Diplomacy Narratives as Documents of Performance

Abstract

The proposition that early modern diplomacy was theatrical is hardly a controversial one, yet in the main the analogy tends to be deployed rhetorically, giving the impression that 'theatricality' requires no further elucidation.* Moreover, the texts on which our understanding of the significance of protocol and ceremonial is based are rarely interrogated for their performative or quasiperformative characteristics-or, as I shall argue in what follows, approached in terms of their original function. This chapter explores a deceptively simple hypothesis: if ceremonial was central to the practice of diplomacy, as William Roosen urged forty years ago, what might it mean to treat accounts of diplomatic activity as documents of performance?1 Like drama, diplomacy depended on actors and audiences; and like drama it was scripted, choreographed, and (sometimes) presented in print to serve as a putative record of the event-which, in turn, invited an imaginative reenactment on the part of the reader. Indeed, sometimes the two overlap seamlessly, such as we find in textual accounts of performance events in the dispatches to Philip III from Spain's ambassador to the court of James I and VI in 1604, during the peace-making that led up to the signing of the Treaty of London. In such cases key features of diplomacy, or rather the rendering thereof through writing, are hardly distinguishable from theatrical texts (here a court masque and a royal entry into the capital).2 The ordering and procession of persons recorded, that is, serve overlapping and intersecting purposes of diplomatic * An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the 3rd International Conference on Anglo-Iberian Relations: From the Medieval to the Modern held at the University of Oviedo, 14-16 November 2019. I would like to thank the Organizing Committee for the opportunity to try out some of the ideas reproduced here on that occasion.