Abstract
In October of 1550 the town of Rouen staged a festival in honor of Henri II and his wife Catherine de Médici on the occasion of their entry into Rouen. This festival was one of the most elaborate and spectacular in a performance genre known for its over-the-top theatricality and spare-no-expense extravagance.1 The festival included such typical displays as pageants and tableaux vivants featuring Roman gods, muses, and nymphs and was marked by the commingled themes of flattery and persuasion typical of royal entries. According to the various contemporary accounts still extant, whose number and detail attest to the fascination the festival inspired, there were marvelous animals like unicorns and elephants side by side with battling gladiators, a mock sea fight between Portuguese and French warships, and a procession of captives won in recent battles. The festival’s pièce de résistance, however, for modern scholars and apparently for sixteenth-century spectators as well, was a meticulously re-created “Brazilian” village, built at the Faubourg Saint-Sever on the banks of the Seine just outside the city walls.
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Notes
For general discussions of the royal entry as a theatrical and political event, see Lawrence Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1986)
Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (New York: Clarendon, 1998)
Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1984).
Les Entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515, ed. Bernard Guenée and Françoise Lehouz (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968), of fers an overview of French royal entries in the late medieval and early modern period.
The Rouen entry has been discussed by, among others, Josèphe Chartrou, Les Entrées solennelles et triomphales à la renaissance, 1484–1551 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1928)
Ivan Cloulas, Henri II (Paris: Boydell, 1984), 274–94
Victor E. Graham, “The Entry of Henry II into Rouen in 1550: A Petrarchan Triumph,” Petrarch’s Triumphs, Allegory and Spectacle, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Amilcare Iannucci (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1990), 403–13
Margaret M. McGowan, “Forms and Themes in Henri II’s Entry into Rouen,” Renaissance Drama 1 (1968): 199–252.
The sixteenth-century accounts of Henri’s entry include C’est la deduction du Somptueux ordre, plaisantz spectacles et magnifiques theatres dresses et exhibes, par les citoiens de Rouen … (Rouen: Robert et Jehan dictz Dugord, 1551), which contains woodcuts of the entertainments and is available in a facsimile edition introduced by Margaret McGowan
see McGowan, ed., L’Entrée de Henri II à Rouen 1550 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977).
All quotations are from this account. Another account is L’Entrée du Roy nostre sire faict en sa ville de Rouen … (Rouen: Robert Masselin, 1550), which has been reproduced by A. Beaucousin (Rouen: Société des Bibliophiles Normands, 1882).
A third account is L’Entrée du très Magnanime très Puissant et victorieux Roy de France Henry deuxism de ce nom en sa noble cité de Rouen … (Bibliothèque Municipale de Rouen, Ms.Y.28), available in a nineteenth-century edition by S. Merval (Rouen: Société des Bibliophiles Normands, 1868).
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 119.
James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 28.
Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3 (1988): 36–37.
Edouard Glissant, Le Discours Antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 28–36.
See the detailed discussion of Chappuys’ influence on the Rouen entry by Michael Wintroub, “Civilizing the Savage and Making a King: The Royal Entry Festival of Henri II (Rouen, 1550),” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 465–94, esp. 482–83.
For his interest in warfare, see Frederic Baumgartner, Henry II: King of France, 1547–1559 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), 40.
Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 67–68, asserts that the Rouen performance performed this sort of exoticizing function for its European spectators, including Henri and Catherine, whom Mullaney argues were invited to see themselves in the figures of the couple wearing crowns and lying in a hammock in the center of the woodcut.
For a discussion of late medieval theatrical spectatorship, see Claire Sponsler, “The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance in Medieval Drama,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 15–29.
Jody Greene, “New Historicism and Its New World Discoveries,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1991): 163–98.
For a history of French involvement in the New World, see Bradford E. Burns, A Documentary History of Brazil (New York: Knopf, 1966)
John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)
Charles-André Julien, Les Voyages de découvertes et les premiers établissements, XVè–XVIè siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).
The two sixteenth-century accounts of the French in Brazil are Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un Voyage fait en la Terre du Brésil (La Rochelle, 1578)
André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amérique: & de Plusieurs Terres & Isles Découvertes de Nostre Temps (Paris, 1558).
For the outlines of this practice, see Christian Feest, Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Aachen: Rader Verlag, 1987)
Carolyn Thomas Foreman, Indians Abroad, 1493–1938 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943).
See Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971–74), for a discussion of these and other cases.
See Bernai Díaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, trans. Maurice Keatinge (London: Harrap, 1927), 2:498–504.
For Aubert, see Eusebius, Chronicon (Paris: 1512)
see F. Joüon des Longrais, Jacques Cartier: Documents Nouveaux (Paris, 1888), 15–16.
Paul Gaffarel, Histoire du Brésil Français au seizième siècle (Paris, 1878), 83
See Binot Paulmier de Gonneville. Campagne du Navire l’ESPOIR de Honfleur 1503–1505, ed. M. d’Avezac (Paris: Challamel, 1869), and the discussion in Green, “New Historicism,” 176–77.
See the perceptive discussion of these performances in David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 37–38.
See Claire Sponsler, “Medieval America: Drama and Community in the English Colonies, 1580–1610,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 453–78.
The most important studies of Spanish colonial theatre are Othón Arróniz, Teatro de evangelización en Nueva España (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1979)
Max Harris, The Dialogical Theatre: Dramatizations of the Conquest of Mexico and the Question of the Other (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993)
Robert Potter, “Abraham and Human Sacrifice: The Exfoliation of Medieval Drama in Aztec Mexico,” New Theatre Quarterly 8 (1986): 306–12
Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz, Early Colonial Religious Drama in Mexico (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1970), which also provides English translations of a number of the plays.
For a description of the performance, see The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1899–1901), 61:114–19.
The Three-Kings performance has been discussed by Martin W. Walsh, “Christmastide Performance in Native New France,” paper delivered at the International Society for Medieval Theatre (SITM) conference in Toronto, August 1995.
Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1588).
James Rosier, A True Relation of the Most Prosperous Voyage Made this Present Yeere 1605 by Captaine George Waymouth in the Discouery of the Land of Virginia (London: George Bisop, 1605), sig. C2v.
The Work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, ed. Paul Hulton, 2 vols. (London: British Museum, 1977), 120.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6.
For a recent analysis of the role of writing, and more specifically print, as an integral part of early English voyages of discovery and conquest, see Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Roger Abrahams, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 48.
For a related discussion of how exotic otherness could slip the bounds of a purely local context, see Claire Sponsler and Robert L. A. Clark, “Othered Bodies: Racial Cross-Dressing in the Mistère de la Sainte Hostie and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 61–87.
Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492–1800, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 3.
See Jean d’Auton, Chroniques de Louis II, ed. R. de Maulde la Clavière (Paris, 1889–95), 2:100–1
Clarence D. Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (1520–1660) (Paris: Boivin, 1941), 22–24.
See Edward Hau, Hall’s Chronicle (London, 1809), 513–14.
Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 301.
For entertainments by the livery companies of London, see A Calendar of the Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640, ed. Jean Robertson and Donald Gordon, Malone Society Collections 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954).
Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geof frey Brereton (New York: Penguin, 1968), 359, describes the “Moors” in the 1389 entry
see Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300–1660, 3 vols, in 4 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 3:48–49, for a discussion of the 1377 mumming for the boy Richard II.
In addition to these performances, see also the many illustrations of black magi and others depicted with dark skin in Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
See also the illumination in the Très Riches Hemes of Jean, Duc de Berry (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 24, of David’s vision of two prophets preaching to the people of the world, who are represented by Africans seated on the left, Caucasians on the right. The Africans have dark skin and earrings and are dressed differently from the Caucasians.
See Denise Gluck, “Les Entrées provinciales de Henry II,” L’information d’histoire de l’art 10 (1965): 191–218.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86.
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© 2000 Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen
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Sponsler, C. (2000). Traveling Players: Brazilians in the Rouen Entry of 1550. In: Sponsler, C., Chen, X. (eds) East of West. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62624-3_10
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