beneath the costumes. The verses’ ironic deconstruction of character breaks theatrical illusion and privileges the identity of the performer over the role.37
This staging of performers’ infidelity to their onstage personas carries particular significance in the context of a ballet about ambassadors. As discussed in Chapter 2, the theatrical metaphor for describing an ambassador’s work was controversial in the early decades of the seventeenth century precisely because it called into question a diplomat’s loyalty to his sovereign. For Hotman in particular, what set an ambassador apart from an actor was the fact that an ambassador could not change roles: when one is a diplomat, “one cannot play different characters under different costumes.”38 This anxiety occupies center stage in the Ballet de la Marine as representatives of distant countries declare their readiness to abandon their homes and missions. The Persian ambassador, for example, discloses that he has not undertaken his journeys because the shah ordered him to do so; instead, “I follow all the pleasures where my age conveys me … and if I seem to adore the sun, / It’s because under this beautiful name I revere Sylvie” (that is, his mistress).39 Later in the ballet, the Amazon rhetorically forswears her countrywomen, declaring, “I prefer the Seine to the waters of Thermodon…. and announce here that the love of Alexander / never pleased me so much as that of Louis.”40 In the guise of trite rehearsals of praise for the French monarch, verses such as these give expression to the fictional ambassadors’ individual subjectivity, their private motivations and sentiments, in a way that troubles the conception of diplomats as perfect representatives of their monarchs’ wishes. In the lighthearted ballet, assertions of diplomatic agency pertain to romance rather than Machiavellian political ambition. Still, the ballet discloses the possibility that although ambassadors profess to represent the wishes and intentions of a head of state, they may be performing according to a different script, one of their own or another prince’s devising.
Both the Grand bal and the Ballet de la Marine play with modes of diplomatic representation by ridiculing the kinds of posturing that occurs at international summits or, more deeply, by referencing the problems of fidelity that arise when ambassadors are charged with acting as surrogates for their masters. In both cases, ballet easily appropriated forms of political representation for artistic purposes. The comic resources of the form—particularly burlesque aesthetics—exposed the ridiculous or unstable underside of these types of representationality on which diplomatic practices relied.
Personifying the Body Politic
The Grand bal and the Ballet de la Marine’s critical engagement with concepts of diplomatic representation raises the question of how else the ballet form might have dialogued with theories of political representation. Important studies of Louis XIV’s participation in court entertainments have analyzed how the dancing body of the king reaffirmed royal authority through its charismatic presence (a topic to be taken up in Chapter 6). If monarchal sovereignty is understood to derive from quasi-feudal relationships between the monarch and his nobles (as for Jean Bodin, for example), ballet reflects and reinforces the nature of those ties through stylized reenactments of gestures of subjection. If, however, the monarch functions as a stand-in for his subjects, as a physical incarnation of the body politic, the stakes of his performance change. Famously explicated by Ernst Kantorowicz and based largely on a study of ceremonial practices, this theological view of sovereignty ensured permanent, stable rule through an “uninterrupted line of bodies natural” giving physical form to the mystical “body politic” in perpetuity.41 Distinct from the feudal model of sovereignty, this theory conceives of the king as a personification of the otherwise unrepresentable whole of the polity. Paul Friedland helpfully clarifies: “Political bodies in pre-modern France were not the ultimate objects of the re-presentative process; political bodies were themselves re-presentations. Even for the most die-hard absolutists, the political body of the king was not so much the object of re-presentation as it was a kind of conceptual way station between the political actor and the true object of political re-presentation: the mystical body of the nation or the corpus mysticum.”42 For this reason, in her pioneering work on forms of political representation, Hanna Pitkin groups monarchal representation under the rubric of “symbolic representation” wherein “a political representative is to be understood on the model of a flag representing the nation.”43 As the (mystical) personification of the state, the king also comes to function as a kind of emblem or icon of it.
Turning away from political ceremonies and toward French legal history for insights about the nature of royal power, Tyler Lange suggests that the “juridical fiction” of the king’s two bodies “never emerged quite so clearly in France as in England.”44 In particular, a 1607 edict “prescribed the necessary reunion of the king’s personal and dynastic property with the royal domain,” insisting on “the irrevocable marriage or union of the individual king and his office rather than the distinction between them.”45 Meanwhile, judicial practices before the eighteenth century usually treated courts as “part of the Prince’s body” such that “the inescapably unitary, simple royal person could only either incarnate or be opposed to the nation.”46 Alain Boureau affirms the simplicity and unity of the royal body in France, highlighting both the centrality of the king’s natural body to political rituals and the ubiquity of representations of monarchs as fallible individuals.47 These insights suggest the inadequacy of monarchal representation as a stand-in for the polity as a whole.
In this context, ballets of nations produced new ideas and concepts for theories of political representation. The figures who playfully represent their nations (that is, their people, those who share their ethnicity and territorial roots) do not, of course, have legitimate political power. Yet they do “speak for” their countrymen within the fictional world conjured on the stage. More important, they serve as emblems of their nation, embodying traits stereotypically associated with their compatriots. Those stylized traits take on a symbolic status through performance and re-performance on the stage. In this way, the ballets develop an iconicity of the nation separate from the logic of monarchal representation, making available a new way to envision a collective (geographical, political) entity.
The representability of nationalities emerged and gained iconic force across repeated performances of national stereotypes in different entertainments. Gradually, and with reinforcement from other visual and discursive cultural productions, a repertoire of traits and imagery developed that could instantly indicate the identity of any nationally marked performer: as Ménestrier described, the Turk has his vest, the Americans their costume of feathers. One early example of such national typecasting occurs in the Ballet de Monseigneur le Prince, likely danced in December 1621 in Bourges (perhaps by Henri II de Bourbon-Condé, a prince of the blood residing in Berry).48 The ribald ballet features a series of dances by lovesick “madmen” (fous) who hail from different countries: France, Flanders, the Indies, England, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, and Turkey. The costumes and music for this ballet have not survived, but the poetry preserved in the libretto suggests how the figures differentiated themselves according to national traits. Each dancer is assigned a different phallic joke evocative of his national character. The predictably drunken German declares: “I always loved wine above all else, / And a sausage was my God.”49 The Polish fool promises the “Dames” of the audience that his cold humor will not impede their potential courtship: “The cold that reigns in Poland / Moves far away from my members / … Touch my ivory pipe: / All my fires rise from there.”50 Although the characters possess a specific identity (as fools), they distinguish themselves through these national traits and come to stand for a national group by way of iconic resemblance.
The same principle of differentiation structures the first so-titled Ballet des nations scripted by Guillaume Colletet and likely performed in the Carnival season of 1622, before Louis XIII’s departure to suppress Huguenot revolt in La Rochelle.51 This ballet’s characters are all identified as fishermen. But they, too,
