Hauptseminar The Lord Mayor's Show Politics Economics and Performance Art in the 17th century 3st

£ 1.300 were spent on the Lord Mayor’s Show in 1613, arguably the prime dramatic event of that year. When we think of seventeenth-century drama we still tend to forget that the annually performed civic pageants were hugely popular with Londoners who lined the streets and the Thames to catch glimpses of the spectacle. Civic pageants like the Lord Mayor's Show were decisively shaped in the Jacobean and Caroline period, even if the first pageant was performed as early as 1535. From 1585 onwards acclaimed dramatists were asked to oversee the entertainment, among them George Peele, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Thomas Heywood, and Thomas Middleton. Shakespeare’s contemporaries who later shaped the theatre in the second and third decade of the seventeenth century were all involved in these entertainments. And these pageants bring to life the streets of early modern London with the political and economic concerns that shaped the metropolis. The dramatic form of the Lord Mayor's Show is still poorly understood. So this seminar will be a research powerhouse. We will have to come up with theories and methods to explore the form, and we will have to make texts accessible that have not yet been edited. To get some idea of what awaits you follow the two links below: https://lordmayorsshow.london/ http://eebo.chadwyck.com.emedien.ub.uni-muenchen.de/search/full_rec?SOURCE=pgimages.cfg&ACTION=ByID&ID=99841929&FILE=../session/1421270351_19548&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&VID=6549&PAGENO=1&ZOOM=&VIEWPORT=&SEARCHCONFIG=var_spell.cfg&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&HIGHLIGHT_KEYWORD= Further reading: Tracey Hill. Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show 1585-1639 (2011). David Bergeron. English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642 (rev. ed. 2003). LMU München SoSe 2015 Department III Anglistik und Amerikanistik