by Toussainct du Bray under the title Recueil des vers du balet de la Reyne. As reconstructed through these various sources, the entertainment featured a set design depicting a mountain in the background. It began with a procession or dance by twelve pages, accompanied by viol music, as a prelude to a majestic recitative song for a singer representing Renommée or Fame. A dance by eight “shades” followed, and then the “mountain” opened to reveal an aquatic backdrop and a theater machine in the shape of a dolphin. Perched on the dolphin’s back, the singer Angélique de Paulet, scantily costumed as a naiad, performed a second récit. Her song paints a portrait of court life dominated by women in their role as tyrannical mistresses of men’s hearts.80 Invoking Petrarchan commonplaces, her verses recount the suffering of lovers and recommend that courtiers “adore them without loving them.”81 At the conclusion of her performance, a final set change revealed a garden scene from which emerged Marie de’ Medici herself and several ladies dressed as nymphs who performed a ballet. The verses penned to accompany this dance continue the Petrarchan theme of the naiad’s song. The dancers “speak” in the collective first person (“nous”) about their disregard for Cupid. By spurning the god of Eros, the dancers maintain erotic power: “For the snow in our breast / Impedes his plans so well.”82 The celebration of chastity casts the female courtiers in a position of authority relative to male spectators and provides an enticing prelude to the social dancing that followed the spectacle.83
Gender distinctions also characterized the royal family’s interactions with their diplomatic guests. As Puisieux remarked, the king invited Carew, while the queen hosted his wife. The king bestowed the honor of the Garter on Carew, while the queen directed particular courtesies toward the “ambassadrice.”84 In their accounts, Puisieux and Carew describe parallel, “his and hers” gestures of cordiality, symmetrical like the moves of a courtly dance. The women’s participation in the ritual serves as a critical supplement to the relationship between the king and the ambassador. Their presence marks the occasion as social as well as political, an act of personal hospitality in addition to a public ceremony.
By inscribing the ballet in a discourse of hospitality, Puisieux also argued that the intimate favors bestowed on the English ambassador effectively guaranteed better treatment for Le Fèvre de la Boderie in London. He continued: “[The ambassador] made several admiring remarks as much about the nobility [gentillesse] of the ballet as about its magnificence; and he won’t have neglected, I rest assured, to give a very good account of it to his master: which will not worsen your position regarding the one to be danced over there, so Mr. Carew has reassured us a little while ago that you will be well treated there and welcomed to your content.”85 Conjecturing about Carew’s account of the ballet in his correspondence with his “master” back in London, Puisieux reminded his reader that the monarch was the ultimate spectator and judge of such events. Although Le Fèvre de la Boderie concerned himself mainly with the live and present audience of fellow ambassadors (and the “whole of Christendom” they synecdochically represented), here Puisieux shifted the attention to the exclusive channels of publicity produced by the ambassador’s writing after the entertainment was over. He implied, moreover, that this way of signifying diplomatic relationships would be more effective in eliciting reciprocal treatment and therefore ensuring French precedence in Britain.
Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s reports on his invitation to the Masque of Queens confirm that the English court reciprocated French gestures of hospitality toward their ambassador. According to the ambassador’s letters, James and Anna mirrored the French king and queen in their displays of intimate affection toward Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his family. They all dined together in the royal family’s private chambers before the entertainment. At the masque, the ambassador was seated next to the king, who assured him “it was in the intention to reserve all the honor for me,” and they talked all the way through the performance.86 In the interludes between acts, Queen Anna sought out the ambassador’s wife, “making a thousand gestures of familiarity toward her” (lui faisant mille demonstrations de privauté).87 The Duke of York invited the ambassador’s young daughter to dance.88 The language of intimacy and familiarity is, if anything, stronger in this letter than in Puisieux’s account of the ballet in Paris.89 Themes of private and familial affections between the French and English dominate the narrative. His wife and “little daughter”—rarely mentioned in his correspondence—here play important supporting roles in a scene of hospitality and friendship between the French family and the English royal clan. The ambassador’s choices in narrating the event imply that such personal attentions were the greatest privileges an ambassador could enjoy.90
This privileging of private favors would seem to contradict the French ambassador’s claim the previous year that there was “no proportion” between a demonstration of friendship behind closed doors and a vastly preferable invitation to a “public solemnity.” The important distinction at the Masque of Queens was that this display of intimacy took place on a public stage. The ambassador wrote that “the king and the Count of Salisbury have declared and made as public that this festivity was mainly being created only for the love of me.”91 The diplomatic success of the event hinged on its synthesis of exclusivity and publicity, its status as a private gesture “made as public” for all the world to observe.
Le Fèvre de la Boderie revealed his continued obsession with the wider audience for his treatment at the London court toward the end of his report on the masque. He concluded his account by tallying up the honors paid to him against those shown to the Spanish ambassador the previous year: “There was nothing similar in the favor received by the Spanish ambassador last year, for he was not feasted by the king and did not eat with him but in a room where not even a single councilor accompanied him. Neither the king nor the queen was ever seen to say a word to him while the ballet took place.”92 By comparing his experience to that of the Spanish ambassador a year before, Le Fèvre de la Boderie reconstructed these private displays of diplomatic hospitality as another arena for public struggles for precedence.93
In fact, the attentions lavished on the French ambassador at the Masque of Queens set in motion another round of mediation of the event among the diplomatic community. Le Fèvre de la Boderie observed that the masque’s advertisement as an exclusive gift to him allowed the English monarch to smooth over the fact that other ambassadors, including the representative from Venice with whom the crown had a favored relationship, were excluded from the entertainment. Indeed, the Venetian ambassador reported that he had been told: “His Majesty never conceived that this could bring any prejudice to the Republic. The French Ambassador was invited alone as a special mark of regard; his Majesty designed still greater honours for me. No one had a right to claim invitation to another’s house.”94 By framing the masque as a personal “invitation to another’s house,” the English court attempted to dodge causing offense to an ally even as their ambassador was excluded from what had previously been considered a public court event. Similar to the way in which Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX disseminated conflicting accounts of the Bayonne festivity to different European audiences, in the publicization of the Masque of Queens French and English actors manipulated both public and private registers of representation to reassure different sectors of the diplomatic community in London.
Diplomatic correspondence provides a window onto the political “backstage” space of court entertainments. Before, during, and after the theatrical event, political actors maneuvered to spin gestures of hospitality in ways most favorable to their own agendas. Seen through the eyes of diplomats, court masques and ballets appear as highly complex theatrical events possessed of a double layer of theatricality. The performance onstage was surrounded by a second level of performance in which diplomatic spectators made a spectacle of their presence and its implications for the prestige of their monarch. This mise en abyme was encircled by a further level of performance in the discourse that interpreted, publicized, and mediated the political significance of favors bestowed on various ambassadors through the entertainment.
Diplomacy and Authority in the Masque of Queens
