ABSTRACT

The most egregious intertangling of politics and theatre in the seventeenth century came with the production in August 1624 by the King’s Men at the Globe Theatre of Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess. Middleton’s earlier work has been noted above, but there was little in it to suggest he would produce this extraordinary success du scandale. However, beside his conventional theatre work, Middleton had by 1624 become London’s most successful creator of pageantry, an inevitably political line of work, and he had also been appointed to the post of City Chronologer. There were plenty of civic pageants to be created in the Jacobean period – both outdoors and indoors, as well as for the court, the aristocracy, the Inns of Court and so on. And each 29 October came the Lord Mayor’s Show when the newly elected Lord Mayor of London travelled from Guildhall to Westminster partly by boat on the Thames, to take his oath of office, and then return to Guildhall. Along the way, the Guild which sponsored him provided a lavish show of pageantry and entertainment: the 1613 show, for instance, cost no less than £1300, enough to rebuild the burned-down Globe Theatre.