ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two accounts of a quite different sort of event—the entertainments offered at Kenilworth during Elizabeth's 1575 royal progress through the West-Midlands. The 1575 entertainments at the Kenilworth, the estate of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, are the first such Elizabethan event for which extant accounts exists. While it constitutes perhaps the best-documented of such events of the Elizabethan period, it nevertheless remains one of the most misrepresented in contemporary scholarship. One of the Kenilworth accounts—Robert Langham's Letter—is the only detailed record of specific non-courtly progress entertainments from the period, and its publication history suggests that it had, and continues to have, intrinsic appeal and value. George Gascoigne's account has received some attention in this regard, but has not been effectively situated in the sociopolitical moment of its inscription. The two accounts of the entertainments at Kenilworth can be understood as differently configured but parallel engagements with the definition and production of sophistication.
