Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances as Rhetorical Discourse.

In this thought-provoking study, Aercke explores a series of lavish, festive performances composed for and performed at the courts of absolute rulers in Europe between the 1630s and the 1680s: Sant'Alessio, at the Barbarini court of Pope Urban VIII in Rome; El Mayor Encanto, Amor, at the court of Philip IV in Madrid; Ercole Amante and La Princesse d'Elide, at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles; and Il Pomo d'Oro at the court of Leopold I in Vienna.

Before discussing the performances themselves, Aercke establishes their historical contexts and erects a useful and convincing theoretical frame. These extravagant but exceedingly ephemeral artistic hybrids, he argues, conduct a discourse with their highly select, courtly audience. This discourse asserts these monarchs roles as virtual gods of the ludic impulses and the ritual and festive events that have regularly characterized occasions since ancient times. Aercke argues that, while sharing some characteristics of the pot-latch - the wealth-sharing, gift-giving ceremonial feasts of technologically less advanced societies - festive celebrations on such a magnificent scale appropriated to the purposes of absolute rulers the spirit of play and, like antecedent rituals, contributed to civilizing the audiences by communicating and reinforcing the mythol and expectations already well known to the courtiers. He further maintains that the principal tools of communication employed by such performances were epideictic modes of Aristotelian rhetoric whose "criterion . . . is beauty, [whose] . . . principal argumentation is the figure of amplification (which incorporates . . . hyperbole, repetition, metaphor, and qualification) (40)," and whose chief mode of communication is via "Neoplatonically inspired models of allegoresis (40)." Conveying multiple allegory, however - which was never the exclusive province of the performances' poetic texts - relied too on music, stage effects (often achieved with complex machinery and sometimes with fireworks), sets and stage architecture, preparations for the performances proper, the spaces within whose confines performances were staged and their decorations, and upon what those spaces implied about the intended audiences. Praise (laudatio) and blame (vituperatio) - sometimes ambiguously interchangeable figures - also contributed to the rhetorical arsenal employed by the makers of these days-long extravaganzas. Aercke (3) suggests that, in their artifice, their complexity and their playful disdain for the real limitations of an imperfect natural world and a flawed social order and human condition, these festive performances constitute a more satisfactory emblem for the essential spirit of the exaggerating and role-playing Baroque age than does Johan Huizinga's suggested periwig. (Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.)

Though interesting and tenable, Aercke's readings of the allegorical complexities of the works seem less compelling than his careful construction of the theoretical and contextual framework that precedes his descriptions and readings of the performances themselves. His use and elaboration of Huizinga's thought causes one to consider the importance of play to social cohesion and therefore, of state support for playful activities. It makes one question the wisdom of insisting that public monies be exclusively allocated to the serious military and business concerns of nations. Sometimes one perceives between Aercke's lines a resigned nostalgia for a more aristocratic age.

Aercke's extremely useful notes survey most of the relevant bibliography and conduct fascinating historical excursions into the lives and times of the ruler-sponsors of festive performances and of the artists they patronized. Given the contribution of spectacle to the performances discussed, a representative selection of the excellent surviving plates would have further enhanced the value of this fine book.

JAMES WYATT COOK Albion College