National Characters: Playing Against Type in the Ballet des Muses (1666–67)

Abstract

Abstract Although exotic figures were a staple of the ballet de cour under Louis XIV, critics of the genre have tended to dismiss these masquerades as rehearsals of ignorant stereotypes about foreign peoples and places. This essay argues instead that the ballets' seemingly grotesque citations of preconceptions about other countries were often informed by a subtle understanding of the discursive force of national tropes. Through an examination of the sophisticated use of national stereotypes in Benserade, Lully, and Molière's Ballet des Muses (1666–67), particularly in the Spanish masquerade, Molière's Sicilian comedy and the Moorish dance, I aim to show that this work explicitly figures national character as a formal commonplace rather than a meaningful category. By enacting well-known stereotypes in ways that divorce them from any notion of original identity, the ballet's performers made space for a critique of more essentialist interpretations of nationality, including those used to underpin French claims to superiority. Thus reframing 'nationality' as performable, the work implies that mastery of the performing arts displaces any particular 'national' trait as the basis for a claim to European or global dominance. As a corollary, this essay also seeks to correct the common misconception that the understanding of 'identities' as performable and performative is uniquely a product of our own postmodern age.