National Actors on the Ballet Stage (1620s–30s)
Court entertainments may have appeared as strangely obscured focal points in most ambassadors’ writings.1 This scarcity of commentary, however, only means that diplomatic spectators rarely recorded their observations, not that they completely discounted entertainments’ content. After all, many spectacles concentrated on themes of professional interest to diplomats, including sovereignty, war, and peace. Although diplomats who witnessed entertainments had little to say about their subjects, the creators of court spectacles insisted on the power of ballets to communicate. Theorists stressed that engaging subject matter was the most important element of a successful entertainment. One of the first ballet manuals, designer Nicolas Saint-Hubert’s La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets (The Way of Composing and Successfully Producing Ballets, 1641), began: “I will start with the subject, upon which depends all the rest.”2 The music, choreography, and all other elements of the spectacle must “accommodate” or “subject themselves” to the representation of the thematic content.3 Describing ballet as a kind of “mute theater,” Saint-Hubert insisted that its primary goal was to transmit meaning to its audience.4 In the following decades, Michel de Pure echoed the comparison of ballet to a “mute drama” while Claude-François Ménestrier preferred the analogy of the “speaking painting” to evoke ballet’s particular communicative power.5
In fact, ballet offered artists a unique set of representational resources well suited to the depiction of political ideas. Characterization—perhaps the key artistic building block of pageant-like early modern ballets—lent itself to reflections on autonomy, sovereignty, and (political) action. This was especially true of ballets that depicted characters invested with national traits. Figures marked as Spanish or Italian, as Turks or Moors, populated the earliest court entertainments. The Roman, Greek, Moorish, Spanish, and Scottish costumes worn by participants in the jousting tournament at the Bayonne Conference (discussed in Chapter 1) suggest some of the traditional uses of national masquerade, adding visual interest to chivalric sports. In the thematically focused setting of court ballets, dancers in national garb allowed for the depiction of political events and relations. As early as 1580, for example, Henri III commissioned an informal chamber ballet in which performers in Spanish and Portuguese dress enacted France’s vision of the crisis of Portuguese succession.6 Whether used for visual appeal or political commentary, the representation of national figures remained a staple of court performance throughout the early modern period.7
In the early decades of the seventeenth century, ballets that featured national characters among their dramatis personae also began to comment on the representational techniques that constituted nationality. The dominant form of the ballet à entrées—a series of independent solo or small-group performances, loosely linked by an overarching theme—lent itself to a critical engagement with processes of characterization and differentiation. In ballets with national themes and figures, this investigation addressed political matters. What did it mean to embody, and thereby represent, a collective entity such as a nation or country?
This question resonated beyond the confines of the dancing hall. Dramatic representation provided models for political thought in relation to a variety of problems. As discussed in Chapter 2, thinkers on diplomacy used the analogy of the relationship between author and actor to characterize the sovereign’s delegation of authority to the ambassador. The conditions of sovereignty itself were described by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes as a form of impersonation through which the absolute monarch assumed the capacity to act on behalf of his subjects. In addition to these well-known and well-studied appropriations of the theatrical lexicon for political theory, other thinkers including Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, and Emeric Crucé considered how representatives of different states might come together in a confederative governing body to ensure peace. Dramatic metaphors (if metaphor is a sufficient term to describe theorists’ reliance on theatrical concepts) did not simply emerge from the ether. Most political theorists and all the practitioners of monarchal and diplomatic politics inhabited a culture rich in dramatic performances, particularly ballets. Sully, a renowned amateur of dance, not only performed in ballets but commissioned the construction of a state-of-the-art dance hall in his residence at 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