Renaissance Faires

What happened

The first one cost about $150 to build. On the weekend of 11–12 May 1963, on a five-acre ranch in North Hollywood, visitors walked into a market town knocked together from scrap lumber: booths, performers in period dress, food, music, and jugglers. It was called the Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market, and it was a fundraiser for KPFK, Los Angeles's listener-supported Pacifica radio station.

The idea belonged to Phyllis Patterson, a schoolteacher who had been staging commedia dell'arte with her students and wanted to put the whole world of the plays around them. With her husband Ron, an art director, she persuaded KPFK to sponsor it. The host, Oliver Haskell, ran a progressive children's day camp on the ranch and had himself been accused of Communist Party membership. That was typical of the enterprise. Patterson had balked at signing a loyalty oath during the Red Scare, and much of the talent came from Laurel Canyon actors, designers, and craftspeople whose Hollywood careers had been damaged by the blacklist. They built, sewed, and performed for free. Figures for the crowd differ — contemporary and later accounts range from more than 3,000 a day to about 8,000 over the weekend — but the faire raised roughly $6,000 and was plainly a hit.

It did not stay small. The spring faire moved to the Paramount Ranch in Agoura in 1965, and a harvest-themed fall faire opened in Northern California in 1967, first at China Camp near San Rafael and from 1971 in Black Point Forest near Novato. The Pattersons ran the events through a nonprofit that became the Living History Centre. By the early 1970s the format was spreading east. George Coulam, a former Pleasure Faire vendor, founded festivals in Minnesota in 1971 and Texas in 1974; the Maryland Renaissance Festival opened in 1976. The Texas Renaissance Festival eventually became the largest in the country.

Why it mattered

The Renaissance faire was a new kind of space: not a museum, not a theme park, not a play, but a walk-in world in which the audience was part of the cast. Staff spoke in period accents and stayed in character; visitors were encouraged to dress up, haggle, and banter back. Unlike European living-history museums, which interpret real historic sites, the faire was frankly invented — a composite, cheerfully inaccurate "Merrie England" that people entered for a day. Historian Rachel Lee Rubin, in Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture (2012), traces how that invented village became a gathering place for the counterculture, the early-music revival, and craftspeople living outside the corporate economy.

That idea of inhabiting a story, rather than watching it, runs straight into fantasy gaming. In May 1966 a group in Berkeley held the medievalist costume party that became the Society for Creative Anachronism, another California experiment in stepping into the past. The fighting and feasting of the SCA, the foam-weapon battles of Dagorhir from 1977, and the broader tradition of live-action roleplay all belong to the same family as the faire: costumed, participatory, and collectively imagined. The same years saw The Lord of the Rings become a campus craze (see "Frodo Lives!"), and the faire gave the young readers of Tolkien and of Arthurian Fantasy a place to wear a cloak in public.

Legacy

Faires became big business. The Southern California faire was sold in 1993 to the for-profit Renaissance Entertainment Corporation; it moved to Glen Helen Regional Park in Devore in 1989 and to the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area in Irwindale in 2005, where it draws around 250,000 visitors a season. Smithsonian has estimated that about 200 faires now operate across the United States and beyond, attracting several million visitors a year. Phyllis Patterson, who died in 2014, also founded the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, extending the walk-in-history idea to Victorian London.

Over the decades the faires drifted, happily, from the Renaissance toward fantasy. Elves, fairies, wizards, and pirates now walk the lanes alongside Elizabethan courtiers, and the costume skills honed there — armor, leatherwork, historical tailoring — flow freely into cosplay at Dragon Con and Gen Con. The faire's lasting gift to fantasy culture is the notion that anyone can step through the gate, put on a costume, and for an afternoon live inside the story.