the Arsenal, where he hosted several entertainments for the royal family.8 Even Hobbes absorbed the traditions of court performance through his role as tutor to the Devonshire Cavendish family of English aristocrats.9 In other words, the same individuals who theorized the means by which nations or commonwealths were represented on the political stage also had the experience of witnessing or participating in the playful embodiment of national characters on the ballet stage. How might ballet have reflected on—or even helped generate—models for understanding political representation?
Ballets of Nations
Performances by national characters became a ubiquitous feature of ballets in the 1620s and 1630s.10 An international pageant in dance form, these “ballets of nations” featured a series of performers each costumed in the characteristic garb of his or her particular “nation,” performing a dance conventionally associated with that country (an allemande for a German, a passacaille for an Italian, a sarabande for a Spaniard, etc.). Verses sung or declaimed during the dance referenced popular stereotypes about the character’s ethnicity. Some entire ballets were devoted to such a parade of national types, as in the Ballet des nations scripted by Guillaume Colletet and performed at Louis XIII’s court around 1622.11 More often, a series of performances by national characters made up part of a larger, more diverse entertainment.
Ballets of nations fit perfectly into the dominant form and aesthetic of ballets composed for Louis XIII’s court. The “burlesque” ballets of the period focused attention on the visual: set design, costumes, and virtuosic dance.12 To maximize spectacular variety, most ballets eschewed complex plots, taking instead a disconnected structure as “parades of disparate figures” that relied on characterization to provide most of their effect.13 Seventeenth-century ballet commentators approved of national ballets because audiences could easily recognize the figures they depicted. In this, they followed Aristotle’s contention in part 4 of the Poetics that the greatest pleasure to be derived from contemplation of an image lies in the satisfaction of recognition.14 Jesuit composer Claude-François Ménestrier, for example, remarked in his Des ballets anciens et modernes (Of Ballets Ancient and Modern, 1682) that ballets should “speak to the eyes” with clearly legible imageries.15 Ethnic or national figures rated highly by this measure, for “the diverse Nations have their proper costumes that distinguish them. The Turk has the jacket and turban, the Moor the color black, and the Americans their outfit of feathers.”16 Simply by using the costume traditionally associated with the Moor or the American, the composer could effortlessly and unambiguously convey the identity of the personage to his audience.
Of course, recognizability was not the only factor driving the popularity of ballets of nations in the 1620s and 1630s. National figures appealed to contemporary French aesthetic interest in the exotic.17 In addition, national characters lent themselves to the comic spirit of Carnival ballets with exaggerated costumes and movements and humorous verses that mocked national stereotypes. Although the national ballet’s depiction of foreign countries certainly depended on well-worn types and trite exoticism, the conceit of embodying and performing national identities on the ballet stage deserves deeper consideration as a material artifact of the way some French artists perceived the category of the nation in the seventeenth century.18
In French in this period, the term “nation” designated an ensemble of characteristics presumed to be exhibited by individuals hailing from a particular country. French dictionaries defined the word “nation” as a collective term referring to “all the inhabitants of the same State, of the same country, who live under the same laws, speak the same language, etc.”19 The meaning and usage of the term pertained chiefly to shared cultural traits, or what we might call ethnicity. Nationality had to do with language and with characteristics tied to region and climate. A “nation” could be bellicose or barbarous, refined or rustic. Each nation had its characteristic “genius” that manifested itself in the poetry, art, and music of its progeny.
Although primarily geographical and cultural, the category of the nation also had political connotations. Long before the “nation-state” as such came into existence, dictionary definitions suggested the political relevance of nationality in their observations that the people who constitute a nation live “in the same State” or “under a common rule” and “under the same laws.”20 Discourses about nationality certainly played a role in international politics—for example, in the heated national rivalries that often accompanied struggles over territory or political power. Questions of nationality, moreover, influenced the delineation of frontiers. As Peter Sahlins has shown in his work on the creation of the boundary between France and Spain in the mid-seventeenth century, “both state formation and nation building were two-way processes…. States did not simply impose their values and boundaries on local society. Rather, local society was a motive force in the formation and consolidation of nationhood and the territorial state.”21 Despite the immense cultural and linguistic diversity within both kingdoms, claims that the ethnicity or “nation” of a particular region was more French or more Spanish helped determine on which side of the border it would lie.
In this context, the performance of nationality on the ballet stage enacted, and asked spectators to reflect upon, assumptions about national differentiation. Across the 1620s and 1630s, French court artists experimented with different approaches to characterizing national identities in ballets: earlier examples of the form presented essentially human characters exhibiting national traits, while later versions employed allegorical embodiments of nations in the abstract. The depiction of national characters frequently served to elaborate national rivalries. Particularly during wartime or on the eve of conflict, the performance of ridiculous national stereotypes permitted the denigration of the countries they represented.22 More fundamentally, though, personifications of nations helped bridge the divide between purely cultural and political conceptualizations of nationality. The materialization of geographical and cultural entities as balletic personas participated in the construction of a political fiction whereby a country personified as an abstract idea or collectivity—rather than in the form of its monarch—might be thought to behave as a sovereign “actor” on the world stage. In this way, ballet modeled ways of thinking about political representation in European diplomacy.
Dances of Delegation
The clearest evidence that ballets engaged with already existing understandings of political representation on the world stage comes from entertainments that featured ambassadors and envoys as their characters. Several ballets of nations use a fictional framework in which characters from distant corners of the globe have traveled to Paris to pay homage to the French monarch on behalf of their countrymen. A few entertainments put greater emphasis on the characters’ identity as ambassadors through verses and staging techniques that invited viewers to reflect on the dynamics of diplomatic representation and delegation.
One example is the comic ballet the Ballet du grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Ballet of the Grand Ball of the Dowager of Bilbao), staged twice during the Carnival season in 1626, first at the Louvre and then at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.23 Margaret McGowan has pointed to this ballet as the epitome of burlesque style, as reflected in Daniel Rabel’s engrossing drawings of the costumes and major props. The grotesque figure of the Dowager, in particular—played by a male performer inside a “machine” by court sculptor Bourdin—ridiculed the aging Marguerite de Valois for an in-group of courtly spectators.24 Although critics have examined this ballet’s commentary on the court and its engagement with the Parisian populace, the entertainment’s international theme has received less attention, even though global imagery makes up the majority of the spectacle.25 The ballet featured a series of performances by delegations from the “Four Parts of the World” who, according to the fictional scenario, had come to visit the queen of the ballet’s title. Their exotic garb and accoutrements (including “machine” animals representing the distinctive fauna of each region) surely appealed to the eye and the imaginations of spectators.
