Welcome to the online hub of the EC-funded research project ‘Catholic Performance Culture in Early Modern England’!
I intend to use this space to comment on the progress of my project, share insights on newly discovered material, and present my work to the widest audience possible. In the following months most of my blogging will consider the material I collected in Rome from February to July 2023, at several archives, and in particular at the Venerable English College, Rome.
But before I delve into my archival findings I wanted to discuss a more immediate concern: what exactly is “performance culture”? What might it mean and what does it mean in the context of CaPer project? Explaining “performance culture” in a few lines is not an easy task. It is made more difficult by the fact that the meanings of its component parts – the words “performance” and “culture” – are both equally difficult to pinpoint. Their connotations and applications are numerous.
For example, we might encounter “performance culture” or “high performance culture” in modern corporate language. It usually denotes a set of values and a particular workplace behaviour, which enable companies and organisations to achieve the best results, growth, and higher profits – in short, to perform well. Similar meaning of “performance” can be applied to almost any other area of human activity, for example sports, science, or engineering. Performance is often modified as “optimal”, “best”, or “peak”; it conveys a sense of quality and efficiency of the action carried out.
CaPer has little to do with this semantic field of “performance”. Instead, my project’s understanding of performance culture grows out of a rather different human activity: the performing arts.
Playing a piece of music, acting out a play, a dance, a trick, or displaying a feat, skill, or some sort of premeditated appearance in front of an audience – all these activities pique my interest as a researcher. Moreover, it is not only the act of performance itself that I find fascinating. A myriad of contexts condition every single performance, and often, especially when we’re studying the cultures of the past, it is only through these contexts that we can really penetrate their complex networks of meaning. These contexts can include everything from the space where the action takes place, the materiality of the objects involved, to social relations and the variety of labour underpinning the event. And we must not forget the intellectual frameworks at play. The sets of meanings, beliefs, and values that enable everyone involved in a performance – before, during, and after the act – to justify it and make sense of it.
My work takes cues from the likes of Richard Schechner and more broadly the ‘performative turn’ in social sciences, driven by a wide variety of writings, from Erving Goffman to Judith Butler.[1] What is common to this body of academic work is, roughly speaking, the emergence of ‘performance’ or ‘performativity’ as crucial terms – both as categories of analysis as well as a way of describing particular behaviour. Whether focusing more on aesthetic (theatrical) or social (everyday) performance, they blur the distinctions between the stage and the everyday life, between spontaneous and constructed/premeditated behaviour. In short, according to these authors, most (if not all) of our social interactions can be in some way construed as performance – and for good reasons!
Using this approach to unpick early modern culture is not at all anachronistic and in fact quite appropriate. Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to understanding human interaction would not have been particularly foreign to people in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Less analytical, but much more imaginative was their articulation of the world as a stage. Theatrum mundi (Latin for ‘theatre of the world’) metaphor was no invention of the melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare’s brilliant comedy As You Like It (1599). It was part of a shared European world view. It pervaded the art and literature of the early modern period, in particular the seventeenth century, the age of Baroque. Between the second half of the sixteenth century and mid-eighteenth century, before the emergence of the public sphere and the rise of the novel, theatre and drama dominated the political and artistic imagination of Europe. For the first time since antiquity, permanent playhouses were erected throughout the Continent, while extravagant court spectacles shaped and projected royal fictions of power and social hierarchy. Theatricality and ostentatious display permeated the everyday culture of the elites, who, self-consciously refining their manners and appearance, enthusiastically engaged in role-playing, social performance, and minute self-fashioning. Communal religious practices became spectacular: confraternities and religious orders invested their efforts in displaying their belief and offering an experience of the divine through performing arts, public processions, and spectacular acts of piety. In short, performance was everywhere.
In the preface to The Complete Horseman (1639), for example, Thomas de Grey makes sure we understand that a gentleman taking a horse for a spin can be considered an act of performance. Owning an excellent horse only pays off when the owner’s exquisite horsemanship is publicly displayed through the animal’s performance of the painstakingly rehearsed gaits:
For if we shall seriously ruminate in how high esteem that man is who is owner and possessor of good Horses, how much commended, how much respected, how much talked of, and how well proffered for them: but when he shall be knowne to be a breeder of such good Horses, will not his encomiums be greater? But when together with these himselfe shall be known to be exquisite in Horsemanship, whereby to cause his Horse to shew himselfe in his Pace, Menage, and all other his postures like as well becomes a right good Horse […], will not (I say) that Gentleman be highly commended, and have more eyes upon him as he passeth a long, than are commonly cast upon a Comet or the Sun eclipsed? Yes undoubtedly.
Thomas de Grey, The Complete Horseman (1639), sig. B4r-v
For early modern gentlemen, owning, breeding, and riding horses was an essential aspect of their upper-class lifestyle and public identity. A bit like owning a Porsche today.
And yet, performance exists on a spectrum, and sometimes it is fruitful to make qualitative distinctions between various expressions of performativity. A gentleman riding a horse through the streets of early modern London going about his daily business is not the same sort of thing as a ceremonial royal entry into London – no matter how self-conscious the rider is about his parade. The sheer scale of a royal ceremony, the financial and intellectual efforts underpinning it, the manual labour and logistics involved, the overt intention to impress and celebrate both the monarch and the receiving community through music, drama, oration, and ritual – all of this speaks of an exceptional (for many perhaps once in a lifetime) event, completely and overtly saturated with intention to be displayed and gazed upon, and to act according to particular scripts. If everything is performance, not all of it matters in the same way.
So what does all this mean for my project? I tend to define performance culture as a diverse body of activities and social occasions that involve enactment or representation of particular scripts, patterns, and compositions in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes. If this sounds rather broad, it does, because it is! However, there are important caveats. While I do recognize a good deal of continuity between the theatrical and the everyday ceremony, and while my research is not strictly confined to the stage alone, my primary focus remains the exceptional festive and recreational performance, rather than behaviour that we might consider ordinary and part of our daily routines.
It is these exceptional events that tend to be more intensely communal and interactive. They embody, communicate, and strengthen social relations and identities. And this is why, I think, performance is important as a concept and an umbrella term, because it allows us to juxtapose and think simultaneously about a variety of practices within a particular community – in my case a College, a religious house, or Catholic community as a whole.
[1] Richard Schechner, American professor of drama, the founder of The Performance Group and performance studies, see his book Performance Theory (1988); Erving Goffman, American sociologist, developed a dramaturgical account of interpersonal encounters in his ground-breaking book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956); Judith Butler, American philosopher, who developed the theory of gender performativity, see her Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990).