This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. The book also demonstrates the ways in which the Shows engaged with the changing socio-economic scene of London and with court and city politics. From 1585 onwards the Lord Mayor's Show was with increasing frequency transmitted from event to text in the form of short pamphlets produced in print runs ranging from 200 to 800 copies. Pageant writers and artificers took advantage of the space available to them just as dramatists did on the professional stage. The book discusses, inter alia, the actors' roles, the props, music and costumes used during the Show and looks at how important emblems and imagery were to these productions. The Show was the concern of the Great Twelve livery companies from the ranks of one of which the Lord Mayor was elected. It highlights the often-overlooked roles of the artificer and those other craftsmen who contributed so valuably to the day's entertainment. This book focuses on the social, cultural and economic contexts, in which the Shows were designed, presented and experienced, and explores the Shows in textual, historical, bibliographical, and archival and other contexts. Pageantry was a feature of the day's entertainment. The London mayoralty was not simply an entity of civic power, but always had its ritual and ceremonial dimensions. The Show was staged annually to celebrate the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor. The London Lord Mayors' Shows were high-profile and lavish entertainments that were at the centre of the cultural life of the City of London in the early modern period. The analyses also highlight a number of subtle changes in the characteristic gender roles within the western, showing how the seemingly clichéd, often marginalised, female roles exemplify broader social concerns and trends. The analyses comment on the use of the western’s iconography and narrative formulas, and several core themes and concerns of the genre are also discussed, including the significance of the frontier in the American imagination, the Wild West’s paradoxical representations as garden or desert and the controversial interpretations of tradition versus progress. From the late 1960s, a so-called spaghetti western exemplifies the formula’s renewed vitality in European filmmaking, and the chapter ends with a 1970s road movie displaying the influence of revisionist westerns. The chronological arrangement of the films highlights the socio-historical context of their original production, from the optimistic post-war western’s belief in progress and reconstruction, through the psychologically inflected 1950s films’ anxieties about the moral dissolution within the family sphere, to a comic variant from the 1960s.
The chapter analyses six Shakespeare adaptations that display elements of the western genre.
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