Recent literary and historical scholarship has become increasingly engaged with the sheer scale and varieties of civic performances in early modern London. The 12 essays collected in this volume by J. Caitlin Finlayson and Amrita Sen explore this burgeoning critical attention towards the early modern preoccupation with spectacles, rituals and the formation of civic communities through their pageants and entertainments. As Finlayson and Sen write in their introduction, Civic Performance presents a ‘diversity of approaches’ that make use of extant printed texts, manuscripts, visual records, archival material and the digital humanities to reconsider the collaborative and multitudinous nature of civic drama. Together, these collected essays gesture towards the aural, visual, textual, material and performative aspects of civic pageants and entertainments, and the role these spectacles have in producing and reshaping London's local and global identity.

The volume's first section ‘Civic to global’ explores the place of London's civic drama on a global stage. The first two essays consider the representations of the East India Company and international trade in the city's Lord Mayor's Shows. Through the figure of the Merchant Adventurer, Tracey Hill explores the surprising scarcity of meaningful references to the international trading activities of the newer mercantile, as opposed to craft, companies, whose governing members simultaneously played significant roles in civic life. Sen considers the figure of the rhinoceros in Thomas Heywood's Porta Pietatis to argue that the display of foreign commodities and peoples in the shows reflects on and grapples with London's increasingly cosmopolitan civic space. Chapters by Sarah Crover and Nancy J. Kay address London's self-conscious engagement with Europe in its civic drama. Crover considers how the innovative spectacles of foreign figures and bilingualism in Anne Boleyn's 1533 coronation pageants on the Thames and city streets endeavoured to generate the image of a prosperous and whole England, which courted closer cultural and political ties with France. Kay explores the relationship between the royal entries of Prince Philip into Antwerp in 1549 and King James I into London in 1604, and discusses the significant contributions and voices of migrant communities in producing these spectacles.

In the book's second section, ‘Material encounters’, three chapters focus on archival sources to illuminate the collaborative, communal and ritualized elements of London's Lord Mayor's Shows. By exploring manuscript accounts and eyewitness reports of the shows, Ian W. Archer moves beyond printed accounts to consider ‘non-dramatic elements’ of civic rituals, particularly the specific meanings and practices of processional orders, feasting and other civic rituals (p. 95). Jennifer Linhart Wood employs livery company records to argue for the intertwining symbolic and material uses of instruments and the sounds they produce in the shows, working together to create music that suggests social and political harmony. Jill Ingram then reads the shows alongside other civic performances and entertainments in and surrounding London to consider how moments where participants gave or received gifts formed part of the ‘mutual civic obligation’ that structures both civic drama and community (p. 139).

The four chapters in the final section on ‘Methodologies for re-viewing performance’ offer fresh approaches to the relative fixity of texts that record civic pageants and entertainments, in light of the discontinuous multiplicity inherent to these kinds of performances. David M. Bergeron demonstrates how pageantry functioned as a continuum throughout the lives of audiences, participants and audiences who were also participants by tracing the varied engagements of Ludovic Stuart, duke of Lennox, with civic drama between 1603 and 1624. Finlayson then considers the centrality of iconography to the multiple iterations of the printed pageant texts detailing James I's 1604 royal entry in the literary marketplace. Continuing this focus on the 1604 royal entry, Katherine Butler surveys the extent to which the aesthetic and symbolic power of music enacts ‘the harmonious and transformative powers of monarchy’ in the city's soundscape (p. 213). Janelle Jenstad and Mark Kaethler then discuss their upcoming geospatial digital anthology of London mayoral shows. Jenstad and Kaether's digital resource aims to ‘to situate the shows in their places of performance’, exploring the performative and spatial relationships across a variety of surviving records and accounts (p. 219).

By emphasizing the range of activities involved in the inception, performance and reception of these pageants and entertainments, this collection contributes an important and welcome intervention into scholarly considerations of early modern civic drama. Although at times the varied threads of the book do not cohere together quite as strongly as they could, this heterogeneity is also the book's main strength. Its diverse approaches avoid privileging the singularly authorial or textual perspective to explore more fully the ways in which civic performances are situated in larger social, material and political networks. For readers interested in undertaking future work on the literary, historical and performance aspects of civic drama, Finlayson and Sen have collected a range of exciting frameworks for approaching the significance and challenges of understanding the civic pageants and entertainments in and around early modern London.