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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
During the course of her summer's progress in 1575, Elizabeth I spent nineteen days at Kenilworth, the Earl of Leicester's Castle in Warwickshire, where she was presented with various entertainments—including plays, fireworks, bear-baitings, water-pageants, acrobatic performances, and dancing—at a cost of over a thousand pounds a day, as part of what has been called “unquestionably sixteenth-century England's grandest and most extravagant party.” Robert Langham, a minor court functionary who wrote an eyewitness account of the party, describes a “lyvely morisdauns” that was featured in this festive show of fealty to the queen. According to Langham, the morris performed for Elizabeth was danced “acording too the auncient manner” and featured “six daunserz, Mawdmarion, and the fool.” The dance was part of a bride-ale procession made up of “lusty lads and bolld bachelarz of the parish” arranged two by two in “marciall order,” who preceded sixteen horsemen and the bridegroom; after the horsemen came the morris dance, followed by three “prety puzels” carrying spicecakes and leading the bride (“ill smellyng” and “ugly fooul ill favord”), who was accompanied by “too auncient parishionerz, honest toounsmen” and a dozen bridesmaids. The procession marched to the castle in the great court in which a quintain had been set up for feats of arms; when these games were concluded, a performance of the traditional Hock Tuesday play from nearby Coventry was enacted. Though these festivities were staged outside her window, apparently the queen did not see much of them because, Langham tells us, “her highnes behollding in the chamber delectabl dauncing indeed: and heerwith the great throng and unruliness of the peopl, waz cauz that this solemnitee of Brydeale and dauncing had not the full muster waz hoped for” (11. 722–26). Elizabeth asked that the Hocktide play be performed again for her on the following Tuesday; Langham does not mention whether or not the morris dance was also repeated for the queen's pleasure.
1. R. J. P. Kuin, “Introduction,” Robert Langham, A Letter, introduction, notes, and commentary by R. J. P. Kuin (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 16.
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3. See Heaney, Michael, “From Kingston to Kenilworth: Early Plebeian Morris,” Folklore 100 (1989), 102, for a similar reading of the Kenilworth morris danceCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4. This was not the first morris dance Elizabeth had watched. Henry Machyn describes a May game by the London parish of Saint John Zachary at Midsummer, 24 June 1559, which included a giant, guns, morris dancers, and pageants of the Nine Worthies, Saint George and the dragon, and Robin Hood. The May game was later played for Elizabeth at Greenwich. See The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. Nichols, John G., Camden Society 42 (London: J. B. Nichols, 1848), 201Google Scholar.
5. Peter H. Greenfield's discussion of Christmas entertainments performed in aristocratic households as mechanisms for cementing relations between locals and lords is also relevant to the social dynamics of the festivities at Kenilworth; see his “Festive Drama at Christmas in Aristocratic Households,” Festive Drama, ed. Twycross, Meg (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), 34–53Google Scholar.
6. Two other pamphlets describing the Kenilworth festivities were also published: The Pastime of the Progresse, now lost, and George Gascoigne's The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenelwoorth. Gascoigne's pamphlet was apparently written for a “gentle” audience and dismisses the popular entertainments, including the “countrie shewe” and “the merry marriage” as “so plaine as needeth no further explication;” see Cunliffe, J. W., ed., The Complete Works of George Gascoigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 2:106Google Scholar.
7. For a succinct discussion of these developments and their consequences for the study of medieval drama, see Kathleen M. Ashley, “Cultural Approaches to Medieval Drama,” Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. Richard Emmerson (New York: MLA, 1990), 64–65. Glynne Wickham sees 1576 as a “watershed year” for medieval theater, because that marks the establishment of permanent playhouses as well as the date of the central government's suppression of religious drama; see his Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 3: xix.
8. For a useful discussion of the difficulties of studying dance as well as an argument in favor of making dance research a part of the project of cultural studies, see Desmond, Jane C., “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” Cultural Critique 26 (1993–1994): 33–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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10. Skillful and creative use of the findings of archival projects can restore some of this situational density, but that does not lessen the degree of erasure of context that has taken place in the process of gathering archival information.
11. Chandler, Keith, “Ribbons, Bells and Squeaking Fiddles:” The Social History of Morris Dancing in the English South Midlands, 1660–1900 (London: Folklore Society, 1993)Google Scholar.
12. Judge, Roy, “Merrie England and the Morris, 1881–1910,” Folklore 104 (1993), 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13. For instance, the dancers on the famous Betley window (c. 1500–1520) are usually assumed to be “morris dancers,” but this assumption is based, as best I can ascertain, on later understandings of what morris dancers looked like; see Davidson, Clifford, Illustrations of the Stage and Acting in England to 1580 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1991), 94–98Google Scholar. Nonetheless, when new costumes were made in the late nineteenth century for the Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers, they were based on the window, which was taken to represent what morris dancers were supposed to look like rather than on morris costumes in use by the village dancers; see Judge, “Merrie England,” 132–133.
14. See Chandler, “Ribbons,”11.
15. The most thorough argument for the pan-European folk origins of morris dancing is Violet Alford, , Sword Dance and Drama (London: Merlin Press, 1962)Google Scholar.
16. See Forrest, John and Heaney, Michael, “Charting Early Morris,” Folk Music Journal 6 (1991), 169Google Scholar. It is possible that these objects were made on the continent, as Chandler, “Ribbons,” 42, notes. What might be morris dancers also appear on the mid-fifteenth-century roof bosses at the Guildhall in York; see Davidson, , Illustrations of the Stage, 162, n.75Google Scholar.
17. See Douch, H. L., “Household Accounts at Lanherne,” Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, n.s. 2, no. 1 (1953), 27–29Google Scholar; cited in Chandler, “Ribbons,” 42.
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19. This question is raised by Wasson, John in the introduction to Records of Early English Drama: Devon, ed. Wasson, John (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), xix-xxGoogle Scholar.
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30. See the discussion of these works in Baskervill, Elizabethan Jig, 365.
31. Heaney, “Kingston,” 99–100.
32. See the charts of social/geographic distribution in Forrest and Heaney, “Charting,” 179–185.
33. Pettitt, Thomas, “English Folk Drama in the Eighteenth Century: A Defense of the Revesby Sword Play,” Comparative Drama 15 (1981), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has argued that most folk performances involve performers who are of a lower status than their audience as part of “the relationship between such socially adjacent and interdependent groups.”
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39. British Library Add. MS 12222, f.5; cited in Heaney, “Kingston,” 99.
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41. Morris dancing in the sixteenth century apparently featured abrupt movement. In Act 4 of John a Kent and John a Cumber, the leader of the morris dance says “Let us jerk it over the greene;” quoted in Baskervill, Elizabethan Jig, 353.
42. For a discussion of the political/ceremonial uses of street pageants, see Bergeron, David M., “Pageants, Politics, and Patrons,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 139–152Google Scholar.
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44. Machyn, Diary, 33.
45. Heaney, “Kingston,” 94.
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50. Mills, “Chester's Midsummer Show,” especially 135 and 137.
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52. The play was largely the work of John Rowe, sergeant at law; Wolsey believed it was about him and had Rowe sent to Fleet Prison along with one of the actors. See Hall, Edward, Chronicle, ed. Ellis, Henry (London, 1809), 719Google Scholar; discussed in Anglo, Spectacle, 238–239.
53. See Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 67–80Google Scholar, on bell ringing as a crucial part of festive celebrations that carried political overtones.
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59. REED: Devon, 126.
60. Heaney, “Kingston,” 98. When Mary Tudor came to power in 1553, she ordered the restoration of altars, images, and festive performances as a real and symbolic reinstitution of the old faith abolished under the protestant reforms of the 1540s and early 1550s. The response from Saint Lawrence's in Reading describes how morris costumes had been lost or sold; see Kerry, History, 227.
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78. Quoted in Judge, “Merrie England,” 131.
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80. The information in this paragraph comes from Whisnant, David E., All That is Native and Fine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 79, 49–50, and 209–230Google Scholar; the newspaper article is quoted on 202.
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82. For an account of recent American morris teams, see Schwartz, David M., “Morris Dancers Are Coming and So It Must Be May,” Smithsonian 12 (May 1981): 118–125Google Scholar. I wish to thank my colleague, Tami Kaplan, for sharing her collection of material on modern morris dancing teams.
