The most formally odd and thoroughly material of the theatrical spectacles to which Lydgate contributed were the subtleties for the coronation banquet of Henry VI. The feast itself was a carefully designed piece of political drama in the form of ceremonies and entertainments that ushered Henry to the throne. Its stage was the hall at Westminster and its audience important members of court, city, and church, many of whom would have seen or heard the other coronation events as well. In the banquet hall at Westminster, they not only watched and listened but also consumed three subtleties, decorative confections that were served between courses and that featured three ballades written by Lydgate on themes important for the occasion. In the subtleties, spectatorship slides into feasting, visual encounters with words and images become alimentary, and writing enters not only literary and civic but also food history. The subtleties present, in short, an extreme version of the media mixing and sensory blending that characterized late medieval culture and that I have been arguing Lydgate’s performance texts utilized, as the taste for performance is embodied in the act of eating.
The subtleties and the banquet came at the end of a long day of coronation events and were to all appearances designed with that larger context in mind. On 4 November 1429, Henry rode with his lords from Kingston over the London Bridge to the Tower. On the following Saturday, Henry’s entourage was joined by priests, the mayor, and aldermen who rode with Henry to Westminster; en route, Henry was entertained by a “toure full of Angels” and a “mimic queen” with maidens and pages at London Bridge, the conduits in Cheapside running with wine, and a “riall castell” at the cross in Cheapside.1 On Sunday, the 6th, Henry was crowned at Westminster, in the company of ecclesiastics and lords temporal, as well as his mother Catherine, “a grete noumbre of ladis and gentill-wemmen rially arayed,” and a surprise visitor—the son of the king of Portugal.2 The coronation ceremony involved elaborate rituals of dressing and undressing, anointing, presentation of scepter and sword, and finally the costuming of Henry as a bishop and the setting of the crown of St. Edward on his head, all accompanied by the saying of mass. His bishop’s garments were then removed and he was dressed in royal garb and crowned with the crown Richard II had made for himself. Afterward, Henry was led in a retinue through the palace to the hall where he sat at his coronation banquet, surrounded by people of note, who were seated by rank. At the first course, the king’s heralds ushered in Sir Philip Dymmock, who on the council’s orders rode into the hall costumed as St. George and proclaimed that Henry was the rightful heir to the crown of England and that he, Dymmock, was ready to defend him as his knight and champion.3
Presumably commissioned by a member of the royal household, perhaps the same controller’s deputy John Brice who Shirley says asked Lydgate for the Disguising at Hertford, the three ballades Lydgate wrote to accompany the subtleties featured scenes close to the concerns of the members of the council and the household. The first showed Sts. Edward and Louis with Henry VI between them, the second featured Henry VI kneeling before Emperor Sigismund and Henry V, and the third depicted the Virgin with child, holding a crown in her hand, flanked by Sts. George and Denis presenting the king to her. Lydgate’s verses explain the meaning of each image, developing and intensifying the themes of kingship that the images conveyed.
While the occasion was royal, the audience was broad and presumably the themes of the subtleties were widely endorsed, given the degree to which they meshed with other entertainments for the king made in the same period but not directly sponsored by the court, such as the 1432 entry. Civic and religious leaders were present, including the mayor, aldermen, archbishops, and other leading members of the church, including, most likely, the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, who was in London for parliament. Lower-ranking citizens would also have crowded in, as at Queen Catherine’s coronation banquet in 1421, which according to one chronicler was “opyn to alle pepull.”4 Parliament was in session at the time of the young king’s English coronation, and important people from around the realm, including the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, were in London.5 By custom, Mayor Estfeld served at the coronation and was rewarded with the gift of a gold cup and ewer filled with gold, while the aldermen, sheriffs, and recorder of London also assisted the butlers and dined at a table in the hall.6 Although we should not be too quick to assume complete unanimity of affect, it seems likely that in their elucidation of the figures depicted by the subtleties, Lydgate’s verses anticipated the interests of this larger group of spectators, touching on the concerns of Londoners as well as the court, particularly the vexed issue of the legitimacy of the dual monarchy and Henry’s youth.7 The verses stress the king’s French heritage and his father’s friendship with Emperor Sigismund, which as Ralph Griffiths notes was a reminder of “the Lancastrian imperium into which Henry VI was now entering,” while also advocating a tough line against heretics and invoking various protectors for the young king, including the patron saints of England and France, all themes that would have had at least some degree of civic as well as courtly appeal.8
Although Lydgate’s verses appear to be expanded versions of the short “reasons” that typically accompanied subtleties, they may also have been read aloud by a master of ceremonies so that everyone in the hall could hear them.9 No impersonation or mimesis seems to have been involved, but if the verses were read aloud by a presenter, there would have been room for gesture and intonation to flesh out the purely visual display. Because feasting was a ritual that called upon its participants to play roles in a social drama, the subtleties function as a kind of play-within-a-play, a series of entr’actes in the larger entertainment provided by the banquet that distilled the feast’s looser messages into a more concentrated essence.10
Like many of the other entertainments to which Lydgate contributed, the subtleties were occasional dramatic forms, created for one specific performance. Their ephemerality is complicated by their cookery form, however, since they were designed to be ingested—not just by ear and eye, in the usual way of performances—but by mouth. Surviving copies of the subtleties often try to recapture their alimentary context, by transmitting not just Lydgate’s three ballades and a description of the scenes that the subtleties depicted but also the menu for the feast. As that impulse to re-create the act of eating suggests, the subtleties represent an outermost form of materiality in which food and theater—the taking in of a performance and the eating of a meal—are collapsed. Just as the ritual of the mass combines theatricality with ingestion of the host, so too the subtleties forced the assembled banqueters to participate at the most fundamental level in the entertainment, by eating the images and words displayed for their pleasure. Robert Epstein has argued that the subtleties represent a kind of “spectacular textuality”; even more so, they are evidence of alimentary spectacle, in which the performance is consumed by the spectator through the act of eating.11
Although it primarily serves to satisfy hunger and provide nourishment, much is also inherently performative about food, any kind of food. Food comes to the table loaded with meaning and emotion, and the codes around it—protocols of cooking, eating, and disposing of wastes—insert it into broader systems of cultural signification. To cook, to serve, to chew are also to perform; at this basic level of tools, materials, and procedures of food preparation and eating, to perform is to do. Food and performance intersect at two other junctures, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has argued. When we follow social rules about food—such as taboos, rituals, and stipulations of etiquette—we perform precepts about food that guide how we act; thus, to perform is also to behave. Tasting a dish begins with a physical and sensual response, but it also involves an exercise in judgment, as the food is evaluated for its flavor and appeal. Eating invites us to appraise, value, and assess, especially when the acts of doing and behaving around food are brought to the foreground and displayed in ways that underscore the theatrical and spectacular; at this juncture, to perform is to show.12
The subtleties for Henry’s coronation operate at that third juncture; dissociated from bodily needs and the satisfaction of hunger, they bypass the nose and mouth, becoming showpieces or spectacles to be displayed and shown rather than foodstuffs intended to assuage hunger. They thus appeal to vision more than to taste or smell and move the experience of food beyond appetite and nourishment. In that enhanced form, the subtleties offer an example of the gastro-aesthetics of the ritualized banquet in which food becomes a performance medium. Both on the banquet table and in the manuscripts that later recorded them, the coronation subtleties for which Lydgate wrote verses provide a glimpse of a history of theater in relation to the senses, where food and spectacle—alimentary and visual consumption—come together.
What Marcia Reed calls “edible monuments” were highly theatricalized objects.13 Although food historians are not in full agreement about their exact composition, subtleties were apparently most often food items, constructed of some sort of comestible—sugar, marzipan, or dough—and meant to be eaten after they were displayed to those present at a feast.14 They could also apparently incorporate paper, wax, or other nonedible materials, much as a decorated wedding cake today might include edible decorations made of icing as well as a plastic effigy of the married couple. Subtleties would have had a short afterlife, being concocted for immediate consumption or, if not eaten on the spot, prone to quick decay. Subtleties were common at coronation and royal wedding banquets or other important ceremonial occasions. Accounts record subtleties at the coronation banquet of Henry IV in 1399, at the wedding of Henry IV and Joan of Navarre in 1403, at a royal feast during Henry IV’s reign (featuring a “Ceruus,” “homo,” and “arbor”), at Windsor in 1416 when Henry V entertained Emperor Sigismund, for the coronation of Catherine of Valois in 1421, and at the banquet in Paris that followed Henry VI’s French coronation in 1431.15 Many of the subtleties mentioned in extant documents are not described, but those that are include a subtlety of “Seint-Jorge on horsebak and sleynge the dragun” and another of “a castel that the Kyng and the Qwhene comen in for to see how Seint Jorge slogh” from the privy purse accounts of Elizabeth of York in BL MS Arundel 334. A cookery book in BL MS Harley 4016 describes a subtlety that consisted of “a godhede in a son of gold glorified aboue; in the son the holy giste voluptable; Seint Thomas kneling a-for him, with þe poynt of a swerd in his hede & a Mitre there-vppon . . . in sinistra parte Johannes Baptista; et in iiij partibus, iiij Angeli incensantes.”16
One of the fullest contemporary descriptions of subtleties is in the Boke of Nurture (c. 1460) of John Russell, usher and marshal to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Russell offers two examples of how to serve meals accompanied by subtleties. The first is of a meat dinner in which the first course is followed by a subtlety of Gabriel greeting the Virgin Mary with an Ave, the second course ends with a subtlety of an angel appearing and singing to three shepherds on a hill, and the third course concludes with subtleties of the Virgin presented by the kings of Cologne. His second example is even more elaborate: each of the subtleties that punctuated the four courses of a lavish fish dinner was accompanied by a couplet from the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum describing the properties of the humors. The subtlety following the first course represented a gallant youth, Sanguineus, standing on a cloud piping and singing to celebrate the season “Pat cleped is ver.” The second subtlety depicted a red and fiery man of war called Estas (Summer), and the third showed a weary man carrying a sickle (Harvest) standing in a river tired and with no desire to dance. The fourth was a representation of Winter, with gray hair, sitting on a stone. As John Burrow notes, “as Duke Humphrey’s guests worked their way through this very unpenitentiary fish banquet, they were invited to see in it the four courses of their own life’s feast.”17 The appeal of subtleties, according to Russell, was:
These iiij. Soteltess devised in towse,
Wher þey byn shewed in an howse,
Hithe doth egret plesaunce
With oþer sightes of gret Nowelte
Þan han be shewed in Rialle feestes of solempnyte,
A notable cost þe ordynaunce.18
Although Russell locates subtleties within the rituals of the table, his focus on their visual appeal emphasizes their theatrical nature, including their resemblance to pageants staged in the streets.19 Some subtleties depicted scenes full of action, such as those in the St. George’s feast for the Emperor Sigismund in 1416.20 The first subtlety presented to the emperor was of the Virgin Mary arming St. George and the angel putting on his spurs; the second was of St. George fighting the dragon, a spear in his hand; and the third, a castle, St. George, and the king’s daughter leading a lamb into the castle gate. Others deployed their written verses or “reasons” so as to form a kind of dialogue among the figures in the subtlety. A subtlety at the coronation banquet of Catherine of Valois in 1421, for example, depicted St. Catherine with a reason in her hand: “La Roigne ma file,” with the panther answering “In cest Ile,” another beast answering “Of Albion,” and another saying “Aves Renowne.”21 Another subtlety, which apparently included an actual dialogue of “Pastor Bonus,” the bishop, St. Andrew, and possibly a presenter, was part of the “Convivium” celebrating the installation of John Morton as bishop of Ely on 29 August 1479.22 There may have been a degree of crossover between drama and subtleties: Glynne Wickham observes that the three-dimensional figures of subtleties, like those of tableaux vivants, endowed images with greater realism than could be found in two-dimensional drawings and thus made them more useful as source material for early play-makers.23
The performative nature of subtleties is underscored by etymology and usage, which link those confectionary entertainments to theater’s arts of disguise and deception. Definitions show that subtleties and subterfuge were not far apart in Middle English usage and reveal that edible tableaux could be understood to be ingenious contrivances as well as crafty deceptions that make a dish look like something it in actuality is not.24 In his translation of the Pilgrimage of Life, Lydgate himself emphasized that closeness, using the phrase “many other soteltes” to translate the French “autre chose desguisee” and thus suggesting that the word sotelte could be used to describe the act of masquerade.25 Like disguisings and other similar enactments, subtleties were entertainments that pleased and instructed by using an artfulness bordering on deception.
In their connection to disguise, subtleties were allied with other processes of courtly identity making of the sort that Susan Crane has described as being part of the performance of aristocratic selfhood in the late medieval period.26 During the coronation feast of 1429, this crafting of the self was focused most intensely on the young king, as the visual and verbal features of the three subtleties presented a specific image of the newly crowned Henry. Henry’s positioning in all three subtleties between historical figures who act as patron saints, and his kneeling posture, demonstrated both his centrality to the ceremony and his still subordinate role as a young ruler-supplicant in need of guidance and help. The third subtlety, with its depiction of Henry as Christ-child, displayed a dual image of the king’s child-like helplessness and his near-divine power. The subtleties also looked beyond the king, engaging the banqueting guests as witnesses to the symbolic construction of Henry and ratifying their status as privileged participants in the royal ceremony, each with his or her own clearly marked place—which was signaled quite visibly by the seating arrangements—in the collective project of king making. Resembling the “voids” of renaissance banquets discussed by Patricia Fumerton, subtleties were heavily charged representational forms, as aristocrats and wealthy commoners consumed objects removed from everyday sustenance, symbolic pseudo-foods that ratified their social status. Unlike the “detached subjectivity” that Fumerton argues characterized the renaissance feast, the subjectivity created by medieval banquets—with their mingling of people, courses, and sensory experiences—was intensely communal.27 The coronation subtleties for Henry thus may have aimed to create a specific image of him as king, but they did so within a context of commensality as a highly social act.
Even though subtleties were solidly material, they were also a fairly rarefied performance medium, requiring the resources of a well-stocked kitchen and skilled cooks, but their social reach extended beyond the aristocracy. A wealthy household in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have had its own cooks, including a waferer and confectioner for making luxurious trifles; class issues were involved as cooks for the wealthy tried to get away from peasant life and tastes and to disguise nature with artifice.28 While the promise of a cookery book from the reign of Richard II to teach the art of making potages and meats and “sotiltees for alle manere of states both h[y]e and lowe” seems exaggerated (how low could such an elaborate and expensive art go?), the book’s assumption that subtleties could be part of banquets at various social levels is supported by other evidence.29
That social reach should remind us that meals themselves are a form of social patterning, in their way “a res publica or public thing,” as Julia Lupton observes, “designed for common consumption in accordance with the order of courses, the rules of seating, and the seasonal rhythms of feast and fast.”30 A public thing within a public thing, the subtlety blended into one compact and spectacular package both the social and the symbolic aspects of dining, offering banqueters not only the chance to see themselves within the social whole but also to internalize key cultural hopes and desires. By first viewing and then eating the subtleties, banqueters played the roles of both spectators and participants, watching and taking part in a complicated performance in which food was at once a spectacle and a commestible. Raising foodstuff to the level of showpiece, subtleties deceive us into taking sugar and dough for miniature pageants, converting the fleeting materiality of pastries into the enduring symbolism of art, and asking us to both destroy that art by devouring it and preserve it by making it a part of ourselves.
Although sharing the general contours of food as performance that I have been describing, the feast and subtleties for Henry VI were shaped by a historical context that gave them specific meanings that would have been available to those who planned and participated in the feast. Signaling opulence and immunity to the dearth felt elsewhere in England that year, the lavishness of the three courses at the 1429 feast suggests an exceptional degree of culinary richness that stands out from the norm of ordinary and even aristocratic consumption.31 As Epstein observes, “the variety and the quantity of items, and the care taken to record each delicacy, give an impression of magnificent superfluity,” an impression designed to display the royal virtue of “magnificence” and thus to demonstrate the extent of the king’s wealth and power.32 Like the other events of the coronation, the banquet’s aims were the political ones of demonstrating the power of the monarchy and Henry VI’s fitness for the crown. While not all of the dishes would have been served to all of the diners, their buffet-like display, deftly captured in manuscript descriptions of them, presented the image of a cornucopia of abundance and was a reminder of royal largesse and might.33
While lavish, the menu was not especially exotic, instead displaying native bounty. The three courses included the full span of meat, fish, and fowl available in fifteenth-century England, such as venison, boar, beef, mutton, capon, chicken, pike, crane, pig, swan, egret, carp, and crab, among many others. This display of the English wild and cultivated game was accompanied by various custards, puddings, jellies, and fritters, including “furmentie” and “viande royal,” sweet porridge-like dishes typically served with meat; a “custade rooial,” presumably a custard-like tart; “leches,” thin slices of a pudding or jelly; and sweet or savory “fritours.”34 The peacock was served “enhakyll,” in its plumage. Rich, grand, opulent, but familiar, the feast was thoroughly grounded in English cookery and represented an expansion of ordinary meals, not a departure from them. This was an English feast for an English coronation, an assertion of native identity that seems calculated to respond to the tensions of the dual monarchy by acknowledging the claims of the homeland.
Where the dishes departed from ordinary fare was in their decorative use of heraldic emblems and patterns, which linked the food with the occasion’s political themes through the use of gold gilt, colors, geometric shapes, and animal figures found on heraldry: the “viande royal” in the first course was “plantid with lozenges of golde” (i.e., cut into saffron-dyed geometrical sections); the boarheads were in “castelles of earmed with golde” (i.e., a castle with black-and-white ermine spots with gold); the “redde lech” had white lions carved into it and the white “leches” featured a red antelope with a crown on a golden chain; the “custade rooial” had a golden leopard; the porkpie was “poudred” with leopards and fleur-de-lis; a cold bake-meat was shaped like a shield; and the fritter in the first course was molded into the shape of a sun with a fleur-de-lis in its center while in the fritter in the second course took the shape of a leopard’s head with two ostrich feathers.35 The insistently royal slant of the decorations—lions and leopards were on the coats of arms of Sts. Edward and Louis, and on Henry VI’s, too, and the French lilies point to Henry’s right to the French crown—turned the foodstuffs into dramatic props enlisted in support of the unifying goals of the occasion.
At some level, all subtleties were aligned with the ritual consumption of the eucharistic wafer, late medieval culture’s most iconic form of symbolic eating, and given controversies surrounding eucharistic devotion in the fifteenth century, that connection was not surprisingly even stronger in the subjects chosen for the Henry VI’s subtleties. Epstein argues that the 1429 coronation subtleties deliberately drew on religious associations to emphasize secular concerns, importing “embattled, orthodox religious practices into the performance of secular political ritual.” Thus, while feasting on signs and symbols of dynastic polity created by the confectioner, the assembled guests participated in something akin to a political mass. Such a conflation should not be unexpected, Epstein notes, since the chief characteristic of Lancastrian culture, besides the politicizing of poetry and other representational forms, was “the unification of church and crown in a marriage of mutual self-interest and self-preservation.”36
The joining of these shared interests can be seen in the subject matter of each of the three coronation subtleties. The first subtlety, like other Lancastrian productions of the 1420s and early 1430s, including the 1432 royal entry, attempted to assert the legitimacy of the dual monarchy. More pointedly, it echoes the “Roundel” and the “Ballade” Lydgate also wrote for the coronation in linking church and crown, England and France, through its depiction of Sts. Edward and Louis “bryngyng yn bitwene hem” Henry VI in his coat armor. According to Robert Fabyan’s 1516 account, the two monarch-saints were accompanied on the subtlety by “a Scripture passynge from theym,” which explained the meaning of the image, with a ballade “under the fete of the sayde sayntes.”37 The ballade consisted of Lydgate’s eight lines of verse stressing that Henry VI is the “braunch borne of here blessid blode” (l. 3) and the inheritor of the fleur-de-lis, who will one day come to resemble his illustrious predecessors in wisdom as well as “in knyghthod & vertue” (l. 8).
The second subtlety took up the question of heresy and Lollard threats and showed Emperor Sigismund and Henry V, wearing the mantle of the Order of the Garter, with Henry VI kneeling before them “with this resoun.”38 In Lydgate’s verses, Sigismund is styled a scourge “Ageinst miscreauntes [i.e., heretics]” (l. 9), and Henry V is depicted as a martial defender of “Cristes cause” and a cherisher of the Church under whom “Lollardes had a falle” (l. 13). The reference in these lines is to Sigismund’s actions against the Hussites (Sigismund betrayed Jan Hus at the Council of Constance and authorized his execution, while also going to battle against his followers) and to Henry V’s against the Oldcastle Lollard plot of 1413, both instances in which heterodox threats were suppressed. In the coronation “Ballade,” Lydgate used the same figures and theme (see ll. 81–88), suggesting that suppression of heresy formed a dominant theme of the coronation. Mentioning Henry’s father’s friendship with Sigismund signals that the dual monarchy has imperial approval while also encouraging the young king to be a vigorous defender of orthodox religion.39 In a collaborative production like the subtleties, it can be difficult to assign responsibility for specific details, but it appears as if the decision to emphasize defense of orthodoxy, if not Lydgate’s own choice, is at least something his verses elaborate and expand on beyond the visual imagery of the subtlety, but the dangers of Lollardy was certainly a concern of the late 1420s, and Lydgate’s decision to emphasize the king’s role as champion of orthodoxy was by no means an eccentric one.40 Epstein notes that at this moment, the banquet guests are eating a jellied dish with the words Te Deum Laudamus on it: “The significance of the words is threefold: they literally proclaim the diners’ devotion to God; being Latin, in this context they take on an orthodox connotation; they are a royal motto. In consuming them, the diners use their own bodies to enact and to signify corporeally their fealty to the ideology of church-crown cooperation.”41
The third subtlety showed the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her lap; she held in her hand a crown, and Sts. George and Denis knelt on either side of her, presenting Henry VI, kneeling, to her “with this reason folowyng.”42 Like “A Prayer for King, Queen, and People,” which was a translation of the hymn “Ab inimicis nostris defende nos christe” that Lydgate had made for the coronation and to which he added an envoy asking for God’s blessing for the young king and his mother, the third subtlety adopts Christian symbols for political purposes. As Epstein remarks, the crown the Virgin holds is ambiguously positioned so that it is unclear which of the religiopolitically paired offspring she is crowning, an ambiguity that underscores J. W. McKenna’s point about “the lengths to which the English royal administrators were prepared to go to advertise the dynastic claims of Henry VI.”43 Lydgate’s verses for the third subtlety take the form of a short prayer to the Virgin and the two monarch-saints in which the poet beseeches them to show their “hevenly light” on him (l. 21) and affirms the youthful Henry’s right to the dual monarchy.
Like other forms of Lancastrian public culture in the first decades of the fifteenth century, the three subtleties touched on the chief concerns of Lancastrian rule—the legitimacy of dynastic succession and the dual monarchy and the need to suppress heresy and support orthodox religion—making those issues the central focus of the coronation banquet. The attempt of the subtleties to fuse the interests of church and crown, interests that would presumably have been at least partially shared by the civic guests at the banquet as well, was made easier by the ways in which the ritual of coronation feasts echoed the ritual of the mass. In a discussion of the mass as ritual and as sacramental theater, Sarah Beckwith observes that “the host will not magically resolve discord or disharmony”; instead, “its properties lie in the structures of relation that are established between the ritual participant and the ritual object.”44 Like the mass, a coronation feast employed food as a performance medium to bind a community around shared values. The powerful latent symbolism of the mass infused this secular feast and the subtleties that were a part of it, harnessing religious ritual for secular political ends, even if—as with the mass—no magical resolution could be assured. If the subtleties were eaten, the consumption of such charged texts and images would have made Lancastrian propaganda unusually compelling as it was literally incorporated by the assembled guests. Even if they were only consumed visually and aurally, as they would have been if Lydgate’s verses were read aloud or simply left to be viewed by king and guests, the feasting context would have imbued the subtleties with similarly heightened meanings.45
The surviving manuscripts do not make clear where on the subtleties for Henry VI’s coronation the verses by Lydgate appeared, but Fabyan’s account suggests that they could issue from the mouths of the figures, be carried in their hands, or be written beneath the tableau.46 In BL MS Cotton Julius B.i., Lydgate’s verses are described as “reasons” or “scriptures,” terms that were used interchangeably to describe the verses that accompanied visual representations. While it could broadly describe various kinds of spoken discourse, the Middle English word resoun also had a more specialized meaning as a written verse or motto, especially one engraved, embroidered, or inscribed on an object.47
The innovation of the 1429 subtleties comes in the expansion of these “reasons” or typically short mottoes or banners typically found on subtleties into full ballades, an innovation that was perhaps specially requested to enhance the impact of the subtleties to suit the importance of the occasion. The elaborateness of Lydgate’s verses suggests, in Gordon Kipling’s view, “that the household was attempting something more ambitious on this occasion. In commissioning England’s most eminent poet to provide the scriptures, they expected—and got—not just a few phrases of emblematic scripture, but stanzas of verse.”48 It is possible that Lydgate was responsible for the design of the subtleties (the “device”), but someone else may have decided on the emblematic subject matter that the artisans and cooks created, and Lydgate was merely assigned the task of writing the accompanying verses or “scriptures,” thus limiting his inventive freedom. The planning for the coronation apparently began in the summer after being set in motion by the coronation of Charles VII at Rheims in July, leaving time for the household to compose the device for the subtleties, send it to Lydgate, and receive the scriptures in return.49
Although commonly ascribed to him, Lydgate’s authorship of the ballades for the subtleties is not absolutely certain. They were not copied by Shirley and are not attributed to Lydgate in the surviving manuscripts or in Fabyan’s account. That lack of attribution may arise from the nature of the sources: many are chronicles that include the verses as part of their accounts of the coronation, and chroniclers may have been unaware of Lydgate’s role in creating the verses or may have been indifferent to the cachet that in some circles was attached to Lydgate’s name. Despite this lack of attribution, MacCracken judged that the verses were “certainly” by Lydgate on the grounds that they fit with the other poems Lydgate wrote for the coronation, a claim that has never been seriously challenged.50
The subtleties themselves were eaten or disassembled or rotted away soon after they were displayed, but Lydgate’s three ballades—and in many cases a list of the courses at the feast and a description of the subtleties—made their way into the written record, thus preserving in the medium of words a feast in which the food was “conspicuously discursive.”51 Food appeals to the senses of smell, taste, touch, and sight, and few of those can be adequately represented through the medium of written words. In that regard, the scribal problem of recording the subtleties was not much different from difficulties involved in representing pageantry or mumming or processions on the manuscript page. None of the manuscripts containing descriptions of the subtleties for which Lydgate provided verses aspires to or attains the level of representational vividness of the souvenir-like festival books and prints produced in later centuries for the elite participants at banquets and for those unable to attend.52 As the heavily symbolic aspect of the subtleties suggests and despite their obvious materiality as items meant to be eaten, when copied into manuscripts, they inevitably came unmoored from their connection to food, as they were transformed from nourishment into image and text. And yet, manuscript copies of the subtleties frequently attempt to hold onto an alimentary context, striving to convey something of the materiality of the subtleties as foodstuffs and as performance objects.
The textual legacy of the feast for Henry VI offers a glimpse of the gastro-aesthetics of the coronation banquet and also suggests which readers would have been interested in Lydgate’s verses as textual representations of the material objects displayed and consumed at the coronation. Not all extant descriptions of the 1429 coronation banquet include the verses Lydgate was commissioned to write; some contain just the courses for the feast along with brief descriptions of the subtleties. Where Lydgate’s three ballades do survive is, overwhelmingly, in the context of London chronicles. That context might seem strange, given the pronounced lack of interest in chivalry among Londoners in the fifteenth century. Perhaps Lydgate’s verses for the subtleties owe their survival to a concern with royal politics that had implications for the city, or to recognition that there was money to be made in hosting tournaments and supplying the trappings of chivalry and writing down the romances that described it.53
There are three interrelated groups of London chronicles in which Lydgate’s ballades appear. The first group includes BL MS Egerton 1995, a late fifteenth-century commonplace book or miscellany written in one hand. It contains treatises, the Siege of Rome, and other material in prose and verse such as model letters, recipes, medical remedies, a courtesy poem, and the chronicle known as “Gregory’s Chronicle,” into which Lydgate’s verses on the subtleties are inserted as part of its account of the history of London.54 Mary-Rose McLaren describes the personality of the author of the chronicle as “that of an older, class-conscious, worldly wise, philosophical man,” noting that he is a fair commentator even if sympathetic to uprisings and injustices, is involved in trade (but is probably not a mercer, since he makes disparaging remarks about mercers), is critical of the king but speaks of Eleanor Cobham as “my lady of Gloucester” and is a supporter of “my good lord Montagewe,” is interested in religion and in the mayoralty, and seems to have contacts outside London.55 Given the strong interest in the gentry and aristocracy that Egerton 1995 shows, the appearance of the subtleties is not a surprise. Egerton 1995 shares some content with a group of manuscripts identified by Margaret Connolly as produced by scribes who had access to Shirley’s manuscripts, although Linne Mooney cautions against assuming that Shirley’s manuscripts were the exemplars for all of these copies.56 In Egerton 1995, as in the related BL MS Cotton Vitellius A.xvi, Lydgate’s ballades are not written in verse, although line breaks are indicated by capital letters and the text of the subtleties is underlined in red, setting Lydgate’s poetry off from the description of the courses. BL Vitellius A.xvi contains 213 leaves of paper and is made up of three separate chronicles in different hands that are arranged as continuations of one another; the subtleties appear on folio 91.57
The second group of related chronicle manuscripts containing Lydgate’s ballades includes London Guildhall Library MS 3313, which consists entirely of a London chronicle; to 1438 it is in a neat, professional hand, but a second hand (with a third appearing in a single quire beginning on fol. 157) continues through 1496, at which point there appears a list of mayors and aldermen, then a continuation of the chronicle through 1512 and an index of events between 1436 and 1496, with other material inserted by various readers.58 Guildhall 3313 also includes Lydgate’s verses on the 1432 royal entry and, on folio 129v, his ballades for the subtleties. Guildhall 3313 appears to be the product of a workshop or professional scribe commissioned to write up a chronicle that could later be added to by the owner.59 The version found in BL MS Cotton Julius B.i., which MacCracken uses as the base text for his edition of Lydgate’s subtleties, appears in a London chronicle whose focus is on the succession of mayors and other aspects of civic government, even though it also includes notable historical events, such as Henry VI’s coronation. The manuscript shows evidence of having been carefully produced, but whether for private use or for sale or on commission is impossible to say.60 Julius B.i. is a manuscript of 102 leaves of paper, written in one neat hand to 1436 with space left for decorated initials; at the year 1432, the page layout changes, which probably marks the point of private ownership, and there is a further change of hand at 1436.61 Along with Lydgate’s verses for the subtleties, the manuscript also includes ordinances, La Bataille du Roy, and some heraldic texts in a variety of hands, although the titles throughout the manuscript are all probably in the hand of the first scribe.62 A similar manuscript with the subtleties is BL MS Cotton Vitellius F.ix., which contains a London chronicle written in the same hand on seventy leaves of paper; the chronicle begins in 1189 and ends in 1439, and up to 1431 it is identical with Julius B.i.63
Also part of this second group is Oxford, St. John’s College MS 57, a folio of 242 leaves of paper in a hand of the first half of the fifteenth century, probably that of a professional scribe. The manuscript is made up of three originally separate booklets all in Middle English containing the Prick of Conscience, a fifteenth-century chronicle of London that covers the years 1189 to 1431, and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, to which is appended Henry V’s Statutes and Ordinances for the army at Mantes (1419).64 Linne Mooney and Lister Matheson have identified its scribe, whom they call “the Beryn scribe,” as being the same as the copyist of the Duke of Northumberland’s Canterbury Tales, which contains a copy of the non-Chaucerian Tale of Beryn, and six other manuscripts, including five copies of the Middle English prose Brut and a copy of Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. Mooney and Matheson localize the spelling of the scribe in south-central Essex but suggest that he may have moved to London to ply his trade. They note that the text of the Life of Our Lady is related to Trinity MS R.3.21, which was written in a London, commercial book-producing setting and, like St. John’s MS 57, was originally composed of booklets.65 The second booklet of St. John’s MS 57 contains a fifteenth-century London chronicle, listing mayors and sheriffs through 1431; while Kingsford classifies its text as one of the earliest of the London chronicles, Mooney and Matheson date the copy to the 1440s or 1450s, on paleographical grounds.66 The text of St. John’s MS 57’s chronicle is close to that of Cotton Julius B.i., Vitellius F.ix, and Guildhall 3313; Lydgate’s ballades for the subtleties appear on folio 221v. Mooney and Matheson note that the Beryn scribe’s access to an early copy of the London chronicle suggests that he or his patron had an interest in English history. Piecing together the scant evidence, Mooney and Matheson conclude that the manuscripts copied by the Beryn scribe were owned by members of the lesser nobility and knightly classes, merchants, and civil servants, who, while geographically dispersed, appear to have relied on London scriptoria for their books.67
The subtleties appear in three other chronicle contexts. Dublin, Trinity College MS 509 is a miscellany of historical and theological works in English and Latin that includes a list of names of London churches, the oath of the mayor and sheriffs of London, the Gesta Edwardi III, a life of the Virgin Mary, a list of English and Irish saints, and the chronicle known as “Bale’s Chronicle,” which includes the subtleties.68 Hatfield House MS Cecil Papers 281 is a commonplace book of 141 leaves of parchment, probably compiled as one book; it contains a variety of material, including two Latin chronicles, records of taxes of London, religious notes, a moral tale, and Lydgate’s verses on the kings of England.69 On folios 32–88, there is a London chronicle in three different hands from 1189 to 1440 with a continuation for the years 1446–50; the chronicle resembles the chronicle in Trinity College, Dublin 509, and both Cecil 281 and Dublin 509 follow Egerton 1995 closely until the year 1437.70 Last of the three, BL MS Cotton Nero C.xi. is a heraldic miscellany containing a chronicle that begins as a Brut and becomes a London chronicle at 1189; it runs until 1485, with a last continuation ending in 1558. It was published as The Newe Cronycles of England and of France by Pynson in 1516 and was later printed as Fabyan’s Chronycle by Rastell in 1553. The chronicle is close to St. John’s 57, Vitellius F.ix, Julius B.i, and Guildhall 3313 but unusual in its style and sources.71
In only two instances do Lydgate’s ballades for the subtleties appear in nonchronicle contexts; both of those appearances are in manuscripts whose contents emphasize matters of chivalry and statecraft. The subtleties are the second item in BL MS Lansdowne 285 (1450–75) (fols. 6v-7r) and follow immediately after a description of “The maner and forme of the Kyngis and Quenes coronacion in Englonde” (fol. 2). Lansdowne 285 may have been the “Grete Boke” copied for Sir John Paston by William Ebesham, a professional scribe, or the “Grete Boke” and Lansdowne may share a common original; in any case, it contains a number of short items related to chivalry and politics during the reign of Edward IV.72 It also contains Lydgate’s translation of the Secreta Secretorum, which was completed by Benedict Burgh. Lansdowne 285 is a coherently organized miscellany of mainly chivalric and heraldic writings clearly written for the landed gentry. In describing the subtleties, Lansdowne 285 lists the menu for each course, under headers written in French (“le primier cours pur la ioure del coronacion,” “le seconde cours,” “le trecie cours”), but does not describe the subtleties; it calls Lydgate’s verses “baladis” (using English rather than French). New York Pierpont Morgan Library MS 775 is an illustrated miscellany of chivalric material written before 1461 for Sir John Astley, a Knight of the Garter who was well established at court and skilled in royal tournaments. The miscellany was dedicated to an unidentified “hye princesse” and “good ladyship,” raising the possibility that it belonged to a woman.73 In addition to Lydgate’s verses for the subtleties, the manuscript contains various works on chivalry and statecraft, including a translation of Vegetius’s de Re Militari, Christine de Pisan’s Epistle of Othea (a tract on advice in the form of a mirror), and Lydgate’s Secreta Secretorum.74 G. A. Lester believes that Morgan 775 served as a model for Paston’s “Grete Boke,” which contains the same material with minor variations, but it is also possible that both derived from a common original that circulated among professional scribes.75
Although it is obvious why Lydgate’s verses for the 1432 royal entry would tend to appear in the context of London chronicles, given the city’s involvement in producing them, it is less apparent why his verses for the subtleties, which were presumably sponsored solely by the royal court, would too. Perhaps their occurrence in chronicles can be explained by the fact that they are linked to the important occasion of the coronation, an event of state that would have interested Londoners. Perhaps because the mayor and important Londoners attended the 1429 banquet, they wanted to commemorate a ceremony they had seen. But the appearance of the subtleties in miscellanies of mostly chivalric and heraldic material suggests that they were also viewed as moments of royal ceremony of interest to aristocratic readers.
How did Lydgate’s verses on the subtleties reach the compilers of London chronicles? They may be an example of passages of verse that occasionally appear in prose chronicles, which Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards view as instances of “random access to illustrative material” or “opportunistic interpolation.”76 Epstein echoes this suggestion, arguing that given the inclusion of the ballades in a relatively high number of chronicle manuscripts, their appearance may be more “opportunistic” than “random”; they may have been deliberately circulated so that they could be included in written documents like chronicles that would ensure them a life beyond the ephemeral occasion of performance. If Epstein is right, the verses may represent authorized models of textual production and reception; like other Lancastrian texts, “they explicitly promulgate dynastic ideology and implicitly appropriate contested orthodox ritual.” The copying of performance texts and their dissemination to readers, Epstein argues, “evokes rituals, performances, and displays with endless public and political ramifications” and constitutes a kind of “political communion, in which the ideology of the regime is symbolically consumed and internalized.”77
While Epstein’s point about the Lancastrian dynasty’s desire to conscript the act of reading for its own purposes is well taken, the manuscript evidence suggests that the desires of Londoners were also a factor in the survival and dissemination of Lydgate’s verses for the subtleties. It is true that several of the chronicles containing the subtleties date from the first half of the fifteenth century, very close to the time of the banquet itself, and thus might represent Lancastrian attempts at dispersal, but the positioning of the subtleties within the context of London chronicles suggests an urban co-opting of the originally royal performance represented by the subtleties. Since a number of the surviving London chronicles are in “commonplace books,” McLaren suggests that they may have been thought of “as the common property of the citizens of London,” which implies “a perception of a communal past drawn upon and recorded by those who saw themselves as its inheritors.”78 The three royal mummings Lydgate wrote survive in single copies by Shirley, his “Ballade” for the 1429 coronation appears in only a few manuscripts related to Shirley, and the “Roundel” for the same occasion appears only in BL MS Harley 7333, a non-Shirlean manuscript. Of Lydgate’s coronation texts, only the “Prayer” survives in as many manuscripts as the subtleties, and its survival may reflect its frequent alteration for use by Edward IV. Perhaps the wider copying of Lydgate’s verses for the subtleties reflects their status as a relatively public performance, one to which an audience broader than just the royal household would have had access.
All of the extant copies of Lydgate’s verses for the 1429 coronation subtleties focus on his words, while offering little sense of the banqueting context or the spectacular nature of the subtleties themselves. No extant copy is accompanied by any visual representation of the subtleties, and the copyists made little attempt to describe what the subtleties looked like.79 That lack of detailed description may reflect the copyists’ source material, which Kipling suggests was the “device” or instructions provided to the cooks and pastry makers, telling them to create, in the case of the first course, a specific set of courses followed by a “sotelte, Seint Edward and Seint Lowes armed in cote armours bryngyng yn bitwene hem the Kyng in his cote armour with this scripture suyng” (MS Cotton Julius B.i., fol. 79), with accompanying scripture by Lydgate.80 By a route not evident to us today, someone at court presumably made the device and scriptures for the banquet available to copyists, who then followed that information without embellishment—acting as faithful recorders of a preexisting textual record of the occasion, rather than as writers concerned with evoking that occasion for readers in all its multisensory detail.
That Lydgate is not identified as the author of the ballades for the 1429 subtleties suggests affinities between them and the other anonymous poetry that found its way into chronicles. While Lydgate’s status as a poet may have been important for those who commissioned the verses from him, chroniclers seem to have cared less about authorial identity and its possible meanings than about the verses themselves. In the context of an urban environment in which public poetry often circulated anonymously, as surviving fifteenth-century political songs and ballads show, lack of attribution may have signaled an understanding of the publicly shared and collective nature of many verses.
In their ballade form, Lydgate’s verses for the subtleties drew on the French lyric and represented a fashionable (and still innovative despite Chaucer’s use of it) as well as sophisticated form of literary art. The eight-line stanzas of the subtleties, with their fairly complicated rhyme scheme of ababbcbc, were difficult to execute in English given its “skarsete” of rhymes, as Chaucer complained; requiring a high level of artistic expertise, the ballades fit the elaborateness of the coronation occasion.81 Expanding the usual brief “scriptures” or “reasons” associated with pageants and subtleties into ballades has the effect of linking the three separate displays into one artistic unit and of refashioning them into an elevated poetic form. Just as the confectioner’s art transformed pastry into spectacle, so the ballades turned simple “reasons” into poetry. As performances, the 1429 subtleties are evidence of the incorporation of poetry into spectacle; when copied into chronicles, the subtleties are evidence of the dominance of verbal over visual modes.
While the bookish nature of the subtleties in their manuscript contexts would seem to signal the triumph of script over performance, such an assumption is not entirely accurate. In the version of the subtleties found in MS Lansdowne 285, there are two substitutions of N for the name of Henry, in lines 11 and 20. The N presumably stands for the Latin word nomen and, like the similar usage in the N-Town Proclamation that gives the play its name, may signal that any name could be inserted as needed. This possible recycling of the verses for other use resembles the treatment of Lydgate’s “Prayer for King, Queen, and People,” which in some manuscript versions has been altered to use for Edward IV.82 Whether such recycling actually occurred or not, the scribal alteration holds out the possibility of a reuse of Lydgate’s verses in which the almost fully poeticized textual remains of the long ago 1429 banquet could come to life once again as performances. In that oscillation from edible performance to written text back to potential performance can be found a record of the intersection of performativity and textuality embodied in the edible theater of the subtleties. Even though the surviving accounts of the subtleties are less than fully satisfying at capturing the materiality of the three subtleties or the feasting context, they nonetheless offer evidence of food as a performance medium and let us glimpse how eating, watching, and reading are all aspects of theater history.