Leaving Mundania by Lizzie Stark Page B

behind castle walls, and so on. The queen is in the midst of the action, and she is involved in the outcomes of the various plots. It is her presence that banishes Sir Bruce and frees the Lady of the Lake. As in a larp, planned spontaneity governs the event. Not every plot point actually occurs—it rains, and so Gascoigne’s play is canceled. The actors, essentially NPCs, have to predict where the queen will be and wait there in order to surprise her with their speeches. As the modern scholar David Bergeron puts it, Elizabeth was often an “active participant in the outcome of the dramatic presentation. She is an ‘unscheduled actor’ in the sense that no part is explicitly written for her; on the other hand, it is intended that she will be an ‘actor’ in the whole dramatic scene.” 15
    The sentiment behind the Tudor pageants is also comparable to larp. The pageants of Elizabeth I and the disguisings of Henry VIII look backward toward a mythical past, including the past of King Arthur and Robin Hood that so many larpers seek out today. Furthermore, this mythical past does not exist in a vacuum; larpers sometimes use scenarios to represent, re-create, or work out real-life issues. The organizers of Elizabeth’s entertainments had real-world goals—first, of course, to honor and flatter the queen by elevating her to mythical status. Elizabeth’s courtiers also used the pageants to advance political and personal causes by way of allegory. During the 1578
Lady of May
put on by the Earl of Leicester, who also threw the Kenilworth entertainment, a woman with two suitors—a shepherd and a forester—surprised Elizabeth in the woods and asked for help in choosing between them. Sir Philip Sydney had written the scene to advance Leicester’s agenda with the queen during a moment when Leicester was in ill favor. Leicester had once been considered a possible husband to the virgin queen, and Sydney wrote the forester to resemble him. In selecting the shepherd as the woman’s fiancé during the scene, Elizabeth made a political statement. In 1624, King James I canceled the performance of the entertainment
Neptune’s Triumph
because he disagreed with the coded message it was sending about policy toward Spain. 16
    The Tudors were far from the only figures to stage the mythological past in spectacular fashion. The Victorian era brought a craze for everything medieval, from fake Gothic ruins put up on the property of nobility, to the Gothic novel, to jousting tournaments. The jousting tournament had been a staple of British royal entertainments from the Middle Ages on through the Tudors—Henry VIII was a notorious fan of and participant in tournaments, and Queen Elizabeth presided over a tilt nearly every year of her reign.
    In the early 1800s, driven by his love of medieval lore and literature, and at the height of the Gothic revival, Archibald Montgomery, the Earl of Eglinton decided to host a tournament. The tournament took its inspiration from Sir Walter Scott’s novel
Ivanhoe
(1819). Scott had also written a romance,
Kenilworth,
based on the earlier entertainment thrown for Queen Elizabeth.
    The tilt at Eglinton Castle was years in the making. At the end of 1838, Lord Eglinton had assembled a roll of 150 young men who wished to compete—the same number of knights who swore to honor the rules of Arthur’s Round Table—and they met to discuss the terms of the fight. They eventually settled on a tournament in the style of the sixteenth century—a civilized joust rather than the brutal melees of earlier centuries. More than half of the knights resigned in protest on the spot.
    In the coming months, driven by the heat of the Gothic revival, the press got word of the upcoming tournament and published sensational gossip about the knights, their custom-made armor, and the arrangements being made. In an era that lauded privacy, Lord Eglinton became a tabloid