ABSTRACT
George P eele’s Araygnem ent o f Paris claims attention as a courtly performance and a printed text, an ephemeral social event and a monument of literary history. It has secured a prominent place in the modern canon of Elizabethan literature precisely be cause it is so characteristic and compendious a production of Elizabethan court culture. The Araygnement has been made to exemplify not only hyperbolic royal entertainment but also humble pastoral retirement; it has been interpreted not only as a glorifica tion of power but as a repudiation of ambition. These diver gent critical responses point to the ideological complexity of Elizabethan culture and Peele’s play. The play’s setting is pastoral, its dramaturgy is spectacular, and its royal sentiments are fulsome. Its action repeatedly involves the humble and the great in rites of homage or strategies of coercion. The Araygnement o f Paris re creates the culture which creates it. Acts of gift-giving and relation ships of power within the fiction reproduce basic characteristics of the social world in which the play is written and performed. I shall explore some of the symbolic forms which typify Elizabethan court culture and P eele’s play: pastoral conventions, myths of royal power, and acts of prestation.* If my exploration of these forms ap pears as much concerned with the contexts of Peele’s play as with the play itself, this is because "text” and "context” define and il luminate each other.
