A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch
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that the English court reciprocated French gestures of hospitality toward their ambassador. According to the ambassador’s letters, James and Anna mirrored the French king and queen in their displays of intimate affection toward Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his family. They all dined together in the royal family’s private chambers before the entertainment. At the masque, the ambassador was seated next to the king, who assured him “it was in the intention to reserve all the honor for me,” and they talked all the way through the performance.86 In the interludes between acts, Queen Anna sought out the ambassador’s wife, “making a thousand gestures of familiarity toward her” (lui faisant mille demonstrations de privauté).87 The Duke of York invited the ambassador’s young daughter to dance.88 The language of intimacy and familiarity is, if anything, stronger in this letter than in Puisieux’s account of the ballet in Paris.89 Themes of private and familial affections between the French and English dominate the narrative. His wife and “little daughter”—rarely mentioned in his correspondence—here play important supporting roles in a scene of hospitality and friendship between the French family and the English royal clan. The ambassador’s choices in narrating the event imply that such personal attentions were the greatest privileges an ambassador could enjoy.90
This privileging of private favors would seem to contradict the French ambassador’s claim the previous year that there was “no proportion” between a demonstration of friendship behind closed doors and a vastly preferable invitation to a “public solemnity.” The important distinction at the Masque of Queens was that this display of intimacy took place on a public stage. The ambassador wrote that “the king and the Count of Salisbury have declared and made as public that this festivity was mainly being created only for the love of me.”91 The diplomatic success of the event hinged on its synthesis of exclusivity and publicity, its status as a private gesture “made as public” for all the world to observe.
Le Fèvre de la Boderie revealed his continued obsession with the wider audience for his treatment at the London court toward the end of his report on the masque. He concluded his account by tallying up the honors paid to him against those shown to the Spanish ambassador the previous year: “There was nothing similar in the favor received by the Spanish ambassador last year, for he was not feasted by the king and did not eat with him but in a room where not even a single councilor accompanied him. Neither the king nor the queen was ever seen to say a word to him while the ballet took place.”92 By comparing his experience to that of the Spanish ambassador a year before, Le Fèvre de la Boderie reconstructed these private displays of diplomatic hospitality as another arena for public struggles for precedence.93
In fact, the attentions lavished on the French ambassador at the Masque of Queens set in motion another round of mediation of the event among the diplomatic community. Le Fèvre de la Boderie observed that the masque’s advertisement as an exclusive gift to him allowed the English monarch to smooth over the fact that other ambassadors, including the representative from Venice with whom the crown had a favored relationship, were excluded from the entertainment. Indeed, the Venetian ambassador reported that he had been told: “His Majesty never conceived that this could bring any prejudice to the Republic. The French Ambassador was invited alone as a special mark of regard; his Majesty designed still greater honours for me. No one had a right to claim invitation to another’s house.”94 By framing the masque as a personal “invitation to another’s house,” the English court attempted to dodge causing offense to an ally even as their ambassador was excluded from what had previously been considered a public court event. Similar to the way in which Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX disseminated conflicting accounts of the Bayonne festivity to different European audiences, in the publicization of the Masque of Queens French and English actors manipulated both public and private registers of representation to reassure different sectors of the diplomatic community in London.
Diplomatic correspondence provides a window onto the political “backstage” space of court entertainments. Before, during, and after the theatrical event, political actors maneuvered to spin gestures of hospitality in ways most favorable to their own agendas. Seen through the eyes of diplomats, court masques and ballets appear as highly complex theatrical events possessed of a double layer of theatricality. The performance onstage was surrounded by a second level of performance in which diplomatic spectators made a spectacle of their presence and its implications for the prestige of their monarch. This mise en abyme was encircled by a further level of performance in the discourse that interpreted, publicized, and mediated the political significance of favors bestowed on various ambassadors through the entertainment.
Diplomacy and Authority in the Masque of Queens
With good reason, ambassadors placed the matter of their own maneuvering and posturing around this series of masques and ballets at the center of their correspondence about them. But what of the content of the Masque of Queens itself? As he had for the Haddington Masque, Le Fèvre de la Boderie declined to describe or comment on the spectacle of the Masque of Queens, focusing instead on the personal attentions lavished upon him by the royal family. In this way, the ambassador exemplified a form of diplomatic spectatorship that willfully marginalized the content of lavish court spectacles. The diplomat’s point of view thus offers a fascinating corrective to scholarly accounts of court entertainment that characterize these pompous displays as oppressive tools of monarchal propaganda.
In fact, the Masque of Queens has galvanized a great deal of critical attention around the question of its relationship between patronage and political authority at court. As its title implies, this masque foregrounded Anna’s role as primary sponsor. In the preface to the printed libretto, Ben Jonson underlined Anna’s particular authority as patron and collaborator. Noting that the masque represented “the third time of my being used in these services to Her Majesty’s personal presentations,” Jonson observed that this necessitated a great attention to the “nobility” and “variety” of the spectacle.95 He attributed the masque’s main innovation—the “foil or false masque” that preceded the queen’s own entry onto the stage—to Anna herself.96 Jonson also highlighted Anna’s role as primary object of the masque’s encomiastic function, in describing the parade of queens that composed the centerpiece: “The twelfth, and worthy sovereign of all I make BEL-ANNA royal Queen of the Ocean, of whose dignity and person the whole scope of the invention doth speak throughout.”97 As Leeds Barroll, Clare McManus, and others have explored, the masque thematized feminine authority of all kinds.98 The opening antimasque featured a parade of “hags” or witches calling for their leader or “Dame.” Finally, a personification of Heroic Virtue descended to clear away the hell-scape and make way for a pageant of noble queens from antiquity: from Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, to Bodicea and finally Anna herself, embodying the culmination and epitome of their glory. As described by McManus, the Masque of Queens staged “the empowering specularity of the female body,” a body that was “expressive despite and because of the physical definition of femininity.”99
Despite this focus on the nature and limits of feminine authority in the themes, imagery, and text of the spectacle, scholars recall that representations of masculine monarchal power remained a crucial feature of this feminocentric spectacle. The figure who banishes the witches from the stage is described as embodying a “heroic and masculine virtue.”100 The penultimate dance honors young Prince Charles by having the masquers form the letters of his name.101 In an essay on the Masque of Queens, Stephen Orgel goes further in asserting the primacy of the king’s authority as signaled by his privileged viewing perspective in the audience: “Outside the fiction but at the center of the courtly spectacle, sits the monarch, declaring by his presence that in this masque of queens, heroism may be personified in the royal consort, but the highest virtue is that of the Rex Pacificus, scholar and poet.”102 Jonson may have organized the spectacle at Anna’s command, but monarchal politics confers final authority to the king. Orgel’s argument here recalls earlier New Historicist arguments that the pompous spectacles of court always refer back to the ultimate monarchal authority that they help realize.103 More recent scholarship adopts the nuanced view that spectacles such as the Masque of Queens demonstrate the “polymorphic” nature