Castiglione’s ‘Green’ Sense of Theater

So wrote Jacob Soll, in 2009, brilliantly recasting Peter Burke’s previous discussion of chivalric and courtly values in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier within a new history of knowledge and politics. There are several things to notice about this quotation. First, Soll suggests that the vast information system that lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state was actually indebted to humanist pedagogy in two ways – that is, through the instrumental legacy of measurement developed by the ars mercatoria, and through the antiquarian ideals of learning related to the use of historical scholarship and paperwork – rather than to be seen as a complete departure from earlier conceptions of the legal archive, both in terms of scale and as an aesthetic object. Second, even though royal business was larger and infinitely more complex than its Quattrocento predecessors, none of its instruments, old and new, were self-evident in their use. The type of double-entry bookkeeping favored by Tuscan merchants, for instance, or Luca Pacioli’s insistence that inventorying should be kept in real time, needed to be articulated, as Soll has shown, by a new class of interpreters and instructors. Thus, these practices also needed a community of scholars and consumers already aware of their importance, and capital assessment, in turn, had a function in creating a larger public in which people’s interests and undertakings switched from manufacture to use and meaning. My question in this chapter is: how can we best describe the managerial dimension of Castiglione in his time and space? To answer that question, I take Castiglione’s unusual engagement as a stage-manager to be a representative instance of theatrical networks and public-making in early modern Italy. The event took place in the ducal palace of Urbino on the last Sunday of carnival, on 6 February 1513, and involved a production of Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena’s successful comedy Calandra. The degree to which that performance is able to stand as an adequate description of an early, coalescing phase of trade, distance, and sociability in European drama as a whole depends not