This book explores the secret relations between theatre and diplomacy from the Tudors to the Treaty of Westphalia. It offers an original insight into the art of diplomacy in the 1580-1655 period through the prism of literature, theatre and material history.

Contributors investigate English, Italian and German plays of Renaissance theoretical texts on diplomacy, lifting the veil on the intimate relations between ambassadors and the artistic world and on theatre as an unexpected instrument of 'soft power'. The volume offers new approaches to understanding Early Modern diplomacy, which was a source of inspiration for Renaissance drama for Shakespeare and his European contemporaries, and contributed to fashion the aesthetic and the political ideas and practice of the Renaissance.

Nathalie Rivere de Carles is Reader in Early Modern English Drama at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France. She authored chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy (2015) and in Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance (2013); and is a contributing Textual Editor of the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare.

1. The Poetics of Diplomatic Appeasement in the Early Modern Era; Nathalie Rivère de Carles.- PART I. FROM TRUCE TO NEGOTIATED PEACE: THE TEMPORAL DIPLOMACIES OF A LITERATURE OF APPEASEMENT.- 2. The Slumber of War Diplomacy, Tragedy, and the Aesthetics of the Truce in Early Modern Europe; Timothy Hampton.- 3. 'Ces petits livres en françois de Messieurs les Hotmans': Peace in a/the European Family; Dominique Goy-Blanquet.- 4. 'Mediating Amicably'? The Birth of the Trauerspiel out of the Letter of Westphalia; Jane O. Newman.- PART II. A VERY POLITICAL PEACEMAKER: THE STAGE AMBASSADOR BETWEEN DIPLOMATIC TACTICS AND POLITICAL STRATEGIES.- 5. The Performative Power of Diplomatic Discourse in the Italian Tragedies Inspired by the Wars against the Turks; Valeria Cimmieri.- 6. The Ambassador as Proteus: Indirect Characterisation and Diplomatic Appeasement in Catiline and Measure for Measure; Nathalie Rivère deCarles.- 7. Galleries and Soft Power: The Gallery in The Winter's Tale; Patricia Akhimie.- PART III. CONCILIATORY NETOWRKS AS SOFT POWER: A DYNAMIC DIPLOMACY OF CROSS-CONFESSIONAL APPEASEMENT.- 8. Marginal Diplomatic Spaces during the Jacobean Era, 1603-25; Roberta Anderson.- 9. Venetian Merchants as Diplomatic Agents: Family Networks and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe; Diego Pirillo.- 10. The Fabric of Silk Power in the Sherley Portraits; Ladan Niayesh.- Selected Bibliography.- Index.-