Pageanteer

This show is being put on by Edward Hungerford, the master pageanteer, with a cast of some 250 people.

The pageanteer, then, must be an effective scenewright as well as playwright. Spectacle is another demand often placed upon a pageant-drama.

This account of a fictional "Merchester" pageant by the novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Brother Copas (1911) was based on his own experience as a writer and actor — or pageanteer, in contemporary parlance — involved with the 1908 Winchester National Pageant.

In November, 1509, within six months after the renewal of his appointment at the accession of Henry VIII, Newark died, and his place as Master of the Children was filled by William Cornish,” the most eminent composer, poet, and pageanteer that had yet graced the Court.

We found that he had no real connexion with any church nor with the L.M.S., but had somehow managed to get enrolled as a pageanteer, with the intention, no doubt, of rifling any pockets that he found convenient.

It was not, by a long way, every pageanteer who could afford to order or hire robes, cloaks, tunics, head-dresses from the professionals. Plenty of the smaller “parts” cut out their own costumes and held sewing-bees, sometimes at one house in the Pageant's neighbourhood, sometimes in another.

However, she also resented the fact that the titled women were given the more aristocratic pageant roles, in contradiction of the usual pageant ideal where pageanteers assumed roles that were the reverse of their own position in society.

Some well-to-do pageanteers evidently traveled around the country to appear in one pageant after another.