“The greatest feast and ioye that euer Eye sawe”: George Gascoigne’s The Princely Pleasures and the Kenilworth Festivities (1575)

Published after the Kenilworth entertainments (1575), George Gascoigne’s The Princely Pleasures comprises a lively dialogue between “verses, proses, poetical inventions and other devices of pleasure” written by Gascoigne himself and other “sundry Gentlemen” such as Richard Mulcaster, William Hunnis, George Ferrers, and Willian Patten. The second extant report about these royal ‘shows’ is the so-called ‘Robert Langham’s letter’. Characterized by a semi-phonetic orthography, this ‘document’ represents a unique description of the Kenilworth pastimes especially because it seems to be written from the point of view of the spectator. This article offers a comparative analysis of George Gascoigne’s The Princely Pleasures and Robert Langham’s letter which aims at exploring the staging of the Kenilworth entertainments, with a special focus on the first day show and one micro-drama produced by Gascoigne for the third day. It suggests that the Kenilworth festivities were characterized by a string of episodic ‘spectacles’ which require to be evaluated in accordance with both the accounts comprised in Langham’s eyewitness report and some scant descriptions concerning the actual performance included in Gascoigne’s collection.