Seeing the Ballet de Cour

Abstract

Dance has often combined entertainment and politics-indeed, some would suggest that any work of art or performance inevitably makes a political statement, whatever else its creators believe is going on. But seldom has dance been so nakedly used for political ends as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when in the trionfi of the Italian courts, the masques of the Stuart court, and above all the ballet de cour of the French monarchy, culminating in the great spectacles staged for Louis XIV, all of the arts were conjoined to glorify despotic power, relating the status quo to natural and supernatural order. Recently these court spectacles-fanciful combinations of dance with music, design, and poetry, which are traditionally seen as providing the origins of ballet-have been scrutinized anew to recover as much as possible about what was actually performed, under what circumstances, and with what effects on both the aristocratic participants and their audiences. The iconography of the English masques designed by Inigo Jones and his colleagues has proved most revealing through the work of