the king's body theatrical mark franko

Majestic Drag: Monarchical Performativity and the King's Body TheatricalAuthor(s): Mark FrankoReviewed work(s):Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 71-87Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147011 .

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Majestic Drag

Monarchical Performativity and the King's Body Theatrical

Mark Franko

Cet oeil courtois, ambitieux, in, simple, doux, hagard, aspre, delicieux

(This eye-courtly, ambitious, refined, simple, sweet, hagard, harsh, delicious).

-La Voye de Laict ou Le Chemin des Heros au Palais de lagloire (1623)

I want to think the critical theory of performance and performativity through the historical lens of kingship in I7th-century French spectacle.' In doing so, I will

posit a link between the king's two bodies and the performance/performativity dualism as theorized byJudith Butler. Ernst Kantorowicz has charted the doctrine of the king's two bodies-one natural and mortal, the other politic and immaterial-from the late middle ages until early modernity (I957). For Kantorowicz, the phenomenal body of the king publicly demonstrated and guaranteed sover-

eignty and stable political identity by virtue of embodiment, which thereby ob- tained a theological dimension. The term "embodiment," notesJudith Butler:

drawn as it is from theological contexts [...] tends to figure "the" body as a mode of incarnation and, hence, to preserve the external and dualistic rela-

tionship between a signifying immateriality and the materiality of the body itself. (I990:I 52, nI5)2

This material and symbolic figuration of "the" body to which Butler refers is that of performativity. Yet, although kingship is generally understood to exemplify patriarchal power through hypermasculine identity, this does not always prove to be true in early 17th-century ballet. And this fact is significant in the context of ballet's political entailments. Confronting Kantorowicz with ballet on the one hand, and Butler with Kantorowicz on the other, enables us at once to question an allegory of the modern "power" of sex in the early modern "sex" of power. In other terms, I wish to compare the sex/gender/power matrix that emerged from

The Drama Review 47, 2 (T178), Summer 2003. Copyright ) 2003

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

71



72 Mark Franko

speech act theory to historical performance materials. These materials enable us to rethink the issue ofperformativity in a dimension not necessarily commanded by discursivity alone.3 The question that emerges from the encounter between Kantorowicz and Butler mediated vis-a-vis court ballet is: Does I7th-century Eu- ropean monarchical performativity stake a symbolic claim to the unified sovereign subject?

Kantorowicz interprets the historical dualism that lurks within royal embodiment as an affirmation of the juridicopolitical status of kingship through its power to safeguard against despotism and justify monarchy as a system of governance. But his two-body theory guarantees more than anything else the perpetual nature of sovereignty.4 The body natural is mortal, but the body politic-and hence monarchy itself-is eternal. The two-body theory presents an interesting case of performativity, which Butler understands as a process of reiteration or citationality. "There is no power that acts," she specifies, "but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability" (I993:9). Performativity underscores the active exercise of continuity through persistent yet unstable actions of the body natural. This body is fundamentally temporal (mortal) although the identity it confirms through continuity appears a-temporal.

Performativity has implications for the historic body politic and draws us into that area where repeated acts have been cultivated in the interests of power: court theatre. If rituals of state can be seen to promote symbolic continuity, court ballets are generally considered "political" in a very local and temporal sense: they are often interpreted through the circumstances specific to diplomacy (see Canova- Green 1993). Court ballet is to be distinguished from the ceremonial, although not, as we shall see, from ritual. The instability Butler pinpoints in "performative" identity by virtue of its necessity to repeat itself is evident in the king's body theatrical: that is, in his reiterated performances.

Two Bourbon kings were dancers in ballets, which were major vehicles of their "representative publicness" (see Habermas 1991:1 I). Moreover, theatre is conventionally repetitive and thus not foreign to the iterative conditions required by performativity. Austin, of course, disqualifies ceremony, ritual, and theatre from the performative function by calling them nonserious or parasitic, "in a peculiar way hollow or void" (I975:I8-19, 25). He is thinking of the modern stage, however, where performance is no longer the life of power.5

Etienne Thuau envisaged 17th-century spectacle as transcending its immedi- ately aesthetic dimension to become a form of public persuasion. He argued that royal performances enabled the public to visualize the religious aspect of monarchy, whereas the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of raison d'etat occurred only in writing.6 I shall argue that court ballets fulfilled a more complex function related to what Louis Marin ([198I] I988) has called the "phantasms" of raison d'etat.7 This is to say that the body natural as perceived in dance is a complex (rather than hollow or void) body, despite the fact that Kantorowicz grants complexity solely to the crown or the corpus mysticum (I957:382).8 The complexity of the body natural resides in its performative rather than juridical status. It is, in fact, not a body natural but a body theatrical. This body calls us to a consideration of the combined aesthetic, political, and ritual functions of court ballet.9 By ritual I do not intend a synonym for ceremonial or for repeated action. Rather, I adopt an- thropologist Carlo Severi's apprehension of the ritual image, which contains contradictory visual and narrative connotations (200I). The contradictory connotations of the image emerge through aesthetic form. When Louis XIII or Louis XIV danced in officially sanctioned ballets, the person of the monarch took up an artistic medium. His aesthetic choices became discernible from within an organized movement system by virtue of his particular execution and phrasing, by virtue, in sum, of his theatricality, understood as the heightening of physical presence, its



Majestic Drag 73

1. The demons' mount from La Delivrance de Re-

^ ̂ -^^^ |-^ X-- i-t- 0-i- - - |-vi Enaud. The king is presum- . . ably seated on the ground so

that he can arise and dance with Renaud (Durand

* r:'S~~ :3:~~~~~ J ̂ ^ (1617). (Courtesy of Cliche , ,i'Uiifi fB BibliothBque Nationale de

France, Paris)

expressiveness (see Franko I986:5). I use the term "expressive" here without calling upon the relationship of embodiment between performance and immaterial meaning. It is important not to lose the theatrical sense of this term. The king was on view as a finite physical and temperamental character-an artist at work-and evaluated by his subjects as such without direct reference to legal and juridical theory. Finally, we must avoid the fallacy implicit in artistry that the king's artistic agency was wholly autonomous; it was modified by the collective enterprise of theatre.

I am arguing that the act of dancing itself personalized the royal persona. Usu- ally, the opposite is argued: the direct trajectory from the king's phenomenal appearance to his body politic is taken for granted. Although the fiction of a

sempiternal body politic may have intruded upon spectator awareness, what the

spectator beheld was the mobilized body natural even when its regal quality, its

dignitas, was theorized as undying (see Franko 2000:35-SI). Were this not so, we would not be talking about spectacle. Furthermore, even the construction of a mobilized body politic took place in and through theatrical norms that mediate between the material body and its construction as a spectacular entity.1? Live per-



74 Mark Franko

formance, where attention is riveted on moment-by-moment production, rarely has such direct access to the theological dimension. Theatre does not work through embodiment but through "bodification." It is thus difficult to imagine the king's dance attaining a religious function for its audience. His ballet roles did not furnish fables that fed his royal mythology such as, for example, the mythology that pertains to the king's curative power. One possible exception was the Apollo role filly un- dertaken only by Louis XIV.

I shall not be discussing this role per se but instead the more frequently encoun- tered "Apollo function": spectacular instances where the interaction of light with

refracting materials such as mirrors sewn into costume fabric visually multiplied and/or fragmented royal identity. Where the performance of royal myth becomes

power itself (the sun), power is realized through a visual splintering of the body image. The effect of light on the perception of the body, attested to in period ac- counts, enhanced the ambiguities inherent in the king's double casting in certain ballets. I contend this aggregation of effects promoted "the dispersion of [his] sub-

jective autonomy" (Hare I993:I44). Thus, the question of his personalization becomes detached from that of his subjectivity.

When it comes to the body, Butler argues, sex and gender are "political categories of description" (I990:I 13). It is difficult to assess the politics of the king's sex/

gender in ballets. The relationship of his biologically male body to the ideologically overdetermined level of symbolic representation presupposed by kingship effec- tively severs the king's body natural from its singular and particular existence even as it weds his "embodied" (theologically invested) political identity to the most visible and visceral forms of power. These are the two traditions of the analytics of power in relation to sex that Foucault warns us away from in The History of Sexu- ality (I990:88-9I). I want to suggest that the king's ballet performances stand out as excessively lacking (lacking in the mode of excess) with respect to the patriarchal, phallocentric model of sex, gender, and power, whose political categories these performances are assumed to consolidate in each performance. Just as sexual identity for Butler "is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results" (I990:25), so the king's body theatrical maintains a question- able relationship to sexual and political performativity. That is to say, far from act-

ing as a prop or support, the king's body theatrical is potentially as suppressed as Butler's drag because its meaning is a "dramatic and contingent construction" (139).I Yet, in the instance I shall describe, which has no cross-dressing, I shall theorize this "dramatic and contingent construction" as "majestic drag." Al- though it is a performative phenomenon, it does leave textual traces.

The theoretical questions are as follows: Can the monarch's stage appearances fulfill the function of a.reiterative and citational act that sustains his political identity? This would be the principle of performativity according to Butler. It is a "ritual process," she specifies, taking place "in time" through the "reiteration of norms" (I993:IO). If performance, in Butler's terms, grants agency to the actor, whereas performativity grants agency to the action performed, how is the king's dancing-which is as assuredly political as it assuredly projects his sex and gender-how is this dancing, then, an instance of his performativity? How, finally can performativity square with Severi's sense of ritual as "a paradoxical representation of positive and negative values" (200o:189)? I shall approach this question initially by pointing out: (i) that there is a mediating theatricality in monarchical performativity, and (2) that the construction of the unified sovereign subject is not always the inevitable result of theatrical performativity. It is a calculated effect of court ballets, in other terms, to "fail" to deliver the body politic.

Elsewhere, I have situated the king's body natural in the context of his cross- dressed roles in burlesque ballets, a phenomenon very suggestive of drag, but linked historically to political tensions over absolutism (see Franko 1998:64-84)."I



Majestic Drag 75

Here my goal is to reconsider the king's sexed and gendered identity in the context of narrative ballets engineered to support absolutism. This subversion has no evidently subversive political context. The source of the work we shall examine here is Torquato Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (I58I). This ballet, like the poem it is based on, is set during the crusade to the Holy Land in o099. Renaud, the irascible Christian warrior of this campaign, is abducted by the Muslim ma-

gician Armide. Rather than kill him, however, Armide falls in love with Renaud, and he with her. In one court ballet based on the epic poem, La Delivrance de Re- naud (I617), we have the ambiguities of cross-dressing with respect to the king's identity without his actual cross-dressed appearance. Instead, his gender instability arises through association with the relationship between Armide and Renaud. The visual impact of travesti is substituted for by other theatrical, scenographic, and choreographic strategies. Through the roles he plays, the king mirrors Re- naud in his weakness and Armide in her strength.

This procedure is faithful to its literary source. Giovanni Careri (1999) analyzes

2. The fire demon costume worn by Louis XIII (lower center) in La Delivrance de Renaud (Durand 1617). (Courtesy of Cliche

Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris)



76 Mark Franko

the inversion of sexual roles that occurs between Renaud and Armide in Tasso's

epic poem as an important stage in what Norbert Elias referred to as the "civiliz-

ing process" (I982). For Careri, Renaud's "excessive sexual desire" must be con- verted into "exceptional aggressive power" in order for traditional masculine

identity to become consolidated. Indeed, for Careri,Jersusalem Delivered is "one of the founding texts of'modern' European affectivity" (I999:43).I3 Most important for my discussion, Careri points out that Tasso insists on this civilizing process in order to achieve "perfect political form," i.e., "the absolute power of the Chris- tian king" (44). Thus, the king's reenactment of this founding text brings the

question of sexual and affective identity (royal subjectivity) together with that of

political and ideological power (royal representation). In La Delivrance de Renaud, Louis XIII played ideologically incompatible roles:

a Fire Demon in the service of Armide and then Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the victorious Francs in the siege ofJerusalem. Somewhat paradoxically, the Fire Demon may be an early attempt to stage Sun King iconography (plate I). Kan- torowicz traces this image to Sol Oriens, a god of sunrise: "He is not identified with Aurora," he specifies, "the roseate Dawn who precedes Sunrise. He is Sun- rise itself, the Rise in timeless perpetuity" (I963:II9).I4 To return from the east, as Renaud and Godfrey do at the end ofJerusalem Delivered, is a politicohistorical requirement of solar iconography. Kantorowicz traces the genealogy of the political sun god back to Trajan, noting that "oriens" (east) signifies "Orient and sunrise at the same time" (126). If Renaud is to return from the east he must vanquish his passionate engagement with magic, femininity, and fire-Armide's allegorical attributes.

The ballet begins with the very scene fromJerusalem Delivered on which Careri focuses his analysis of the inversion of sexual roles that occurs through passionate gazing into the beloved's eyes.Is Armide, however, is absent from this scene in the ballet. Exultant in his voluptuous passion for the absent enchantress, Renaud re- clines in Armide's grotto. The famous warrior, having betrayed Godfrey, is now a victim of love, which means above all that he is the prey of emotions. A mountain towers in the background from which demons (among whom is Louis XIII playing a Fire Demon) overlook the stage (plate 2). The mountain later revolves en- abling the transformation of Armide's grotto into a garden designed to distract the soldiers sent by Godfrey to rescue Renaud. But apart from such scenographic in- novations, the representation of the hero in this situation is itself innovative. Let me say a few words about its unusual qualities.

Official court ballets had previously been dominated by cosmic allegory. Scenes of emotional quandary-particularly of jealous rage-were conventionally the

purview ofhetaera such as Circe, Medea, and Alcine, as well as Armide.'6 In such scenes, the heroine's jealousy and her desire for vengeance were expressed in rhe- torical rather than performative terms. That is, they were conventionally linguistic and histrionic rather than choreographic. Although not the king himself but his closest adviser (the duc de Luynes) played Renaud, a noble male character had never before been depicted in a court ballet submerged in personal and sensual fantasies.

For these reasons alone, La Delivrance de Renaud should open a different per- spective on French court ballet because it raises the issue of performance relative to raison d'etat. This is not to say that court ballet was unpolitical, but that we require a nuanced and comprehensive definition of the politics of royal dancing: we need a description of political performance encompassing the "display-of- absolute-power" myth along with the minutiae of political existence that lend it texture. Such a "textured" description would account for elements all too frequently ignored in dance history as well as in political theory: the monarch's real or imagined subjectivity, his physical body, and the erotics of his spectacle. These



Majestic Drag 77

last give rise to what scholars of historical performance often dismiss as "curiosities." Such curiosities script the performance of absolutism and are thus funda- mental, not incidental, to the performativity of political power.

Consider an example from a respected interpretation of La Delivrance by Mar- garet M. McGowan:

The Renaud ballet is the first indication of Louis XIII's [...] desire to exercise his authority and to reestablish the stability which had been compro- mised since the death of Henry IV. [...] The most striking and important meaning of the ballet is political. (1963:I02, io8)I7

If it is true that the most important meaning of the ballet is "political," we have still to clarify what "political" means. The political meaning of court ballet is linked for McGowan to the topical interpretation of its imagery. She calls this ballet a "spectacular remedy for political instability" (Io9). But the relationship of spectacle to ritual can be addressed only to the detriment of this interpretation. For example, not only are the king's companions demons in La Delivrance, but the king himself plays one. McGowan notes this role's peculiarity: "It is curious that Durand [the librettist] makes the companions of God on earth at the start of the ballet demons of the mountain, who represent the illusory delights of the idle life of love" (IIo).18 Yet curious it is, because McGowan claims they are overshadowed by the spectacular elements-decor, music, and dance-whose effect is un- ambiguously to confirm political ascendancy (I 13): "The king's grandeur, translated to the beholder by the spectacular splendor, became evident" (I I I). Similarly, mu- sicologist Charles Townsend Downey argues that Armide was read allegorically by the audience as the Regency of Marie de Medicis during the king's minority. Thus, the politics of the ballet have to do with very specific and embodied power strug- gles. That is, the ballet itself is a political battleground rather than a unified political statement. Downey notes:

The man charged with the ballet's realization, Etienne Durand, was himself executed in July of the same year for allegedly having been involved in the traitorous activities of the regent and for having published a pamphlet slan- dering Charles de Luynes who portrayed Renault in the ballet. (I998:I66)'9

Here, it is a concept less of the political function of ballet than its very status as politicized action. If Armide is an allegory for the king's mother and Regent, Ma- rie de Medicis, the king affirms his authority by having Durand write Armide out of the ballet's opening scene. In this way he limits the Regent's power through the public spectacle in which she appears under erasure. I am not questioning the validity of interpretations according to which the ballet stages local power strug- gles, but I ask how ritual-in the guise of curiosity-works toward the ends of politics, i.e., toward the reiteration of norms at the basis of Butler's definition of performativity. It is indeed the most curious elements of the ballet that contain the ritual dimension, but for that very reason they should not be considered curious. In order to develop this point, let us consider the stage action and its intertextual relationship to Tasso.

The Fire Demon, played by Louis XIII, is assigned by Armide to guard Re- naud: "avec charge de lui faire passer le temps en tous les delices imaginables" (called to pass the time with him in the most pleasurable fashion imaginable; La- croix 1968, 2:103). This pleasurable pastime takes the form of a duet. Fulfilling his charge by dancing with Renaud, the king is virtually an agent of Armide's enchantment. The Fire Demon role constitutes a departure from Tasso's text. In fact, the king dances a conflation of textual elements. In the Liberata, when the infidel



78 Mark Franko

3. Renaud, seeing his reflection in the shield/mirror throws his chains on the ground and prepares to es- cape from Armide's thrall (Durand 1617). (Courtesy of Cliche Bibliotheque Na- tionale de France, Paris)

Ismen makes the forest surroundingJerusalem appear to burn in order to protect it from the incursions of Chris- tian soldiers who pillage its wood to construct moving fortresses, a "City of Flame" is created: "The tallest flames have the shape of castles proud and turreted"

(Tasso [I582] I987:13.33). Monsters appear to defend these flaming battlements. Later, when Renaud is dis-

enchanted, having escaped from Armide's thrall, he en-

*Il; ; 0.:.:..: .... .: :0 .- :: : :i;: ::X .. ;: :0i . ters the enchanted wood and is confronted with her

::::;:::-::;-:-:. .. i;:::: :::: :: apparition, which emerges from a myrtle. Armide is at

i ̂ :A:h::;: ner most ambivalent: "She looks upon him in sorrow . :;-;: and mirth at once: a thousand passions show mingled in

one glance" (18.31.389). As lenaud lifts his sword

against the myrtle, however, she is transformed into a demon. Tasso links fire and demonic possession with Armide. The librettist transforms these images of fire and demonic possession belonging to Armide into the

, i l : i visual and dramatic attributes of the king.

j::: ::::::: ^:;iit; tI The royal connotations of fire and possession are ex- tended scenographically through particular uses of reflected light to which I shall turn shortly. Let me note here that the spectacular modality of reflection is central to the dramatic turning point of the story, both in the

: poem and in the ballet. Renaud's scene of deliverance

~ :::* -corresponds closely to its literary source. Two knights armed in classical style ("armez a l'antique"), unde- terred by the blandishments of the place, hold up a crystal shield to Renaud's face:

Et faisant voir Renault a luy-mesme dans l'escu de cristal qu'ils avoyent ap- port&, l'emmenerent hors de ce lieu enchante, jusques au milieu de la salle, ou ce guerrier eut telle honte de sa jeunesse ainsi passee, que ses carquans luy furent des meurtres reprochables, ses dorures des taches inffames, et sa demeure voluptueuse une funeste prison. (Lacroix I968:1 I2)

(And having Renaud look at his own image in the crystal shield that they carried, they led him away from this enchanted place to the middle of the hall where this warrior conceived such shame of his youth squandered in this way that his chains were as murders, his gildedness infamous stains, and his voluptuous home a disastrous prison.)

Confronted with his effeminized image, Renaud is shamed back to his virile

self, and deserts the garden to rejoin Godfrey's ranks (plate 3). This peripeteia at the work's center turns on Renaud's perception of his own image, which is more

precisely an image reflected in the shield-as-mirror. Armide, betrayed by Renaud, is then besieged by demons transformed into hideous creatures seeming to mock her lament (plate 4). This scene offsets the psychological significance of Renaud's altered subjectivity with a burlesque tableau of uncontrolled passion and spite. The moving platform again revolves, revealing the king as Godfrey and his closest associates (the former demons) (plate 5). Louis XIII congratulates Renaud on his liberation and all dance an elegant ballet in the form of a male geometrical dance

(plate 6).2 In this brief synopsis, I have neglected some impressive scenic effects and many

of the linguistic inflections to which I shall return shortly. I wish to underline a



Majestic Drag 79

methodological point: all the king's danced appearances should be taken into account when interpreting the ballet's political significance. No one role should be relegated to the status of curiosity. The king as a figure of enchantment and as an enchanted figure is, like the character Armide, highly seductive and ambivalent. Tasso depicted Armide to be, not unlike the French monarch, a theatre of attrac- tions. Her charms were "the arts by which she was able secretly to capture thousands and thousands of souls" (Tasso [1582] I987:4.96.89). The final song of the ballet characterizes Armide as "nothing less than a sun in her light" ("rien moins

qu'un soleil en clairte"), thus giving royal attributes to her magic power (Durand I617:23).21 Either directly or by association, the king "bodifies" a sequence of un- reconciled subject positions that mirror Renaud's inversion and evoke Armide's

power. What politics are here worked out in ritual and aesthetic terms? Louis XIII personally chose the story of Renaud, according to the librettist Du-

rand, for production as a court ballet. "Your Majesty," writes Durand in the ded-

icatory letter, "chose the deliverance of Renaud from among many other subjects presented to him" (Lacroix 1968:99). But the libretto also contains a disclaimer about the king's interest in the story of Renaud who was distracted from the siege of Jerusalem and "drowned in the lascivious concerns of love" (Tasso [1582] I987:4.17.72): "the King himself who can (it seems) give more licence to appe- tites, let everyone know that the only voluptuousness he cherished was that born of virtue" (Lacroix i968:ioi).22 Durand represents the king moralizing on Re- naud's conflict between honor and love even as the libretto itself attests to the

king's commission of a court entertainment-a plaisir-whose spectacular en- ticements yield "a night more delicious than the most beautiful spring day" (II9).23 Starting at 2:00 A.M. and lasting until 5:00 A.M., La Delivrance is the oc- casion for a night of pleasure at its most hyperbolic and unforgettable. Is this the time and place to rectify political instability, as McGowan and Downey suggest? If it is, the ballet's means of doing so is to combine, as the libretto says, frivolity with

gravity (I II).24

Although La Delivrance concludes with victory for the West Renaud's as well as the nation's-I wish to A concentrate on the king's ambiguous and even contra-

: i-- ---

dictory attributes in the ballet. The libretto lavishes attention on the Fire Demon role, detailing not only the

king's costume but listing the role's diverse allegorical interpretations. The costume dazzles the eye like a bed of fragmented mirrors: gold and silver thread and gilded braid on the flame costume reflect the candlelight em-

anating from the hall:

Ses flammes estoyent esmaillees et faites avec un tel artifice, que le feu mesme se rendoit plus es- clatant par elles, lorsque les rayons des flambeaux ..j|_ innombrables de la salle estoyent adressez dessus, et que ceux qui regardoient en recevoyent la re- flexion. (I05)

(His flames were enameled and fashioned with such artifice that they made the fire itself more i brilliant when the rays of the innumerable torches from the hall were reflected upon them, and then in turn reflected at the audience.)

This costume intensifies firelight by refracting it back i? at the audience. The king's body irradiates the bedaz- :

4. Armide, furious at Re- naud's departure, summons demons that have metamor- phosed into tortoises, crabs, and snails (Durand 1617). (Courtesy of Cliche Biblio-

theque Nationale de France, Paris)



80 Mark Franko

5. The platform revolves to reveal the king as God ey and his 12 warriors in their pavilion (Durand 1617). (Courtesy of Cliche Biblio- theque Nationale de France, Paris)

zling light of which it appears constituted. Durand relates the allegorical meanings of flame, which include the king's passion for his wife, his good intentions toward his subjects, and his majesty to foreigners, but also his power to destroy his enemies. Durand also points out the likeness of this demon to seraphim (Io5). Kan- torowicz's remarks are relevant here when he links the immortality and sexless

quality of the Phoenix as metaphor for the corporate body with the similar qualities of angels in both Catholic and Rabbinic traditions (1957:394-95). The fiery spirit projects a divine aureole, and thus the Fire Demon himself, although rep- resenting Armide's powers, also comes to suggest the corporate body of the king. Even in the iconography's religious connotations, the king's intermediate being is stressed in this likeness to angels. But the menacing quality of the Fire Demon would tend to overshadow the role's beatific connotations. It is perhaps as an af-

terthought but also as a sign of what actually transpired in the king's interpretation that Durand qualifies the more aggressive connotations of the Fire Demon costume with the king's contrary movement quality: extreme gentleness. "One



Majestic Drag 8I

would have thought it was to consume his enemies that he was covered in flame, were it not for the extreme gentleness of his actions" (Lacroix I968:Io5).S I shall return to this performative quality of "extreme" gentleness, sweetness, or kindness

(the term gentillesse is used later) that was sustained across the king's dancing of both roles. If it is true that the king's performance personalized him, and that this

personalization occurred principally through his movement qualities-his dance

artistry-then the issue of royal subjectivity is directly an issue of movement aesthetics (or of"actions" as it is phrased in the libretto).

When he appears as Godfrey, the king is likewise both illuminated and ob- scured by the darting rays that attract, emit, and refract ambient light:

L'esclat des pierreries cacha pour un temps la majeste des visages, et soudain

apres, les visages se faisant connoistre, firent negliger les enrichissements des habits. II fut douteux encores si les masques paroissoyent immobiles pour l'estonnement de voir tant de beautez, ou si les beautez mesmes ne se mou-

voyent point de peur de se divertir tant soit peu de l'agreable veue des

masques. (118-19)

(The brilliance of the jewels outshone for a time the majesty of the faces. But suddenly the faces became recognizable and overshadowed the richness of the costumes. One was uncertain whether the masks were immobilized at the surprise of so much beauty or whether the beauties themselves chose to remain still so as not to detract from the agreeable sight of the masks.)

In the suggestion of the uncertain oscillation between the jewels and the faces, or between the costumes and the masks, we note the reiteration of the contrary qualities of the Fire Demon already discussed. If the Fire Demon's glints of flame competed with and outdid the torches of the hall, the brilliance of the apparition of Godfrey and his entourage is bedazzling: it suggests an oscillation between still- ness and movement, identity and role playing. At the most crucial moment of the ballet's "political" message, perception is suspended by mirage-like uncertainty. Rather than ascribe this to "le merveilleux monarchique" (the monarchical su- pernatural), I suggest it is a calculated "failure" of the royal person's performance to consolidate its own subjectivity, in a word, its own performativity. This failure to personify, although due to excess rather than a lack, is in my view decisive. The manner of his representation exceeds the logic of his own identity without thereby mutating into political transcendence: it is indecipherable.

La Delivrance de Renaud presents us with a paradoxical situation in which hypermasculine identity and sovereignty are no longer or not yet coincidental. At this point, my argument invokes a strong genre demarcation between court ballet and theatre as well as between the earlier and later part of the I7th century26 When not separated into "serious" and "curious" instances, the king's appearances in La Delivrance de Renaud point to the paradox of sovereignty, which consists for Giorgio Agamben "in the fact that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order" (1998:15). In court ballets, this dis-placement is visual and kinesthetic because it affects the royal body as a sexed and gendered entity as well as the theatrical presentation of that body. This "state of exception" is necessary to the originary foundation of power which cannot be inscribed in history, and which thus assures the potential for violence.

I propose that the way the king's dance is scripted across contradictory roles underlines his relationship to this groundless founding moment of monarchical power. The grounds upon which dance establishes the identity of the body natural remain necessarily dis-located. Agamben stresses "the permanent state of juridico-political de-localization and dis-location" (38). This has a destabilizing



82 Mark Franko

effect on monarchical representation in court ballet, or, rather, ballet is the privileged place of this de-localization and dis-location. "Such is the Baroque trait," notes Gilles Deleuze, "an exterior always on the outside, an interior always on the inside" (I993:35). This baroque trope stands the figure of embodiment on its head. The spectacle neither asserts absolutism in a juridical sense nor undermines it in an aesthetic sense. If the king's subject position is to stand both within and without, then it should be understood in a ritual sense. It is the very aesthetics of ritual that calls performativity into question as citational practice by rendering its

instablility perceptible. This is neither performance nor performativity as contem-

porary theory defines them. We know that with the critical analysis of performativity comes the realization

that every performative is unstable. But that instability is remedied by repeated acts. The contradictions engendered by the king's roles and the uses of light as I have examined them raise the issue of theatricality in relation to performativity. Theatricality avows its instability. Theatricality operates on the basis of semiotic

6. The knights dance a geometrical dance to close the ballet (Durand 1617). (Courtesy of Cliche Biblio-

theque Nationale de France, Paris)



Majestic Drag 83

polarization within one term, and thus an indifferentiation of opposites (as between the inside and the outside); in performance this engenders a perceptual oscillation.27 These qualities are signaled in La Delivrance by the effects of double casting and the visual phenomena whereby sources of power are placed in question.

For Butler, however, performativity conceals its theatricality. The performative act, she specifies:

is not primarily theatrical; indeed its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated (and conversely, its theatricality gains a certain inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity). (1993:12-I3)

This is to say that, if disclosed, the historical basis of its citationality would both reveal its theatrical (that is false) nature, and conversely, that its theatricality (as apparent truthfulness) derives from the lack of any such disclosure. In the historical examples I have focused on, theatricality shuns the claims to the relative stability in either apparent truth or outright deception. It exposes its own performativity. Thus, theatricality is no longer a liability to power.

The founding gesture of sovereignty is the erasure of a historicity in which

power derives its strength from an arbitrary event. This historicity, as Butler remarks, is vowed to "the impossibility of a full disclosure" and constitutes what Agamben identifies as the "state of exception." It is not simply privileged; it is category-less. This lack of category is connoted in many court ballets of the early 17th century by the dispersion of the monarch's autonomous identity in a series of roles and mirroring effects that are in excess with respect to his personal affective self-control. Yet, when Renaud perceives his own reflection in the shield, the figure of reflection is deployed in the name of self-control. It is productive of Re- naud's shame at his own reflection and thus leads to a mastery of his fantasies.28 Yet, this dramatic progress implied by the protagonist's transformation is not iter- ated by the ballet's most performative aspects. In this way, the king stands outside the dramatic structure. It thus becomes evident why the king does not play Re- naud.

In closing, let me return to Louis XIII's personal performance style with two remarks on the grand ballet-the final group choreography of court ballets that celebrates the turn of events in the plot-where antistructure should presumably have resolved back into structure. "The majesty, which seems contrary to such actions," we read, "was always in his steps, and the grace would have been for him alone if those who accompanied him had not stolen it to make what they imitated admirable" (Lacroix 1968:I119).29 These words indicate to me that the qualities of

gentleness, sweetness, and kindness that had been those of the king as Fire Demon are also those of the king as Godfrey in the grand ballet. The roles as they are actually danced are, in this respect, not contradictory. The docility of the king's performance contrasts with the majesty encoded in his movement vocabulary. That majesty is recuperated almost by anticipation, because it moves "ahead of his steps" ("au devant de ses pas" [I I9]). And finally, grace belonged uniquely to the monarch unless "stolen" by others and mimetically reflected back at him. We have in these final comments a strikingly articulated confirmation of the dispersion and mirroring I analyzed in the king's various appearances. Here, performativity acts to iterate dis-location by dispersing its semiotic gesture across members of the king's own body or between himself and members of his court. In this sense, what is disclosed is not historicity in Butler's terms, but the impossibility of historical disclosure itself. The theatricalization of this disclosure of the impossibility of disclosure is spatialization. I think we have here a "subversive" reading of the corporate body which, as Kantorowicz stresses, is "collective only and exclusively



84 Mark Franko

with regard to Time" since "the plurality of its members was made up only and exclusively by succession" (1957:3 I2).

Spatialization of the performance of/for succession goes hand in hand with dis- ruption of the closure of the royal subject. Despite the literary source and its dramatic peripeteia, the ballet delivers the stasis of instability, one might almost say the antidramaturgical perpetuity of its subversion. Dance and music, rather than belonging with those spectacular effects that reinforce in their blatant magnifi- cence the political message of power's presence, are actually the formally subversive means through which the performance sustains the ambiguity and contradiction of personal sovereignty, and leaves it with the audience to carry away and contemplate or resolve.30

Notes

i. A version of this article was presented as a keynote address to the Annual Symposium in Me- dieval, Renaissance and Baroque Studies, "Performance and Performativity," at the Univer- sity of Miami in 2002.

2. Butler calls this relationship between the sexed body and its assigned gender "expressive," a term whose importance in dance theory cannot be overestimated, but which Butler deploys in a strictly philosophical sense. In Bodies That Matter (1993) she replaces "expression" with

performativity. 3. Catherine Soussloff first suggested the visual aspects of performativity in her essay "Like a

Performance: Performativity and the Historicized Body, from Bellori to Mapplethorpe" (2000:69-98).

4. See Giorgio Agamben's critique of Kantorowicz's emphasis on this aspect of the theory in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (I998:9I-I03).

5. This is, of course, where Butler's critique of Austin also begins. See also Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (I995).

6. For background on "raison d'etat" in the early I7th century, see Thuau (I966). "Raison d'etat" was the 17th-century term for sovereign authority. Thuau writes:

This monarchical ideology [...] is at the junction of two currents: on the one hand, a "philosophy" of the monarchy, the work ofjurists and theorists in the King's service, and, on the other hand, a religion of the monarchy, which through its fetes and cere- monies imposes itself on imaginations and sensibilities. (I966:14)

7. Louis Marin: "The fete, by its magic and in that register, represents more clearly than any other domain the phantasms that animate the reason of state in its principle and project" (I988:I93- 94).

8. This point is not contra Kantorowicz, but may actually flow from his positioning of French monarchy with respect to the two-body theory. He noted:

France though fully aware of the different manifestations of individual king and im- mortal Dignity, eventually interpreted the absolutist rulership in such a fashion that the distinctions between personal and supra-personal aspects were blurred or even eliminated. (1957:446)

9. Thus we cannot agree with Canova-Green's position that: "The only true meaning of court divertissement is given it, not in its aesthetic value but by its value at once as effect and representation of political power" (1993:58).

Io. For Butler there is no body prior to its construction, although this absence poses a potential problem for thinking the operations of performativity in appropriate theatrical terms.

1 I. The distinction Butler develops between performance and performativity in Bodies That Matter is articulated in Gender Trouble in terms of "performativeness" and "expression": "The distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial" (1990:14I).

I2. For an earlier version of this essay, see "Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Perfor- mances of Louis XIV" in TDR (1994:71-82).

13. I understand Careri to mean by this that the control of affect, part of the civilizing process Elias describes, is staged on the male body.

14. I thank Richard Kroll for bringing this article to my attention.



Majestic Drag 85

5. This scene occurs in book I6 of Tasso. I6. The character of the mage Alcine and her bewitchment of Roger in Ariosto's Rolando Furioso

(1 532) parallels in many ways Tasso's narrative of Renaud and Armide. The story also in-

spired a number of important ballets and comedies-ballets, the most noteworthy of which in France are Le Ballet de Monseigneur le duc de Vandosme (I610) and Moliere's Les Plaisirs de l'ile enchantee (1664).

I7. McGowan situates the melodramatic genre of court ballet, of which La Delivrance is a prime example, between I610 and 1620 (I963:72).

18. The king's role as one of the demons is what associates him the most closely with Armide, who is surrounded by a number of other demonic characters in the ballet. The demons are an extension of Armide's magic power and an expression of her energy and will rather than

representations of evil. 19. I thank Kate Van Orden for bringing this research to my attention. 20. On geometrical dance, see Franko (1993:15-3 I). 2I. The original publication of the libretto by Ballard contains the music, plates, and song lyrics.

It is at the Cliche Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris: BN Res Vm. 7.683 (2). 22. "Le Roy mesme, qui peut (ce semble) donner plus de licence aux appetits, a fait connoistre

i tout le monde qu'il n'estimoit aucune volupte loiiable que celle qui naissoit de la vertu." 23. "Une nuit plus delicieuse que la plus belle journee du printemps." 24. "Un Ballet de bouffonnerie et de gravite entremeslee." 25. "N'eust este la douceur extresme de ses actions, on eust creu que des lors sa Majeste s'estoit

couverte de feu pour consumer ses ennemis." 26. Mitchell Greenberg (I994) makes a strong case for the coincidence of patriarchy and sover-

eignty in court theatre of the I7th century. 27. For a theory of theatricality as indifferentiation, see Marco Baschera's Thedtralite dans l'oeuvre

de Moliere (1998). 28. On the relation of shame to performativity, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Queer Perfor-

mativity: HenryJames's The Art of the Novel" (I993). 29. "La majeste qui semble contraire a telles actions estoit toujours au devant de ses pas, et la

grace n'eust este pour luy seul, si ceux qui l'accompagnoyent ne l'eussent par fois derobee

pour faire admirer ce qu'ils faisoyent en l'imitant." 30. I am grateful for the Collegium Musicum performance led by Kate Van Orden of La Delivr-

ance de Renaud at Hertz Hall, University of California at Berkeley, 27 February 2002. It con- firmed for me that the music supports the effects I am ascribing to the dance.

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Mark Franko is the author ofThe Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the I930S (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Indiana University Press, 1995), Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge University Press, 1993), The Dancing Body in Renaissance Cho- reography (Summa Publications, 1986), and coeditor, with Annette Richards, of Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines (Wesleyan University Press, 2000). He has published numerous articles in anthologies and journals such as Res, TDR, Theatre Journal, Annals of Scholarship, Discourse, Social Text, and Per- formance Research. His research has been supported by The Getty Research Center, The American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the France/Berkeley Fund. A dancer and choreographer, Franko has presented his work inter- nationally since 1985, and is Professor of Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.



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