The pastoral celebrates love, friendship, and being in nature stripped of all the trappings of culture and politics.
Yet, in practice, the deceptively simple aesthetic could serve as a powerful agent of symbolic power. As Meredith Martin observes, Catherine de’ Medici had long favored pastoral stylings in her ceremonies as a way to associate herself with iconographies of fertility and maternity, enhancing her status as a figurative mother to the French nation.59 The evocation of regional cultures in pastoral music and dance also helped to stage the royal family’s claim to French territory. Marguerite de Valois (the king’s younger sister) recalled in her memoirs that the shepherds in this entertainment represented “all the provinces of France” and that each troupe of performers “danced in its regional style” from Poitevin to Provençal to Breton.60 For French observers, Marguerite’s account suggests, the spectacle amounted to a synoptic pageant of provincial identities, a tour of France through its folk dances. Foreign viewers, however, seem not to have picked up on this nationalistic dimension. The Spanish viewer describes the show as a generic pastoral affair.61 While the regional connotations of particular costumes and dances were invisible to foreign guests, they could still appreciate the global significance of the pastoral mode, whose evocations of the simple charms of rural life epitomized aristocratic otium and pleasure. The poems sung by several performers dressed as nymphs underscore this theme:
I no longer fear the return of your troubles,
Since I see the French and the Iberian
Joined and united, not as foreigners,
But as two sibling shepherds.62
The poem attempts to replace political alliance with a simpler, more natural form of relationship evoked with the image of “sibling shepherds.” The contrast implies that shepherds are too naive to understand the political conflicts and divisions experienced by subjects of particular states. By playing at shepherds, the guests will naturally forget their differences as well. In the environment of “this river and wood,” participants are free “to feel your joy reaching toward the heavens.”63
Pleasure itself cannot be underestimated as a means to create a sense of unity among those who attended these entertainments. Banquets, late-night suppers, and elegant collations punctuated the program festivities at Bayonne. Abel Jouan pays particular attention to the food served during the festivities, conveying the copious nature of one feast by listing its dishes: “Magency hams, tongues of beef … all sorts of candied fruit, salads, jellies, and a great abundance of wine.”64 These gustatory events appealed to all guests regardless of rank or nationality. Perhaps for this reason, the anonymous Spanish spectator lavished special attention on meals. He remarks on the “saroo” enjoyed after the joust and the dinner served before the enchanted-castle masquerade, and gives a detailed account of the seafood-laden menu consumed after the water pageant. The obvious convivial nature of feasting was reinforced in the traditionally Catholic societies of France and Spain where the act of breaking bread had an especially deep connection to concepts of fellowship and communion.
Sonic pleasures similarly appear in witness accounts as agents of connection. The theme of harmony prevails in references to music. The Spanish author, for example, describes how knights in the masquerade were fêted “with the best musical harmony and with all the kinds of instruments that are known” and how guests at the queen’s banquet were serenaded “with much harmony from the music of many instruments.”65 His phrasing perfectly reflects the ideal of concordia discors—harmony emerging from the sounds of myriad different instruments. An Italian account of the Sirens’ song at Catherine’s banquet noted that it “exceeded every sweetness.”66 The same author described the reaction to a song performed during the allegorical tournament: it “left the souls of everyone rather desirous that such a song would last forever.”67 These references to harmony indicate that audiences broadly accepted the view of music’s effects espoused by the court artists who were responsible for creating the entertainments.
As discussed previously, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Pierre Ronsard, and their collaborators worked under the philosophical assumption that art really did have the power to remake its audience as a harmonious body. The notion that spectacle can unify its audience into an ideal community has an echo in some recent work in performance studies. Most notably, Jill Dolan has explored the “utopian” possibilities opened up by performances that unite viewers, however temporarily, through a common emotional and aesthetic experience.68 In the moment of performance, spectators feel connected to each other by their awareness of shared feeling.
To some degree, eyewitness accounts of the Bayonne entertainments bear out this hypothesis. Observers depict the spectacles as a rich, absorbing, visual experience. Ekphrastic passages elaborating costumes, decor, and theatrical machines give way to expressions of amazement and marveling. The anonymous Spanish writer, for example, describes the enchanted-castle entertainment in admiring terms, lauding their “most beautiful invention” and “most beautiful artifice that has ever been seen,” especially the sight of “all the flowers that could be imagined made from silk.”69 The density of superlative constructions conveys the viewer’s sense of wonderment. Moreover, the author’s insistence that the spectacle surpassed all imagining implies that all audience members shared this response. This entertainment, he tells us, was objectively amazing. In this respect, he describes a “utopian” audience response in which a sublime aesthetic experience obliterates individuality and joins the assembly in a common feeling.
Finally, this experience of audience communion was not always the direct result of the artists’ efforts. Many spectators of live performance have had the experience of witnessing a mistake—a flubbed line in a play, a false note in a concert, an acrobat’s misstep. These errors remind us of the “liveness” of performance. A perfect show may be repeated, but an accident is unique, sharpening spectators’ awareness of the performance’s ephemerality. It transforms them into witnesses of a one-time event, and therefore into a community.70 This seems to be what happened at the end of the island banquet. This entertainment, which began with a theatrical pageant on the water and continued with the pastoral dance recital, ended with a grand feast that lasted until one in the morning. In the dark (and probably tipsy), the guests returned to their residences the way they arrived—by boat. The disembarkment was eventful. As the Spanish chronicler wrote, “There were great disgraces and falls of ladies and women and individuals.”71 Marguerite de Valois attributed the “confusion of the retreat” to a storm that broke during the return trip. The disorder was redeemed because it “supplied as many good tales to laugh over the next day as the magnificent feast had supplied pleasures.”72 The scene of confusion on the night of the banquet had an afterlife as an event that spurred continued interactions among its witnesses.
As these various eyewitness accounts illustrate, the entertainments succeeded, at least to some extent, in creating an atmosphere of harmony and commonality. In the case of Bayonne, this convivial atmosphere failed to translate into any kind of real political accord. But the entertainments proved themselves politically useful as a focal point for a campaign of mediation and interpretation in their wake.
Discordant Accounts
Previous scholarship on the political significance of the Bayonne festivities has tended to assimilate them to a domestic French politics of spectacle.73 Like entertainments staged for a predominantly French courtly audience (such as the court’s going-away party at Fontainebleau in 1564), the Bayonne festivities centered in large part around King Charles. In the opening tournament, the knights and ladies “of diverse nations” paid tribute to him alone. He had the honor of liberating Peace from the enchanted castle. Throughout the festivities, encomiastic poetry fêted the French king as the most noble, courageous, powerful sovereign. Neptune’s Tritons declared their obedience to him.74 A personified Heroic Virtue declared, “I have my seat and dwelling
