la Boderie and the “incident” surrounding his attendance at court masques in London shows that if court entertainments provided a center of gravity for diplomatic relations, they did not function as an exclusive focal point. For ambassadors at the French and English courts, entertainments were a normal part of their annual calendar of duties. They offered an important but routine occasion at which to participate in the life of the host court as a part of its diplomatic community. As such, they allowed individual ambassadors to jockey for little signs of favor that would be noticed by their peers and appreciated by their masters when relayed in correspondence. Court entertainments operated simultaneously as a “public” stage on which diplomats could distinguish themselves before others and as a “private” event in which monarchs bestowed hospitality and gestures of intimate friendliness upon resident foreigners at their court. In this way, entertainments challenged diplomatic spectators to attend both to bilateral personal and political relations with their hosts and to the broader matter of their sovereign’s position on the European stage. In the midst of crafting his own performance for these distinct audiences, the ambassador, understandably, had little attention left over to focus on the entertainment on the masque or ballet stage.
This active form of diplomatic spectatorship revealed in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s incident complicates the standard narrative of court spectacle as effective propaganda for their sponsors. Those responsible for creating and hosting a ballet or masque had to think of the diplomatic audience as a privileged and highly sensitive sector of the audience and had to try to predict the international consequences of small choices about seating and staging. The norms of diplomatic culture limited the freedom of artists and sponsors to depict and to invite whom they wished. Moreover, however pompous their aesthetic, court spectacles were just one form of representation in a broader theatrical field in which multiple actors continually performed and witnessed others’ performances. The experience of diplomatic spectators might not differ very much from that of other courtiers, who also competed for marks of royal favor before an audience of fellow nobles.112 When court performance is considered not as a uniquely captivating spectacle but as the centerpiece around which other, individual performances took place, we see it not as a blunt instrument of power but rather as a space for negotiation.
All of this portrays the audience for court entertainments as radically fragmented. The fractured audience of early seventeenth-century spectacle represents a significant departure from the courtly entertainments staged by the Valois monarchs (discussed in Chapter 1) that incorporated music, movement, and poetry thought to unite spectators in a shared experience, and whose observer accounts confirm that they succeeded at least partially in configuring their viewers as members of a community. In contrast, the ballets and masques attended by Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his counterparts offered not a common experience but rather a common space in which viewers worked to distinguish themselves. Although diversity reigned over concord in these events, the idea of a united European public haunted the entertainment in the form of the imagined “whole of Christendom” whose gaze Le Fèvre de la Boderie wished to command. However spectral, this ultimate audience for the diplomat’s performance-as-spectator construed diplomacy itself as one big theater. The conception of Europe as a “fictive public” made it theoretically possible for creators and sponsors of court entertainments to attempt to capture that collective vision through forceful performances on international themes.113 Some of these are the focus of Chapters 3 and 4.
Chapter 3
National Actors on the Ballet Stage (1620s–30s)
Court entertainments may have appeared as strangely obscured focal points in most ambassadors’ writings.1 This scarcity of commentary, however, only means that diplomatic spectators rarely recorded their observations, not that they completely discounted entertainments’ content. After all, many spectacles concentrated on themes of professional interest to diplomats, including sovereignty, war, and peace. Although diplomats who witnessed entertainments had little to say about their subjects, the creators of court spectacles insisted on the power of ballets to communicate. Theorists stressed that engaging subject matter was the most important element of a successful entertainment. One of the first ballet manuals, designer Nicolas Saint-Hubert’s La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets (The Way of Composing and Successfully Producing Ballets, 1641), began: “I will start with the subject, upon which depends all the rest.”2 The music, choreography, and all other elements of the spectacle must “accommodate” or “subject themselves” to the representation of the thematic content.3 Describing ballet as a kind of “mute theater,” Saint-Hubert insisted that its primary goal was to transmit meaning to its audience.4 In the following decades, Michel de Pure echoed the comparison of ballet to a “mute drama” while Claude-François Ménestrier preferred the analogy of the “speaking painting” to evoke ballet’s particular communicative power.5
In fact, ballet offered artists a unique set of representational resources well suited to the depiction of political ideas. Characterization—perhaps the key artistic building block of pageant-like early modern ballets—lent itself to reflections on autonomy, sovereignty, and (political) action. This was especially true of ballets that depicted characters invested with national traits. Figures marked as Spanish or Italian, as Turks or Moors, populated the earliest court entertainments. The Roman, Greek, Moorish, Spanish, and Scottish costumes worn by participants in the jousting tournament at the Bayonne Conference (discussed in Chapter 1) suggest some of the traditional uses of national masquerade, adding visual interest to chivalric sports. In the thematically focused setting of court ballets, dancers in national garb allowed for the depiction of political events and relations. As early as 1580, for example, Henri III commissioned an informal chamber ballet in which performers in Spanish and Portuguese dress enacted France’s vision of the crisis of Portuguese succession.6 Whether used for visual appeal or political commentary, the representation of national figures remained a staple of court performance throughout the early modern period.7
In the early decades of the seventeenth century, ballets that featured national characters among their dramatis personae also began to comment on the representational techniques that constituted nationality. The dominant form of the ballet à entrées—a series of independent solo or small-group performances, loosely linked by an overarching theme—lent itself to a critical engagement with processes of characterization and differentiation. In ballets with national themes and figures, this investigation addressed political matters. What did it mean to embody, and thereby represent, a collective entity such as a nation or country?
This question resonated beyond the confines of the dancing hall. Dramatic representation provided models for political thought in relation to a variety of problems. As discussed in Chapter 2, thinkers on diplomacy used the analogy of the relationship between author and actor to characterize the sovereign’s delegation of authority to the ambassador. The conditions of sovereignty itself were described by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes as a form of impersonation through which the absolute monarch assumed the capacity to act on behalf of his subjects. In addition to these well-known and well-studied appropriations of the theatrical lexicon for political theory, other thinkers including Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, and Emeric Crucé considered how representatives of different states might come together in a confederative governing body to ensure peace. Dramatic metaphors (if metaphor is a sufficient term to describe theorists’ reliance on theatrical concepts) did not simply emerge from the ether. Most political theorists and all the practitioners of monarchal and diplomatic politics inhabited a culture rich in dramatic performances, particularly ballets. Sully, a renowned amateur of
