Because Gorboduc, or The Tragedie of Ferrex and Porrex (1561) sees a king divide his kingdom between his two sons while he still lives, much scholarship discusses the play as an Elizabeth succession parable. However, the printer John Day’s prefatory letter to his 1570 octavo (O2) provides a different frame, documenting an instance of Gorboduc’s later reception that scholarship has not yet recognized. This article argues that by comparing the playtext to a sexually assaulted woman Day does not merely advertise his edition’s supposed superiority to O1, as some have claimed. Considering Day’s reformist network, his investment in preserving Protestantism in England, and his output in 1570—including the massive second edition of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments and political treatises by Gorboduc’s co-author Thomas Norton—Day’s ‘better forme’ of Gorboduc becomes newly legible within histories of reading. For by claiming O2 will ‘play Lucreces part’, Day reads Gorboduc’s materialization of misrule’s effects through violence against ‘Mother Brittaine’ as anti-tyranny polemic—and asks book buyers to read it this way as well. Synthesizing historicist and feminist literary approaches with recent book historical work on paratexts, this article demonstrates how O2’s prefatory letter figures gender violence to justify resistance to tyranny.
In the third and final part, "Methodologies for Re-viewing Performance," the essays model different approaches for investigating civic spectacles. David M. Bergeron shifts the scale of analysis. Rather than looking at a specific occasion or type of event, Bergeron traces out over years the various roles played in civic displays by a single person. J. Caitlin Finlayson examines the translation and circulation of ephemeral architecture in print while Katherine Butler reconstructs soundscapes through texts to access something of the lived experience of festivals. Finally, Janelle Jenstad and Mark Kaethler present a digital geospatial tool that enables users to visualize London's pageants within their dynamic urban contexts. Together these contributions push the study of early modern festivals to consider a fuller range of objects, actors, spaces, and practices.Where the volume is perhaps less successful is in its organization. The themes that frame each section do not quite work as organizing devices, if only because as lines of inquiry they run through all of the volume's contributions. In sum, for the way that they open new avenues for analyzing ephemeral modes of display, the essays are valuable not only for the specific insights they offer about London's civic pageants but also as models for investigating festival cultures in other early modern contexts. More broadly, the essays together invite critical reflection on civic performances in the present. London continues to stage the Lord Mayor's Show, and the celebrations given for Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee in 2022 made clear that pageantry remains a potent fixture in our contemporary cultural landscape.
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