Favour and patronage: dancers in the court ballets of early seventeenth-century France.(Report)

I. Introduction

There has been surprisingly little published on the ballets de cour, the court ballets of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, since Margaret McGowan's path-breaking study in 1963. (1) The reason is mystifying, because her book is excellent and the topic interesting. Her thoroughness may have made further research seem unnecessary during the heyday of the Annalistes' socio-economic studies. A half-century has passed, however, and it is time to take another look at this popular form of court entertainment. Ballets are a neglected source of information on early modern French courts, a subject of considerable recent interest. (2) As a meeting place for nobles who came to see and be seen, royal courts were vast stages where everyone was on display. Dancing in ballets was popular because it offered a rare opportunity to be seen by the whole court in a glamorous setting, and so ballets became a stage within a stage.

Men danced most of the roles in court ballets, and participants included Louis XIII himself, who greatly enjoyed performing as a youth. When the king danced, the dances were known as grands ballets du Roy or royal ballets. Louis's brother, Gaston d'Orleans, and his cousin, the prince de Conde, also danced in ballets, while the queen and ladies of the royal family danced in their own separate ballets. Besides royal family members, however, hot. much is known about the dancers in court ballets. (3) This essay looks at about fifty men and women who danced in seven ballets performed at the French court between 1613 and 1620. The teenaged Louis XIII danced the lead in three royal ballets presented in 1617, 1618, and 1619, and his oldest sister, the princess Elizabeth, danced the lead in two women's ballets presented in 1613 and 1615, while his teenaged queen, Anne of Austria, danced the lead in two others presented in 1618 and 1619. Four of the seven ballets under discussion Were women's ballets, which have been emphasized here because less is known about them. These seven ballets had a total of about 100 parts for performers, but only about half that number of courtiers actually danced in them because most appeared in more than one ballet. So, who were the dancers in these ballets? Why were they chosen, and what does their selection tell us about the operation of favour and patronage at the French court?

The court centred around the households of the king and his immediate family with their large domestic staffs. Louis XIII's household numbered 1,711 in 1611. (4) Anne of Austria's household numbered over 250 in 1615, and had grown to about 400 by 1620. (5) The king's brother, Gaston d'Orleans, had a household of 437 in 1627, while the king's youngest sister, Henriette Marie, had a household of 193 in 1625. (6) Their mother, Marie de Medicis, had a household of 464 in 1606. (7) The majority of these large household staffs were men. Only three per cent of the staff in male-headed households were women, who did the laundry and repaired the linens. There were more women in female-headed households, but they were still in the minority. Women were about twenty-five per cent of the household of Catherine de Medicis, but only about nine per cent of the household of Anne of Austria. (8) As a result, there were comparatively few women at court, and most of them were invisible household members about whom little or nothing is known. The exception were grandes dames from the great noble families, a small elite who often appeared in ballets. Women dancers, therefore, were a tiny minority of the few women at court, and they enjoyed a rare public visibility which allows a brief glimpse of their lives, a secondary interest of this essay.

II. The Court Ballet: A Description

What were court ballets, and how were they performed? Court ballets combined dance, opera, drama, poetry, pantomime, choral, and instrumental music with exquisite costumes, elaborate sets moved by complicated machinery, and ingenious stage effects intended to astonish and surprise. Not ballets in the modern sense, they were more like masques, also popular at this time. Masques were a series of loosely coordinated dramatic sketches, often allegorical in nature, in which the actors wore masks. Court ballets, by contrast, were multimedia performances emphasizing dancing that were intended to be magnificent, breathtaking spectacles. They ended with a final grand ballet in which all the leading performers danced. (9)

Ballets were often presented in the grand salon of the Louvre. This long, narrow room, sixty-four yards long and sixteen yards wide, had several tiers of seats in galleries on three sides so that spectators could look down on the dancing from above as well as watch from the floor below. The stage was at one end of the room, and a dais was at the other end, where the royal family sat under a canopy. The dance floor lay between the dais and the stage, and two fifteen-foot runways connected it to the stage, which was hidden behind a painted curtain. To begin the ballet, torch-bearing pages would enter in procession to take up positions along the walls, and the curtain would be dropped to the floor and pulled aside. Royal ballets often began late in the evening and lasted long after midnight. The room would be lit by a thousand or more candles in silver sconces and candelabras, and the bejeweled costumes sewn with gold and silver thread would sparkle and glow in the candlelight. This much light so late in the evening was both rare and expensive, and a newspaper account of the 1615 ballet declared that there was so much light everyone thought it must still be late afternoon or dawn of the next day! (10)