Bulletin of the Comediantes

THE STUDY OF EARLY MODERN COURTLY CEREMONIES has experienced a significant surge in the last decade or so, revealing their centrality in the public and political cultures of Europe and its empires. These studies have, among other things, identified early modern courts as centers of great artistic production that enriched material and cultural life, while also enhancing the power of their monarchs or princes. Monarchs and nobles often commissioned artistic works from painters, architects, and musicians—as well as writers, historians, poets, and philosophers—for inclusion in courtly plays and ceremonies. As these events conveyed the patrons’ habits, tastes, and worldviews, they shaped early modern societies, delineating the hierarchies that ordered them and those of the more private sphere of the court. The production and staging of royal triumphal entries, masques, ludic games, and plays employed all the arts available to rulers to exercise their authority and instruct wider audiences on the workings of social and political power.

In the specific case of court theater, new techniques combining music, dance, architecture, perspective scenery, and sophisticated stage machinery enhanced written texts, producing great works of “magical illusion at the service of the exaltation of the monarch” (6). Performing the King Divine examines these various techniques in Spanish court theater, not just as printed literature but also as dramatic texts that came to life through a “net of communicative strategies, verbal and otherwise, that formed part of the [overall] spectacle” (8). Moving chronologically, Marchante Aragón examines transformations in court theater from the late Middle Ages, during which it conveyed the king’s physical proximity to the divine, to the end of the seventeenth century, when it presented the Spanish Habsburg king Charles II as himself a divine being. In examining this process, the author draws from speech act theory the notion of the “performative utterance.” This approach informs the title of the book, Performing the King Divine; in other words, onstage performances of kingship produced monarchical divinity. [End Page 165]

One characteristic of early modern court theater that made these transformations possible was the inclusion of the patron in the audience as part of the spectacle, dissolving the boundaries between the “real” and the “performed” worlds. Such blurring of boundaries conveyed to audiences the special link between the worldly and the divine, as found, for example, in the court dramas created at the turn of the sixteenth century by Juan del Encina and Gil Vicente. Such associations worked within a larger courtly ceremonial language derived both from political thought and from ritual performances aimed at legitimating kingly rule. Under the reign of Charles I (1516–56), as part of the claim to the imperial title that in 1519 made him Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Habsburg dynastic language came into use in Spanish court theater. According to Marchante Aragón, this language was founded on “fabulous genealogical arguments” (87–95) entrusting the Spanish Habsburg with the “providential mission of restoring the earthly Paradise represented with images of the classical Golden Age” (10). These genealogies connected the emperor with Jesus Christ via the Roman emperors, gods of antiquity, and priest-kings of the Old Testament the Habsburg claimed as their ancestors, ultimately transforming him into the ruler best positioned to bring back the Golden Age. Charles V’s divine descent and genealogical rights along with his inherited virtues were made explicit in plays by means of the use of mythological imagery.

Habsburg genealogies and mythological imagery were imbued in larger fields of meaning. The salón de saraos, the theatrical space built circa 1605 in the royal palace in Valladolid, was designed in such a way that its decorative and architectural programs were essential components of the “performative text” (105). The building itself was part of a dynamic creation of meaning, as for Marchante Aragón, this space was intended “to create and fix the memory of a divinely ordained imperial dynasty by displaying a series of symbols in its architecture...