civilisation, London. Such a founding myth was not individual to either London or Britain: many cities and countries throughout Europe had had similar stories concerning their origins. They had also let go of such stories a good century prior to Dekker's writing. As Philip Schwyzer has commented, 'the continued allegiance of the English to Brutus the Trojan ... made them a laughing-stock among continental scholars'.3 At the same time, historians and antiquarians in Britain had decidedly mixed feelings on the relevance of Troy. Forty years previous to Dekker's use of the history in Britannia's Honor, William Camden's Britannia (1586) dismissed the link between London and Troy as nothing short of fairytale, even as it allows for the potential usefulness of such a tale:For mine owne part, let Brutus be taken for the father and founder of the British nation; I will not be of a contrarie minde . …

TRACEY HILL. Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor's Show, 1585-1639.

TRACEY HILL. Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor's Show, 1585-1639.

Agitating for a design and regeneration agenda in a post-conflict city: the case of Belfast

Agitating for a design and regeneration agenda in a post-conflict city: the case of Belfast

Mercantilism and the Path to Spiritual Salvation in Thomas Heywood's Londini Emporia, or Londons Mercatura (1633)

Though often neglected, Thomas Heywood's London Lord Mayor's Shows are markedly different in both content and literary style from the printed accounts of civic pageants by other pageant authors, such as Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker. Londini Emporia (1633) in particular is innovative and distinctive, expanding in an original way the public performance material for the private sphere of its readership. In Londini Emporia Heywood weds the conventional praise for commerce of these street performances to a religious discourse on the salvation of the individual soul, which he expands in his book's extensive narratorial commentary. Departing from merely recording speeches, pageant devices and locations, Heywood creates a complex, multifaceted text that challenges the reader and becomes to a degree a new genre. More importantly, he retrospectively refocuses aspects of the performance with the aim of reconciling the public, commercial populist sphere of performance with the private, religious and meditative sphere of his readership.

The League of Nations, Public Ritual and National Identity in Britain, c.1919-56

On the morning of Saturday 8 November 1919, the streets linking the historic Guildhall in the City of London to the Royal Courts of Justice two miles to the west began to fill with crowds drawn by the promise of a dazzling visual spectacle. The occasion was the Lord Mayor’s Show, an ancient ritual first performed in the thirteenth century to mark the installation of a new occupant in London’s highest municipal office. The fortunes of the annual procession had waxed and waned over the centuries, but by the time of the First World War its status as one of the most eagerly anticipated dates in the civic calendar was once more assured. 1 As on previous occasions, spectators lining the route in 1919 marvelled at the brilliant display of civic and military pageantry, the mayor’s familiar gilded coach and the eye-catching banners of the London livery companies interspersed with marching bands and columns upon columns of smartly uniformed troops. This year, however, the Lord Mayor’s Show unveiled a novel feature. Filling a large slot between the pipers of the Scots Guards and the Worshipful Company of Musicians could be seen a lavish pageant dedicated to the League of Nations, the supranational body created only months before by the Allies at the Paris Peace Conference. At the head of the pageant strode the Herald of Peace, followed by a horse-drawn wagon festooned with foliage and conveying five exotically attired women representing the continents of the world. Appearing next, as the Times correspondent described, was ‘a long cavalcade of women on horseback, personating the Allied States and neutral countries, all in the national costumes, and attended by ‘‘maids of honour’’, young girls in white with flowing veils and bearing roses’. 2 Onlookers feasted their eyes upon France wearing her liberty cap and tricolour robe, Italy in green, red and white with a wreath of grapes on her head, Japan, whose hair was garlanded with yellow chrysanthemums, and beyond her the United States, clad in stars and stripes. The dominions and the four nations of the United Kingdom followed on, with the helmeted figure of Britannia bringing up the rear. It was, the Times reporter gushed, ‘really one of the most wonderful sights of the kind ever seen in the streets of London’. 3 The League of Nations was to make a repeat appearance at the Lord Mayor’s Show exactly a decade later in the shape of an intricately decorated horse-drawn car occupied by a giant birthday cake, marking the tenth

Apcoa Parking (UK) Ltd v The Lord Mayor and Citizens of the City of Westminster

Apcoa Parking (UK) Ltd v The Lord Mayor and Citizens of the City of Westminster

‘A worse importation than chewing gum’: American Influences on The Australian Press and Their Limits—The Australian Gallup Poll, 1941–1973

In studies of the Australian press, a wide range of American influences—on news genres, on notions of newsworthiness and presentation, and on the language in which stories are written—has been larg...

The Illogic of Zero

Throughout 2009, proponents of the abolition of nuclear weapons were unlucky. Almost each time they tried to make their case on the international scene, the real world came to haunt them. On April ...

John Squire: The Unknown Author of The Tryumphs of Peace, the London Lord Mayor’s Show for 1620

The Lord Mayor’s Shows for the inauguration of London’s mayor offered the street audience a mix of dramatic speeches, elaborate pageant devices, and a sumptuous procession, all financed and produced under the auspices of the city’s livery companies and written by some of the most successful playwrights of the seventeenth century: John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday and Thomas Heywood. However, one show, John Squire’s The Tryumphs of Peace (London: Nicholas Okes, 1620), is written by a figure unknown to literary history. Since the typical writer of Lord Mayor’s Show in the early Stuart period was an established dramatist, who produced multiple shows, this paper considers why the Haberdashers’ Company would select a writer with no dramatic reputation to compose their mayoral show in 1620. This paper aims to establish the likely identity of the author and to discuss the connection to the guilds of this unknown literary quantity.

Myopic Beauty: The Map, the Photograph, the Palimpsest, and Joyce

Myopic Beauty:The Map, the Photograph, the Palimpsest, and Joyce Joseph Nugent (bio) Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand. —Good night, Dan, he said gaily. (Joyce, Dubliners 216) James Joyce, too, was familiar with it, and familiar with the family of Daniel O'Connell, the man it honored. He had particular reason to be. Two generations before, his grandfather had married into the prosperous O'Connells of South Kerry. Dan, the Joyces claimed, was one of their own. Of course, the family connection was difficult to prove, but the Liberator himself, Richard Ellmann tells us, was happy to indulge the notion (11). That would have been enough for James Joyce, who knew that history was more than a paper trail. History, Joyce understood, was a lived condition, its traces all around. In Dublin it underlay the fabric of the city, was written in its very stones, confronted the citizen at every turn, was omnipresent, ghostly, nightmarish. And in 1882, the year that James Augustine Joyce was born, even as the metropolis turned its eyes to the future, with the much-heralded Irish Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures, it marked the centenary of the Irish Volunteers and, Janus-like, looked backwards too. Dublin was a place of retrospective [End Page 266] aspiration, its eyes set firmly on a past it did not want the citizen to forget. Since 1808 the hero of Trafalgar had presided over Sackville, not yet O'Connell, Street from the great Doric column that was the Nelson Pillar. Victorians knew the value of the great man as aspirational device and of emulation as ideological tool. As the cult of the fallen hero spread across the nation-states of Europe, boulevard and thoroughfare were colonnaded with warriors and leaders, reifications in bronze and stone of the glory of the race. Surmounted by the great and good, idealized types, these monuments were rubrics of the national narrative, assertions of a seamless continuity between glorious past and certain future. A newly confident Irish people, too, set out to ossify the exemplary qualities of its dead for the edification of its youth. On August 15th, 1882, the Freeman's Journal reported, "Hundreds of thousands, young and old, hopeful in heart for a great and glorious day," braved a dismal downpour to converge on O'Connell Bridge. They had come to celebrate the opening of the Exhibition and to witness the unveiling of what was to be the most imposing piece of public sculpture to grace the city yet. It had been conceived barely a decade after the Great Famine. On this, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, John Henry Foley's magnificent memorial was finally ready to be unveiled. The proceedings of the much-anticipated day would proclaim the breadth of Dublin's industry displayed by its menfolk marshalled in grand procession. From all corners of the city came its tradesmen: the city's horseshoers, then its nail makers, its printers, cork cutters, butchers, basket makers, its skinners, plumbers, bottle-makers, brush makers, saddle makers. "At one o'clock … the veil fell to the Lord Mayor's signal, and the O'Connell Bronze stood revealed," wrote the Freeman's; then "a mighty roar went up from ten thousand throats." At that very moment "the sun suddenly opened its beams through the drenching rain, and gloriously lighted up the monument and the crowded platform" (O'Hanlon lxxiii). The gods were smiling. Four Winged Victories surround the monument's base. Here are Patriotism and Fidelity, resplendent, massive, in resounding bronze. Courage and Eloquence, two more embodiments of the qualities the [End Page 267] Irish people revered O'Connell for, sit out of sight. Between them are mounted the four great shields of Ireland's provinces. For years James Joyce carted his own coat of arms from dingy flat to other flat, a step ahead of the landlord, proud, like his father, of his ancestry. Strange, then, that in the pantheon of Irish heroes it was not to his reputed kinsman but to Parnell he always looked. Joyce was patriotic, but his patriotism was not of...

‘Ford Madox Ford: Autobiography, Urban Space, Agoraphobia’

Some time in late 1898 or early 1899 Ford Madox Ford came across Emile Zola seated on a bench in Hyde Park. Ford, still in his mid-twenties, was already a published biographer, novelist and poet. Zola, who died in 1902, was in his late fifties. He had fled to London after being convicted of criminal libel for his role in the Dreyfus Affair and sentenced to prison. On Zola‟s previous visit to the city, in September 1893, he had been positively feted: “The Lord Mayor received him at the Guildhall; an elaborate firework display illuminated his portrait in the sky above the Crystal Palace; and editors and writers hosted soirees in his honour” (Cummins 130). At one point, he was conducted on a gruesome tour of the scenes of Jack the Ripper‟s crimes in Whitechapel. “As to London, which I visited for the first time,” he told the Guardian on his return to Paris on that occasion, “the big city made an indelible impression on my mind. Its beauty is not in its monuments, but in its immensity; the colossal character of its quays and bridge, to which ours are as toys” (“Emile Zola Interviewed”). This time, exiled from his homeland, the city‟s immensity did not have the same exhilarating effect on him. He arrived at Victoria Station, with almost no possessions, in July 1898. Soon after he left London on a series of “suburban peregrinations” that his friends insisted would help him “achieve total obscurity” (Brown 752). He spent an anxious few months in England, sporadically afflicted by nervous seizures. Ford recalls the occasion on which he happened upon Zola in Hyde Park in his autobiographical memoir, Return to Yesterday (1931). There he records that Zola “had been gazing gloomily at the ground and poking the sand with the end of his cane” (Return 214). “No gloom could have ever been greater than his,” he adds in a drily melancholic tone (Return 214). According to Ford, Zola listlessly complained that on the ground beside the bench, in the course of the morning, he had found as many as eighteen hairpins carelessly dropped by negligent nursemaids: “A city so improvident must be doomed” (Return 214). Ford, who appears to relish the precision of the number eighteen, implies that this behaviour is positively compulsive. “He had, at any rate during that stay in London, many phobias,” he continues (Return 214). Ford then proceeds to describe another occasion, presumably at about this time, when a mutual acquaintance asked him to convey Zola to some address in a hansom cab. Zola scarcely spoke during the journey, on the assumption that Ford could not speak French. “But eventually I found that he was counting the numbers of the registration plates of the cabs that were in front of us,” Ford notes:

Three Renaissance Usury Plays: 'The Three Ladies of London' by Robert Wilson, 'Englishmen for my Money' by William Haughton and 'The Hog Hath Lost his Pearl' by Robert Tailor. (Revels Plays Companion Library) by Lloyd Edward Kermode

218 Reviews Three Renaissance Usury Plays: 'TheThree Ladies ofLondon byRobert Wilson, 'Eng lishmenfor myMoney' byWilliam Haughton and 'The Hog Hath Lost his PearV byRobert Tailor. Ed. by Lloyd Edward Kermode. (Revels Plays Companion Library) Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2009. ?60. xii+380 pp. ISBN 978-0-7190-7262-8. This is a very topical publication. Lloyd Edward Kermode cites a Jacobean com mentator who wrote that 'themightie sommes imployed by the waye of Usurye [...] are thought tobe soe hudge, that ifall themoney ofEngland were layd on one heape and every Usurer should clayme his parte therewoulde not be coyne suffi cient to pay them' (p. 2): in 2009, this vision of irresponsible lending and national bankruptcy seems far from hypothetical. It is not only its financial theme that makes this edition timely,however. In thewake of ScottMcMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean's The Queen's Men and theirPlays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and theUniversity of Toronto's experimental performances of items from that company's repertory, accessible scholarly editions of 1580s plays such as Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies ofLondon (performed firstby Leicester's and then by the Queen's Men) are much to be welcomed. Kermode's edition of the play is certainly scholarly and accessible; I could wish he had followed McMillin and MacLean's lead by devoting more attention to its performative aspects (for instance, by providing stage directions for apparent instances of direct address to the audience). He also might have spentmore time explaining the play's allegory? something students are likely to find more challenging than, say, its reference to Robin Hood, glossed as a 'Nottingham folk hero of the Middle Ages and Renaissance' (4. 36 n.). Towards the end of The Three Ladies of London we are told that the character Usury 'was seen at the Exchange very lately' (17. 10). InEnglishmen for myMoney, by contrast,William Haughton gives his usurer a name?Pisaro?and shows him atwork in the Exchange; Kermode's volume thus nicely exemplifies the transition from late allegorical morality to the specificity of citizen comedy. He deals well with what must be one of the trickier editorial aspects of Englishmen, the garbled versions ofDutch, French, and Italian spoken by some of the characters, electing to retain an orthographic inconsistency 'in character with the text itselfand with the arguments about Anglo-foreign relations that the play raises' (p. 66). Translations and a glossary guide the reader through the resulting tangles, and amap of London helps localize the play's many topographical references. The surprise inclusion in this volume isRobert Tailor's The Hog Hath Lost his Pearl, acted by apprentices at the Whitefriars in 1613. The performance was broken up by the sheriffs and some of the actors detained, whether because theywere unlicensed amateurs, because the performance was in Lent, or because the 'Hog' was taken as referring to Lord Mayor John Swinnerton (Kermode does not discuss Matthew 7. 6, 'pearls before swine', a phrase that also seems to inform the title). Part city comedy, part Fletcherian tragicomedy, this is an outstandingly derivative play to which usury is, until the final act, relatively marginal. More striking is MLR, 105.1, 2010 219 its frank discussion of the Protestant doctrines of predestination and salvation by faith, repudiating 'the self-justifier,who doth surmise |By his own works to gain salvation' (iv. 3. 76-77). The notion that through being cheated out of his goods the usurer has saved his soul is also treatedwith apparent absence of irony: this is the kind of conversion Jonson, Chapman, and Marston had already parodied in Eastward Ho. While Tailor's play is a left-field (though not unwelcome) choice, modernized editions of the other two are long overdue. Kermode's discussion of earlymodern ideas about usury, and his survey of literaryand dramatic treatments of the subject, will also make this book an essential point of reference for those interested in the topic. Sheffield Hallam University Tom Rutter Acting Like a Lady: BritishWomen Novelists and theEighteenth-Century Theater. By Nora Nachumi. New York: AMS. 2008. xxvi+347 pp. $94.50. ISBN 978 0-404-64850-3. There are many good things to say about Nora...

Bernard Vincent Lee

Bernard Vincent Lee came from a well-known Manchester family, which had given two Lord Mayors to the city. He began his medical career by undertaking ear, nose, and throat surgery,...

Ireland's First Jewish Lord Mayor: Sir Otto Jaffé and Edwardian Belfast's Civic Sphere

This article examines the public life of Sir Otto Jaffé, Belfast and Ireland's first Jewish Lord Mayor, and through him the civic sphere in Belfast in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. It explores the inability of the public sphere in Belfast to wholly assimilate an enthusiastic, provident businessman and dedicated unionist. As a public figure Jaffé experienced a ‘doubleness’: he was at once seen as an ideal civic leader by his peers and rejected as an alien by others. His career also reveals the contraction of the office of Lord Mayor and the poverty of the civic sphere in the city, particularly at the end of the century. Finally, his departure from Belfast exposes the xenophobia and hostility experienced generally by British and Irish Jews in the context of the First World War.