familiarity with cold weather for the Pole. Distinctive bodily performances reinforced these verbal articulations of difference. Although the music and choreography for this ballet have not survived, clues in the libretto suggest that each figure performed a dance style associated with his nation. The Venetian Pantalone’s reference to the “movement in my buttocks,”52 for example, describes the kind of lively passacaille often used in Italian entrées of ballets of nations, while the German’s allusion to his “strength in the middle of the body” evokes a sturdy allemande dance.53 Distinctive ways of moving and gesturing as well as costume and character traits constituted a performance of nationality that would be recognizable whether embodied by a fool or a fisherman, a king or a clown. In this way, the ballet form allowed a nation—in the sense of a people—to be personified by actors other than the sovereign himself.
Comic, festive, and frivolous, national ballets seem distant from the legal erudition of political theory. Yet theatrical performance offered an important vocabulary for early modern thinkers analyzing and reflecting on modes of political representation. The theatrical metaphor has been most famously used to describe sovereign power in chapter 16 of Hobbes’s Leviathan, “Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated.” Hobbes here traces the origins of the legal category of personhood to the Latin concept of persona defined as “disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage … and from the stage, hath been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals, as in theatres. So that a person, is the same as that an actor is.”54 Although historians of political representation often point to his deployment of theatrical vocabulary as original, in fact Hobbes drew from a long tradition that conceived of political power in theatrical terms. Quentin Skinner, for example, shows that Leviathan employed an understanding of political representation as “speaking for” or “acting for” that reached back to patristic authors such as Saint Ambrose and Gregory the Great who, in turn, relied on Cicero’s account of the “role” of public officials in representing the interests of the people.55
Hobbes was not at all alone in understanding that political action only took place through the intermediary of representation. He did, however, provide the most iconic image of representative power in the form of the engraving that served as the frontispiece for Leviathan. Indeed, it has become nearly impossible to address Hobbes’s political theory without reference to this illustration of a large, imperious king whose body is composed of the many, tiny faces of the subjects he represents. The image supports Hobbes’s characterization of the sovereign as a “feigned or artificial person” who gives voice to another’s “words or actions” through surrogation.56 This “artificial person” represents—in the sense of acting for—the will of the multitude.57
One ballet explicitly depicting sovereign representation also elaborates how “artifice” might permit a monarch to represent the will of a people. The Ballet des quatre monarchies chrétiennes (Ballet of the Four Christian Monarchies) resembles a typical ballet of nations except for the fact that each national performance is headed by a “monarch” in the form of a mythological persona. Performed at the Louvre on February 27 and March 6, 1635, the ballet was presented as a thank-you gift from eight-year-old Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans (known as “Mademoiselle”) to Louis XIII after he pardoned her father (the king’s brother), Gaston d’Orléans, for his secret treaty with Spain the previous year.58 As described in a commemorative in-quarto pamphlet, the ballet’s “admirable subject” depicted “Italy conducted by Orpheus, Spain by Juno, Germany by Bacchus, and France by Minerva; each of these Kingdoms having some relationship to the qualities of these four nations that all came to the feet of the noblest king on earth.”59 The librettist draws an interesting distinction between “kingdom” and “nation” in this initial description of the ballet’s conceit. The term “kingdom” (royaume) generally referred to the “governed state,” that is, the territory and people under the command of a monarch. In this instance, however, the word appears in an older and less common usage, as a vernacular equivalent of “regnum” or ruling power. Understood in this sense, “kingdom” refers to the gods and goddesses leading each troupe of dancers, a reading that explains why Germany and Italy are labeled “Monarchies” centuries before those countries existed as unified political entities.
Although the mythological figureheads do not belong to or hail from their nations, the librettist takes care to indicate that they share characteristics with the people they represent. Italy, for example, follows Orpheus, deity of music and poetry. Accompanied by lutenists and singers, the god delivers an opening récit in praise of Louis XIII. In the last verse, he introduces his “subjects,” promising they will pay the king their compliments “in a style as sweet as my voice.”60 The series of performances that follow develops the parallel between Orpheus and Italy by showcasing the nation’s association with music, dance, laughter, and frivolity. “Pleasingly dressed” chestnut roasters dance with such liveliness it seems they “fricasseed their legs” as well as their delicacies.61 Neapolitan “buffoons” and harlequins perform acrobatics and boast about their comedic prowess. Similarly, in the third part of the ballet, Bacchus declares in his récit: “One sees an eternal proof of my power on the banks of the Rhine.”62 The dancers in his entourage incarnate stereotypically inebriated Germans, gamboling joyfully but clumsily in such a way that “they make you burst with laughter.”63 These performances rehearse common French depictions of the Italian and German national characters familiar from countless ballets. In the Ballet des quatre monarchies, though, national traits provide the justification for their representation by a particular mythological ruler. An essential similitude connects the “monarchs” to their subjects.
The role of resemblance in the ballet’s assignment of mythological monarchs to the four Christian nations troubles the assumption that nationality had no relevance to early modern political sovereignty. Often retained within a family and underwritten by divine authority, sovereignty was most often understood as “jurisdictional,” requiring no natural connection between the sovereign and the territory or people he ruled.64 For a thinker such as Jean Bodin, a prince’s usurpation of new territory posed no problem, as sovereignty demonstrated by conquest was sufficient to justify dominion.65 For this reason, on the international stage, monarchs and princes interacted as individuals rather than as “heads of state” understood to be representing the interests, will, or character of their people.66 The Ballet des quatre monarchies, however, challenges the idea that heads of state have a purely imperial relationship to their peoples. Instead, the entertainment plays with the idea that characteristic resemblance strengthens bonds between a sovereign and his or her subjects.
The entrées of Italy, Spain, and Germany rely on symbolism, stereotype, and metonymy to make this claim. The entrée of France presents the most structurally complex version of this vision of sovereignty owing to the identity of the ballet’s performers and spectators. The French subjects need not be represented through the performance of French stereotypes because actual French subjects attended and danced, effectively representing themselves. In the fourth and final part of the ballet, Mademoiselle herself takes the stage as Minerva, France’s own figurehead. The libretto describes her as the epitome of the noble community: “This young marvel … begins to appear in the sparkle and luster of the whole court.”67 The synecdochal connection between the figurehead and the larger group becomes concrete as the entertainment concludes with a ball in which the whole assembly participates.
Throughout the final scenes devoted to the Monarchy of France, the ballet’s framing conceit breaks down to accommodate French political reality. This is especially true in the way the ballet addresses Louis XIII, who participated as a privileged spectator and dedicatee. As Minerva first enters the stage, she rhetorically cedes her authority as fictional “monarch” of France to the true French sovereign off stage. Her entrance is accompanied by the “most beautiful voices and best lutenists of Europe”68 and Mercury, who sings:
Great
