Dancing Queen: Marie De Médicis' Ballets at the Court of Henri IV

Under glittering lights in the Louvre palace, the French court ballets danced by Queen Marie de Médicis prior to Henri IV’s assassination in 1610 attracted thousands of spectators ranging from pickpockets to ambassadors from across Europe. Drawing on newly discovered primary sources as well as theories and methodologies derived from literary studies, political history, musicology, dance studies, and women’s and gender studies, Dancing Queen traces how Marie’s ballets authorized her incipient political authority through innovative verbal and visual imagery, avant-garde musical developments, and ceremonial arrangements of objects and bodies in space. Making use of women’s "semi-official" status as political agents, Marie’s ballets also manipulated the subtle social and cultural codes of international courtly society in order to more deftly navigate rivalries and alliances both at home and abroad.

At times the queen’s productions could challenge Henri IV’s immediate interests, contesting the influence enjoyed by his mistresses or giving space to implied critiques of official foreign policy, for example. Such defenses of Marie’s own position, though, took shape as part of a larger governmental program designed to promote the French consort queen’s political authority not in its own right but as a means of maintaining power for the new Bourbon monarchy in the event of Henri IV’s untimely death.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Principles of Transcription and Translation

Introduction

1 Magnificence, Mistresses, and Marie’s Dance of Maternity
2 Royal Women’s Ballet and/as Royal Ceremonial
3 Alliances and Others
4 Eros and "Absolutism"
5 Dances of Diplomacy: London, Valladolid, Paris

Conclusion

Appendices

Appendix 1: Verse Texts for the Ballet of the Sixteen Virtues (1602)
Appendix 2: Verse Texts for the Ballet of Diana and her Nymphs (1609)
Appendix 3: Verse Texts for the Ballet de Madame (1609)

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Melinda J. Gough is a professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University.

"The book can be read by historians more generally as well as scholars who specialize in dance history. They will all find an interest in the way Marie de Médicis contributed to dance history, on the one hand, and to French history, on the other. Gough succeeds in reconsidering the queen not simply as a patron of the arts but also as a cunning performer, whose intentions were at once artistic and political. Furthermore, this monograph opens the way to the reconsideration of the role and place of women’s court entertainments, as Gough suggests, in order to ‘encourage future works on the topic.’"

"Dancing Queen offers a new reading of the history of France at a time of enormous change. Thanks to the close reading and analysis of details that, at first, may seem to be not very significant, and thanks to a brilliant ability to connect details that may not, at first, seem linked together, Dancing Queen offers a much richer understanding of Marie’s role as queen, the difficulties she had to face, and the results she obtained through her creation of an ‘alternative center’ of power at court. Thanks to this volume, scholars will now be able to understand more clearly the social and political significance of the court ballets Marie sponsored, which will provide an additional and important source for our understanding of France in the early seventeenth century."

"Dancing Queen's fascinating account of how ambiguity was deliberately exploited to convey different messages to different audiences raises a question that deserves a bit more attention: how intelligible were these often subtle messages to each ballet's intended audience? There is no doubt, however, that Gough has made them substantially more intelligible to her intended audience in this scholarly, informed and illuminating book."

"Through meticulous, wide-ranging interdisciplinary research, Melinda Gough builds a compelling case in the five chapters of this book that Marie de Médicis used to advance both her own status as queen consort of France, and the interests of the French monarchy in the fraught political period of the early 1600s."

"As a detailed study of a genre of performance that had a bearing on elite entertainments at the Caroline court, this book should be of contextual interest to Milton scholars, especially in its welcome understanding of the complex socio-political interactions between the various European powers."