Online Talk: Pageants and Revels: Spectacle, Dance and the Folkloresque Past

Pageants and Revels: Spectacle, Dance and the Folkloresque Past

A Folklore Society Online Talk

by

Juliette Wood

Tuesday 12 January 2027

19:00-20:30

When Prospero says at the end of The Tempest that his life in exile, and by extension the play itself, was an ‘insubstantial pageant,’ contemporary audiences would have recognised the performances to which he referred. A little more than a decade after this play was written, Ruperra Castle, a rare example of a 17th-century mock ‘pageant’ castle, was built in South Wales. Pageants and masques that glorified royal power through an imagined past were important events in Tudor, Jacobean, and Carolingian courts. The aim of this talk is to examine how this imagined past was recreated through certain performative aspects of this genre, especially dance, costume and scenic design. The past they evoked was the rapidly disappearing world of courtly love and warfare, but they also provided images and ideas which contributed to modern re-enactments, fantasy literature and the creation of a ‘folkloresque’ past.

Dr Juliette Wood teaches at Cardiff University, in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion. She is a former President and a long-standing Council member of The Folklore Society and has published widely on Welsh folklore, medieval Welsh literature, Celtic mythology and traditions, fairies, fantastic creatures, and more.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code: just log in to the Members Only area to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/pageants-and-revels-spectacle-dance-and-the-folkloresque-past-tickets-1998746970995?

Every ticket sold helps to support the work of The Folklore Society