The early modern Lord Mayor’s shows, as Tracey Hill observes in Pageantry and Power, were “magnificent occasions” that, “despite their undoubted importance in their own day, … have too often been sidelined by modern scholars in favour of the professional theatre and courtly entertainments like the masque” (3–4). Hill plausibly attributes this scholarly neglect to a variety of factors, including “Shakespeare’s absence from the civic scene” (21) and the fact that the shows’ hybrid nature means that they “do not always cohere with the artistic values rated for drama” (5). In Pageantry and Power, Hill sets herself the ambitious task of rescuing from obscurity the Lord Mayor’s shows—in particular, “the material aspects and the lived experience” of the shows (13).

To that end, the book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 surveys some critical and historical contexts for the shows; chapter 2 considers the writers and artificers who devised them and the livery companies that commissioned them; chapter 3 examines how, on a practical level, the shows were brought to life, with emphasis on their visual and auditory aspects; chapter 4 looks at the relationship between the shows as events and as texts; and, finally, chapter 5 discusses some contemporary political and socioeconomic contexts. As Hill’s subtitle suggests, most of the shows under consideration date from 1585 to 1639, 1585 being the year in which the Lord Mayor’s show began “with increasing frequency [to be] transmitted from event to text in the form of short pamphlets” (214), and 1639 being the last year, before the outbreak of civil war, in which the show was presented “with any pageantry” (282)—although perversely, the reader has to wait until well past the book’s halfway mark to learn the significance of these two dates.

That said, there is much to celebrate here. Hill has clearly spent considerable time in the archives of several of the livery companies, and she is at her best when, in chapters 2–4, she summarizes and extrapolates from her archival findings, often juxtaposing the contents of company records with the official printed pamphlets produced to commemorate individual shows as well as, where relevant, unofficial eyewitness accounts, usually written by visitors to London. In so doing, she brings the early modern Lord Mayor’s shows (and, in some cases, their behind-the-scenes dramas) to life. Thus, we learn about the ways in which competition between the companies, as well as tensions within individual companies, sometimes found expression in the shows. We learn, too, that financial considerations were “never far from the surface” (62) and that the unexpected—in the form of inclement weather, unruly crowds, or child performers who failed to speak loudly enough on the day—could, and did, derail the best-laid plans. Hill compellingly marshals evidence from company records to suggest that writers and artificers worked together on the shows as more or less equal partners—not, as traditionally has been assumed, in a hierarchy in which the writer was the dominant figure—and she also argues convincingly that the “face [sic] that a single name appears on a printed work does not necessarily mean that uncomplicated authorship, or sole authorship, occurred” (68). Elsewhere, Hill notes “a degree of congruence” between the print runs of the pamphlets printed to commemorate individual shows and “the number of livery members of the Companies that commissioned them,” on the basis of which she speculates, intriguingly, that it “is therefore possible that the bulk of the copies were designed for these recipients” (220).

Throughout, Hill compares and contrasts the early modern Lord Mayor’s shows with contemporary courtly entertainments, including Elizabethan progress entertainments and Jacobean and Caroline court masques. She also touches briefly on Continental civic pageantry, particularly with regard to printed festival books—a welcome corrective to the traditional scholarly practice of treating early modern English and Continental practices in isolation. Disappointingly, however, little attempt is made to relate the activities of the livery companies, as patrons, to those of other London institutions, such as the Inns of Court, which employed some of the same writers, artificers, and painter-stainers.

It must also be said that Hill’s penchant for name checking and for peppering her own prose with quotations from other scholars detracts from the book’s (deserved) claims to originality. Pageantry and Power is also let down by some factual and typographical errors. For example, Sir Philip Sidney’s funeral and the execution of Mary Queen of Scots are both misdated to 1588 (255, 332 n. 101), while Baynard’s Castle, the Thames-side palace of the Earls of Pembroke and an important landmark on the processional route of most Lord Mayor’s shows in the period under discussion, is repeatedly (3, 119, 149) referred to as “Barnard’s” Castle (although the correct name is used when, on 154, a source from 1585 is cited). I also would have liked, for a conclusion, something more than the one-paragraph summation that appears at the end of chapter 5.

Nonetheless, Pageantry and Power succeeds admirably in rescuing the early modern Lord Mayor’s show from scholarly obscurity. The book also—and it is this which will probably appeal to the greatest number of readers—fleshes out our knowledge of the careers of a number of writers associated with these shows, including Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, Thomas Heywood, John Taylor, and John Webster.