A recent critical facsimile edition of one of early ballet's best-documented works, La Délivrance de Renaud (1617), draws attention to remarkable French records of seventeenth-century theatrical dance and music. This carefully edited and attractive volume, the first to focus on a single work from the Louis XIII era, opens with bilingual articles on the production's sources and historical context. The six contributors to this book—Charles T. Downey, Georgie Durosoir, Greer Garden, Anne Surgers, Kate van Orden, and Peter Walls—provide interdisciplinary analyses of the performance and its records from a range of disciplines including musicology, theater, and dance studies. In addition to a full-sized, color copy of the 1617 livret of Etienne Durand's Discours au vray du ballet dansé par le Roy, the publication includes an English-language translation and new edition of the music. These nuanced contributions revise and build upon earlier analyses of the performance by Margaret McGowan (Reference McGowan1963) and Henri Prunières (Reference Prunières1914).

Published in Paris by the king's music printer Pierre Ballard, the Discours au vray is one of the most comprehensive and cohesive records of an early seventeenth-century ballet. The slim booklet is a mine of information on court spectacle, offering contemporary scholars a rare instance of a beautifully preserved livret containing music notation, images related to the ballet, and detailed descriptions of the work.Footnote ¹

Counter to perceptions of ballets de cour as fussy aristocratic entertainments, this facsimile edition, edited by New Zealand musicologist Greer Garden, puts the medium's satirical and politically charged elements into evidence. The ballet's source, in cantos from Torquato Tasso's La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), celebrates the return of the hero, Renaud, from Crusading armies in Palestine in the eleventh century and the end of his love affair with a “powerful Muslim sorceress … a comic character, danced and sung by a man en travesti” (41).Footnote ² Illustrations of the enchantress in this facsimile include some of the finest, extant representations of a seventeenth-century travesti role in ballet de cour.Footnote ³

Music for the ballet, transcribed from diverse sources by the volume's music editor Charles T. Downey, gives insight into the work's collaborative context (269).Footnote ⁴ The team of composers working with Pierre Guédron on the ballet included accomplished dancers and musicians who also performed in the work. One of the four composers associated with La Délivrance de Renaud—Jacques de Montmorency (dit Belleville), of whom little is known—likely danced, composed music, and choreographed roles for the demons in the performance (60).Footnote ⁵ His cross-disciplinary practice is characteristic of a period in which, as contributor Georgie Durosoir proposes, “dance was almost consubstantial with the practice of the violin” (60). Professional performers, including Belleville and Marais (in the role of Armide), appeared in the production with members of the court, performing what Durosoir terms an “interpenetration of roles” in which “composers served as heads of orchestras, violinists were also dancers, and singers performed as lutanists and actors” (56). The artists' ability to move between disciplines, she suggests, lies at the root of the early medium.

In the narrow sense of actual dance steps, little information on the ballet's movement appears in Durand's livret.Footnote ⁶ Clear in his account, however, is the work's ambition as choreographic theater. Court ballets are profoundly and self-consciously pluridisciplinary, drawing on a wide variety of techniques for theatrical impact. A single scene from La Délivrance de Renaud, for example, includes such lush compositional prompts as the sound of infinite birds singing with counterfeit human voices and a working fountain containing the figure of a naked siren.Footnote ⁷ Other standout images from the livret include a ballet of demons (disguised as snails, crayfish, and turtles), animal–human chimeras, and a wild dance of elderly women (vieilles) costumed, Durand specifies, in men's clothing from the waist down and women's clothing from the waist up.Footnote ⁸

Performed late on Sunday, January 29, 1617, between two thirty and five in the morning, La Délivrance de Renaud featured Louis XIII, then sixteen, performing as a Demon in a cast composed of high-profile members of the court (7–13).Footnote ⁹ Durand's account of the ballet lingers on spectacular effects, including the king's reflective costume for the Demon of Fire, scattering light through the candle-lit theater. Durand also describes scene changes and transitions in his narrative, praising sets that seemed to move “of their own accord” and dancers that take cues from a gesture by the king.Footnote ¹⁰ As Mark Franko argues in “Majestic Drag” (Reference Franko2003) and “Jouer avec le feu” (Reference Franko and Careri1999), such stagecraft doubles as political metaphor in the ballet, celebrating the spectacularity of the king's body across material, esoteric, performative, religious, and ideological registers.Footnote ¹¹

Given a court whose history is as spectacular (and bloody) as the sources of either recent television series The Tudors or The Borgias, this publication takes a subdued approach to the Bourbon family drama. The thirteen articles introducing the facsimile are rich in biographical detail, yet they withhold the fate of the librettist, Étienne (or Éstienne) Durand. His public execution at the Place de Grèves [he was charged with lèse majesté and plotting against the ballet's leads (Louis XIII and Charles de Luynes)], concluded with the burning of the thirty-three-year-old poet's body, along with his writings, in July 1618 outside Paris' Hôtel de ville.Footnote ¹²

McGowan's influential chapter on La Délivrance de Renaud, in l'Art de ballet de cour en France (Reference McGowan1963)—long considered a definitive reference on court ballets—makes explicit parallels between the performance's plot and Louis' coup d'état. This longstanding historiographical tradition equates the king's mother, Marie de Médicis, with the figure of the enchantress in the ballet, Armide, and Louis XIII's coup against his mother with Renaud's deliverance from her sorcery and her love.Footnote ¹³ However, in a significant break with McGowan, Durand's fate only appears as a footnote in the new facsimile edition (23). This move away from a long-established reading of the performance, while commendable for its attention to the historical record, risks underplaying Durand's contributions to the medium and his fascinating, occasionally violent narrative voice. Though this critical edition of the Discours au vray achieves rigor from its commitment to chronological caution, the cost of this approach is to disperse what Anne Surgers, who contributes a substantial article on architecture and visual sources, terms a reading of the ballet as a “forceful political act” (87).Footnote ¹⁴ The volume's historiographical stance also contrasts with Mark Franko's vivid, theoretically rich analyses of Louis XIII–era ballets in “Fragment of the Sovereign” (Reference Franko2007), “Majestic Drag” (Reference Franko2003), and Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (1993).

In contrast with this publication's largely conservative approach to historiography,Footnote ¹⁵ Surgers offers particularly nuanced readings of the ballets, synthesizing aspects of critical theory with concrete studies of architecture and visual sources. Surgers hypothesizes that La Délivrance de Renaud was staged at the Palais du Louvre in the Salle des Cariatides, and theorizes that the ballet's mismatched records produce a kind of a hypertext and engages with emblems as iconographical sources for demons and chimeras in the ballet (see Orgel Reference Orgel1975, 37). Surgers's considerable contribution to the volume is not available in English, however, and her study of images would benefit from the inclusion of art historical analyses of the engravings in Durand's Discours au vray.

By contrast with Surgers' scholarship on characters as emblems in La Délivrance de Renaud, the role of “Mediterranean” figures in the ballet receives surprisingly little attention. Verse written by René Bordier for the “Moor” played by the French aristocrat the Sieur de Brantes makes an elaborate, poetic claim that the fire that “blackened” (a noircy) the character's skin, and burned his heart to ash, is the result of a “cruel conflagration” of a lover's beauty and a “conquering eye” (263).Footnote ¹⁶ Bordier's verse for the Moor, likely handed on paper to female spectators at the end of the performance, gives insight into the racial, religious, and sexual politics of early ballet and carnival traditions. Taking up Tasso's discourse on the passions, the figure of the Moor's burning heart is not only a potent image of religious conversion, but also a trope bound up with exoticism, desire, and fear. The stanzas for this burning man also raise questions about links between the régime's invocation of conquest in the Mediterranean and its celebration of affect and furore in Tasso's religious epic Jerusalem Delivered (see Cozzarelli Reference Cozzarelli2007).

Laced with potent symbolism, including the Christian sign of the burning heart, violent images of love in the ballet conflate chivalric discourse on the beloved with the performance of racialized signs of subjugation, excess, and affect. In conjunction with a study of the poem's placement near the end of a ballet staging the First Crusade, a cultural history of the Moor in ballets de cour would make a significant contribution to early dance studies and to legacies of the genre, possibly also including American minstrelsy (as the popular and formal practice of these dance forms moved with colonial settlers to the Americas).Footnote ¹⁷ The recent proliferation of sources available for studies of these works, in print and in digital formats, expands access to reliable sources, outside a handful of institutions, and facilitating such scholarship in upcoming years.

Of the small number of facsimiles currently available in print, Brepols's Discours au vray sets a new standard for image quality, layout, and rigor,Footnote ¹⁸ providing a significant resource to scholarship on baroque music and dance. Along with the approaching four-hundredth anniversaries of many of Louis XIII's burlesque ballets, the appearance of this new facsimile suggests that more studies of the medium are to come—and, with these, the possibility of new appraisals of these dance histories. The price of the volume is significant, however, making this edition most appropriate for libraries and specialists.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite the wealth of notes running in the margins alongside contributors' articles, the absence of a full index and bibliography limits the volume's accessibility as reference material.Footnote ²⁰

In striking contrast with theater, music, and visual art, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists and performances remain obscure points of reference in the humanities, even within dance studies. This lacuna affects both artists' and scholars' engagement with theatrical dance conventions emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Durand's Reference Durand1617 text demonstrates, early modern records of the ballets are not only remarkable documents in their own rights, they are also significant traces of dramaturgical practice, including interdisciplinarity and the complex, sometimes violent relationships of these works to the world outside Europe. Such impulses, historically, have been repressed in scholarship on dance. As artists exert increasing pressure on these conventions, scholars also have the potential to challenge and interrogate the medium and the history in which such dramaturgy emerges. Taking up documents such as Durand's Discours au vray offers possibilities for challenging received notions of theatrical dance history and addressing constructions of representation and ideology that engage major questions of contemporary thinking on embodiment, including critical analyses of gender, race, religion, and sexuality. Historiographical engagement with these materials draws attention to a long, often neglected tradition of published dance dramaturgy that offers the potential to raise questions and indicate structures central to contemporary practices and theories of performance.