Joseph Barnes's 1592 Progress Speeches: Bisham, Sudeley, and Rycote

Topic: Joseph Barnes's 1592 Progress Speeches

Identification

The book remembered as a Joseph Barnes publication concerning Queen Elizabeth's progress is:

Speeches delivered to Her Maiestie this last progresse: at the Right Honorable the Lady Rvssels, at Bissam, the Right Honorable the Lorde Chandos at Sudley, at the Right Honorable the Lord Norris, at Ricorte (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1592).

The original title page reads:

At Oxforde, Printed by Ioseph Barnes: 1592.

It is STC 7600, ESTC S105478, and TCP A21246. The Folger catalogue records the quarto as [24] p., signatures A–C⁴, and links a complete set of Folger digital images. A public searchable transcription is available from the EarlyPrint Library.

This is not itself entitled The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth. John Nichols later reprinted its contents in The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. The Barnes quarto is the short contemporary source; Nichols is the later historical compilation.

The Rycote portion has now received a separate quotation-controlled comparison with the Shakespeare canon. See The 1592 Rycote Entertainment and Shakespeare and the complete illustrated report. That report reproduces Barnes page images and documents both the extended performance structures and the reviewed verbal correspondences with full Folger quotations.

The same Rycote text has now been compared with Henry Neville's letter corpus v12. See The 1592 Rycote Entertainment and Henry Neville's Letter Corpus v12. That pass found little significant long exact phrase overlap, but a sustained rhetorical sequence linking words, profession, performance, service, life, blood, testimony, and sealing. It also corrects two dates in v12.

Barnes was printer and compiler, not necessarily author

The verso following the title page contains a short address “TO THE READER,” signed I. B.:

I GATHERED these copies in loose papers I know not how imperfect, therefore must I crave a double pardon; of him that penned them, and those that reade them: The matter of small moment, and therefore the offence of no great danger.

Folger and ESTC identify I. B. as Joseph Barnes and describe him as compiler as well as printer. The wording matters. Barnes says that he gathered copies found in “loose papers” and refers separately to “him that penned them.” The surviving booklet therefore does not authorize attribution of every speech, song, or device to Barnes. His secure roles are:

1. Oxford printer;
2. gatherer or compiler of the loose papers;
3. writer of the signed prefatory note.

The authorship and devising of the three household entertainments remain separate questions.

Public page-image witnesses

Two complete public microfilm scans have been located:

1. Internet Archive: Early English Books Tract Supplements copy. This route corresponds to the British Library tract-supplement witness described by the Folger's electronic-resource record.
2. Internet Archive: second 1592 page-image witness. The Archive collection label says “1641–1700,” but the scanned title page unmistakably gives 1592; the collection label must not replace the book's own date.

Both scans contain 23 photographed pages, beginning with the title page and ending with FINIS. The bibliographical extent [24] p. represents twelve leaves; the omitted image is apparently a blank side rather than missing printed text.

The clearest internal route through the first scan is:

The 1592 progress chronology

The booklet itself supplies only some dates. The Folger's Elizabethan Court Day by Day: 1592 reconstructs the itinerary from household, municipal, Privy Council, and printed evidence:

The Bisham date requires one qualification. On 4 August Thomas Posthumous Hoby wrote that the queen had appointed to be there “this day sennight,” or 11 August. Some modern scholarship repeats that planned date. The Folger chronology states that the queen actually arrived on 12 August and stayed through the 14th. The primary script does not assign a date to the individual stations. Rycote is more secure: both the 1592 heading and the itinerary give 28 September. The derivative 28 October date circulating online is wrong.

The original Rycote heading visibly reads:

The 28. of September, her Maiesty went from Oxforde to Ricort, where an olde gentleman, sometimes a souldier, deliuered this speech.

One Archive OCR layer misreads 28 as 13. Direct inspection of both independent page-image witnesses establishes 28.

A missing administrative letter about thirty soldiers

Myers & Co.'s 1917 Illustrated Catalogue of Rare Books adds a document not present in Barnes's printed script. Item 140, directly checked on the catalogue page image, describes:

a letter signed, 1 p. folio, dated Rycot, 8 Oct., 1599, to Sir Henry

Neville, relating to the payment of the wages of 30 soldiers in connection

with his entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Rycote in 1592

The dealer also records a postscript of five and a half lines entirely in Lord Norreys's autograph and an armorial seal.

The original letter has not been located, and the catalogue entry cannot be treated as a manuscript transcription. The printed year is especially important to verify. If 1599 is correct, the recipient would naturally be the younger Sir Henry Neville during his French embassy, and the account concerned a seven-year-old expense. If the final digit was misread and the date is 1592, the letter would fall six days after Elizabeth's departure from Rycote and would concern the elder Sir Henry Neville. That second chronology is attractive but remains a hypothesis.

Barnes mentions no body of thirty soldiers and no wage payment. The missing letter may therefore preserve administrative evidence about performers, guards, a muster, local levies, or another group omitted from the literary record. Even the phrase connecting the men with the entertainment may be the dealer's summary rather than language found in the manuscript. A dedicated source-location packet preserves the unresolved date, recipient, and whereabouts.

Bisham: the Cooke–Hoby–Russell–Killigrew connection

The Bisham host, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, was a daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke and sister of Katherine Cooke Killigrew. Katherine was the mother of Anne Killigrew Neville. Lady Russell was consequently Anne Neville's maternal aunt and Henry Neville's aunt by marriage.

The 1592 event therefore belongs directly to the extended family environment into which Henry Neville had married in 1584. It does not prove that Henry or Anne attended. What it establishes is that a major printed Elizabethan household entertainment took place at the residence of Anne's maternal aunt and featured her Russell first cousins.

The Folger chronology identifies Lady Russell's daughters Elizabeth and Anne Russell as the two shepherdesses Sybil and Isabel. The original booklet itself names the dramatised speakers Syb. and Isab. but does not append an actors' list. The identification should therefore remain tied to the modern itinerary's biographical control rather than presented as a title-page statement.

The Bisham scholarship located in the email archive

The article attached to Ken Feinstein's October 2019 and June 2020 emails has now been directly identified. Its generic downloaded filename, 7405-Article Text 11780 1 10 20091016, is misleading: it is not a 2009 article. The PDF is Alexandra F. Johnston, “The ‘Lady of the farme’: The Context of Lady Russell’s Entertainment of Elizabeth at Bisham, 1592,” Early Theatre 5.2 (2002), 71–85. The journal supplies an open article page and PDF, DOI 10.12745/et.5.2.635.

This is the study remembered in the 2019 correspondence as an important Bisham lead. A separate May 2021 email contains a Cambridge Core package for Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich's 2016 monograph, The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance and Gender. The email trail therefore preserves two different scholarly objects, not two copies of one article.

Johnston's argument

Johnston explicitly argues for Lady Russell's authorship:

It is my contention that Lady Russell is indeed the author of the Bisham entertainment.

Her case is contextual and cumulative:

1. Lady Russell had a long personal and political relationship with Elizabeth.
2. Her daughters Elizabeth and Anne Russell needed advancement and had very

small independent incomes.

3. The entertainment presents two conspicuously accomplished young virgins,

probably the Russell daughters, before the queen.

4. The pastoral dialogue unexpectedly turns to samplers, “double stitch,”

“Queenes stitch,” female truthfulness, chastity, and the practical skills expected of women attending the queen.

5. Its dense prose, Protestant foreign-policy praise, celebration of

virginity, learning, and melodramatic petitionary voice fit what is known of Lady Russell's writings and public identity.

6. Both daughters had entered court service within three years. Johnston

treats that outcome as evidence that the entertainment achieved a practical household objective.

Johnston's most original observation is that the needlework is not incidental pastoral decoration. The “double stitch” and “Queenes stitch” exchange simultaneously displays female manual accomplishment, turns technical knowledge into wit, and makes the girls' verbal resistance to Pan legible to the queen. In Johnston's reading, that is the final contextual clue pointing toward a woman writer familiar with embroidery.

The article also places the entertainment within Lady Russell's broader political and literary activity: her mediation between members of the Cecil and Essex networks, her forceful letters and petitions, her translation of a French Protestant treatise, her Latin, Greek, and English funerary inscriptions, and her later leadership of the 1596 Blackfriars petition. It therefore enlarges the Bisham event from a local masque into an act of household advancement by a learned political operator.

What Johnston does and does not establish

Johnston's attribution is an argument, not a documentary discovery. No authorial draft, payment, household account, or contemporary attribution to Lady Russell is produced. Barnes's prefatory reference to “him that penned them” remains contrary evidence, although Johnston argues that Barnes wrongly assumed one male writer for three stylistically and politically different entertainments. She calls for the distinction indirectly by noting that she had not performed a full stylistic analysis of all three texts.

The research question should therefore not be reduced to a binary choice between “Lady Russell wrote everything” and “an unnamed man wrote everything.” Writing, devising, commissioning, revising, rehearsing, and performing could have been divided among several participants. This is especially important because the surviving pamphlet is Barnes's compilation from loose papers, not a household production archive.

Later scholarship

Three later studies deepen or refine Johnston's proposal:

• Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “Lady Russell, Elizabeth I, and Female

Political Alliances through Performance,” English Literary Renaissance 39.2 (2009), 290–314, DOI 10.1111/j.1475-6757.2009.01048.x. The complete JSTOR PDF has now been read and its decisive pages visually checked. Kolkovich treats Bisham as a negotiation between women: it advertises the Russell daughters, promotes a militant Protestant foreign policy, and adapts the progress-entertainment genre for female political alliance. She also reconstructs the longer sequence from Elizabeth's 1566 letter to Russell, through the 1592 performance and the daughters' entry into court service, to the 1600 Herbert wedding masque and Russell's 1601 complaint about the costs of court.

• Peter Davidson and Jane Stevenson, “Elizabeth I’s Reception at Bisham

(1592): Elite Women as Writers and Devisers,” in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford University Press, 2014), 207–226, DOI 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199673759.003.0011. They place Bisham within Lady Russell's lifelong production of Latin verse, inscriptions, monuments, and self-representation, and propose “devisership” as a category broad enough to capture women's cultural agency beyond sole penmanship.

• Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, *The Elizabethan Country House

Entertainment: Print, Performance and Gender* (Cambridge University Press, 2016), DOI 10.1017/CBO9781316460818. This is the Cambridge Core book sent in the 2021 email. It supplies the larger genre history in which Bisham should be tested against other country-house entertainments and their movement from household performance into print.

The sequence matters. Johnston makes the focused contextual authorship case; Kolkovich emphasizes female alliance and political negotiation; Davidson and Stevenson supply the more flexible concept of devisership; Kolkovich's book places the episode within the performance-and-print system. Future work should use all four rather than citing one as if it settled the separate questions of writer, deviser, patron, and performers.

The entrance device

The Bisham text begins:

At the top of the Hill going to Bissam, the Cornets sounding in the Woods, a Wilde Man came forth and uttered this Speech.

The Wild Man says that the unfamiliar music has enchanted the woods. Pan then courts two young shepherdesses who resist him through a witty dialogue about lust, speech, sewing, and literary composition. Pan asks:

How doe you burne time, and drowne beauty, in pricking of clouts, when you should be penning of Sonnets?

The women answer by exposing the doubleness of male rhetoric. Their samplers depict “the follies of the Gods” and “the honour of Virgins.” The dialogue gives young women the argumentative force of the scene while Pan becomes its comic and morally compromised speaker.

Politics inside the pastoral

The entertainment moves from sexual politics to international policy. Sybil praises Elizabeth:

One hande she stretcheth to Fraunce, to weaken Rebels; the other to Flaunders, to strengthen Religion; her heart to both Countries, her vertues to all.

This places apparently local pastoral entertainment inside the political geography of France and the Low Countries. The harvest imagery then culminates in Ceres yielding her crown to Elizabeth. The “Lady of the Farme,” Lady Russell, is represented as receiving new life from the queen's presence.

For Neville research, this is a concrete example of the kind of courtly, political, mythological, and female-centered literary performance operating within Anne Killigrew Neville's immediate Cooke family.

A dedicated Bisham topic now expands this section with the corrected date, three-station landscape, Pan's coercive threat, needlework as political publication, the daughters' foreign-policy counsel, Katherine Butler's musical reading, the Ceres–Cynthia contest, the 1566–1601 royal relationship, Barnes's regional print strategy, household advancement, and the distinction between authorship and devisership.

Sudeley: pastoral welcome and staged metamorphosis

At Sudeley an old shepherd greets Elizabeth with Cotswold plainness:

Vouchsafe to heare a simple Shephard: Shephards and simplicity cannot part. Your Highnes is come into Cotshold, an uneven country, but a people that carry their thoughtes levell with their fortunes; lowe spirites, but true harts.

He offers a lock of white Cotswold wool, “Virginitie's colour.” On Sunday the entertainment becomes a fully staged Ovidian transformation. A shepherd follows Apollo pursuing Daphne. Daphne has already become a laurel tree; Apollo sits beside the tree while one performer sings and another plays:

Sing you, play you, but sing and play my truth,

This tree my Lute, these sighes my notes of ruth:

The Lawrell leafe for ever shall be greene,

And chastety shalbe Apolloes Queene.

After the song, “the tree rived, and Daphne issued out.” Apollo resumes the pursuit, then yields Daphne to the shepherd. Daphne runs to Elizabeth for protection and presents writing tablets. This is not merely an oration reported after the event; Barnes preserves entrances, movement, music, properties, costume assumptions, transformation machinery, and direct dialogue.

The Folger itinerary dates the arrival to 9 September and the Apollo–Daphne performance to Sunday, 10 September. It also notes that bad weather prevented a proposed third-day device on 13 September, although the intended material survives in the printed booklet.

Rycote: a military household represented through absent family members

The Rycote section begins with the “old gentleman, sometimes a soldier,” identifiable in the reconstructed itinerary as Henry Norris, first Lord Norris. He contrasts the household's military idiom with the preceding mythological speeches:

Vouchsafe dread soueraigne, after so many smooth speeches of Muses, to heare a rough hewentale of a souldier.

He says his four sons have “stollen” his horse, armour, shield, and sword, vowing themselves to arms. Over the following days messengers embody the absent family's geographical service:

The sequence turns the Norris household's absences into theatre. Irish, Dutch, French, and Spanish mottoes, foreign messengers, jeweled military objects, mistaken letters, music, and sonnets all declare that dispersed service remains centered on Elizabeth.

The final page records the Monday-morning messenger from Jersey and ends with FINIS.

The Rycote household also has a direct Neville connection independent of the printed performance. On 26 October 1592, less than a month after the visit, Lord Norreys wrote from Rycote to Sir Henry Neville the elder about renewing a Windsor tithe lease and subscribed himself Neville's Affyne. The exact marriage chain remains unresolved, but the date, sender, elder recipient, and subscription are controlled from the primary manuscript and independent institutional records. A dedicated Rycote topic now develops the military, epistolary, material, financial, gendered, and regional dimensions of the event.

Why this book matters

1. It is a contemporary printed witness to household performance rather than a nineteenth-century reconstruction.
2. Barnes explicitly says he gathered loose papers, providing evidence about how ephemeral entertainments entered print.
3. The Bisham section is located in the household of Henry Neville's wife's

maternal aunt. Thomas Hoby's family chronicle supplies an earlier direct connection: Henry Neville's mother and maternal grandmother jointly served as godmothers to Hoby's daughter Elizabeth at Bisham in 1562.

4. Women are not decorative presences only: the Bisham shepherdesses conduct the central verbal contest, Ceres speaks for Lady Russell's household, Daphne seeks protection, and the Rycote daughter sends the final gift.
5. The three entertainments join mythology, foreign policy, local identity, marriage politics, household genealogy, military service, music, poetry, dialogue, and material gifts.
6. The two Archive scans and Folger's separate copy make a three-copy comparison possible.
7. The paired Bisham and Rycote households sit inside the same regional

Protestant network as the Nevilles: Bisham through the Cooke–Hoby– Killigrew marriages, and Rycote through Lord Norreys's documented relationship with Sir Henry Neville the elder.

Rycote and Shakespeare: new systematic comparison

A separate topic now documents a full computational and close-reading comparison between the 1,839-word Rycote section and the Folger Shakespeare corpus. The pass covered contiguous word and lemma n-grams, controlled skip-grams, ordered word pairs, scene similarity, themes, and wider EarlyPrint frequency controls.

The principal results are:

1. Rycote's “at euery sentence end” and As You Like It 3.2's “at every

sentence' end” form a rare exact four-word parallel. Five EarlyPrint documents contain the phrase, including a necessary pre-Rycote witness in the 1579 English Eunapius.

2. The Lady Squeamish letter and Henry V 5.2 share a sustained soldier-

wooer construction: bad or plain speech, rejection of verse and eloquence, martial action as proof, constancy, tongue and lady's ear, and a demand for a direct answer.

3. Rycote's cold black ink / hot red blood / sonnet / sword complex has a

close conceptual counterpart in 2 Henry IV 4.1, where ink is turned to blood and pens to lances.

4. Rycote's wrongly superscribed love letter has a close dramatic counterpart

in the misdelivered letter of Love's Labor's Lost 4.1.

5. A scene-level comparison ranked Pericles 2.2 first. Close reading

confirmed the performance-form connection between Rycote's procession of jeweled weapons with Irish, Dutch, French, and Spanish mottoes and Pericles' serial presentation of shields, devices, and foreign-language mottoes to Thaisa.

The complete discussion is in the related topic “The 1592 Rycote Entertainment and Shakespeare: Verbal, Rhetorical, and Performance Parallels.” It treats the computational rankings as a reading queue, quotes every Shakespeare passage from the Folger text, and records common or proverbial language separately from rare phrases.

Source conflicts and cautions

• Joseph Barnes printed and compiled the volume; individual authorship is unresolved.
• The booklet does not prove that Henry or Anne Neville attended the Bisham entertainment.
• The original spells the places Bissam, Sudley, and Ricorte; modern forms are Bisham, Sudeley, and Rycote.
• The Folger Court Day by Day parenthetical descriptions call the booklet “London, 1592.” The original title page and Folger rare-book catalogue unmistakably give Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1592.
• Archive OCR is unreliable for names and numerals. In particular, one OCR file reads the Rycote date as the 13th; both checked page images read the 28th.
• Nichols's nineteenth-century reprint is useful for navigation and annotation but should not replace the 1592 images when exact typography or wording matters.
• The Myers item 140 date of 8 October 1599 has not been checked against

the manuscript. 8 October 1592 is a research hypothesis, not an accepted correction.

• Myers's statement that the thirty soldiers were connected with the Rycote

entertainment is a dealer-catalogue description. Barnes does not mention them.

• The queen was expected at Bisham on 11 August but arrived on 12 August. The

two dates should not be collapsed.

• The Rycote entertainment began on 28 September, not 28 October.

Public sources

• Speeches delivered to Her Maiestie this last progresse (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1592), STC 7600, ESTC S105478: Folger catalogue and Folger digital images.
• First public microfilm scan: Internet Archive.
• Second public microfilm scan: Internet Archive.
• TCP A21246: EarlyPrint Library.
• Marion E. Colthorpe, ed., The Elizabethan Court Day by Day: 1592: Folgerpedia PDF.
• John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, new ed., vol. 3 (London, 1823), printed pp. 130–143: Internet Archive.
• Myers & Co., [An Illustrated Catalogue of Rare Books (1917), item 140,

printed p. 31](https://archive.org/details/illustratedcatal00myerrich/page/n68/mode/1up).

• Alexandra F. Johnston, [“The ‘Lady of the farme’: The Context of Lady

Russell’s Entertainment of Elizabeth at Bisham, 1592,” Early Theatre 5.2 (2002), 71–85](https://earlytheatre.org/article/view/635).

• Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, [“Lady Russell, Elizabeth I, and Female

Political Alliances through Performance,” English Literary Renaissance 39.2 (2009), 290–314](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2009.01048.x).

• Peter Davidson and Jane Stevenson, [“Elizabeth I’s Reception at Bisham

(1592): Elite Women as Writers and Devisers,” in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford University Press, 2014), 207–226](https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199673759.003.0011).

• Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, [*The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment:

Print, Performance and Gender* (Cambridge University Press, 2016)](https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316460818).

• Katherine Butler,

“‘By Instruments her Powers Appeare’: Music and Authority in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I,” *Renaissance Quarterly* 65.2 (2012), 353–384.

• Bruce R. Smith,

“Landscape with Figures: The Three Realms of Queen Elizabeth's Country-house Revels,” *Renaissance Drama*, new series 8 (1977), 57–115.

• REED Online,

“Berkshire: Historical Background”.

Internal research controls

• bim early english books tract supplements speeches delivered to he 1592.
• bim early english books 1641 1700 speeches delivered to he elizabeth queen 1592.
• title page 1592.
• barnes preface IB.
• bisham wild man opening.
• kolkovich lady russell elizabeth 2009.
• smith landscape with figures 1977.
• sudeley shepherd opening.
• sudeley apollo daphne song.
• rycote 28 september opening.
• rycote final daisy finis.
• archive leaf n68.
• johnston lady of the farme 2002.
• johnston lady of the farme 2002.

Source-Fact Audit — 8 August 2026 (Round 7)

Joseph Barnes is the printer of the 1592 Oxford compilation, not automatically the author of every speech it contains. Bisham, Sudeley, and Rycote were different progress events with different hosts, performers, devisers, and textual transmission histories. The packet now routes each quotation to the particular entertainment and page rather than treating the volume as one authored work.

The lost-letter lane is also separate: the dealer description of a letter about thirty soldiers is evidence that such an item was offered and described, not a substitute for the letter image. Where scholarship assigns a deviser or speaker, the attribution is labeled as editorial unless the printed witness names that person. This preserves the rich Norreys/Bisham context without converting contextual reconstruction into printer authorship.