Introduction Metaphors of the performing arts abound in talk about diplomacy. Journalists condemn the emptiness of "diplomatic theater" when negotiations seem to serve no purpose other than political posturing. At other times, skillful negotiators receive praise for carefully "choreographing" a "diplomatic dance" and avoiding any "misstep." The eighteenth-century notion of a "concert of nations" survives in today''s discourse if only as an ideal of global concord. However trite, these metaphors retain their currency because they concisely evoke the aims and intricacies of diplomatic negotiation. Like a play, ballet, or symphony, diplomacy requires a coordinated effort by multiple players. It demands a degree of responsiveness, perhaps the ability to improvise. Diplomats need a sense of theatricality and an eye for symbolism--an awareness of how actions will be interpreted by negotiating partners and the broader public.

Finally, when it works, diplomacy should produce--at least temporarily--order and harmony in the world. A similar lexicon pervaded discourses on international negotiation in early modern Europe. From the advent of those practices that we would recognize as features of modern diplomacy (such as ambassador exchange), commentators characterized diplomats as performers. Writers about diplomacy relied heavily on a theatrical vocabulary to describe the ambassador''s work. In the 1580s, for example, Italian theorist Alberico Gentili recommended that diplomats attempt to act like and even to "assume" the personality of the princes they represent, as if playing his character on a stage. In his influential tome L''ambassadeur et ses fonctions (first published 1680), Dutch legalist Abraham de Wicquefort wrote: "In all the world''s commerce, there is no personage more actor-like than the ambassador." In a 1716 work, French diplomat François de Callières echoed: "An ambassador resembles in some way an actor exposed on the stage to the eyes of the public in order to play great roles." Although framed as comparisons, it would be unfair to characterize these references to theatrical performance as mere metaphors.

As countless manuals stressed, a good ambassador needed a strong repertoire of performance skills. To succeed in his mission, he had to deliver good speeches and carry himself with grace in the elaborate ceremonies of diplomacy. He had to be able to dissimulate as well as any actor--to tell lies or at least conceal knowledge--in order to gather intelligence for his master. In addition, early modern diplomats were sometimes called on to perform in artistic contexts as well as in negotiations. As a resident in a foreign court, an ambassador had to be able to participate in the routine festivities of aristocratic society. This meant riding in equestrian pageants, dancing at balls, dressing up for masquerades, perhaps singing on occasion. It is not surprising, in this context, that ambassadorship was considered an "art." In fact, throughout early modern Europe, the performing arts infused the day-to-day lives of ambassadors.

In addition to their own quotidian uses of performance techniques, diplomats took part in the entertainments of music, dance, poetry, and pageantry that celebrated peace treaties and punctuated the annual rhythms of court life. Foreign diplomats constituted an important sector of the audience for masques in Stuart and Jacobin England, court ballets in Valois and Bourbon France, royal processions in Spain, and noble families'' theatrical celebrations of Catholic holidays throughout Italy. Ambassadors sometimes hosted parties with music, dancing, and fireworks to congratulate their host regime on a royal birth or to diffuse their own sovereigns'' good news abroad. Such "diplomatic entertainments" were frequent and common throughout the early modern era. Their ubiquity raises the question: Exactly what kind of diplomatic work did these entertainments perform? This book investigates the multiple, evolving diplomatic functions of theatrical entertainments from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth century--the period in which "modern" diplomacy emerged and took hold in Europe. The culture of diplomatic entertainment developed in tandem with broad shifts in the theory and practice of diplomacy: the custom of exchanging resident ambassadors, pioneered in Renaissance Italy, was adopted throughout Europe by the second half of the sixteenth century. It became codified over the course of the following century, giving rise to internationally accepted rules and conventions regarding diplomatic immunity and extraterritoriality. By the Congress of Utrecht in 1713, a coherent diplomatic system--which some commentators consider the modern one--had been established throughout the continent.

This set of shared diplomatic practices facilitated a major renegotiation of European powers'' relationship to one another in the long post-Reformation era, gradually replacing the authority of the pope as the primary agent of mediation among princes. Throughout this extended period of transition, theatrical entertainments performed in diplomatic contexts--whether at court for an audience of resident ambassadors or at summits and congresses--both paralleled and played an active role in these shifts. In fact, the emergent diplomatic culture depended on a set of theatrical practices that translated seamlessly from the scene of diplomacy (the court, the summit, the negotiating room) to the stage. These practices could be grouped into three broad categories: embodied representation, performance, and spectatorship. As seen in the diplomatic manuals cited above, the language of theatrical representation pervaded discourses on diplomacy to describe the ambassador''s role. Ambassadors not only had to speak for their princes in addresses and negotiations but also were charged with continually embodying the "dignity" of their sovereigns, particularly in relation to other diplomatic representatives. The imperative to maintain dignity derived from the primary way the European diplomatic community was imagined and represented in the early modern period. From the early sixteenth century, the "rule of precedence" organized European states into a theoretical hierarchy of prestige, an international-scale mirror image of the system of rank that governed interactions among barons, dukes, and marquises within individual court societies.

The conventional "rule" by which kingdoms outranked duchies and other lesser principalities took concrete form whenever delegates from several states assembled--whether at a diplomatic congress, royal wedding, or funeral--and was reflected in the order of procession. Such ceremonies constituted dramatic representations in microcosm of the imaginary order that structured the European community of princes. Not only ambassadors but entire courts worked to represent the international dignity of the monarch through sumptuous, highly stage-managed diplomatic ceremonies such as royal audiences as well as through formal entertainments. The representation of monarchal power is a familiar theme in scholarship on court spectacle. Roy Strong''s foundational Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-1650 examines how entertainments became "a natural part of the apparatus of the Baroque monarch" and "a central instrument of government" by making manifest the ruler''s magnificence. A diverse array of scholars working in post-structuralist or New Historicist traditions have also shown how court entertainments functioned as strategic or ideologically driven displays of power. But while most of these analyses have focused on representations'' power to "impress" domestic spectators with the prince''s overwhelming authority, early modern commentators more often described court entertainments as a means to dazzle foreign observers. During Louis XIV''s reign, for example, French theorist and playwright Samuel Chappuzeau wrote that spectacular performances should "make foreigners see what a king of France can do in his kingdom.

" Monarchs competed with each other to design ever more impressive forms of entertainment at their courts. Christian IV of Denmark, for example, enchanted diplomatic visitors at his pleasure house in Rosenborg with "invisible concerts" performed by musicians concealed in an antechamber and piped in through architectural conduits, provoking wonder through a masterful display of "sonic control." In mid-seventeenth-century France, ministers and diplomats worked to import Italy''s premier artists and engineers to enrich French court theater practices and make them the best in Europe. Performed before a captive audience of ambassadors, court entertainments exhibited the wealth and artistic talent amassed by the monarch for international appreciation. This understanding of entertainments'' function might be considered an early modern equivalent to what Joseph Nye calls "soft power": the power that "arises from the attractiveness of a country''s culture" and values in foreign eyes. The importance of such "attractiveness" in an early modern context resulted from the way European society as a whole was represented in the diplomatic imagination as monarchs jockeyed to maintain or achieve a favorable place in the fictive hierarchy of international society. Beyond their role as ostentatious displays of prestige, diplomatic entertainments also engaged explicitly in the task of imagining or reimagining international relations in their content, through allegorical iconography. Many ballets and pageants performed for a diplomatic audience reflected on international themes by personifying "nations" and even "Europe" itself as dramatic characters interacting with each other onstage.

Iconographies for international relations offered a stylized language for thinking about the nature of political community. This was particularly true through the last de.