This aura of suspicion led diplomatic thinkers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to reject the theatrical metaphor in favor of more limited conceptions of the ambassador’s freedom to perform. Torquato Tasso imagined the possibility that the ambassador might manipulate but only in the interests of his sovereign.23 In his De legationibus libri tres (1585), Alberico Gentili put much stricter limits on the ambassador’s agency, casting him as an actor who carried out his sovereign’s script: “Why should the ambassador have the right to attempt anything apart from his instructions? … The ambassador is an interpreter…. [I]n a case where definite instructions have been given, ambassadors should not be allowed to diverge even a finger’s breadth from them.”24 Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that ambassadors should “assume” the personality of the princes they represented when delivering orations.25 As Ellen McClure observes, Gentili leaves behind a language of theater, opting instead for a vocabulary of the sacred to strengthen the connection between the monarch and his legate.26 The ambassador is like an angel, Gentili writes, carrying messages “in the interest of the state or sacred person by whom he has been sent.” For Gentili, fidelity—not prudence or discretion—is the most prized quality in an ambassador.27
The anti-theatrical bias of diplomatic manuals was expressed in more strident terms in the early part of the seventeenth century. In his L’ambassadeur (1603), Jean Hotman declared, “An embassy and theater are dissimilar things.”28 Although he described the ambassador’s work as entailing the “representation” of his monarch and the manipulation of speech to persuade his foreign interlocutors, Hotman insisted that the theatrical metaphor was insufficient to depict diplomacy because the ambassador could never change roles.29 Juan de Vera figured the diplomat’s relationship to his prince through a biological metaphor: “The Ambassador is called by some the organ by which the thoughts and ideas of absent people are communicated, and the embassy the art of keeping two princes in friendship.”30 The ambassador in this view is not an actor giving voice and movement to the sovereign’s script. He is a prosthetic extension of the monarch’s body: his eyes and ears abroad.
Hotman’s and Vera’s outright rejection of the theatrical metaphor demonstrates the persistent force of that trope: they found it necessary to address the analogy of ambassadorship to acting even as they discounted the utility of the comparison. By the end of the seventeenth century, texts on diplomacy recuperated theatrical terms, as Abraham de Wicquefort declared in his summa work L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions: “There is no personage more actor-like than the ambassador.”31 Despite theorists’ qualms, moreover, individual ambassadors continued to rely heavily on a theatrical vocabulary in their own correspondence throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Again and again, they attested to their efforts to represent, to demonstrate, to make visible an intention, emotion, or quality of their sovereign. They described their role as that of actors playing out by proxy, in a virtual way, interaction among their princes. It is clear that a profound sense of theatricality characterized diplomats’ daily life, self-understanding, and worldview. Whether motivated by personal honor, professional duty, or material self-interest, ambassadors were keenly attuned to the performative dimension of their work and put significant effort into making sure that they played their parts well.
Court Entertainment as Diplomatic Meta-theater: The “Incident” of the Masque of Beauty
Diplomats’ keen awareness of their self-presentation manifested itself particularly acutely in their participation in lavish celebrations including spectacular court entertainments. On one hand, an ambassador’s presence as a spectator at a ballet, masque, or other festive occasion signaled his prestige and that of his sovereign in the eyes of his hosts. Prime occasions to see and be seen, entertainments provided a key stage on which ambassadors enacted their own professional skill and their prince’s “dignity.” In dispatches recounting these events, moreover, ambassadors shrewdly narrated their own performance as spectators in order to burnish their own image and reputation. Sometimes this entailed giving a detailed description or penetrating analysis of the performance onstage, a demonstration of the diplomat’s talent for observation. More often, ambassadors limited their accounts to their own efforts to represent their sovereigns in the best possible way. Examples of both strategies show how the “act” of courtly spectatorship was a dynamic theatrical practice rather than a passive state.
A rich example of the stakes of diplomatic spectatorship comes from the correspondence of Antoine Le Fèvre de la Boderie (1555–1615), who headed an extraordinary embassy to London from April 1606 until December 1609. Already a seasoned diplomat when he was first sent to England in April 1606, he had begun his political career as a secretary to the French ambassador in Rome in 1592 and then became an ambassador in his own right serving in Brussels after the Treaty of Vervins (1598), then in Turin in 1605. His stint in England occurred in a relatively peaceful decade, the period of “armed neutrality” leading up to the Thirty Years’ War.32 Accordingly, the embassy had only limited political goals. Henri IV’s instructions charged the ambassador with three primary tasks: making headway on a trade agreement, confirming an alliance against Mediterranean piracy, and keeping an eye on religious conflicts. The ambassador reported on all these matters in his missives back to France, addressed to state secretaries Nicolas de Neufville, marquis de Villeroy, or Pierre Brulart de Sillery, vicomte de Puisieux. He also devoted significant space to recording and commenting on the spectacle of statecraft in England. In these passages of his dispatches, Le Fèvre de la Boderie works to distinguish himself as an astute observer of political theater. After witnessing James I’s appearance at Parliament, for example, he concluded a detailed description of his clothes, the throne, and the setting by remarking: “The ceremony was in truth very beautiful and felt of its ancientness.”33 He signaled the close alliance between England and Denmark by detailing the feasts, fireworks, and other entertainments lavished on the Danish king during his visit to London in summer 1606, noting that the preparations served as “a testament to their good neighborliness and friendship.”34
Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s descriptions of events at court are nearly always accompanied by such conjectures about their hidden significance. As Hampton points out, many early modern diplomats styled their dispatches on the model of the relazione penned by Venetian ambassadors for the doge and senate. A relazione writer would highlight his skills “as a reader of signs, as an interpreter,” often by foregrounding his own expert gaze through extensive first-person narration.35 Venetian diplomats—or, more precisely, their professional secretaries who polished the ambassadors’ notes—practiced the form of the relazione as a finely honed craft.36 French ambassadors, by contrast, exhibited widely varying styles in their reports. For example, the volume of hand-copied letters from France’s ambassadors in Venice in the 1630s features an abrupt change in tone when du Houssay took over for the ailing De La Thuillerie in 1638, as the cool professionalism of the older diplomat gives way to panicked queries about protocol, flurries of postscripts, and complaints about the weather.37 Le Fèvre de la Boderie more closely sticks to the Venetian example. Compared to his colleagues from La Serenissima, though, he downplays the first person. The ambassador’s own point of view appears more frequently as an object of someone else’s action (“they tell me”) than as the subject of an independent action or observation.
The ambassador’s personal subjectivity becomes more prominent, however, in the passages devoted to court entertainments. In a December 20, 1607, letter outlining the preparations for a holiday dance, for example, he asserted his interpretation of particular casting choices in the first person: “I also take as a sign of their attempts to display less ill will toward the Catholics that the King, as he left for the hunt, asked the queen to prepare a ball for the Christmas festivities, and took personal responsibility for the expenses which, it is said, must be more than six or seven thousand écus (for they don’t know how to do anything for less here). They remark that almost all the ladies the queen has called to be in the ball are Catholics.”38 The ambassador foregrounds his subjectivity, performing his interpretation in the first person before authorizing his viewpoint with corroborating hearsay. He continues: “What assures me more is that this interpretation is given and publicized