Female Roles in Court Ballet I: Men Playing Women

Abstract

By the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, ballet de cour (French court ballet) was a well-established and popular feature of the French court, dating back to the late—sixteenth century. The first example of the genre is generally taken to be the Balet Comique de la Royne, written to celebrate the marriage of the Queen’s sister, Mademoiselle de Vaudemont, to a favorite of Henri III, the Duc de Joyeuse, in 1581 and performed in the Great Hall of the Louvre as part of a long series of wedding festivities.1 The Balet Comique is generally attributed to its principal creator and choreographer, Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx (d.1587), but any single attribution is inevitably misleading as French court ballet was a fundamentally collaborative genre, combining as it did the efforts of choreographers, composers, musicians, dancers, set designers, costume designers, and many others. Like the majority of its successors, the Balet Comique was embedded in a specific context of royal celebration, that is to say of entertainment (or divertissement—such events were often called divertissements de cour) but also, inevitably, of political display. Spectacular magnificence, exhibited in the extravagant costumes, decors, music and choreography, as well as in the sheer scale of the entertainment, was a persuasive means of demonstrating—or rather, performing—the power of the sovereign. The king was understood to be both the driving force behind all such performances and also its privileged spectator. In addition, both Louis XIII and Louis XIV appeared as dancers in a number of court ballets (some of Louis XIV’s roles are examined below).