Manchester University Press Five Elizabethan Progress Entertainments (Revels Plays Companion Library)

Designed to introduce the student or general reader to a largely unfamiliar area of Elizabethan theatrical activity, Five Elizabethan progress entertainments focuses on a group of entertainments mounted for the monarch in the closing years of her reign. Richly annotated, and prefaced by a substantial introduction, the texts enable an understanding of the motives underlying not only the progress itself, but the choice of locations the monarch elected to visit, and the personal and political preoccupations of those with whom she determined to stay. Selected for their diversity, the entertainments exhibit the tensions underlying some royal visits, the lavish expenditure entailed for the monarch’s hosts, and the overlap in terms of both material and authorship between the progress entertainments and more widely studied products of the sixteenth-century stage. Hitherto unavailable in a fully-annotated, modern spelling edition and re-edited from the original sixteenth-century accounts, the five texts facilitate classroom discussion of a range of aspects of a body of material previously accessible only to specialists in the field, promoting an understanding of the breadth of late sixteenth-century histrionic activity, and the links that existed between elite coterie entertainments and other aspects of late sixteenth-century culture. In line with contemporary critical developments in its focus on non-canonical histrionic works, the volume will be of interest to all those interested in widening the study of early modern drama beyond the public playhouses of the Elizabethan age and in the variety of contexts in which the socio-political tensions of the period were played out.