The first Jacobean banqueting house : lessons in the production of early modern space

From 1608 to 1619 aspirations, traditions and innovations of the English monarchy were played out within the singularity of three ten metre square cubes at the heart of Whitehall Palace. In its order of building, formalities of movement and codes of seeing the royal Banqueting House condensed the variety of politics, society and spirituality to the consensus of a single proportioned space. To use the words of one contemporary treatise on mnemonics, the Banqueting House successfully brought 'a multitude into one'. Moreover, it was a space in which ideology of power was made practical and concrete - an abstract strategy attempting to impose itself on to reality. Using Henri Lefebvre's 1974 work La production de l'espace as its theoretical atlas, this thesis uses the subject of the first Jacobean Banqueting House as a means to explore the discourses of space within the monarchical culture of King James I of England. Through Lefebvre's notion of l'espace vécu, Part One presents a history of the Banqueting House and its space of information in which the elements of individuality nascent in the early modern period were adopted, duplicitously, to uphold the inequalities of monarchy. It is a story of the modes of information (which, elsewhere, were allowing for a new sovereignty of the individual) being dominated in order to define, instead, the individuality of the sovereign. Through the notion of l'espace conçu, Part Two then considers the ways in which the new Renaissance discourses on the motions and mechanics of nature were smoothly assimilated by the royal culture within the receptive, English notions of progress and the established protocols of entrée. It is seen that within the closed chamber of the Banqueting House the royal culture codified a system of kinematics and dynamics, access and egress, that synchronised the natural movements of the physical world with the rhythms and spaces of court.