Gustav III - The very last of the chevaliers
Hastiludes and carousels in Sweden were revived by Gustav III during the 1770s and 1780s. He followed on directly from the pageants of the Italian Renaissance and the French carousels in the reign of Louis XIV, as well as their emulations in 17th century Sweden - the coronation and wedding tournaments of Gustavus Adolphus, the numerous pageants of Kristina's reign and the Certamen Equestre of Charles XI.
These Gustavian hastiludes are the manifestation of an impassioned historical romanticism. Gustav III was swept off his feet by the medievalism which arose in France during the second half of the 18th century. Paraphrasing the epithet of the Emperor Maximilian I, one might describe the King of Sweden as "the very last of the chevaliers".
Tancrède, Voltaire's new drama of chivalry, and several tragedies of national history by de Belloy, which inspired the young Crown Prince with a romantic craze for chivalry, were already performed in Stockholm during the 1760s. Amadis des Gaules, the Renaissance tale of medieval chivalry, and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, were other important sources of inspiration, together with the new French translations of Boiardo's and Ariosto's Orlando poems.
Gustav III was well-supplied with literature on the tournaments and hastiludes of earlier times. Inventories of his books mention such authors as Maximilian I, Rüxner, Menestrier, Perrault, La Colombière and many descriptions of festivities at the many princely courts of Italy, Germany and France in the 16th and 17th centuries. Gustav III regarded himself as the foremost member of the nobility, and this literature confirmed him in his conviction of the pre-eminence of nobility and chivalry.
Sporadic carousels took place in various parts of Europe during the 18th century, but only two of them in Gustav III's opinion were worthy of the name, viz the Berlin carousel of 1750 and that in St. Petersburg in 1765. The former he had already studied as a child, by looking at the costume drawing from the lavish festival presented to his mother, Lovisa Ulrika.
Gustav III's feudal festivals, however, are not just insubstantial costume performances. His imagination imparted new significance to the hastiludes. In the historic introduction to the programme for the tournament at Adolf Fredriks Torg in 1777, the King himself has told us what he was aiming for. Revival of the tournaments of the age of chivalry would make it possible to sustain among the nobility that "heroic spirit" and "just desire for honour" which were "so necessary to an estate intended for the defence of the realm". That spirit will also stem the decadent influence of the new habits, and chivalrous exercises would have a beneficial effect on body and soul.
In this manifesto the King distinguishes between tournaments and hastiludes on the one hand and carousels on the other. In the former, the participants appear under their own names in purely military exercises, ceremonially and splendidly staged but without any dramatic setting. In the carousels, by contrast, we meet a range of characters from the medieval romances, history and mythology, in a setting which was theatre in the foremost sense of the world. The entire court, headed by the King and his siblings, were involved in the preparations for and conduct of these grandiose festivities, which could last for several weeks at a time out at Drottningholm, "where", as Agne Beijer so graphically expressed it, "the theatre burst its banks and engulfed the entire park".