Theatre under Louis XIV: Cross-Casting and the Performance of Gender in Drama, Ballet and Opera (review)

Julia Prest's Theatre under Louis XIV announces itself as a rather ambitious project. Its ambition becomes even more apparent by its subtitle: she extends her study of Classical theatre to the rather ideologically overdetermined realms of sexual and gender identity. The reader will immediately recognize a rather obvious reference to the work of Judith Butler in Prest's subtitle: the Performance of Gender . . ., but even the most recalcitrant of seventeenth-century scholars need not fear Prest's book: he will not be confronted with an elaborate analysis of transvestism, drag or gender-bending seventeenth-century frolickers. Instead what we have is a serious, rather traditional, literary–musicological survey of one of the most interesting aspects of theatrical spectacle in the seventeenth-century, i.e. the role of 'cross-casting' (as opposed to 'cross-dressing') in court ballet, drama and opera during Louis XIV's long reign. Prest brings to her work a 'bona-fides' in music and musicology that most of our seventeenth-century scholars do not have. She is thus well positioned to discuss the overlapping phenomena of dance, music and drama. Her study proceeds rather prosaically from the history of 'cross-casting' (that is men/boys playing women's roles, and vice-versa) from the mid-sixteenth century Jesuit academies, to the court ballets of the early part of Louis XIV's reign, where the young monarch enjoyed participating in the ballets he organized for his court's entertainment, through the dramatic productions at St Cyr to conclude with a discussion of the gender ambiguities of opera. In the court ballets different aristocrats were, as Prest dutifully notes, cross-cast as they interpreted various allegorical roles. Prest continues her explorations of this interesting phenomenon in her discussion of the young ladies of St Cyr who took on male roles in Racine's Esther and Athalie. She concludes her study with a good chapter on 'gender ambiguity' at the century's end with the triumphant emergence of opera as a form of theatricality that threatened tragedy's preeminence. Prest study offers an interesting overview of the phenomenon of 'cross-casting' at the same time that she presents considerable paraphrase of that underappreciated impresario of court ballets, Benserrade. What we are not given is any detailed analyses of the most intriguing problematics that the book's title seemed to promise. Despite all the recent work on cross-dressing, on 'gender' politics inspired by the work of Butler, but also that of M. Garber, K. Weil and R. Stoller, Prest's work remains intriguingly unimpressed. Although aware that 'cross-casting' as a theatrical phenomenon and 'cross-dressing' as a sociological, psycho-sexual phenomenon are not exactly congruent, there are enough areas of overlap to provide a rather vast terrain of exploration of seventeenth-century constraints on sexuality, on gender formation and thus the implications for the creation of a certain conception of French culture and civilization as to expand our canonically informed 'idées reçues' of Classicism. Perhaps this was not Prest's intention. She seems content to point to these interesting possibilities while containing her own study within a well informed but rather traditional discussion of a theatrical convention that remains, in her work, conventional.