4 - The Household and Performance

Summary

Ritual and performance are central themes in historical studies of the court. One of the most influential ideas in this field is that of the ‘theatre state’, which draws on the work of Clifford Geertz. While few scholars of the court would now subscribe wholesale to Geertz's theory, the idea of the court as a place in which ritual and performance are used to project messages about power to a wider audience, as expressed in the metaphor of the court as a stage, is widely used, including in studies of the Scottish court. In such a formulation, the household might be assumed to be involved in the ‘backstage’ element of such performances, the insiders preparing the message for wider consumption. This chapter argues that a better analogy for the role of the household in such ritual is immersive theatre. In immersive theatre, audience interactivity is central and the boundary between performer and audience is blurred. Even rituals at the court of James IV which had a clear focus on wider, including international, audiences, such as chivalric tournaments, involved the household as ‘backstage’ functionaries, performers and audience all once. The immersive theatre of the court and the household's prominent role within it becomes even clearer when we consider those forms of performance which were more exclusively directed towards an audience of relative courtly insiders. Through these means members of the household could leverage and display status and advantage, and the courtly society could generate messages for itself, including messages about where members of the household stood in relation to the court's focal point, the monarch.

The ‘theatre state’ and ‘the court as a stage’

Clifford Geertz's view of the field of anthropology shows a similar direction of travel to the historiography of the court, which has moved from viewing the court's ritual and splendour as empty decadence towards a serious consideration of ritual as part of the exercise of power. For Geertz, the ‘confinement’ of anthropology to

the supposedly more “symbolic” aspect of culture is a mere prejudice, born out of the notion, also a gift of the nineteenth century, that “symbolic” opposes to “real” as fanciful to sober, figurative to literal, obscure to plain, aesthetic to practical, mystical to mundane, and decorative to substantial.