3 - Performing Prestige

Summary

This chapter investigates how the prestige of the court and its genres were deployed in school-based contexts. Alignment with the court and its glamour took many forms. Elaborate polyphonic service music, pageants for visiting dignitaries, and masques performed by students evoked the performative specter of dancing courtiers, the progresses of Elizabeth I, the Chapel Royal, the royal body itself. The students’ imitation of performative behaviors that originated in other contexts served the needs of ambitious schoolmasters, drawing attention to the skills of talented pupils, the training they received, and the institution’s alignment with powerful people. Yet the same performances also established temporal connections between past and present, as the specter of the court, with all its religious, political, and class complexities haunted the pedagogical space of the schoolroom, sometimes in unexpected ways. Students overturned established hierarchies even as they co-opted behaviors of the court, as their singing, dancing, and acting exerted control over the passions of those who would rule them.