A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch
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the cultural glue of Latinity and the political force of the Holy Roman Empire facilitated rhetorical formulations of unity, such as Charlemagne’s self-proclamation as “Father of Europe” (pater europae) or Charles Quint’s title as “lord of all Europe” (totius europae dominus).16 That language lost its power in the sixteenth century, as the Reformation weakened the political authority of the Catholic Church and as European powers began competing over New World resources.17 The widespread adoption of modern diplomatic practices including the exchange of resident ambassadors could be seen as one response to the fracturing of the European political community. In Robert Jackson’s terminology, the “universitas” model for conceptualizing the community of Christian states shifted toward a “societas” model in which sovereign states adhering to different political and theological regimes came together to negotiate their relationships to each other through legal and diplomatic tools.18 In this sense, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent a prolonged transitional—or perhaps liminal—period in which Europe as an idea and as a community of states underwent a crisis and (partial, temporary) resolution of its identity.
Theatrical entertainments had an important role to play in Europe’s conceptual reintegration. Often, they brought members of the diplomatic community together in the activity of performance. Foreign dignitaries played roles alongside local courtiers, as when the Spanish minister the Duke of Alba rode in a masquerade equestrian game in France in 1565, or when the English exiles the Duke of York and Duke of Buckingham danced in the Ballet royal de la nuit in Paris in 1653. Even when diplomats simply attended masques or ballets, they would be expected to “perform” alongside other courtiers in the social dancing that followed the show. These inclusionary gestures allowed court performances to celebrate values and behaviors that European statesmen held in common. At a time when ambassadors were drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the aristocracy, ballets and equestrian spectacles functioned as an aesthetic meeting ground for a transnational patrician community and as quasi-ritualistic reenactments of bodily practices associated with nobility, namely dance and horsemanship. The importance of a social and civilizational foundation for diplomatic interactions has been stressed by thinkers associated with the “English school” of international relations, particularly Hedley Bull. He coined the phrase “society of states” or “international society” to designate “a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values” that “form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.”19 The history of international relations, in this view, entails attending to the construction of norms—cultural and social as well as legal and institutional—that governed the interaction of states over time. Bull and his followers did not elaborate on the role of artistic endeavors in forming international societies. It is clear, though, that the performing arts played an important role in early modern international norms of sociability. Ballets and other court entertainments functioned as community events or quasi-rituals that brought the diplomatic corps together. They offered themselves as a stylized celebration of social practices common to European aristocrats, a spectacular reification of shared values. Yet, as performances, they also called attention to the fact that these shared values and the relationships they structured could be revised each time they were rehearsed anew.
The overlapping yet conceptually distinct categories of dramatic representation and performance attend to how the production of theatrical entertainments influenced international relations. What about questions of reception? Diplomatic entertainments addressed themselves to particular publics, including both eyewitnesses of live performances (courtiers, ambassadors, sometimes paying spectators) and vicarious audiences who consumed secondhand accounts in correspondence or published relations. Strategies of address illuminate the kinds of effects diplomatic entertainments were thought to have. The language of harmony in early entertainments implied an almost mystical belief in poetry, music, and dance to instill concord among spectators. As one court artist wrote, experiencing a dance performance helped achieve “a conformity of the body to the soul, and the soul to music,” and “harmony perfectly unites all things.”20 Later, theatrical entertainments on topics such as war and peace rhetorically addressed their diplomatic audiences to persuade negotiators toward a particular course of action. Sometimes they used dramatic techniques to play on audiences’ emotions. Yet individual accounts of diplomatic spectatorship, preserved in diplomatic correspondence and memoirs, provide a corrective to theories of entertainments’ power as an effective force for unity and harmony. Confusion, misunderstanding, and conflicts about the quality of hospitality extended to diplomatic audience members all bring to concrete life the strife entailed in international relations.
In these various ways, diplomatic entertainments lend themselves to an approach that Timothy Hampton has called a “diplomatic poetics.” In Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe, he proposes “a way of reading literature that would be attuned to the shadow of the Other at the edge of the national community, and a way of reading diplomacy that would take into account its fictional and linguistic dimensions.”21 Such a chiasmic reading produces an understanding of literature itself as “a space and tool of compromise.”22 A Theater of Diplomacy draws inspiration from Hampton’s diplomatic model of reading but shifts the focus from linguistic procedures to performance practices. To paraphrase Hampton, this book adopts a way of interpreting theatrical court entertainments that is attuned to the presence and participation of members of the international community, and a way of analyzing diplomatic encounters that takes into account the theatricality of international affairs. It examines how practices of dramatic representation, performance, and spectatorship transferred between the literal stage and the “theater of diplomacy” writ large.
The intertwined histories of early modern international relations and the performing arts involve Europe as a whole but come into particular focus when viewed through the case of France. During the long period in which a modern image of the European community emerged, France excelled at using spectacular entertainment for diplomatic advantage. The strategic use of the performing arts in French diplomacy began under the queenship of Catherine de’ Medici, who imported Florentine traditions of court spectacle to France following her marriage to Henri II. The French quickly earned an international reputation as masters of the form. In particular, the French forged a style of court ballet that proved especially compelling for diplomatic uses. These perennial events on the court calendar were well adapted to commenting on matters of international import. With help from lavish costumes and explanatory poetic texts distributed in printed libretti, dancers incarnated allegorical or mythological figures to play out spectacular reflections on themes such as pleasure, love, the arts, war, and peace. For early modern audiences, moreover, ballet represented an ideal fusion of music, dance, poetry, and visual art in theatrical form. The hybrid genre modeled diplomatic negotiation at the level of art by containing multiple, often conflicting aesthetics within one performance. The fractured, polysemous nature of ballet might even be considered an advantage for diplomatic communication when obfuscation was more appropriate than clarity. Ambassadors in the audience could draw their own conclusions about the French position on an ongoing treaty negotiation or proposed alliance, all the while being impressed by the display of wealth and talent on the dance floor.
Ballet was also instrumental in augmenting France’s cultural clout in Europe. The French form of ballet de cour influenced how other European courts practiced the art—sometimes exported with French princesses who married into foreign royal families (as when Henrietta-Maria became Charles I of England’s queen and oversaw a renovation of the masque),23 sometimes imitated in an act of cultural rivalry (as when Christina of Sweden ordered the construction of a salle de ballet that mimicked the dimensions of French ballet stages).24 By Louis XIV’s era, the French court had established itself as the epitome of pomp, a European capital of theatrical splendor. This distinction bolstered France’s claim to precedence in international society in the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the trope of “French Europe” in the age of the Republic of Letters.25 Diplomacy itself became French in this era as French thinkers such as François de Callières established normative practices for negotiation and as French replaced Latin as the