more or less accurately identify these figures on sight and immediately grasp what concepts they were meant to represent. In addition to offering a high degree of legibility, Greek and Roman references allowed viewers to commune with a time and place considered to be the common origin of European cultures according to the prevalent discourse of translatio imperii. As Aby Warburg puts it, the frequent appearance of Classical figures in early modern court festivals “afforded a unique opportunity for members of the public to see the revered figures of antiquity standing before them in flesh and blood.”39 The presence of ancient personages in performance collapsed the temporal distance between spectators and their idealized past, allowing them to dwell within that shared vision of Greco-Roman antiquity.
Theatrical performance always, in some sense, transfers audiences to another time and place. Samuel Weber calls theater a “medium” precisely because it serves as an agent of mediation between the space of the performance and an imagined “elsewhere” that space represents.40 The Bayonne festivals used this capacity of performance to convey participants not only to a shared vision of Classical antiquity but also to another idealized historical landscape: that associated with chivalry. Poetry, set design, and costumes asked spectators to transport themselves to a legendary feudal landscape borrowed from popular romances. Festive rehearsals of chivalric practices such as jousts and tournaments were a regular feature of Renaissance court culture.41 Even in this context, though, the events at Bayonne stood out both for the concentration of chivalric activities and for the sustained use of Arthurian themes.42 This mythical chivalric imagery effectively transformed the ground on which the festivities took place. For the duration of the entertainments, the French courtiers, foreign royals, and diplomats who made up the group of participants and spectators no longer found themselves on the western edge of the French kingdom. Instead, they occupied a fictional landscape that belonged equally to all their national cultural traditions. The tilt-yard, the enchanted castle, and the tournament field represented the natural habitat for the European aristocracy, spaces where they could practice the arts of war that constituted “the true activity of Nobles.”43
The entertainments highlighted the easy translatability of codes of chivalry across national traditions by having participants dress themselves in diverse national costumes. According to the official account, actors in the ring-tilt joust performed as “several knights and ladies of diverse nations.”44 As the account discloses, the “Knight and Ladies” were in fact played by French and Spanish noblemen, costumed as French, Moorish, Spanish, and Scottish warriors and their female companions as well as figures from antiquity.45 Although eyewitnesses failed to accurately identify the nationalities the players were supposed to represent, they did pick up on the international theme. A French observer noted: “The knights who ran the joust were not armed but were masked, some dressed in the Spanish style, some in the Italian…. The others were dressed magnificently and diversely.”46 An anonymous Spanish spectator simply stated that each knight was “dressed in the clothes of all the nations that are known.”47
The visual theme of national diversity in this entertainment amplified or called attention to the joust’s role in uniting the various nationalities represented by its participants. Because both countries shared a tradition of chivalric performance, all spectators were able to comment on the event with competence and authority. The Spanish reporter, for example, declared that “all ran very well and on good horse[s].”48 While international spectators could all appreciate the equestrians’ demonstration of skill, other French and Spanish noblemen and women were brought together by performing side by side in the tournament.49 The Duke of Alba even had the honor of serving as one of twelve Masters of the Camp (a fact noted by the Spanish eyewitness).50 The men—including, it seems, those costumed as women—ran the joust.51 The queens and the ladies in their entourages played an equally important role as privileged spectators, seated in viewing stands high above the field. Although seemingly passive, the women completed the chivalric tableau by providing the feminine gaze required to approve the knights’ skillful exploits. One Spanish lady (Madalena Giron) played a particularly critical role. When a French gentleman of the king’s chamber won the joust, he bestowed his prize upon her—a classic knightly gesture from the tradition of courtly romance.52 Courtliness mapped onto the relationship between the two countries, with France figured as the chivalric hero full of prowess, Spain as the revered object of his loyalty and idealized love.
Although the aristocrats who played in the joust have not left firsthand accounts of their experience, the resources of performance theory provide a way to speculate about the entertainment’s effects on them. The tournament invited the actors—French and Spanish, male and female, royals and delegates—to imagine themselves as belonging to the same courtly community. This fictional conceit is established in the textual apparatus of the performance as recorded in the Recueil des choses notables: “Their Majesties were informed that there had arrived several Knights and Ladies of diverse nations, who desired the king’s protection: and before receiving this honor, they wanted to test their skill and valor in his Majesty’s presence: and taking their leave they begged him to give them safe haven at his Court, and freedom to make a camp, where they might perform those tests in presence of their Majesties and the Knights and Ladies of their Courts.”53 Functioning as a speech act, this request from the “Knights and Ladies” effectively transformed the summit site into a medieval court and chivalric “camp.” In this fictional scenario, the knights and ladies, despite hailing from “diverse nations,” pledge their loyalty to a single lord and engage in a common performance of chivalric prowess to impress him. In this respect, the performance took place in what Victor Turner terms the “subjunctive mood” of culture, a mode of thinking and behaving “as if” other social rules applied.54 Courtliness, in many ways, is inherently “subjunctive.”55 By definition, it demands an enactment of a predetermined code, a set of idealized behaviors. The European tradition always figured these ideal behaviors as belonging to an earlier age. If Renaissance jousting tournaments repeated celebrations associated with medieval court life, romances in turn encouraged their audiences to discover their models of comportment in the legendary past of Arthur’s round table. The rituals of courtliness were overlaid with nostalgia for a perfect court society situated in a lost time and place. In the Bayonne entertainment, chivalric imagery united participants in an enactment of this nostalgia and in performance of a shared aristocratic ideal.
The poetry woven into the performance enhances this experience of nostalgia. After the entry procession of costumed knights and ladies, six women present a “cartel” or inscribed card to Charles:
Who will ever believe it, who will ever be able to believe
Such a rare event? O Goddess of Memory
Engrave with your blade in the century to come
The rare memory of such a rare event.56
The poem plays with tenses to project its listeners into an imagined future time in which the present moment belongs to a wondrous past. The verses ask the audience to look back on themselves and the tournament as a spectacle, joining them together as a new kind of public. Through these multiple rhetorical and performance strategies, the chivalric display and its texts momentarily unite the diverse actors as a community occupying a single, utopian cultural space.
A somewhat different form of ideal, shared world was evoked by the use of pastoral tropes during the queen mother’s banquet. Following Neptune’s recital and the mock hunt of the artificial whale, guests disembarked from their pleasure boats to a bucolic setting. They were welcomed by courtiers dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses who performed rustic dances to music played on bagpipes and musettes and bestowed gifts of silk flowers and little toy sheep made from silver embroidery thread. Such pastoral imagery—inspired by the Eclogues of Virgil, Ovid’s retelling of the Orpheus myth, and other classical antecedents—was a commonplace of court festivities throughout the early modern period.57 As Louis Auld notes, “Various writers have seen in
