first text to expound upon the duties of a resident ambassador, humanist author and translator Ermolao Barbaro described the diplomat as the perfect embodiment of moderation and discretion.16 Fully assuming the role of his state’s representative, he was simply “to do, say, advise, and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state,” while secretly gathering intelligence for his monarch.17
This early conception of the resident ambassador’s work recalls Henry Wotton’s often quoted line: “The ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”18 In this view, a sovereign and his ambassador and delegates acted in concert to work toward a shared goal. As such, they behaved as what Erving Goffman has labeled a “performance team,” or a group of individuals who coordinate their roles to project an agreed-upon image to an unsuspecting public.19 By contrast, in the decades following Barbaro’s work, other writers characterized the ambassador as a free, independent performer not bound to such close cooperation with his master or the other members of his delegation. Niccolò Machiavelli’s letter of “Advice to Raffaello Girolami” (1522), for example, suggested that the ambassador might work for his own private interests as well as for his monarch’s. To this end, it was doubly important that he “acquire great consideration” in his host court, which he could do “by acting on every occasion like a good and just man; to have the reputation of being generous and sincere, and to avoid that of being mean and dissembling, and not to be regarded as a man who believes one thing and says another.”20 This quintessentially Machiavellian piece of advice highlights the paradoxical nature of diplomatic performance in which the ambassador dissimulates in order to maintain his reputation as an honest person. In a book of maxims titled Ricordi (1530), Florentine jurist and diplomat Francesco Guicciardini echoed this idea. He wrote that, although “frank sincerity is a quality much extolled,” deception is sometimes necessary and thanks to a good ambassador’s “reputation for plain dealing,” “his artifice will blind men more.”21 In the diplomatic scenario, Guicciardini reminds us, it is not only the ambassador who can deceive. Some sovereigns conceal their true political intentions from the agents they dispatch to enact them, “judg[ing] it better only to impart what they would have the foreign prince persuaded of, thinking they can hardly deceive him unless they first deceive the ambassador who is the instrument and agent for treating with him.”22 The extreme theatricality of diplomatic practice as described in these texts conjures a scenario in which all men—even those supposed to be on the same political “team”—are in reality acting for their own self-interest, professional prestige, and even financial gain in the form of gifts. In this context, the comparison of ambassadors to actors no longer simply described the diplomat’s protean adaptability and charisma but highlighted his capacity for dissembling, his essential untrustworthiness.
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
