Robert Withington

Selected Poems of William Wordsworth; With Matthew Arnold's Essay on Wordsworth Robert Withington

Publisher Marketing: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ENGLISH PAGEANTRY CHAPTER I ELEMENTS OF THE PAGEANT PROFESSOR Sir Adolphus Ward, in his History of English Dramatic Literature? defines pageants as moving shows devoid of either action or dialogue, or at least only employing their aid by way of supplementing and explaining the living picture. This definition is, in the main, satisfactory;2 it is with these moving shows that a large part of this work has to deal. A pageant is primarily something compacted together; but, as I noted in the Introduction, the characters which give a symbolical or historical significance to the float or wagon are more important than the wagon or stage which bears them; and symbolism and history may be expressed by the image of a giant or of some animal. Later chapters will trace the development of the pageant from the thirteenth century down to our own times; it is the task of this to treat some of the elements that have been drawn from folk-custom, modified by the Church, or borrowed from the metrical romance. The root of a moving show is obviously the procession ? but we are not concerned with processions pure and simple. Giants, animals, figures of saints, and wagons bearing characters dressed up to represent something they are not in real life, give these processions a pageantic aspect. I shall disregard chronology, partly because one must, in dealing with folklore material, and partly because chronology is here not a thing of great importance. The unfortunate result, however, is that the chapter may seem chaotic; this is also partly due to the fact that the elements of pageantry are not homogeneous. 1 (1875) i, p. 79; (1899) i, pp. 145 f. These exhibitions, he continues, formed an important part of the public life of the later Middle Ages, and . . . were to a larg... Contributor Bio:  Wordsworth, William Nicholas Halmi is University Lecturer in English Literature of the Romantic Period at the University of Oxford and Margaret Candfield Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is the author of The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (2007) and numerous articles on British and German Romanticism, editor of Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye (2004), co-editor (with Paul Magnuson and Raimonda Modiano) of the Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge's Poetry and Prose (2003), textual editor of the Opus Maximum in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2002), and an advisory editor of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.