Metropolitan resurrection in Anthony Munday's Lord Mayor's shows.(essay)(Critical essay)

Few ideas are more unsettling to the imagination than the notion that human bodies, once dead, might return to life; yet in Jacobean London, Anthony Munday devised not one but two Lord Mayor's shows in which blaring trumpets summon forth long-dead mayors who can hardly contain their amazement at the wonders of the city. At first glance, the emphasis on resurrection in Chruso-thriambos: The Triumphs of Golde (1611) and Chrysanaleia: The Golden Fishing, Or Honour of Fishmongers (1616) seems to defy explanation. (1) Indeed, the simplest tack would be to dismiss the resurrections as mere curiosities were it not for the fact that Munday's underwriting of the metropolitan community depends on the reanimated mayors to negotiate an innovative merger between commerce and Christianity. (2)

In early modern London, notions of resurrection mattered to people in ways that demand explication. Everyone knew the words of Saint Paul: "[a]nd if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vaine, your faith is also vaine." (3) Lest early Christians dwell on the potential for emptiness, teachers made it a point to emphasize the new world of surplus that awaited the faithful Christian. (4) People in early modern London were perfectly situated to experience the ambiguity of this formulation in their "booming capital" wherein "half the aldermen, the merchant princes, were domestic traders." (5) Material surplus was easy to spot, but thoughtful observers wondered about its effect on the soul. In A Treatise of Commerce (1601), John Wheeler complained that "too many ... have made merchandise of mens soules." (6) It should come as no surprise, then, that an extraordinary cadre of preachers took up the old Pauline anxieties in sermons that, according to Bryan Crockett, "function dramatically--that is, as public performances." (7) When these ministers looked out at their audience, they saw people with money on their minds, a hand in government, and an indeterminate interest in their own salvation. They answered with performances that aimed "to resolve paradoxes not in logic, a task that is by definition impossible, but in communal experience." (8)

The son of a merchant, conversant in the language of metaphysics and merchandise, Lancelot Andrewes epitomized this new generation of preachers. Helping to translate the Pentateuch and certain historical books for King James's new Bible, Andrewes was equally adept at translating the modern languages of metropolitan ambition for his Jacobean audience. (9) Preaching on Easter Sunday, five years before Munday penned his 1611 show, Andrewes subtly recasts resurrection in commercial terms. He declares "that Christian knowledge is not a knowledge without all manner of account, but that we are accountants for it; that we are to keep an audit of what we hear." (10) Famous for his heterodox mode of thought, Andrewes boldly yokes his religious message to a merchant's world of bookkeeping. Indeed, the OED confirms that "accountant" could, at this time, refer to both a person who reckons and a professional clerk who manages accounts. To grasp the occasion of the resurrection, according to this Jacobean preacher, is to emphasize "knowing and counting" in order to arrive at a "sum or charge." (11) In this way, Easter becomes an accounting problem, and the preacher subtly displaces the old concerns over vanity. (12) At such a moment, logic is set aside in favor of the preacher's performance.

On the streets of London, the shows of Munday and his colleagues offered, "even improved upon," this kind of revelation; indeed, James Knowles has pointed to an "explosion in civic ceremony after 1603." (13) Part of what David Cressy has called England's "calendar of festivity," the annual celebration of a new lord mayor's installation on 29 October served, for a pageant's moment, to unify the metropolitan world. (14) In his still definitive and recently revised English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642, David M. Bergeron concludes, "[o]ne could argue that a 'comic' vision prevails in the pageants, a perspective that allows for victory, for continuity, for new hope, for an upward movement; thus they share with the medieval dramatic tradition this comic pattern as well as a didactic and instructional function." (15) Other contemporary studies of pageantry have tended to politicize these functions. For instance, Curtis Perry tells us that "the pageant was supposed to legitimate the civic elite in the eyes of a wider viewing and reading public." (16) Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky declares that "the Jacobean Lord Mayor's Show was an artistic medium shaped by an explicitly political context." (17) Unremarked in these studies is the genre's capacity for audacious innovation. If a given show seems to offer revelation, it does so, to adapt the words of Michel Foucault, through a dazzling series of "substitutions, displacements, disguised conquests, and systematic reversals." (18) Setting up his scaffolds at the intersection of commerce and Christianity, Munday could assimilate the ancient labor of preaching about resurrection and, in so doing, authorize a new metropolitan community.

Author of John a Kent and John a Cumber (ca. 1590) and two Earl of Huntingdon plays (ca. 1598), Munday always aimed for a broad audience. In his Palladis Tamia (1598), Francis Meres confirms a certain degree of success, including Munday in the list of best writers of comedy and singling him out (rather inexplicably) as "our best plotter." (19) In addition to his theatrical works, Munday edited the 1618 edition of John Stow's Survey of London, translated romances, and wrote ballads and lyrics, but he seems to have found his niche in the early seventeenth century as a writer of pageants. As Bergeron explains, "Munday is to the Jacobean Lord Mayor's Show what Ben Jonson is to the court masque: Munday dominates the scene." (20) Or we might say that Munday was to the streets, what Shakespeare was to the stage. Bergeron describes the writer's particular contribution to the craft: "Munday breaks down the notion of a still-life tableau with such action and thereby brings us further in the direction of vital dramatic action." (21)

In 1611, his challenge was precise. Munday needed to invent "vital dramatic action" that would communicate the prominence of the goldsmiths to the people of London. A venerable guild with a stunning history of pageant patronage stretching back to 1377 and 1382 when they paid for an elaborate castle to ...