ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with a telling instance of the assimilation of 'history' into 'story' in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English festivals: the use of the classical myth of the Golden Fleece. It focuses on Lord Mayor's Shows organised by the London Company of Drapers, who featured the myth of the Golden Fleece quite frequently in their shows throughout the early Stuart period. The chapter traces the iconographic and symbolic development of the myth from classical sources through chivalric orders and the Old and New Testament, up to seventeenth-century Protestant ideas. It shows how symbols that may now seem obvious carried instead a complex semantic and semiotic resonance in festivals used to convey a political and economic agenda. By the mid-seventeenth century the numerous meanings connected with the Golden Fleece had converted into a metaphor of England's commercial history, which, from then on, would take different and broader directions.