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, distinguish themselves from each other by alluding to traits stereotypically associated with their nations: braggadocio for the Spaniard, dancing ability for the Italian, a sturdy build for the German, 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