A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch
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The diplomatic setting adds an extra layer of chaos and confusion to our understanding of the masque’s political context, as it asks us to consider the perspectives of viewers only tangentially interested in power struggles within the English court. Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s account of the masque places himself and the matter of Britain’s diplomatic relations with France at the center of the event. Although it might be tempting to dismiss his perspective as narcissistic or as biased by professional self-fashioning, this is surely not the whole story. His letter exchanges with Villeroy and Puisieux reveal how much time and attention were invested to ensure that the masque accomplished its diplomatic goals. Moreover, since the French ambassador sat alongside the king at the performance, any argument about the significance of James’s privileged vantage point on the dance must apply to Le Fèvre de la Boderie as well.
Given his particular set of preoccupations and expectations, what might he have seen from his seat of honor next to the king, and how might he have interpreted it?105 The discourses mobilized by the diplomatic correspondence draw attention to features of the masque’s text and imagery that may have spoken to the French ambassador in particular. Much of the scholarship on this masque has focused on the elegant, triumphant second part, the parade of queens. But for a contemporary audience, it was the first, grotesque part of the masque (called the “antimasque” by modern critics)106 that deserved most attention. The dialogue between the witches and their Dame allows for a scene of exposition in which the hags announce their names and identities. They expound on the vices they represent—Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, Falsehood, Murmur, Malice, Impudence, Slander, Execration, Bitterness, and Rage Mischief—all characterized as “faithful opposites / To Fame and Glory.”107 As Barbara Ravelhofer points out, many Britons—including King James—believed in witches and demons; this scene would have had a “creepy impact” on this sector of the audience in particular.108 The moral content represented by the witches also takes on special resonance when viewed in the context of the affair over the French ambassador. As Jonson remarks in his marginal notes on the libretto, he gave a great deal of thought to the presentation of the witches in order to make this scene plausible and appealing to spectators. He explains, for example, that he delayed the witches’ proclamation of their identities until the Dame arrived onstage to avoid boring “narrations” directed at the audience rather than another character.109 Moreover, he had the hags reveal their names in a natural order: “In the chaining of these vices I make as if one link produced another…. Nor will it appear much violenced if their series be considered, when the opposition to all virtue begins out of Ignorance.”110 Jonson aims to produce moral reflection in spectators. The sequence of the witches’ speeches should provoke a consideration of how moral errors accumulate: from ignorance to suspicion to credulity to falsehood to murmur and so forth. It is noteworthy that the “vices” personified in the masque pertain to the circulation of information and discourse. In part, this foreshadows the triumph of “Good Fame” at the end of the masque.111
From Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s perspective, however, a more pointed interpretation leaps to mind, in which the hags embody—and mark as “vices”—some of the behaviors and emotional responses produced by the recent diplomatic incident. The sequence of witches onstage echoes the way the French ambassador’s reaction to his non-invitation escalated from “ignorance” and “suspicion” of its political justifications through the spread of “murmur” and “malice” in correspondence, and all the way into “execration,” “bitterness,” and (a mild form of) “rage mischief” in the demands he reportedly transmitted to James. Could the honor of his invitation to the masque have also provided the occasion for a subtle rebuke of his behavior in dance form?
Because Le Fèvre de la Boderie never recorded his impressions of the masque for posterity, what he glimpsed from his ambassador’s oblique gaze and how he interpreted the witches and queens he saw onstage at Whitehall remain unrecoverable. Yet the fact that he neglected the content of the performance in his reports reveals something important about his mode of spectatorship. For the ambassador, attending a masque was less about watching than about acting and interacting. Moreover, the present event paled in significance as compared to the diplomat’s own performance, destined for publication through letters to a wider—and often more prestigious—audience in the masque’s aftermath. The masque provided the centerpiece for these peripheral performances directed at ever-widening circles of audiences, but it was subsumed by the everyday theatrics that surrounded it.
Conclusion
The story of Le Fèvre de la Boderie and the “incident” surrounding his attendance at court masques in London shows that if court entertainments provided a center of gravity for diplomatic relations, they did not function as an exclusive focal point. For ambassadors at the French and English courts, entertainments were a normal part of their annual calendar of duties. They offered an important but routine occasion at which to participate in the life of the host court as a part of its diplomatic community. As such, they allowed individual ambassadors to jockey for little signs of favor that would be noticed by their peers and appreciated by their masters when relayed in correspondence. Court entertainments operated simultaneously as a “public” stage on which diplomats could distinguish themselves before others and as a “private” event in which monarchs bestowed hospitality and gestures of intimate friendliness upon resident foreigners at their court. In this way, entertainments challenged diplomatic spectators to attend both to bilateral personal and political relations with their hosts and to the broader matter of their sovereign’s position on the European stage. In the midst of crafting his own performance for these distinct audiences, the ambassador, understandably, had little attention left over to focus on the entertainment on the masque or ballet stage.
This active form of diplomatic spectatorship revealed in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s incident complicates the standard narrative of court spectacle as effective propaganda for their sponsors. Those responsible for creating and hosting a ballet or masque had to think of the diplomatic audience as a privileged and highly sensitive sector of the audience and had to try to predict the international consequences of small choices about seating and staging. The norms of diplomatic culture limited the freedom of artists and sponsors to depict and to invite whom they wished. Moreover, however pompous their aesthetic, court spectacles were just one form of representation in a broader theatrical field in which multiple actors continually performed and witnessed others’ performances. The experience of diplomatic spectators might not differ very much from that of other courtiers, who also competed for marks of royal favor before an audience of fellow nobles.112 When court performance is considered not as a uniquely captivating spectacle but as the centerpiece around which other, individual performances took place, we see it not as a blunt instrument of power but rather as a space for negotiation.
All of this portrays the audience for court entertainments as radically fragmented. The fractured audience of early seventeenth-century spectacle represents a significant departure from the courtly entertainments staged by the Valois monarchs (discussed in Chapter 1) that incorporated music, movement, and poetry thought to unite spectators in a shared experience, and whose observer accounts confirm that they succeeded at least partially in configuring their viewers as members of a community. In contrast, the ballets and masques attended by Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his counterparts offered not a common experience but rather a common space in which viewers worked to distinguish themselves. Although diversity reigned over concord in these events, the idea of a united European public haunted the entertainment in the form of the imagined “whole of Christendom” whose gaze Le Fèvre de la Boderie wished to command. However spectral, this ultimate audience for the diplomat’s performance-as-spectator construed diplomacy itself as one big theater. The conception of Europe as a “fictive public” made it theoretically possible for creators and sponsors of court entertainments to attempt to capture that collective vision through forceful performances on international themes.113 Some of these are the focus of Chapters 3 and 4.