It was not that Louis had lost his hold on court ritual. Indeed, the ceremonial requirements at Versailles in particular grew ever more elaborate in the final years of the king’s reign. But this too represented a weakening, and if courtiers increased their vigilance, it may have been because they sensed—with the Duchesse d’Orléans—that the forms were growing brittle. It was no accident that in the years immediately before and after Louis’s death in 1715, Paris regained its luster, the Opera took its distance from the court, and the Italian players, who had been so unceremoniously expelled, returned. Taste was also changing in ways that favored lighter and more effervescent (and erotic) divertissements and episodic forms: high society held intimate fêtes galantes in private country retreats, clothing became (for a moment) looser and less ornate, and the prevailing mood shifted from Nicolas Poussin to Antoine Watteau.56
In this sense, ballets at the end of Louis’s reign were very much of their time: lighthearted reminiscences, decorative miniatures, or theatrical portraits of a court art in decline. L’Europe Galante, after all, was little more than a pageant of divertissements, each depicting a different European culture—a commonplace trope mocked by Molière in the Ballet des Nations and reaching back to the earliest days of the ballet de cour. But it was not just that these ballets had a wispy, retrospective air. Things really had changed, and not only in matters of taste and etiquette. Courtiers and kings had once been the main players in ballets, but at the Paris Opera they now watched professionals enact their roles onstage. Ballets had once originated at court; now those at the Opera rarely did. Moreover, social dances were becoming simpler, whereas professional technique was gaining complexity, with new and more difficult steps and dances added each year. Underscoring the magnitude of the change, in 1713 a formal school was established at the Paris Opera to train professional dancers—and continues to do so to this day.
The circle was thus closing: ballet had moved from court to theater, from social to theatrical dance. But in the process—and this is the crucial point—the imprint of court life was retained. Ballet, after all, was a perfect artifact of seventeenth-century French aristocratic culture: an amalgam of the rules and regulations of court life, of chivalry and etiquette, codes of noblesse, le merveilleux, and baroque spectacle. All of these things were written into its steps and practices. Moreover, if ballet seemed—as the Ancients claimed—to cleave to baroque flattery, deception, and bombast, or to be locked in the straitjacket of court ritual and artifice, we should remember that it also articulated high ideals and formal principles. Because the etiquette elaborated at Louis’s court strove for symmetry and order, and drew from deep currents of Renaissance and Classical thinking, ballet was imbued with an anatomical geometry and clear physical logic that also had transcendent implications. As an art, it was pulled between the strong poles of classical and baroque style. It was a vision and defense of nobility—not as a social class but as an aesthetic and way of life.
*They called themselves the Pléiade after the ancient Greek poets who believed in the power of poetry to mediate between gods and men.
*The first Italian opera to be performed in Paris was La Finta Pazza in 1645, with dances by the Italian Giovanni-Battista Balbi. In 1647, Orphée created a storm of resentment over the considerable funds dispersed for Italian art. During the Fronde when Mazarin was targeted, Giacomo Torelli, the “wizard” theatrical designer, was imprisoned, and many other Italian artists fled.
*Wigs were probably introduced by Louis XIII, who coveted fine locks of curled hair but found himself balding.
*Molière, who spent much of his life entertaining the king, was refused final rites and denied a proper Christian burial; Jean-Baptiste Lully, dancer, musician, and court composer, called for a priest on his deathbed and was compelled to burn his final opera and renounce his profession, which he did (though lore has it that he slyly retained another copy). He received a grand funeral at the Madeleine.
*Foucquet would soon be dismissed and imprisioned, reportedly for the extravagance of this fête and his presumptions to grandeur, although his fall was also part of a larger power play orchestrated by the king.
*Molière was gone: he died onstage in 1673 while performing Le Malade imaginaire.
*La Fontaine also occasionally appeared in court ballets, but otherwise we know little about her life except that she eventually settled (though without taking vows) in two different convents, and died in 1738.
Children of Terpsichore, give up fancy jumps, entrechats and other complicated steps; abandon affectations for feelings, simple graces and expressiveness; apply yourself to the noble pantomime.
—JEAN-GEORGES NOVERRE
I add my feeble voice to all the voices of England to make a little clearer the difference between their freedoms and our slavery, between their wise confidence and our crazy superstition, between the encouragement that London gives to the arts and the shameful oppression under which they languish in Paris.
—VOLTAIRE
of Louis XIV’s death in 1715, classical ballet had spread to cities across Europe. Taken up by monarchs who looked to the French court as the ne plus ultra of the civilized world, it had set down roots in Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, the Habsburg realms, the German states, Poland, Russia, and also in many Italian cities, where la belle danse encountered a lively indigenous tradition. This welcome, however, soon turned sour. In the course of the eighteenth century, French ballet was criticized and attacked everywhere, even, and especially, in its most settled stronghold: Paris. Indeed, precisely because ballet was a court art par excellence and seemed in many ways to personify French aristocratic style, it became a target for men and women who aspired to create a different and less rigidly hierarchical society. To the philosophes and their admirers, and to those abroad who were becoming increasingly suspicious of French taste and customs, ballet was no longer a symbol of refinement and elegance; to the contrary, it had come to stand for decadence and decline.
For ballet masters and dancers, there was only one way forward: reform. Thus in the course of the eighteenth century artists across Europe set out to radically restructure their art. It was a broad movement that spread across several fronts, from London, Paris, and Stuttgart to Vienna and Milan. Throughout, the Paris Opera remained the capital of ballet, but in spite of its considerable prestige it was also administratively and politically entrenched: the most important artistic breakthroughs happened elsewhere. The pull of Paris remained so strong, however, that the new kinds of dance that emerged took full hold only when they were brought back to the center and performed on the Opera’s legendary stage.
Reform had many protagonists, chief among them women. Traditionally relegated to a supporting role, in the course of the eighteenth century ballerinas emerged as outspoken critics and bold innovators. As we shall see, they also found common cause with male dancers interested in “low” and popular forms; drawing on fairground traditions, Italian mime, and acrobatic styles, these artists reinvigorated ballet from below. At the same time, others attempted to shift the emphasis away from noble steps and comportment and toward acting and pantomime, in keeping with French Enlightenment critiques of the perceived fakery and artifice of la belle danse and the ancien régime alike. Yet for all their different approaches, dance reformers everywhere were animated by a single overarching desire: to cast aside French ballet’s aristocratic heritage with its angels, gods, and kings, and to remake dance instead in the image of man himself.
The English had always harbored a deep suspicion of ballet. Unlike the seventeenth-century French kings, who had disciplined their nobility into a tightly knit society in Paris or at court, the English elite was more rural, reclusive, and independent: “the great oaks that shade a country,” wrote Edmund Burke. Rank depended on land ownership, and the aristocracy preferred their manor houses and vast country estates to the more confined and socially regulated environs of the court or city. Moreover, they did not share the French prejudice against work, a
nd the luxuries of an idle existence held less appeal: they taxed themselves, albeit lightly, and many readily participated in trade and industry. Little impressed by opulent displays and spectacles, the peers and gentry of England had only peripheral interest in the rules and forms of ballet. The fact that ballet was French did not help: the long-standing English antipathy toward their neighbors across the Channel made them wary followers of its court arts. The conditions that gave classical ballet life in France simply did not exist.1
The English did, of course, have a court, but by the seventeenth century it had become a relatively wan and pale affair, a shrinking and unconvincing imitation of its French cousin. The masque, as Ben Jonson duly noted, was a “studie of magnificence” that offered lavish entertainments and dancing, often staged in the royal banqueting hall at Whitehall, but its festivities were no rival to the ballet de cour. To be sure, Charles I (1600–1649), who firmly believed in the Divine Right of Kings, took the French court as a model and sent representatives abroad to study its practices; he even planned to build a Versailles-like palace and hoped to emulate the richly costumed theatrical and ceremonial events staged by the French kings. But these plans were abruptly abandoned in 1649: at the climax of the English Civil War, the ill-fated king was tried for high treason and led to a scaffold outside the banqueting hall, where he was summarily beheaded.2
Under the new leadership of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans, the performing arts were sharply curtailed: playhouses were closed, and stern polemicists such as William Prynne declared theatrical entertainments “effeminate,” “lust provoking,” and likely to “corrupteth and depraveth the minde.” Drawing on a deep current of Puritan and Calvinist loathing for theater and for any exhibition of the human—and especially female—body, Prynne’s views were hardly original. “The whole bodie,” one writer had exclaimed in 1603, “is abused to wantonnesse in dauncing.…here is an artificiall grace, and artificiall pace, an artificiall face, and in euerie part a wicket art is added to encrease the naturall filthinesse.” When the ballet master John Playford published his book The English Dancing Master in 1651, he self-effacingly apologized for even raising the subject of dance, since “these Times and the Nature of it do not agree.”3
With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, the times reverted and court entertainments resumed with almost forced exuberance. Like his father, Charles II sent representatives to France to learn more about Louis XIV’s spectacles, and French ballet masters were imported to bring pomp and sheen to the beleaguered English monarchy. But Charles’s court was notoriously lacking in social etiquette and propriety. Charles was an unlikely king who despised ceremony and formal ritual—to the horror of his supporters, he even openly mocked his own high position, prompting the well-placed Earl of Mulgrave to remark that Charles “could not on premeditation act the part of a King for a moment,” since he could not help “letting all distinction and ceremony fall to the ground as useless and foppish.”4
The kings and queens that followed were (for their own reasons) no better when it came to court ceremony and ballets: William III was Dutch, Protestant, and hardworking, and had little taste for spectacle or polite society; Anne presided over a drab court and was preoccupied with politics and her own difficult pregnancies and ill health; her successor George I was Hanoverian and reclusive, spoke little English, and deliberately retreated from public events and pageantry. In the English context, French ballet thus hardly stood a chance. As the artist William Hogarth later explained, the English hated “pompous unmeaning grand ballets” and preferred instead more lively and comic styles.5
Indeed they did. Reaching back at least to Shakespeare, the English had a long-standing taste for commedia dell’arte, farce, and pantomime. Italian troupes were a constant presence in England from the sixteenth century, and Charles II invited the well-known Italian mime Tiberio Fiorillo to London no fewer than five times to perform at court. Early in the reign of George I, French pantomime troupes arrived in full force, and Harlequin became a popular stock figure who cropped up frequently in what one prim critic disapprovingly referred to as “monstrous medlies” throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6
As things stood at the end of the seventeenth century, ballet was seen as a “frivolous Circumstance” at best and at worst as a suspect enterprise cloaking indecent impulses and vaguely related to prostitution. Yet in the early eighteenth century, this changed quite suddenly: dance came to the fore, and for a brief time it seemed that ballet, reformed and seen in a new light, might take its place as a distinctly English theatrical art. The change owed much to the efforts of a simple English dancing master from Shrewsbury, John Weaver. Weaver was born in 1673 to a local dancing master who taught ballet to aspiring gentlemen at the Shrewsbury School; like his father, Weaver became a dancer and teacher and would eventually run a respectable boarding school in the town. He also taught social dances to the nobility in London. Known for his comic skills and clowning (he had a taste for practical jokes), he performed frequently in light entertainments typically inserted between the acts of plays and bearing titles such as “that delightful Exercise of Vaulting on the Manag’d Horse, according to the Italian manner.”7
As it turned out, however, Weaver was more than a run-of-the-mill comic dancer or schoolteacher. He belonged to a small group of like-minded ballet masters living and teaching in London, including one Isaac, who was Queen Anne’s dancing master, and Thomas Caverley, who ran an esteemed school in Queen’s Square. Like dancing masters everywhere, these men closely followed developments in the French capital, and in 1706 Weaver translated and published Feuillet’s treatise on notation. Several years later he produced an ambitious, freewheeling (and freely plagiarized) reflection on his art: An Essay Towards an History of Dancing, In which the whole Art and its Various Excellencies are in some Measure Explain’d. The work was dedicated to Caverley and published by the Whig bookseller Jacob Tonson, who also published Milton, Congreve, and Dryden. And this was only the beginning: Weaver later published (among other writings) his Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures on Dancing, and a polemical defense of his own life’s work, The History of the Mimes and Pantomime.
Where did this outburst of enthusiasm and writing about dance come from? Weaver was unusually gifted and ambitious, but he was also the product of a very particular and dynamic historical moment. In the early eighteenth century, London became a thriving metropolis, displacing its court as the center of English cultural life. The city grew precipitously from some 475,000 people in 1670 to 675,000 by 1750 and became, in the words of one observer, a “mighty Rendezvous of Nobility, Gentry, Courtiers, Divines, Lawyers, Physicians, Merchants, Seamen, and all kinds of Excellent Artificers, of the most Refined Wits and the most Excellent Beauties.” The theatrical “season” took hold, drawing aristocrats from their country estates to London. Burgeoning leisure activities, entertainments, and art vied for support among the elite and popular classes alike, and—with the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695—publications boomed, Grub Street emerged, and commercial publishers fought to harness a pent-up desire for news, gossip, and literature.8
Coffeehouses and clubs were formed, bringing together like-minded people to discuss and debate the affairs of the day. Among them was the Kit Kat Club, founded in 1696 by a group of aristocratic Whigs including Tonson and Congreve, along with Horace Walpole and the writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. These men belonged to a generation shadowed by the memory of civil war, regicide, and deep religious and political schisms; they had witnessed the breakdown of court culture and seen London grow before their eyes into a sometimes overwhelming urban mix of classes and peoples. Under the influence of writers such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who himself had been educated by the philosopher John Locke, the Whigs of the Kit Kat Club developed an ethic of “politeness,” which they hoped would become the foundation of a stable new English urban and civic culture. “All Politeness,” Shaftesbury wrote, “is owing to Liberty. W
e polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision.”9
The politeness they had in mind was distinctly different from what Shaftesbury maligned as “Court-Politeness”—that “dazzling” and corrupt form of behavior that had reached its height in the court of the Sun King but had also poisoned the Restoration court of Charles II, for all the royal indifference to French frippery and forms. France, Shaftesbury insisted, was a modern-day Rome: decadent and in decline. The future lay with a simpler, less adorned style of social interaction and an aesthetic that was “above the modern turn & species of Grace, above the Dancing-Master, above the Actor & the Stage, above the other Masters of Exercise.” The idea was to replace the decaying court with a new kind of moral authority, rooted in urban life and the freedoms of Britain’s hard-won parliamentary system.10
To this end, Steele and Addison founded The Spectator in 1711. It quickly became the most important journal of its time, and its essays were circulated and reprinted widely. At a penny an issue, it was reasonably affordable and appealed to men and women of the elite and aspiring classes alike. “Mr. Spectator” was a representative seventeenth-century gentleman: born on a rural estate, he resided in London and spent his days debating standards of taste and style. As a Frenchified ballet master, John Weaver may have seemed an unlikely ally of the sober-minded Steele, but Weaver nonetheless managed to convince Steele that ballet was an invaluable civic tool—that its manners and graces were not necessarily effete and frilly but instead a form of politeness that might be turned to the cause of English civic propriety. In 1712, Weaver published an open letter in The Spectator, introduced by Steele himself, in which he argued the merits of dancing as a high art but above all as a vital educational tool “of universal Benefit,” as he later put it, “to all Lovers of Elegance and Politeness.” That same year Tonson published Weaver’s Essay Towards an History of Dancing.11
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