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 place / In the royal heart of Charles King of France.”75
Although valid with respect to French spectators, this reading leaves out the experience of foreign viewers loyal to sovereigns other than Charles. How were they supposed to react to such enactments of his singular power? Eyewitness accounts suggest that, for some spectators, the most blatant affirmations of the French king’s supremacy simply did not register. It is important to recall that in the mid-sixteenth century the French language did not yet hold a privileged stature in Europe. Although French was becoming a “second lingua franca” after Latin, it was far from universally spoken.76 Even the Duke of Alba, Spain’s foremost diplomat, had a poor command of French.77 By choosing to feature exclusively French-language poetry and song lyrics, therefore, the creators of the Bayonne festivities excluded a significant part of its audience from full comprehension.78 This fact becomes obvious in a Milanese account of the entertainments whose author claimed that the canto sung by Heroic Virtue (cited above) lauded Philip rather than Charles.79 While the language barrier caused some misunderstandings, nationally specific iconologies obscured other politically charged meanings from foreigners’ view. The fact that Charles participated in the first joust dressed as a Trojan, for instance, had a particular resonance for French courtly viewers: a commonplace in royal imagery, the reference to Troy evoked a specifically French version of translatio imperii that traced the monarch’s ancestry to the founders of ancient Rome. Not primed to look for this allusion, foreign observers only noted that the king wore an “ancient” or “ornate” costume, while the visual assertion of French supremacy apparently passed them by. In this way, the Bayonne festivities navigated between imageries and sensory pleasures accessible to all its guests with specific verbal and visual signs legible only to a restricted portion of its audience. The entertainments revealed content to some while concealing it from others—and often they did not even realize they were missing something. This “something for everyone” quality of the festivities made them ripe for manipulation in post-event mediation by politicians.
Before the French court could pack up their affairs and move on from Bayonne to the next stop on their tour, Catherine de’ Medici and her son began writing letters reporting on the recently