Abstract

AbstractThomas Heywood's Londini Artium & Scientiarum Scaturigo or Londons Fountaine of Arts and Sciences (1632) provides a distinctive approach to the conventions of the genre of the Lord Mayor's Show, presenting the audience not with a typical panegyric to the merchant class's trade or the mayor's virtues and accomplishments but to London as an ideal city and as the site of a vital social institution—education. In this Show, Heywood reinvigorates the genre to escape from the time-worn themes and abstractions of Honour, Truth, and Peace, and, by embedding the performance material in a focused prose commentary on the theme of education, asserts more immediately relevant values, those of the ideal city and civil society. This study also explores the central conceptual influence of John Stow's Survey of London and The Annales of England on Heywood's 1632 Lord Mayor's Show and its theme of London as an ‘Open University’.