Leaving Mundania by Lizzie Stark

masque, in which a group of costumed dancers would show up unexpectedly in court, their appearance sometimes explained by a brief theatrical skit. After dancing with one another in their costumes, the performers then chose partners from among the court and danced again before leaving.
    Henry particularly loved Robin Hood, according to historian Cornelia Baehrens. During a May 1515 shooting trip, “Robin Hood and his merry men” met Henry and his retinue, led them to their forest hideout, and served the nearly two hundred people a banquet of venison and wine. On the way home, the group met women dressed up as Lady May and Lady Flora—personifications of wild nature—who sat in a carriage drawn by costumed horses, each of which had a singing child sitting atop it.
    If Henry VIII was not quite a larper, he was close to it, proof that people—even kings—have long wanted to live the mythic and heroic lives that escape a mundane human’s grasp. And while larp itself is a modern creation, derived from a peculiar Prussian war game of the nineteenth century (more on this later), its spiritual heritage lies, perhaps, in Renaissance Europe in the fabulous pageants, disguisings, and outdoor entertainments thrown by and for Europe’s monarchs.
    Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter, presided over some of England’s most opulent examples of the outdoor entertainment. During her reign, Elizabeth and her court made a series of journeys across England, known as progresses. Having a mobile court allowed her to maintain her visibility among the common folk and to keep the scheming nobility—many of its members capable of raising a standing army—on its toes.
    The cost of putting up the queen and her hundreds-large retinue was daunting for many of the nobility, but not as daunting as the rich gifts they were expected to present, including entertainments. In 1575, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, threw Queen Elizabeth an entertainment so ostentatious that it would put the most vulgar modern-day displays of wealth to shame. He reportedly paid about £1,000 per day for board and entertainment during Queen Elizabeth’s visit, and she stayed for at least seventeen days. 4 It’s hard to measure what the cost of £17,000 would mean in present-day terms, but an estimate would be something on the order of £3.2 million, or roughly $4.5 million. 5 For comparative purposes, in Elizabethan times, a soldier earned about five pennies a day, a pound of beef cost about three pennies, and theater tickets cost between one and three pennies. 6 For the same amount of money that the good earl probably spent on Elizabeth’s entertainment, he could have fielded an army of nearly 1,000 soldiers for an entire year, purchased 566,000 pounds of beef, or gone to the theater between 566,000 and 1.7 million times.
    When Queen Elizabeth arrived at the castle on the evening of July 9, Dudley stopped his castle clock to illustrate that the queen’s greatness transcended the boundaries of time. 7 A sibyl, a mythic prophetess, clad in white silk, met Her Majesty at the gate and recited a poem written for the occasion by the queen’s chaplain, predicting that her reign would be full of virtue, peace, and the love of the people. Passing along farther, she met an excessively tall porter, Hercules, also dressed in silk. At first he berated her for making so much noise with her retinue, but then he recognized her and humbly knelt to beg her pardon. He cued a band of trumpeters eight feet tall, probably papier-mache figures with real trumpeters inside or behind them. 8 Beyond the trumpeters, the queen passed by the Kenilworth castlelake, where the Arthurian Lady of the Lake, accompanied by two nymphs—all in silk, of course—appeared to glide over the water to her, conveyed by a moveable island lit by torches. 9 When Elizabeth finally made it into the castle, she was greeted by decorative posts left as