ABSTRACT
As the primary artificer for the 1604 royal entry, Stephen Harrison produced an illustrated folio, The Arches of Triumph, of the entry’s seven arches. This composite text combines Harrison’s architectural designs with his accompanying prose commentary and with excerpts from the speeches performed at each arch from Jonson’s His Part of King James, His Royal and Magnificent Entertainment and Dekker’s The Magnificent Entertainment. This chapter defines the type of performance record contained in the folio, explicating how the author differentiates his readership from the spectators of the performance, and exploring what sociocultural functions, besides the representation of performance, this text fulfils. More specifically, it considers the visual aesthetics and iconography of individual arches as well as some of the disparities between Harrison’s designs and his own descriptions of them, and the subsequent impact of this on the reader’s experience of this rare illustrative folio of English pageantry. The chapter also addresses how its front matter and paratextual materials advertise the main text, creating a bourgeois ethic of possession, including the possession – via text – of a moment in time. Ultimately, the author establishes how The Arches of Triumphs situates itself among the multiple textual iterations of the 1604 royal entry in the London literary marketplace.
