Before pickle priests and jousters, this is the story of the first Renaissance Fair
What started as a 1960s school fundraiser in California became a nationwide escape into the past. Here’s the history behind the Renaissance fairs and how they blend fantasy, theater, and community in ways their founders never imagined.
Every year when the weather warms, millions of Americans gather in bustling, Elizabethan fantasylands. They eat oversized turkey legs and drink mead while watching jousts and cheering “huzzah!” for their favorite contenders. They crowd into amphitheaters for falconry shows, and they take turns bowing to kings and queens in the lanes of a fictional 16th English village. Swaggering pirates, glittering fairies, clanking swordsmen, courtly ladies, and the occasional guy in a Deadpool costume weave their way through jostling crowds, while smartphones record the whole scene. It is, of course, the Renaissance Fair.
There are dozens of fairs across the United States, each with its own local flavor. In Pensacola, Florida, they embrace pirates, while one Arizona festival touts its very own "London Bridge"—made from pieces of the original 19th century structure that spanned the River Thames. In typical Lone Star fashion, the Texas Renaissance Festival is the nation’s largest, hosting half a million visitors every year.
But America’s beloved institution of turkey legs and corsets all started in the countercultural center of Laurel Canyon, California. The Renaissance Pleasure Faire was the first of its kind—and was artistically fueled by the Soviet-era Red Scare and the burgeoning resistance to the stifling conformity of postwar America.
“Lots of people have told me over the years [that] they felt like they had found home,” says Kevin Patterson, whose parents Phyllis and Ron Patterson founded the original festival. “Nineteen-fifties America, with the white picket fences and the men with their briefcases and the women with their aprons, was not satisfying for them.”
Here’s how it all began—and how the Renaissance Fair’s legacy lives on today as a haven for creativity, self-expression, and inclusivity.
Birthing the first Renaissance Fair
Phyllis Patterson took interactive learning to a whole new level when she founded the first Renaissance Faire in May 1963. As historian Rachel Lee Rubin recounts in Well-Met: Renaissance Faires & The American Counterculture, the educator got the idea for the Ren Fair while running an after-school program teaching kids about theater history. Her students particularly loved commedia dell’arte, a form of outdoor popular entertainment from the Italian Renaissance.
“She wanted to get people out of the classroom and into this other imaginative realm,” says her son, Kevin, who maintains an archive of Faire history and has taken over for his now deceased parents in running San Francisco’s Great Dickens Christmas Fair. (The family sold the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1994.)
Phyllis and her husband Ron Patterson launched the event as a fundraiser for the progressive radio station KPFK-FM—“That was where a lot of the artistic community in Los Angeles gravitated to, and she thought it would be a good demographic for what she was doing, creatively,” Kevin explains—opening the gates to the first Renaissance Pleasure Faire in May 1963.
The spelling of “faire” was an attempt to be authentic while still appealing to modern audiences: “They looked at the 16th-century spelling of the word ‘fair,’ which was ‘fayre,’ and they thought it would be misunderstood,” says Patterson. So, they tweaked the spelling to make it feel archaic, but still legible for the times.
The Renaissance Pleasure Faire cemented its countercultural reputation from the very beginning. “The Faire brought the lefties, the artists, the longhairs and the eccentrics out of the woodwork to play together under the trees,” an early participant, Alicia Bay Laurel, told Rubin.
The artistic and cultural climate of California in the early 1960s was key to shaping this atmosphere. Cold War paranoia and the House Un-American Activities Committee’s attempts to root out “subversive” citizens had hit Los Angeles hard. The committee was particularly preoccupied with Hollywood, calling on prominent entertainers to testify about supposed communist influence on the movies. This created an atmosphere of fear and a chilling effect across the industry, leaving many left-leaning people struggling for work. Many of those creatives gave their time and talents to pull off that first fair.
(A strike threatened to cripple Hollywood in 1960. Here's how they resolved it.)
“Those people volunteered to help make papier-mâché masks and banners” and other distinctive decorations, says Patterson. “The fair was just instantly very, very beautiful and complex visually.”
From the beginning, it was also an innovative, participatory theater experience combined with historical reenactment, where performances were interactive with attendees. The whole event allowed visitors to immerse themselves in an imagined Elizabethan world, and watching commedia dell’arte in something like its original context dissolved the typical boundaries between show and audience in ways that fit well with the emerging counterculture.
(Queen Elizabeth I's rule set a golden legacy for Britain.)
The 1963 festival lasted just a weekend and raised $6,000—but would set the tone and the visual language for the cultural explosion that would follow.
The growth of the faire
The Renaissance Pleasure Faire grew quickly, expanding to a second location and spinning off from KPFK. The world of the festival deepened and expanded, for example evolving a series of "guilds"—groups of performers who would appear year after year—dedicated to archetypes like jesters and peasants; the Pattersons even created a nonprofit, the Living History Centre, to share the educational and theatrical techniques they’d developed. And unaffiliated festivals began to spring up across the country, some establishing permanent fairgrounds, including the Texas Renaissance Festival in 1974, which now claims to be the nation’s largest.
The earliest years of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire had helped contribute to a craft revival in America—now an entire ecosystem of artisans and vendors evolved to serve the emerging fair circuit. Businesses sprang up to supply elaborate costumes for attendees, and fair marketplaces provided a special place for traditional crafts like leatherworking, blacksmithing, and glassblowing.
As the concept spread across America and the globe, many fairs loosened their attempts to recreate 16th century England. But that playful, immersive quality remained important.
“When we say all the fair's a stage, we're not kidding,” one of the organizers of a local festival told The New York Times in 1979. From almost the very beginning, for example, costume was a huge element of the experience, with attendees arriving decked out in historical attire. Consequently, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire and its successors provided an important early space to foster the growth of cosplay and live-action roleplaying, or LARP, offering a homebase for fantasy fans.
Multiple generations of families have gotten involved with their local renaissance festivals. Sue Honor is from one of them: “You know how some families do soccer? My family does fair.” Her mother was an artisan in the fair’s earliest days. Honor is a longtime performer and Guildmaster at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire—and now her own daughter and granddaughter are involved with creating the magic of the fair.
Fairs have evolved over the years to incorporate a broader swath of the globe. These days, Ming Dynasty costume appears alongside the Elizabethans, as attendees continue to help shape the character of the beloved seasonal event.
Why we still love the Renaissance Fair
More than half a century later, the Renaissance Fair continues to thrive in the digital age.
“There are fewer and fewer things that we’re able to dedicate ourselves to that are not involving a screen,” says Patterson. The Ren Fair is one of them.
However, that doesn’t mean the Fair has no online following. A viral Instagram reel shows a group of women scampering about the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in rat costumes, offering plague to their fellow attendees via flea stamps. That trio of plague rats illustrate how important play and interactivity remain to the fair, all these decades later.
The group of friends have attended the fair together for years. “We were positively overwhelmed by how many people wanted to play along with this,” said Kelsey Walmer, a Los Angeles voice actor and content creator. The idea started with her friend Samantha, who specifically wanted an interactive costume and landed on rats; their friend Chloe adapted a pattern from an online creator, Cardboard Adventures, to create masks. They hadn’t even made it through the gate before the first person excitedly approached them for a stamp.
“When you go to the Renaissance Fair, there’s so much play and involvement—you want to curtsy for the queen, you want to cheer at the joust,” says Walmer. “So, us coming up and saying we’re plague rats, can we give you the plague? People went, ‘Absolutely.’” They plan to return as rats next year—but accompanied by more friends.
That’s the core of the Renaissance Fair’s appeal, from its founding to today: it offers a place for creativity and self-expression, whether that means lacing oneself tightly into a corset, or sweeping through the fair’s dusty streets in a cloak, or strapping on a sword and flirting outrageously all day, or building a rat mask out of cardboard.
“Attendees get to invent themselves every time they come, in any way they want to. And that personal expression is rare in our world,” says Patterson.
