A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch
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and Jacobin England, court ballets in Valois and Bourbon France, royal processions in Spain, and noble families’ theatrical celebrations of Catholic holidays throughout Italy. Ambassadors sometimes hosted parties with music, dancing, and fireworks to congratulate their host regime on a royal birth or to diffuse their own sovereigns’ good news abroad. Such “diplomatic entertainments” were frequent and common throughout the early modern era. Their ubiquity raises the question: Exactly what kind of diplomatic work did these entertainments perform?
This book investigates the multiple, evolving diplomatic functions of theatrical entertainments from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth century—the period in which “modern” diplomacy emerged and took hold in Europe. The culture of diplomatic entertainment developed in tandem with broad shifts in the theory and practice of diplomacy: the custom of exchanging resident ambassadors, pioneered in Renaissance Italy, was adopted throughout Europe by the second half of the sixteenth century.5 It became codified over the course of the following century, giving rise to internationally accepted rules and conventions regarding diplomatic immunity and extraterritoriality. By the Congress of Utrecht in 1713, a coherent diplomatic system—which some commentators consider the modern one—had been established throughout the continent.6 This set of shared diplomatic practices facilitated a major renegotiation of European powers’ relationship to one another in the long post-Reformation era, gradually replacing the authority of the pope as the primary agent of mediation among princes. Throughout this extended period of transition, theatrical entertainments performed in diplomatic contexts—whether at court for an audience of resident ambassadors or at summits and congresses—both paralleled and played an active role in these shifts.
In fact, the emergent diplomatic culture depended on a set of theatrical practices that translated seamlessly from the scene of diplomacy (the court, the summit, the negotiating room) to the stage. These practices could be grouped into three broad categories: embodied representation, performance, and spectatorship. As seen in the diplomatic manuals cited above, the language of theatrical representation pervaded discourses on diplomacy to describe the ambassador’s role. Ambassadors not only had to speak for their princes in addresses and negotiations but also were charged with continually embodying the “dignity” of their sovereigns, particularly in relation to other diplomatic representatives. The imperative to maintain dignity derived from the primary way the European diplomatic community was imagined and represented in the early modern period. From the early sixteenth century, the “rule of precedence” organized European states into a theoretical hierarchy of prestige, an international-scale mirror image of the system of rank that governed interactions among barons, dukes, and marquises within individual court societies. The conventional “rule” by which kingdoms outranked duchies and other lesser principalities took concrete form whenever delegates from several states assembled—whether at a diplomatic congress, royal wedding, or funeral—and was reflected in the order of procession. Such ceremonies constituted dramatic representations in microcosm of the imaginary order that structured the European community of princes.
Not only ambassadors but entire courts worked to represent the international dignity of the monarch through sumptuous, highly stage-managed diplomatic ceremonies such as royal audiences as well as through formal entertainments. The representation of monarchal power is a familiar theme in scholarship on court spectacle. Roy Strong’s foundational Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 examines how entertainments became “a natural part of the apparatus of the Baroque monarch” and “a central instrument of government” by making manifest the ruler’s magnificence.7 A diverse array of scholars working in post-structuralist or New Historicist traditions have also shown how court entertainments functioned as strategic or ideologically driven displays of power.8 But while most of these analyses have focused on representations’ power to “impress” domestic spectators with the prince’s overwhelming authority, early modern commentators more often described court entertainments as a means to dazzle foreign observers. During Louis XIV’s reign, for example, French theorist and playwright Samuel Chappuzeau wrote that spectacular performances should “make foreigners see what a king of France can do in his kingdom.”9 Monarchs competed with each other to design ever more impressive forms of entertainment at their courts. Christian IV of Denmark, for example, enchanted diplomatic visitors at his pleasure house in Rosenborg with “invisible concerts” performed by musicians concealed in an antechamber and piped in through architectural conduits, provoking wonder through a masterful display of “sonic control.”10 In mid-seventeenth-century France, ministers and diplomats worked to import Italy’s premier artists and engineers to enrich French court theater practices and make them the best in Europe. Performed before a captive audience of ambassadors, court entertainments exhibited the wealth and artistic talent amassed by the monarch for international appreciation. This understanding of entertainments’ function might be considered an early modern equivalent to what Joseph Nye calls “soft power”: the power that “arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture” and values in foreign eyes.11 The importance of such “attractiveness” in an early modern context resulted from the way European society as a whole was represented in the diplomatic imagination as monarchs jockeyed to maintain or achieve a favorable place in the fictive hierarchy of international society.
Beyond their role as ostentatious displays of prestige, diplomatic entertainments also engaged explicitly in the task of imagining or reimagining international relations in their content, through allegorical iconography. Many ballets and pageants performed for a diplomatic audience reflected on international themes by personifying “nations” and even “Europe” itself as dramatic characters interacting with each other onstage. Iconographies for international relations offered a stylized language for thinking about the nature of political community. This was particularly true through the last decade of the Thirty Years’ War and during the Congress of Westphalia when French “ballets of nations” reenacted that country’s relations with Spain and the Italian and German states in allegorical form.
These mise-en-scènes of European diplomatic society highlight the artificiality of the idea of Europe in the early modern period. Far from a static concept, it could be manipulated by artists and patrons to respond to shifting political conditions. The malleability of “Europe” comes into focus when viewed in the context of diplomatic entertainments and through the lens of performance studies. “Europe” appears here as a performative category, reinvented with each reiteration on the stage. In this sense, the practice of performance worked to mediate, or to enact, the broader legal and political reorganization of European diplomatic society.
Anthropological theories of performance furnish one way to conceptualize this function of early modern diplomatic entertainments. Spectacles staged during times of international crisis lend themselves particularly well to analysis as examples of what Victor Turner terms “social dramas”: performances that function as quasi-rituals to resolve fractures in a community. Such events move the community through four “phases of public action”: from a “breach of regular norm-governed social relations,” to “crisis” and side-taking, to “redress” through self-reflexive contemplation and remediation, and finally to reintegration.12 Commenting on the “liminal” character of ritual performances, Turner remarks: “We are presented, in such rites, with a ‘moment in and out of time,’ … which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond.”13 Turner calls that “generalized social bond” communitas, a “community, or communion” brought together by feeling and symbolism rather than by social, political, or legal structures.14
Seventeenth-century theorists certainly noted the socially therapeutic dimension of diplomatic entertainments, attributing to them the power to heal rifts after international wars, for example. The Jesuit commentator Claude-François Ménestrier recommended ballets for precisely this purpose, noting that a people “must rejoice … after such inquietudes.”15 There is a case to be made that routine performances, even those that took place during peacetime, also did important work to reimagine the political community represented by the statesmen and delegates who participated in them. Up until the early sixteenth century, the legacy of the Roman Empire and the idea of Christendom provided a strong basis for a discourse of European