A Venetian ambassador sees a performance of Pericles

Sometime between May 1606 and July 1608, the Venetian ambassador to England saw a performance of Pericles, and invited the ambassador of France, the ambassador’s wife, and the Florentine resident in England, to join him. We know this because it is mentioned in a deposition made a decade later.

Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Inquisitori di Stato 155, fols. 72-79 contain a report of the interrogation of the interpreter Odoardo Guatz (Guazzo), which, as recorded on fol. 1, took place in London on April 18, 1617. The interrogation is included in a collection of reports mostly connected with the trial of former Ambassador Antonio Foscarini, who had been arrested on his return to Venice in March 1616. Among the many accusations brought against Foscarini by his former secretary Muscorno, and others, were those of having converted to Protestantism, of being a drunkard, a womanizer, and a theatergoer. 

The trial was concluded with Foscarini’s full acquittal on July 30, 1618 (cf. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 49, 1997). Interestingly, Guazzo testified that Foscarini had only been “three or four times to see the plays.” Being asked, the interpreter confirmed that other ambassadors, including that of the Archduke of Austria, were occasional frequenters of the London theaters, and that they sometimes even took their wives to see the shows. He evidently believed that this was fairly common, and not considered worthy of censure by the local diplomatic community. Guazzo had “served all the ambassadors” as an interpreter. He was appreciated as a man who “knows his duties and is necessary not only for the language but to give much other information." (Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, 69-85). In fact, even the well-known and much appreciated former Venetian representative Zorzi (Giorgio) Giustinian, Guazzo stated, had been to a play in the company of the French ambassador-in-ordinary, Antoine LeFevre de la Boderie, and his wife, and Ottavian Lotti, the Florentine resident in England. The play in question was Shakespeare’s Pericles. Giustinian was the Venetian Ambassador to England from January 5, 1606 to November 23, 1608. Leeds Barroll convincinginly argues that the only time this group could have seen the play together, due to plague closings, was May/June 1606, April 1607, or April-July 1608. It is assumed that the venue was the Globe, based on the title page of the first edition (Barroll, p. 193), but it has also been argued that Giustinian paid for a private performance.

The image reproduced here is taken from folios 76v-77. Only the text on the former (of which only two sentences are relevant to Pericles) has been transcribed. The unbound documents now contained in box 155 were numbered sequentially, hence the numeration “72-79” (the final blank pages were not foliated) for this quire. As evidenced by the central hole visible throughout, these leaves were once bound together with other documents by means of a string or cord, a common procedure for legal manuscripts in seventeenth-century Italy as well as in Continental Europe.