Court and World as Actor's Stage

The motif of sociality as the truest form of morality that is shared by much of Cinquecento ethical speculation becomes a true leitmotif in Stefano Guazzo's (Casale Monferrato 1530–1593) La civil conversatione, where it insistently recurs even ad nauseam.^[37] This treatise is remarkable for its impact abroad, which in distant England was almost equal to that of Castiglione. It is significant that Guazzo's rather modest book enjoyed greater influence abroad than the more substantial treatises by Speroni, Piccolomini (Alessandro), Pomponazzi, Nifo, Gelli, and Paruta, which it rather unimaginatively summarized. This was because it explicitly put the accent on those criteria of social conduct that observers of Italian life wanted to hear about.

A Piedmontese courtier, ambassador, and writer, Guazzo came from a noble and wealthy family of courtiers to the marquises of Monferrato and the dukes of Mantua. He continued in his forefathers' footsteps

by serving the same lords as secretary and courtier at different times, following Ludovico Gonzaga of Mantua to France for seven years when the latter became duke of Nevers, then serving as ambassador to Charles IX of France and, in 1566, to Pope Pius IV. Enjoying no fewer than thirty-four Italian editions (twenty-five of them between 1574–1603, but none after 1631), his major work was soon translated into French (ten versions), Latin (fourteen versions), Dutch (two versions), Spanish, and German; of the six English versions (last, London, 1788), most influential was the one by George Pettie (1581, first three books), continued by Bartholomew Young for book 4 and published in complete form in 1586.^[38]

Guazzo's title made “conversation” a term for social behavior throughout Europe. It echoed Della Casa's “comune conversazione,” but its twofold acceptation of “pleasant, civilized social intercourse” and “using language as a civilized and civilizing means” was already established, as shown in the “cosmological” thesaurus La fabrica del mondo (1546–1548) of Francesco Alunno (1485–1556). The notion of “civil conversation” and the association of the city with courtesy, urbanity, and civility was manifest in Alunno's definition of urbanità: “urbanità, la civilità”; “urbanità: Lat. urbanitas, facetiae, dicteria, ioci, sales, lepores, cavillatio, dicacitas, argutiae, delitiae; è gratiosa conversatione di cittadini.”^[39] It was a list of rhetorical figures covering all forms of wit. Alunno defined conversare as “conversare per praticare insieme,”^[40] and cortesia as “beneficence, gift, humane and gracious liberality, with a becoming habit of moderation; so denominated from the courts of good princes where such virtues always shine.”^[41]

Although conversation for Guazzo meant social intercourse, his dwelling on verbal civility contributed to the spreading of “conversation”'s more modern acceptation.^[42] The lexical choice is an important echo of the humanistic emphasis on language as the foundation and carrier of civilization—“language as the basis of social intercourse,” as Burckhardt recalled with reference to the large section dedicated to linguistic matters and the effective use of language in Castiglione's book 2.^[43] Humanists conceived of speech as the essence of humanity, and language as action in dialogue, hence truly “the art of conversation.” “He who wishes to engage successfully in civil conversation,” says Guazzo, “must consider that language is the mirror and portrait of his soul; and that, much as we can tell a coin by its sound, so from the sound of our words we see deeply inside a man's character and his behavior.”^[44]

After Castiglione, his earnest concern for the moral substance of the

man of court came to take second place to the art of speaking charmingly and effectively in public. The art of the courtier became a sort of court rhetoric and elegant conversation. Guazzo well represented this narrowing of the horizon according to a widespread trend that was perhaps more pronounced in Spain than elsewhere, as clearly shown by Luis Milán's Spanish translation of Il Cortegiano in El libro entitulado el Cortesano (1561), dedicated to Philip II. Milán's hero must speak well but mostly, it seems, about pleasant, witty, and harmless things: he must be a good motejador. Although this emphasis on orality was to be further developed in France, the Spain of Philip II provided a new breeding ground for the medieval virtue of reticence: besides knowing how to speak well, the new hero, el cortesano, that is “el caballero armado virtuoso, la mejor criatura de la tierra,” has to know when it is more appropriate to keep silent: “bien hablar y callar donde es menester.”^[45] We sense here a new twist away from Castiglione's individualistic and comparatively independent agent toward a mere servant at court, prudent master of diplomacy and self-effacement. This twist was already apparent in Pellegro Grimaldi, who in his Discorsi (1543) did not want to discuss the virtues of a complete courtier but only the art of survival, to be summed up in the advice “to keep your mouth shut, as the saying goes,” “tenete (come si dice) la bocca chiusa,” after doing all that pleases the prince—and no more.^[46] One of the more than one hundred proverbial sentences that stud Guazzo's Civil conversatione has the same ring: “il tacere a tempo è più lodato che il ben parlare,” “keeping mum at the right moment wins more praise than eloquence.” Guazzo also differs from Castiglione by focusing on real conditions and practical applications. Furthermore, he extends the area of Erasmian “civility” and deemphasizes the service to the prince and the imperative of pleasing the prince with a willful search for a broader social grace that will satisfy the inner man, too.

The dialogue sets Annibale Magnocavalli, a doctor, against the author's brother Guglielmo, who, disappointed by the futility of courtly life, is thinking of retirement from the world. Appearing as Guazzo's spokesman, Annibale argues for a good life in service of society but away from politics and the court. One senses here a disenchanted echo of Guazzo's difficult relationship with the rulers of Monferrato and their ruthlessly absolutist disregard for the statutory freedoms of the recent feudal past. His patron Ludovico Gonzaga was distrusted by Duke Guglielmo of Mantua, whose cousin Vespasiano Gonzaga Marquis of Sabbioneta, his longa manus and strongarm man in Casale, at one

point even ordered all followers of Duke Ludovico of Nevers out of town.^[47]

Guazzo basically follows Castiglione in the ordering of topics, even down to the digressive theme of love, although in formal presentation he echoes the Cortegiano only in book 4, which enacts an actual conversation in the course of a banquet, whereas the preceding three books are more like a treatise.^[48] Nevertheless, he makes a brave attempt at originality in departing from the established generic patterns. The result is an idiosyncratic nomenclature that strikes the reader as plainer and more down-to-earth than Castiglione's, especially since the discussion divides the topic into public and domestic behavior, including relationships between spouses (as in treatises on the management of the household), and presents a set of virtues and vices that does not remind us specifically of the received schemes. Guazzo's love is a civilizing force whereby a man “waxes more wise”; an honest love makes us capable of finer things; it inflames us with virtuous thoughts and even “stirs up to Poetry” (book 2, vol. 1: 238 of Pettie's 1581 translation). Sprezzatura has become negligenza o sprezzamento, based on avoidance of affettazione (p. 161 ed. Venice: Robino, 1575) and on hiding that arte which is the cultural basis of the elect behavior: “faccia il tutto con arte, ma in maniera che l'arte sia nascosta e paia il tutto a caso” (ibid.: p. 20).^[49]

The city, larger setting of the court, is regarded as the seat of civilization and virtuous living, “albergo di virtù,” although it can also be “albergo de' vizi” (book 1). Hence the sphere of civility goes beyond the walls of both the court and the city: “Civile conversation is a vertuous kinde of living in the world  . . . [but] to live civilly is not said in respect of the cities, but of the qualities of the mind: so I understand civile conversation not having relation to the citie, but consideration to the manners and conditions which make it civile” (Pettie 1: 56).^[50] Thus, beyond the taste for a plainer style, Guazzo's originality vis-à-vis Castiglione lies mainly in this broader scope than that of the man whose whole career is centered on currying favor with superiors and the powerful. Consequently his art of conduct becomes, in the end, potentially incompatible with the dissimulation, the insincerity, the theatrical display, the cultural dilettantism, and the outward ornamentation that life at court seemed to require and that court critics found so objectionable even in Castiglione, regardless of that author's lofty moral concerns.^[51] Only transcending the world of the court would satisfy the other protagonist of the dialogue, his brother Guglielmo, at whose instance the dialogue was presumably engaged. His appeal to the broader common

sense and freer manners of the educated gentleman rather than the professional courtier is similar to Della Casa's impatience with insincerity in all forms.

Yet, the centrifugal force of court patterns was such that, while Guazzo was trying to transcend the narrow boundaries of the court, his views of good behavior remained conditioned by the court. Standards of conduct at court were based on a relationship between individual worth and public image. Accordingly, Guazzo's willful advice to be what we want to appear, “tale dee procurar l'uomo d'essere, quale desidera d'apparere,”^[52] remained wishful thinking. What the French would later call le qu'en dira-t-on, similar to the punctiliousness of the Spanish pun de onor, is a special dimension of a society that recognizes the importance of our public image: the man of court is all reputation, next to which inner worth is nonexistent or irrelevant. Regretfully, Guazzo had to recognize that “the jugement which wee have to know our selves is not ours, but wee borrow it of others” (Pettie). An attentive critic (Frank Whigham [1983]: 637) has underscored this statement as a sign that reputation had replaced virtue for all practical purposes, and was therefore “radically dependent on the eye and voice of the audience.” Thus, “the ideal courtier is never off-stage” and “public opinion takes precedence over one's own moral perception” (Whigham 634 f.). On this ground Stanley Fish (1988: 260) makes a remark which could be a summary conclusion on the general drift of that courtly ethic we have seen unfolding from the beginning: “so self-consciously rhetorical is courtly life that moral categories themselves are realized as various performative styles.” Fish (261) quotes Heinrich F. Plett's further observation (1983: 613) that “the courtier lives only as a social being and is in private ‘retreat’  . . . a cipher.” The literature of the sophisticated court society of Louis XIV compels us to agree with these characterizations. From his angle, Fish was trying to define Ben Jonson's (1572–1637) poetically productive attempt to protect himself from the cannibalistic nature of the court by reversing roles and offering the truly moral and honest man a way to form an inner society away from the court, within “the tribe of Ben.” This interpretation offers an understanding of Ben Jonson's difficult predicament in reconciling inner honesty with successful adjustment to the ways of the world, especially in the hothouses of princely courts.

Guazzo's attempt to broaden the social scope of good manners was a latter-day index of Renaissance humanism, and was destined to be lost in the reversion to a top-heavy social makeup that came about in

the baroque age. Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675) typically expressed this need for a select speech that in its witty urbanity (arguto, urbano ) would operate as a status symbol, privileging the élite gathered around the prince by sharply differentiating them from the hoi polloi: “differenzia il parlar degli uomini ingegnosi da quel de' plebei.”^[53] The motif of urban versus rustic that we have often encountered is here intensified into an explicit defense of the theatricality of court manners and gestures as a functional semiotic pattern, consciously sought and accepted as part of necessary class distinctions within an aristocratic society.