SOURCE: Palmer, Barbara D. “‘Ciphers to This Great Accompt’: Civic Pageantry in the Second Tetralogy.” In Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, edited by David M. Bergeron, pp. 114-29. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Palmer points out the subtlety of Shakespeare's depiction of pageantry and ceremony as political tools in Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V.]

A single definition of pageantry in Shakespeare's plays is elusive at worst and probably unprofitably reductive at best, but the diversity of forms that scholars have called pageantry does make discussion confusing. As Robert Withington observed in his pioneering study, “We have in pageant a term which is extremely elastic,”¹ stretching to include tableaux vivants; emblematic representation; acrobats, waits, and minstrels; tournaments and jousts; royal, civic, and ecclesiastical ceremonies; masques, interludes, and allegories; dancing, from morris to bear; and any procession slightly more orderly than Wat Tyler's. Its general characteristics, however, can be agreed upon. An event or action of living picture calculated to be seen, the form of display is as important to its effect as the content. It is public rather than private, orderly and planned rather than chaotic and spontaneous. Above all, pageantry is spectacle with a public purpose: to entertain, to impress, to appease, to reassure, to reaffirm a belief or commitment, sacred or secular.

One difficulty in analyzing pageantry stems from disagreement about whether what is shown is more definitive than how it is shown and, further, the relation of pageantry to or within the drama of the public theater. Essentially, the question is whether pageantry within drama is active or static, whether its function is to advance the themes, pace, and structure or to suspend them while perhaps adding stature, scope, and color. The most extreme expression of static pageantry invites us to see Shakespeare's audience as that fictive tribe of unlettered apprentices, dissolute young gentlemen, and distracting orange-wenches, tolerating the soliloquies for the hope of the swordfights, not hearing the pentameter because gawking at the procession.²

Such a naïve view of pageantry, on- or off-stage, underestimates its political dimension. Whether pageantry at court, pageantry by or for the commons, or pageantry in the drama, these displays all share a political purpose beyond their obvious function as entertaining spectacle. That political purpose of course varies with the occasion, and this study in no way seeks to link court with commons with theater pageantry: the concern here is simply to assert and examine a political bias to pageantry, not to trace connections from historical monarch to civic display to dramatic character.

This point of view, the assertion that all pageantry is inherently political, also may seem naïve because it rests on very basic and often overlooked human factors. In general, people seldom spend time, effort, and money unless either they have to or else they get something of value in return, a generalization particularly apt to the intermittently parsimonious Tudors and consistently parsimonious middle-class Elizabethans. For these tremendously expensive displays to continue, as they did year after year, both royalty and commons must have received satisfaction, one aspect of which was visible advertising: a city's prestige or loyalty, a guild's products or skills, a king's power.³

Content aside, the mere fact of such presentations was a political statement, whether the impressive display of a victorious king's person or the purposeful Harmony of Heaven pageant contrived for Henry VII's first visit to the city of York. Part of rising nationalism, class identity, civic pride, and conscious governance, pageantry can be viewed as a reflection of social and political phenomena rather than as disengaged entertainment.⁴ The medieval and Renaissance dramatic records, which give detailed accounts of civic pageantry, support such a political interpretation of spectacle. That interpretation, in turn, encourages a reexamination of the verbal and visual ways in which Shakespeare presents pageantry in the four plays from Richard II to Henry V, plays often cited as devoid of pageantic spectacle.

These four plays are particularly interesting because they picture a world in change: the fall of a divine-right king, the rise of a citizen king, the washing off of balm, the very process of exchanging kingly robes for an almsman's gown, a progress from the flower of all chivalry to the mirror of all Christian kings. Because the concept of governance changes in these plays, one might expect Shakespeare's treatment of pageantry, the display of governance, to change as well, and so it does. Instead of innocent, timeless ritual or popular entertainment alone, pageantry in these plays can be defined as the calculated public display of the king's person and the commons' response to such a display, what Richard II calls “respect, / Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty” or what Henry V characterizes as “general ceremony … place, degree and form, / Creating awe and fear in other men.”⁵ Rather than static spectacle, pageantry or ceremony is a gauge of the king's power, a metaphor for the way in which and the success with which he governs.

In the “citizen king” plays, one might expect an abundance of civic pageantry, the kings' public appearances to the commons. Here kingship ostensibly is based on the goodwill of the commons, and here are kings who lose or gain their thrones by their relation to and manipulation of the people they govern. Instead, however, of presenting civic pageantry on stage in these plays, Shakespeare seems to rely on his audience's knowledge of such pageantry, reinforcing that knowledge with numerous textual references to the commons and their displays of power. To argue thus, that civic pageantry is a thematic force albeit not a visual one in these plays, is no more farfetched than to argue that the Elizabethan audience's familiarity with Renaissance psychology, rhetoric, or fashion informs other plays.

That Shakespeare does not choose to display civic pageantry on stage in these plays is not surprising: the content and forms of such displays were essentially unvaried over the years, his audience brought their collaborative imaginations and memories with them, and his thematic perspective in these plays is looking down from the throne rather than up from the street. As David Bergeron points out, however, “Something as innocent as a civic pageant can be a two-edged sword in serving nationalistic purposes,”⁶ and Shakespeare's kings are not the only force wielding the weapon of pageantry. The English town, whether Coventry or York or Bristol, was not a pawn in a feudal system but a powerful, wealthy, corporate body seeking to define and exert its individual identity. One of the public means of displaying this identity was civic pageantry, particularly the pageantry devised for a king's entrance to the city. Although apparently naïve in content and form, such civic display “often carried meanings far beyond anything which its surface tedium might suggest.”⁷ As various scholars have noted, the content of civic pageantry at kings' entries seldom was overtly political.⁸ The event itself, however, was political, an open statement of a city's power, wealth, ingenuity, technology, culture, and identity.

Representative examples of these entries can help modern readers to share the vision of civic pageantry possessed by Shakespeare's audience as well as to understand the support or threat that the commons held for the king.⁹ Full texts of welcoming speeches, physical necessaries for shows, exact procession routes, yardage and colors of livery, banquet menus, and costs—always costs—are recorded, visit after visit. The sheer repetition of detail substantiates the generalization that Shakespeare's audience was familiar with these forms: civic pageantry was dictated by tradition and then varied as political and economic circumstances demanded. One finds frequent reference to how it was done at the last king's visit, often a decade or more earlier; in York, at least, these forms were so securely in memory and in record that an “etc.” sometimes suffices. “Certain blanks are filled with new names, as the years pass; but the formulae remain pretty nearly the same. … Kings, queens, archbishops, and mayors may come and go; but the companies and the citizens are always there to greet their successors.”¹⁰

The four major divisions of a king's visit that can be examined for political and propaganda nuance from the records are the initial meeting site and company, the mayor and civic officials' meeting site and pageantry, the preparation of city and citizens along the procession route, and the welcoming ceremonies themselves. In general, numbers and distance count: how far from the city the initial authority rides out to meet the king's party, whether the mayor goes outside the city walls,¹¹ how many city streets are included in the procession route and consequently have to be refurbished, and the number of citizens on horse and foot at various stations carry significance to both king and commons. Thus in the York records, Richard III's visit in 1483 reflects the unease occasioned by the Wars of the Roses, and Henry VII's first visit to the city in 1486 stands in striking—and, at this distance, amusing—contrast.¹²

The competitive nature of civic displays deserves further study, as the accounts from the remainder of this 1486 progress suggest.¹³ Hereford seems to have received Henry rather shabbily only a mile outside town and laid on a Saint George pageant, Gloucester's officials rode out three miles but produced no pageant or speech, and Bristol's three-mile meeting and pageantry are comparable to York's. Certainly the cities compared notes, most likely for both prestige and for cost reduction, as the York record of Princess Margaret's 1503 visit attests: “Item that my lord of the common costez schall send an Officer vnto Colyweston to knawe howe the Qwene of Scottes hase ben receyued at Northamton & othir placez & if she kepe hir gestes appoynted.”¹⁴

These brief examples, among many others, are representative of the pageantry employed for a king's visit to a civic community. Aside from the detailed production knowledge one gains from the records—for example, civic officials usually are scarlet-gowned, sheriffs' ceremonial white rods are four and a half feet long, streets are indeed strewn with rushes and herbs, bells are rung and trumpets blown—one also gains a sense of pageantry's being used to political profit. The citizens are absolutely clear on why they are going to all this bother and expense: to have their particular city in a king's “tendre and graciouse remembraunce.”¹⁵ The king is equally clear on his purpose: “I will haue no Coach, for the people are desirous to see a King, and so they shall, for they shall aswell see his body as his face,”¹⁶ a calculated statement that James I did make and which Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV, or Henry V could have made.

Of the history plays, Richard II is the most formally patterned, and certainly of the four considered here it displays the most conventional pageantry: court entrances, the elaborate mock tournament, the deposition, tableaux vivants, in addition to the diction and imagery of pageantry. The abundance of chivalric language, the rhetoric of courtesy, points to the central conception of pageantry in this play: words without action, form without content, a substitute for proper governance instead of an orderly display of it. Heavily centered in personal adornment and the signs of office, pageantry here is a self-indulgent display directed to nobles and court while utterly disregarding the commons.

Part of Shakespeare's treatment of pageantry in Richard II is simply to show it as empty, an aspect that becomes visible in the aborted tournament.¹⁷ The preparation for Mowbray's and Bolingbroke's physical confrontation is replete with visual and verbal pageantry. According to Holinshed, “There was a great scaffold erected within the castell of Windsor for the King to sit with the lords and prelates of his realme,”¹⁸ and the gages, trumpets, formal entrance, combatants' chairs, and “such officers / Appointed to direct these fair designs” are an eyeful. The language of chivalry supports the visual effect of “this princely presence” as language and spectacle become an inflated substitute for action in the alternation of speeches and the extenuated repetition of formulas. Further characterization of such pageantry ironically is foreshadowed in Richard's diction as he stops the combat with words that describe a rebellion rather than a formal tournament (“wake our peace,” “boist'rous untun'd drums,” “fright fair peace,” “trumpets' dreadful bray,” “grating shock of wrathful iron arms”), describe rebellion so accurately, in fact, that Shakespeare will use many of them again in Henry IV's opening speech.

A second aspect of pageantry in this play is what one only can call negative or reversed pageantry: the formal stripping of “respect, / Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,” the undecking of “the pompous body of a king.” This “woeful pageant” Richard himself anticipates before the actual deposition as he verbally exchanges jewels for beads, scepter for palmer's staff, and so on. Both of these types of pageantry, empty abortive ceremony and negative, reverse ceremony, are seen by the audience of Richard II. A third type of pageantry, however, is wholly verbal rather than visual: accounts of Bolingbroke's entrances to the towns and his own diction in this play. Whereas Richard's visual spectacle is much like his kingship, “seen, but with such eyes / As sick and blunted with community,” Bolingbroke's pageantry often is heard but not seen.

One can be tempted to portray Richard as a chivalric, poetic king in this play and Bolingbroke as an unrefined usurper, a simplistic contrast that Bolingbroke's language belies. His diction and rhetorical structure in the prebanishment scenes convey the liberal temper and imagination assigned to Hotspur later: “And even as I was then is Percy now” describes more than the act of rebellion itself. Characterized as “bold … Boist'rous … high-stomach'd … full of ire / In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire,” Bolingbroke's fury elicits Richard's “How high a pitch his resolution soars!,” a line remarkably echoed in Northumberland's and Worcester's asides on Hotspur's outburst in 1 Henry IV, I.i. Likewise, the imagery of Bolingbroke's “Shall I seem crestfallen in my father's sight? / Or with pale beggar-fear impeach my height” is paralleled in Hotspur's “To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon.”

But highflown as Bolingbroke starts out in language and behavior, the reality of banishment quickly tempers his nature, his view of pageantry, and his expression. The change is rung in his response to Gaunt's plea for him to use his imagination: “O, who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?” (Richard II, I.iii.294-95). From here until his death in 2 Henry IV, Bolingbroke's imagination and use of ceremony consistently will be yoked to political expediency. Although his language retains the elegance of courtesy, his visual pageantry is of war, a juxtaposition of martial threat with courtly parlance heard distinctly on his drum-and-colors entrance to Berkeley Castle:

If not, I'll use the advantage of my power,
And lay the summer's dust with showers of blood
Rain'd from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen—
The which, how far off from the mind of Bolingbroke
It is, such crimson tempest should bedrench
The fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land,
My stooping duty tenderly shall show.

[Richard II, III.iii.42-48]

The visual images of the two protagonists are as clearly juxtaposed: Henry's “glittering arms” and “barbed steeds” below, Richard's “so fair a show” above. Richard “yet looks … like a king”; Henry is well on his way to being one.

Perhaps Northumberland best summarizes the effect of hollow pageantry in his hopes for Bolingbroke:

If then we shall shake off our slavish yoke,
Imp out our drooping country's broken wing,
Redeem from broking pawn the blemish'd crown,
Wipe off the dust that hides our sceptre's gilt,
And make high majesty look like itself,
Away with me in post to Ravenspurgh.

[Richard II, II.i.291-96]

Although using the terms of pageantry, Northumberland implicitly is referring to the necessary content of kingship: sound finances, allegiance of commons and nobles, and good management, a thoroughly Tudor view of governance. Richard's pageantry and domestic extravagance have cost an enormous amount of money, money drained from both nobles and from “wavering commons,” whose “love lies in their purses.” Bolingbroke will not miscalculate so grossly, and his concept of pageantry as a tool of governance, a weighing of the show's value against its cost, pervades the two Henry IV plays.

It frequently has been asserted that the Henry IV plays are devoid of pageantry, with various reasons, from Falstaff's consuming stage presence to Henry's guilt to possible shifts in the Chamberlain's Men's fortunes speculated as the cause. In fact, these plays are not devoid of pageantry: they simply do not show the kind of court spectacle found in Richard II because Henry's court is not Richard's. Had it been, this canker Bolingbroke, “this vile politician,” would not have seized the throne from that sweet, lovely rose, Richard. In these plays, as in Richard II, Shakespeare structures the pageantry to the dramatic or thematic explication of a king instead of using spectacle solely for its own sake.¹⁹

As noted above, Henry's opening speech on civil war echoes Richard's phrases on the Bolingbroke-Mowbray dispute, but the first account of civil war hardly is chivalrous. Instead of seeing a mock tournament, we hear of Welshwomen mutilating bodies, discharges of artillery, “civil butchery” indeed. The image of governance which Henry sets in his first speech, however, is not Richard's glistering show: the end of this king is that his subjects

Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks,
March all one way, and be no more oppos'd
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies,

[1 Henry IV, I.i.14-16]

a military image of order which almost characterizes the pageantry, visual and verbal, in 1 and 2 Henry IV.²⁰

Before establishing a new image of pageantry, however, Shakespeare first blackens both the language and spectacle of the pageantry seen in Richard II by here turning it into mock pageantry. Most clearly this debunking occurs in the tavern play, where Falstaff's state is a joint stool, his golden scepter a leaden dagger, and his precious rich crown a cushioned bald crown. Through this parody of pageantry both the mock symbols of kingship and the real are brought into question, inviting us to look to the further reality of power behind the symbols. Richard looked like a king but failed to rule like one; Falstaff does not remotely look a king except perhaps of Misrule or Vice; Hal does not behave like a king but tells us in his first soliloquy that he knows how to be one; Douglas cannot tell who the king is because all men on the field of battle can dress like a king. The message to look through the hollow crown, through the appearance or symbol of kingship, to the power beyond is clear.

As courtly ceremony and the signs of office are questioned in this play, so too is inflated courtly language mocked, although both Henry and Hal are capable of being articulate in the extreme when it serves their purposes. Fulsome language—“holiday and lady terms,” “bold unjointed chat”—is mocked in Hotspur's scathing account of the perfumed courtier, while Falstaff's lying, bandying words of honor, courage, and kingship point to a further schism between word and deed. In Richard II, language was presented as an alternative, albeit an ineffectual and temporary one, to action. In this play, however, both language and spectacle are directed toward war, whether the action of the mock war centered in the tavern activities or the very visible war at the end of the play. Falstaff by his words and his very presence provides the contrast of mock war to real: his cowardice, the self-inflicted nosebleeds and hacked swords from the robbery, his numerous references to the heir apparent, honor, and “instinct” all build to point to Hal's payment of “the debt [he] never promised,” his real courage in his father's field of battle and later in his own.

Two juxtaposed descriptions bring the image of real war and mock war into inescapable contrast, the first Vernon's account to Hotspur of Henry's troops and the second Falstaff's account of his own “toasts-and-butter.” Vernon's description of Hal and his comrades is a pageantic description, complete with costumes and deux ex machina, while Falstaff's mock soldiers are “the cankers of a calm world and a long peace, ten times more dishonourable-ragged than an old fazed ancient,” a straggling assortment of villains and cowards whom he paints wandering by the hedges to steal linen.

In contrast to these stragglers is the repeated orderly appearance of Henry, his sons, and his armed nobles, marching all one way “in mutual well-beseeming ranks,” the image with which the play began and with which it ends. The king himself characterizes the change in pageantry as he charges that the rebels “made us doff our easy robes of peace / To crush our old limbs in ungentle steel,” and instead of the “gay apparel” of Richard's court, we here see the armor, plumes, and bloody swords of Henry's. This pageantry may not be the courtly ceremony of Richard II, but to deny it as pageantry at all is nit-picking. In the armed, orderly war councils, in the trumpets, colors, and plumes, and in the abundance of chivalric language, Shakespeare here has created an image of display linked with force, display with a purpose, not an inappropriate image for his “vile politician.” Instead of the interminable hurling of gages in Richard II, the pageantry of 1 Henry IV repeatedly shows the pulling on of gages.

If pageantry is, as has been asserted above, a metaphor for the way in which and the success with which a king governs, then 2 Henry IV is almost a long discussion of ceremony rather than the thing itself, a summing up of how to turn “past evils to advantages.” This extensive reference to ceremony and its function pulls together the strands of display woven in the preceding two plays. In Richard II the symbols of office were seen as adornment, the decking of the pompous body of a king. In 1 Henry IV these symbols were first parodied and then exchanged for war weeds. In 2 Henry IV the crown and other appointments are firmly associated with duty, worry, and care: the omnipresent crown in this play comes to symbolize the orderly and responsible passing of power.

On-stage pageantry, however, is minimal, restricted to the initial appearance of “Rumour, painted full of tongues,” Henry V's first entrance as king,²¹ and the final rejection-of-Falstaff procession. This sparcity of ceremony does not necessarily suggest that the court scenes are informal: quite the contrary, with the consistent presence of princes, counsellors, and Henry IV's elaborately balanced rhetoric. But the visual images in this play are not of court or civic pageantry: instead, one retains scenes of tavern, country, and town streets, populated by bawds, whores, diseased soldiers, and garrulous old men. Even the scenes of the armed rebels bring no visual fruit as no actual combat occurs in the play: it essentially is a play of talk rather than of action. It is a play that debates at length whether order or chaos will rule the kingdom, a tenuous condition best expressed by Henry IV in terms suggestive of pageantry when he fears that Hal will pluck down his officers, break his decrees, and “mock at form.”

That Henry IV need not fear that his “poor kingdom … wilt be a wilderness again” is seen clearly in Henry V's post coronation procession. Here, where ceremony and drama are linked, Shakespeare employs elaborate pageantry: rushes are strewn, trumpets sound, a full procession follows the king's entrance, all exit, shouts and trumpets sound again, and the king and his train reenter. One might ask, as various scholars have done, why Shakespeare does not show the coronation itself, since he obviously had sufficient resources for the elaborate procession. A possible answer lies in his propensity to yoke pageantry to theme in these plays, to avoid empty spectacle unless it substantiates the portrayal of kingship.

The audience does not see Hal's coronation; neither, apparently, does Falstaff, nor does he see Hal's initial processional entrance, which prepares the audience for the inevitable confrontation between the majestically arrayed, anointed king and his “stain'd with travel” former companions. Falstaff's interruption of the procession thus is both visually and verbally inappropriate, a point which the audience grasps somewhat earlier than Falstaff.²²

The primary thematic issues of this play are the death of Henry IV, the state of the kingdom, and the capability of his successor, not the coronation itself. From his heir-apparent garters on, the true prince's being crowned was not in doubt; the only question Shakespeare raises is what kind of king he will prove. The final focus on the rejection rather than on the coronation answers the question, and thus once again pageantry is chosen to illustrate governance, the dramatic incident over the static display.

Henry V, a play curiously flat in many respects, is extraordinarily subtle and complex in its treatment of pageantry. We have been assured by Henry IV that the crown “shall descend with better quiet, / Better opinion, better confirmation” to Hal, and we have been assured by Hal that he will maintain it “with more than a common pain / 'Gainst all the world”: we thus might expect to see the courtly pageantry of Richard II restored to symbolize Henry V's right to the throne. Shakespeare instead, however, collects the various aspects of pageantry presented in the preceding three plays and uses them all; in terms of the fullest definition of pageantry, Henry V does indeed reflect “the mirror of all Christian kings.”

In its formal opening and formal close, verbal pageantry frames the play. The Prologue sets a picture of pageantry but then confesses the inadequacy of representation, asking that we use our imaginations to piece out the imperfections of the theater. We have served as “ciphers to this great accompt” before: Bolingbroke's civic entrances, Vernon's description of Hal, and Hal's coronation, among many other verbal accounts of or references to pageantry, ceremony, or chivalry. The Chorus's four speeches that open the acts further invite imaginative collaboration as they verbally present the pageantry of the English army's preparations, their departure “with silken streamers,” the night vigil that asks us to mind “true things by what their mock'ries be,” and the full description of a victorious king's entrance to London, “which cannot in their huge and proper life / Be here presented.”²³ In the Chorus's close as Epilogue, both content and structure are formal and ceremonious, the content again reminding us that the “full course of their glory” cannot be portrayed in stage pageantry, the structure a sonnet.

These verbal descriptions of pageantry not shown on stage serve several functions, namely, bridging time, space, and cast limitations, but the one most relevant here is the indirect enhancement of the throne. By extending the glory, the scope of power through words, Shakespeare is able to focus on the king as man, “his ceremonies laid by,” and retain some of the complex character of Hal developed in the preceding two plays. Only at two points are we shown Henry V in active pageantry: I.ii, a formal entrance to the presence chamber, and V.ii, the full court entrance of both French and English. The first scene is contrived carefully to build up a sense of history, tradition, justice, and chivalric nostalgia (vis-à-vis the Black Prince): in many respects, this scene serves as Hal's coronation ceremony, the visible proof of an anointed king sanctioned by church and state. The challenge Henry issues to the Dauphin clearly suggests that he understands the function of arrogant display:

But tell the Dauphin I will keep my state,
Be like a king and show my sail of greatness
When I do rouse me in my throne of France:
For that I have laid by my majesty
And plodded like a man for working-days,
But I will rise there with so full a glory
That I will dazzle all the eyes of France,
Yea, strike the Dauphin blind to look on us.

[Henry V, I.ii.273-80]

The Constable's summary to the French of the occasion attests to the stage display's pageantry: “With what great state he heard their embassy, / How well supplied with noble counsellors.” The court entrance of French and English in V.ii also allows Shakespeare to shift to the character of Hal in the following wooing scene without loss of face to the character of Henry V and England. After the splendor of that entrance, the number of actors, the formality of language, Hal can rather charmingly protest to Katharine his being “such a plain king that thou wouldst think I had sold my farm to buy my crown” without disturbing the political balance and nationalistic fervor of the play as a whole.

In the middle three acts, however, no formal pageantry is ascribed to the king; instead, Henry is presented repeatedly in images of war, but they are images stripped of glamour and orderly form. Not here does one find the “glittering arms” or “barbed steeds” of Richard II or 1 Henry IV; rather, the stress is on a reverse pageantry, an insistence on the English poverty of appointment. The grime and tatter accumulate—“poor soldiers,” “yond poor and starved band,” “island carrions,” “ragged curtains,” “poor jades”—until Henry directly links the absence of martial pageantry with the thematic point:

It earns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
.....We are but warriors for the working-day;
Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'd
With rainy marching in the painful field;
.....And time hath worn us into slovenry.

[Henry V, IV.iii.26-27, 109-11, 114]

If martial pageantry is so determinedly stripped from the English soldiers, it is used to dress the French, who display the empty spectacle of Richard II. Their Act III entrances are alternated with homely scenes of English soldiers, the Dauphin's incessant hot-tempered boasting of his armor and horse sounds vaguely like a less-commendable Hotspur, and the image one receives is of a decorative French court waiting for a war to happen, a static vision of inactivity. The Dauphin's remorseful conclusion, that “Reproach and everlasting shame / Sit mocking in our plumes,” again suggests that Shakespeare has harnessed pageantic appointments to political theme.

These various uses of pageantry suggest that the show of kingship cannot replace the substance of kingship, but when the substance of power and governance is present, ceremony effectively can display and enhance it. Such a summary of royal spectacle, however, does not begin to address the full scope of pageantry in this tetralogy, for it omits the vital role of the commons in destroying or forming these kings. In the Henry plays, particularly, Shakespeare gives no view of a naïve kingship unaware of the uses of pageantry, and the dramatic records, conversely, give no view of a naïve citizenry unaware of the city's importance to the throne. We see instead two forces, king and commons, charily using pageantry to manipulate each other, a tool intrinsic to the changing concept of governance that these plays embody. Reinforced repeatedly is the commons' response to king and king's consciousness of commons, starting with Bolingbroke's climb to the throne in Richard II. Whereas Richard has “quite lost their hearts” and “the commons they are cold,” Bolingbroke “did seem to dive into their hearts / With humble and familiar courtesy”: no fewer than six accounts in the play cite Henry's calculated attention to the commons,²⁴ and Holinshed confirms this attention as well.²⁵

His son, the madcap prince of Wales, learns his lesson well but modifies it to include knowledge of the commons, an amplification of pageantry into governance. From his early statement to Falstaff that “wisdom cries out in the streets and no man regards it” to the image in his first-act soliloquy of “bright metal on a sullen ground,” which will “show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off,” Hal both knows and uses the commons with pageantry as propaganda. Although he asserts that “the king is but a man, as I am: … his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man,” he seldom is foolish enough to lay by those ceremonies, as the Chorus clearly shows in his imagined account of Henry V's victorious entrance to London.

At no point in the plays, however, does Shakespeare suggest that either Bolingbroke or Hal actually feels love and respect for the commons. Richard's initial characterization of the populace as “slaves … poor craftsmen” and Bagot's contempt for “the wavering commons … the hateful commons” are not amended by Bolingbroke: at no place in the text does he utter a positive word about the citizens of the country he has just usurped. In 1 Henry IV, his concept of the commons as a tool to be manipulated emerges in his account to Hal of how he got the throne, and in his final accusation of the rebels his description of the commons is more scathing than Bagot's: “fickle changelings,” “poor discontents,” “moody beggars.” For all his direct contact with “the very base-string of humility,” Hal has no more love for them than his father had, nor does he ever find cause to alter the Archbishop's view of “the fond many,” “the beastly feeder,” “the common dog.”

The view of the commons is not flattering in these plays: they clearly are a force to be manipulated by the throne, and Shakespeare's kings waste no words of admiration or affection about them. But as the nature of governance shifts through these plays, so too does the means of controlling the commons. From Richard's fatal mistakes of ignoring them, piling them “with grievous taxes,” attempting to subdue by force the “rough rug-headed kerns” of his Irish kingdom, and casting them aside as “wavering,” we see Henry IV's calculated moves to gain their goodwill through pageantry and the selective display of his royal person. If the commons indeed are “wavering,” and little in these plays suggests that they are otherwise, both Bolingbroke and his son draw the wavering toward their throne rather than in opposition to it.

As the dramatic records show, however, “the still-discordant wav'ring multitude” could be as adept in its use of pageantry as the crown. Its “general ceremony” is not that of kings but on that account no less significant as a political force behind these plays. Shakespeare's kings have their “tide of pomp,” the

                    balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, and crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running 'fore the king,
The throne he sits on …,

[Henry V, IV.i.257-61]

and the commons too has its tide of pomp: the costumes, signs of office, processions, welcoming ceremonies, calculated exhibits of their persons and cities. Both forces, king and commons, share a motivation and purpose: “Creating awe and fear in other men” through the judicious use of pageantry.

Shakespeare's dramatic treatment of pageantry is equally judicious in these four plays. Not spectacle alone, not mere entertainment, not empty static ritual, pageantry is a symbol of kingship. When backed with power, economic, political, or martial, the display of kingship becomes a vital means of keeping the throne. When not backed with power, however, the empty display of kingship is shown to be a means of losing the throne. The hollow crown, the symbol of pageantry, ceremony, and governance in these plays, thus takes its definition from the power, purpose, and wisdom of the king himself. To note this glistering stage property's shift from egocentric adornment on Richard's head to uneasy burden on Henry IV's to parodic misrule on Falstaff's to near-divine approbation on Henry V's is also to note Shakespeare's fluid treatment of ceremony as a political tool.

Notes

1. Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (1918-20; rpt. ed., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963), 1:xix. Other helpful studies include David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971); Alice S. Venezky [Griffin], Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage (New York: Twayne, 1951); Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975); Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959-); and, of especial use to the approach taken here, Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

2. In part Venezky presents this view—“the promise of a glittering parade drew many to the playhouse” (p. 27)—but she also adds that “even playwrights of the popular stage might forego the splendor of a royal entry in favor of a more dramatic effect” (p. 41).

3. Long noted as has been the frequent correspondence of medieval guild to the business of properties of the cycle play assigned to it: Shipwrights, Fishmongers, or Drawers to the Noah pageant; Tanners clothing God in a white leather robe for their Creation pageant; Goldsmiths or Merchants responsible for the elaborately garbed Magi; or Vintners for the Miracle at Cana. Whether parodic (the Shipwright Noah's ineptitude in ark building or the Vintners' starting with water) or practical assignments, the guild's abilities and products nevertheless were advertised.

4. Also reflecting Tudor sociopolitical phenomena was the popularity of English chronicles, which stressed such pageantic splendor. See Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), pp. 297-338.

5. King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure, 5th ed. (London: Methuen, 1961), III.ii. 172-73; and King Henry V, ed. J. H. Walter (London: Methuen, 1954), IV.i.243-44. Other Arden editions cited in the text are The First Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys, 6th ed. (London: Methuen, 1960); and The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1966).

6. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, p. 25.

7. Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy, p. 3.

8. See Bergeron (English Civic Pageantry), Venezky (Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage), and Anglo (Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy), although all three cite instances that were sufficiently political to approach treason.

9. Gordon Kipling's essay in this volume centers on one of the more remarkably political entries, Richard II's 1392 return from York, where he had moved his court “for grete malice of the cite of London” when its citizens refused him a loan. See Withington, English Pageantry, pp. 129-30.

10. Ibid., p. 180. The volumes of dramatic records currently being edited by the Records of Early English Drama, University of Toronto Press, are a source for continuous rather than selective civic pageantry and, consequently, for the continuous political subtext that motivates that pageantry.

11. “Typically, it was their walls that the men of London and Canterbury, of Oxford, Colchester and Shrewsbury, chose to depict on their seals. In contemporary art, it was the wall of a city which identified it.” Colin Platt, The English Medieval Town (London: Granada, 1979), p. 50.

12. The archbishop, civic officials, and Sir Henry Hudson, who devised the pageants, conspired to represent York as poor, loyal, and exhausted, in order that Henry might “the rather be movid to think that the said maier Aldermen Sheriffes and other inhabitances heyr be gladdid and loifull of the same his commyng of other kinges yer souerain lord.” Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., York Records (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 1:138.

13. See Withington, English Pageantry, pp. 159-60, and Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy, pp. 28-36.

14. Johnston and Rogerson, York Records, 1:193.

15. Ibid., 1:193.

16. Ibid., 1:515.

17. See Wickham, Early English Stages, 1:13-50, where he notes that “the performance, for such it may be called, at first no more than a crude mock battle, was gradually transformed into an elegant entertainment which conformed to an etiquette as elaborate as its staging.”

18. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), 3:389.

19. For further discussion of this point, see Gerard H. Cox's essay in this collection.

20. Froissart's account of Henry IV's 1399 coronation in fact describes an almost military show of power in the king's procession of six thousand horses; likewise, his entry to London earlier that year displayed pomp and power but no pageantry as entertainment. Withington comments that “perhaps the troublous times account for the absence of pageantic features at this royal-entry” (English Pageantry, p. 132).

21. There seems no reason not to read Henry V's entrance lines in V.ii.44 as literal description: “This new and gorgeous garment, majesty, / Sits not so easy on me as you think.”

22. Alice Venezky cites only a single procession “returning from the coronation ceremonies at Westminster”; rather, there are two entry processions, separated by Falstaff and his followers' arrival and longish discussion. “Shouts within. The trumpets sound,” which ends the discussion and signals the second entry, seems to suggest that the coronation has occurred in the interval, thus strengthening Venezky's estimate of “this effective technique of placing an irregular incident within a framework of formality” (Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage, p. 29).

23. Considering that Henry was greeted, at various stations, by mayor, aldermen, twenty thousand citizens, a giant, lion, antelope, singing angels and patriarchs, twelve singing apostles, twelve kneeling “kings,” and fourteen bishops, the Chorus's judgment probably is wise. See Withington, English Pageantry, pp. 132-36.

24. The six accounts are by Richard (Richard II, I.iv.23-36), York (V.ii.7-21), Henry IV (1 Henry IV, III.ii.39-84), Hotspur (IV.iii.66-88), Scroop (2 Henry IV, I.iii.88-108), and Westmorland (IV.i.131-39).

25. Holinshed notes the “woonder it was to see what a number of people ran after him in everie towne and street where he came, before he tooke the sea, lamenting and bewailing his departure” and, on Bolingbroke's return, how he “shewed himselfe now in this place, and now in that, to see what countenance was made by the people, whether they meant enviouslie to resist him, or freendlie to receive him.” Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 3:394, 397.