ABSTRACT
Offering a preview of the world’s first full anthology of mayoral Shows, forthcoming from the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML), this chapter reflects upon what has been done thus far (the diplomatic transcriptions of the pageant books) and what will be accomplished in the coming years. This digital anthology will perform the traditional and necessary editorial work of creating modern critical editions of the extant books written by London dramatists for the livery companies. However, in responding to Laura Mandell’s call to ‘break the book’, this digital anthology also offers a geospatial edition in which these printed books are but one eyewitness account. We position the commemorative books within an intertextual web that includes accounts from foreign ambassadors, livery company records, and other documentation in order to reconstruct and map the original event as best as possible through MoEML’s geospatial technologies and TEI-encoded site-specific toponyms. The aim of this editorial framework is to provide users with a palimpsestic walking tour that adumbrates what the mayor and spectators would have seen and proves the Shows to be more than insubstantial pageants faded.
