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 chapter engages in a new mode of translation criticism. Herbert’s adaptations of Marino’s verse placed him within a larger European literary culture, which included Italy and France. Herbert’s engagement with Marino was also central in developing his own kind of poetic “wit,” which evolved at an angle to that of Marino and Carew his wit finds its expression in images and metaphors of reproduction and renewal, which in fact dominate his French-phase poetry, and relate to new acts of poetic renewal. Their adaptations of Marino’s verse, through the lens of their respective poems “A Description” and “The Complement,” rework Marino’s “Durante il bagno.” More broadly, Herbert and Carew, along with others such as William Drummond of Hawthornden and Samuel Daniel, were conduits for Marino’s influence in England, arguably leading to the achievements of the later community of poet-translators that centered around Thomas Stanley (who referred to themselves as the “Order of the Black Riband”) in the 1640s. Both Edward Herbert and Thomas Carew have been seen as important and early followers of John Donne, but during their time working together in France they also encountered another important mutual poetic influence: Giambattista Marino (also Giovan Battista Marini, 1569–1625).

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