• 1 Michael Clyne, “Multilingualism”, in The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. Florian Coulmas, Oxford, (...)
• 2 Peter Burke, Language and Communities in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (...)
• 3 Aldo Scaglione, The Emergence of National Languages, Ravena, Longo, 1984, pp. 9–49

1Michael Clyne defines multilingualism as the ability to speak several languages and that of using several languages, whether by an individual, an entire nation or society.1 Defining multilingualism in terms of use and territory echoes the Humanist approach to languages and, particularly, to Latin. The Humanist philological project promoted Latin to create a neutral zone where one would reach an audience beyond their linguistic community2 while increasingly codifying vernacular languages.3 These two dynamics underpin the relationship of the Renaissance audience with the language of the Other: language is in turn a conflict zone and a way to diminish hostility.

• 4 Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You Know No bodie; or The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth part 2, (...)
• 5 On the staging of anti-Spanish sentiment in the 1590s, see in this volume Nora Galland, “Armado or (...)

2Multilingualism in the Renaissance is both a matter of delocalising and re-localising languages in a less adversarial linguistic territory. It is a subtle form of linguistic diplomacy that Thomas Heywood dramatises in the literal context of two diplomatic scenes in the second part of If you know not me, you know no bodie or The Troubles of the Queene Elizabeth, first registered in 1605.4 Heywood’s is a rare play dramatising this form of diplomatic multilingualism blending Latin and vernacular language through the voice of an ambassador and his interpreter. Written and performed within the two years following Elizabeth i’s death in 1603, Heywood’s two-part play dramatises immediate-to-recent history. Part 1 chronicles Mary I’s reign, ending with Elizabeth’s accession. Part 2 is a hotchpotch of significant events symbolising the creativity, threats and victories of the Elizabethan era: the first three acts deal with Thomas Gresham’s building of the Royal Exchange, then the action shifts from city comedy to historical play as the plot focuses on Elizabeth and her political entourage, with Doctor William Parry’s assassination attempt and the Spanish Armada’s failed invasion of England.5 The play was written and first performed at the same time as the 1604 Treaty of London ending the Anglo-Spanish war was signed. The diplomatic context is supposedly that of a temporary cooperation or at least a status quo between the two kingdoms. However, the treaty was not so favourably received in England. This ambivalent diplomatic endeavour is reflected in Heywood’s play and its use of multilingualism.

• 6 Marianne Montgomery, Europe’s Languages on England’s Stages, 1590-1620, Basingstoke, Ashgate, 2012, (...)
• 7 Ton Hoenselaars, Dirk Delabastita, Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporari (...)
• 8 Marvin Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Language at Play in the Theatre, Ann Arbor, University of Mich (...)
• 9 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1965, p. 3.
• 10 Roy Harris, The Language Myth, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1981, p. 167.
• 11 Francis Thynne, The Perfect Ambassadour treating of the antiquitie, priveledges, and behaviour of m (...)
• 12 Burke, Language and Communities..., pp. 5–7.

4In her illuminating study of European languages on the English stage, Marianne Montgomery analyses these scenes as “idealized exchanges” that show “the key cultural issues – of gender, of class, of nation, and of education that attend the staging of Europe’s languages in early modern England”.6 This article extends this analysis by focusing on the diplomatic potential of these scenes and how they shed light on the English language culture at the turn of the seventeenth century. My approach combines the literary and the historical approaches, i.e. textual study and “looking at multilingualism both as a dramatic device, and as a sign of cultural, social and political shifts and tensions”.7 While studying the nature of Heywood’s dramatic use of Latin, I kept in mind Marvin Carlson’s warning against the excessive “formulation [of] regularizing and abstracting qualities”,8 i.e. considering “ideal speaker-listener” operating “in a completely homogeneous speech community” and “knowing its language perfectly”.9 Carlson suggests analysing dramatic texts from the perspective of “integrational linguistics”, that is, to consider that “language is continuously created by the interaction of individuals in specific communication situations”.10 This study shows how Heywood dramatises diplomatic communication and what was known about it to discuss English language culture. Contrasting Heywood’s diplomatic scenes with Francis Thynne’s The Perfect Ambassadour (1578) and Jean Hotman’s The Ambassador (1603),11 this study considers, with Peter Burke, language culture “in terms of linguistic, cultural and social conflicts as well as of collective solidarities and identities”.12 It approaches languages in terms of communities, but not communities organised between insiders and outsiders, but as loci of construction and reconstruction of national and territorial identities.

• 13 Author’s translation. Abraham de Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, La Haye, Maurice Georg (...)

7Wicquefort criticises early modern diplomacy primers’ frequent use of Greek and Latin quotations and promotes writing in vernacular language: “Nous luy permettons de s’égayer de son grec et de son latin pendant que nous parlerons un langage, que l’on puisse entendre aujourd’huy.” [He is allowed to entertain himself with his Greek and his Latin, while we speak a language we can understand today].13 Latin was the principal language of diplomacy for centuries, however, and retained its importance in international relations for most of the seventeenth century and way into the eighteenth century, in which treaties were still drafted in that language. Notwithstanding the debate regarding its increasing obscurity and the importance of reaching a wider audience through vernaculars, Latin is more than an ornamental tool or issue: it represents the relationship with linguistic otherness and the tension between the diplomatic need for both visibility and invisibility.

• 14 See also Pierre Danès, Conseils à un ambassadeur, Paris, 1561, and Étienne Dolet, De officio legati(...)
• 15 Thynne, The Perfect Ambassadour, ff. 18v–19r.
• 16 Ibid., ff.14v, 18v–19r, 70v.

8Multilingualism is a requirement for ambassadors¹⁴ and many a Renaissance treaty on diplomacy reflects this by switching between languages and offering translations or glosses of non-vernacular quotations. In The Perfect Ambassadour, Francis Thynne lists all the qualities expected from an early modern diplomat: “that he be wise, valiant, circumspect, furnished with divers Languages, eloquent of quick capacitie, of ready deliverance”.15 Thynne quotes several examples of multilingualism in ambassadors, with a special emphasis on Greek and Latin.16 In chapter 4, “What Lawes, and privileges were made, and allowed for and to Ambassadors”, he explains that during a diplomatic audience, each would have been speaking in their own language and resorted to interpreters. Speaking one’s own native language is power assertion on both parts. However, quoting the example of Alexander’s envoys speaking Greek to the Roman Senate (which allowed only Latin to be spoken in its premises), Thynne refines linguistic power play:

• 18 Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Historical Sociolingusitic Changes in Tudor and Stu (...)
• 19 John Stubbs, Discovery of a Gaping Gulf, London, 1579.

10If Thynne’s linguistic tactic is debatable, it is also revealing of a historical fact and maybe of a deeper strategy of power increase through language. Thynne’s narrative betrays the contentious fact of early modern English being a lesser-known language in other countries.18 Thynne’s language tactic is a means to secure that if England’s help or alliance is required, English must be the language of negotiation. To do so, it requires the foreign negotiators to be taught English. Thynne published his text the same year as the unpopular marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and François, duke of Alençon. This instance of marriage diplomacy triggered xenophobic reactions taking the form of linguistic defiance, as in John Stubbe’s Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579), which predicted that the marriage would result in Italianate Frenchmen “gibber[ing] in the streets half Hebrew, half Ashdod” and that Englishmen would be forced to “mumble the strange tongue of Rome.”19 In that tense context and that of European hegemons regularly switching alliances or engaging into conflicts, Thynne’s view of diplomatic multilingualism might be less a question of education of future ambassadors than the elaboration of a linguistic strategy of power gain and expansion.

• 20 Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power. The Means to Success in World Politics, New York, Public Affairs, 20 (...)
• 21 Uptal Vyas, Soft Power in Japan-China Relations: State, Sub-state, Non-state Relations, New York, R (...)

11Thynne’s approach may suggest the beginning of England’s linguistic soft power – the projection of one’s interest through convincing and attracting to co-opt rather than relying on hard military and economic power. Joseph Nye explains that “soft power resources are slower, more diffuse” than those of hard power.20 Uptal Vyas explains that soft power’s vehicles are cultural and educational exchanges.21 Thynne’s strategy is not as clearly worded as one might expect it to be nowadays. However, imposing the use of English when England’s help is sought requires widening England’s linguistic implantation abroad. It is a way of compelling English-language learning on a wider scale, starting with political circles and then letting the trickle-down-effect do its work. Such linguistic dynamics would then trigger a wider diffusion of English printed culture and increase England’s influence.

• 22 See Elizabeth i: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, William Rainey Harper, Janel Mueller, Mary Be (...)
• 23 Roger Ascham, Letters of Roger Ascham, trans. and ed. Maurice Hatch and Alvin Vos, New York, Peter (...)
• 24 Montgomery, Europe’s Languages…, p. 105. Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gende (...)

12Elizabeth i’s linguistic skills are a well-known topos of Elizabethan biography and hagiography.22 They are evidenced in her own letters and in the letters of her tutor Roger Ascham, first published in 1576 and describing a more-than-able student. In a 1550 letter to the Strasbourg humanist Johannes Sturm, Ascham writes that Elizabeth “speaks French and Italian as well as she speaks English; her Latin is smooth, correct and thoughtful; frequently and voluntarily she has even spoken with me in Greek tolerably well”. He uses also the gendered topos later to be found in Heywood’s play that she has “talent without a woman’s weakness”.23 Following in Louis Montrose’s footsteps, Marianne Montgomery stresses that: “Since her gender barred her from heroic exploits on the battlefield, Elizabeth’s languages became for her a source of authority”. Montgomery adds that languages were used “as tools and even as weapons in her conduct of foreign policy”.24

• 26 Montgomery, Europe’s Languages…, p. 2.

14Ascham describes what Montgomery names “a near-impossible scene of triple conversation”.26 However, the scene is far from chaotic and confused, and Elizabeth is represented as a cohesive linguistic hub. Her linguistic skills are weaponised to legitimise her rule and her competence as a monarch. They promoted and consolidated her image as a serious geopolitical player.

• 27 Early modern monarchs were expected to display the classical cardinal virtues (wisdom, justice, for (...)

15In Ascham’s letter her multilingualism is the expression of her royal virtues of wisdom (her education), of constancy (she brings harmony and not chaos to the scene), and her strength (she can handle not one but three ambassadors from three different countries at the same time).27 The usual heroic portrayal of a male monarch is thus transferred on the intellectual and linguistic levels. Her fortitude is an intellectual one, as she comes to embody the pax Christiana (peace between all European Christian kingdoms).

• 28 “Speech 22, Additional Documents A, B” in Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 335.
• 29 Ian Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: The Career of John, First Viscount Scudamore, (...)
• 30 Janet M. Green, “Queen Elizabeth i’s Latin Reply to the Polish Ambassador”, The Sixteenth Century J (...)
• 31 Dzialynski was received “publickly, in the chamber of Presence, where most of the Erles and Nobleme (...)
• 32 Green, “Queen Elizabeth i’s Latin Reply to the Polish Ambassador,” pp. 988; 990. John Speed, The Hi (...)
• 33 Michelle Parkinson, ”La Jupe Blanche: (Ad)dressing Elizabeth I”, Prose Studies, 28:2, 2006, pp. 168 (...)

16Her fortitude expressed itself through more irate use of her linguistic skills, as during her meeting with the Polish ambassador, Pawel Dzialynski on 25 July 1597. Dzialynski transmitted King Sigismund iii’s grievances over England’s interfering with Poland’s shipping trade with Spain. His Latin address was met with Elizabeth’s off-the-cuff reply in the same language.28 Discussing Jean Hotman’s views on the language of negotiation, Ian Atherton suggests the power game at play in diplomatic multilingualism: “It was generally held both a tactical advantage and an honour to one’s master for an ambassador to be able to speak his native tongue, but, failing that, Latin was often accepted as a common diplomatic language”.29 Dzialynski’s not being able to use Polish recalled the difference in geopolitical weight of both states. Yet Sigismund’s choice of sending his message in Latin and not in Polish – as the ambassador noted he was quoting his master – was also a tactic to display the king’s own perfect mastery of Latin, the language of Catholicism, and his opposition to Elizabeth’s treatment of English Catholics. Janet M. Green studies Elizabeth’s spontaneous oration and points out language as a both a local and an international battlefield historicising the constantly questioned legitimacy of Elizabethan rule.30 Elizabeth’s direct reply in Latin was meant to surprise Dzialynski and display her political readiness. It avoided the delaying effect of an interpreter, using speed to empower speech. It also made sure that a fair number of important players in the audience could understand and broadcast the incident.31 Similarly it made the process of translation and diffusion of her oration much easier as Latin was a shared language across the continent and could be more easily translated than English. Green notes that an “unusual number of manuscript copies” and printed texts of Elizabeth’s speech in Latin, English and Italian circulated. The incident was soon included in historical narratives such as John Speed’s The History of Great Britaine (1614).32 It was also famously recounted in the correspondence between two members of Elizabeth’s privy council, Robert Cecil and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in praise of their queen’s strength.33

• 34 G. Berridge, ‎Alan James, ‎Lorna Lloyd, Dictionary of Diplomacy (third edition), London, Palgrave M (...)

17We may then wonder to what extent Ascham’s letters, the circulated accounts of Elizabeth’s Latin rebuke of Dzialynski and the exchange between Cecil and Essex partook of a proto soft power initiative aiming to promote the monarch. Ascham’s letters to Johannes Sturmius fit the description of what is known today as track two diplomacy or “backchannel diplomacy” or the reliance on the diplomatic agency of non-stage actors.34 His correspondence, including the letters to Sturmius, was later reproduced in his own educational book, The Schoolmaster (1570). It can be construed as part of a non-official proto soft power relying on a new medium: print. Of course, the readership would have been limited but the book would have reached the targeted audience of political circles at home and abroad.

• 35 See Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England, C (...)

18Similarly, the correspondence between Cecil and Essex was not intended to be read by many readers. The possibility of interception of the letters, however, was real and known to the writers.35 Thus, their portrait of Elizabeth’s multilingualism might have not only served their own sycophantic self-aggrandising ambitions but also helped propagate beyond English borders a portrait of Elizabeth as a strong ruler who, Janus-like, blended capacities for war as well as for peace. This portrait of Elizabeth as a linguistic hub creating a coincidence of opposites re-emerges in Thomas Heywood’s two-part play about her reign: If You Know Not Me, You Know No bodie, or the Troubles of Queene Elizabeth.

• 36 Hereafter identified as ‘first’ and ‘second diplomatic scene’.
• 37 Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections”, Studies in (...)

19Two scenes featuring ambassadors36 in If you know not me (part 2) testify to Heywood’s reliance on topicality and verisimilitude effects in his plays, and his skills at staging circumstances most spectators would have been hardly acquainted with.37 First, the scene is set at the Royal Exchange, a significant location in terms of language culture and diplomacy. When discussing the English population’s familiarity with foreign languages, Peter Burke notes that Latin dominated in schools and universities, that the gentry and the prosperous urban classes resorted to private tutors to study modern vernaculars, and that the lower classes’ exposure to foreign languages for instance in London centred on the Dutch and French churches in London and the workshops of foreign-born artisans and around the Royal Exchange. Besides its multilingual potential, the Royal Exchange was also a place of residence for two Scottish ambassadors who met with the Russian ambassador Heywood used as inspiration for his play. The setting is multilingually diplomatic and so is Heywood’s script. The blend of English and Latin in the first diplomatic scene is evocative of the multilingualism of treaties on embassy. The latter is dramatised through the character of the interpreter, another element of the play’s diplomatic verisimilitude.

• 38 Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney, 18 oct 1600, Sydney Papers, vol. 2.
• 39 N. E. Evans, “The Meeting of the Russian and the Scottish Ambassadors in London in 1601”, The Slavo (...)

21By the time of the play’s first performance, Anglo-Russian diplomacy was a popular subject, as shown by the print success of Sir Thomas Smithes voyage and entertainment in Russia (1605). The latter recounted the 1604 journey of English commercial diplomats to Boris Godunov to negotiate privileges for English merchants. However, if The Voyage seems the most obvious choice as Heywood’s diplomatic muse, the first public audience of a Russian ambassador at the English court on 14 October 1600 and his stay in London until 1601 seems a more accurate source for Heywood’s first diplomatic scene in If you Know not me (part 2). Boris Godunov’s Ambassador Grigory Ivanovich Mikulin seemed to have been the talk of the town in 1600–1601. Contemporary letters stressed the fascination for the many pearls on his coat: “He had a gowne of clothe of goulde […} made close by laces of pearle, […} a capp … imbordered very richly with greate pearles”.38 N.E. Evans’s study of the visit recounts Mikulin’s notorious spat in November 1600 with the French ambassador, Jean de Thumery, Sieur de Boissise, his not so secret meeting with two Scottish ambassadors, John Erskine, Earl of Mar, and Edward Bruce, abbot of Kinloss, who resided near the Royal Exchange in March 16o1 and the use of an interpreter, Andrey Grot.39 If you know not me (part 2) features these three significant details characterising Mikulin’s visit:

• 40 Nathalie Rivere de Carles, “The Ambassador as Proteus: Indirect Characterisation and Diplomatic App (...)

23Flanked by a retinue and an interpreter, the Russian ambassador is dramatised in a conventional manner: he is named after his function, is confined to a form of silence as he does not speak English and plays the part of Catastrophe, being both a semi-silent figure and the pretext to announce Gresham’s reversal of fortune in the shape of his wrecked ship.40 The novelty here is the focus on the multiple forms of diplomatic multilingualism: Heywood reprised the actual diplomatic conventional use of Latin as lingua franca as full multilingualism rather than mere code-switching. He stressed the role of chirological codes related to welcome ceremonies as proved by the inner stage direction indicating a drinking gesture: “We understand that signe”.

• 41 See commentary on Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered and the promotion of peace in Timothy Hampton, Fictio (...)

27The multimodal choices of performance of linguistic otherness are problematic as they seem to bring out adversity more than what Tasso considered to be the core of diplomacy i.e. generating an entente.41 Such a choice questions Heywood’s Latin speeches in terms of the relations with the Other. Does the use of Latin prolong the adversarial tendency or act as an instrument of appeasement?

• 42 Joseph M. Brincat, “The language of the Knights. Legislation, administration and diplomacy in a mul (...)

28In Language and Diplomacy, Joseph Brincat recalls that “Latin was a unifying fact for all high register writings, [while] the dialects were a factor of fragmentation”. It testified to “the author’s will to de-localise their language” to avoid the fragmenting power of competing territorialised languages.42 Peter Burke explains that

• 44 Bulstrode Whitelocke, A Journal of the Swedish Embassy, London, 1855, vol. i, p. 300.
• 45 C. M. Millward, A Biography of the English Language, 2^nd ed., Orlando, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, (...)

29In 1653, the Swedish chancellor, Oxenstierna, spoke Latin to Cromwell’s envoy, Bulstrode Whitelocke, because he said that Latin was “more honourable”, and that it was then a “language not peculiar to any people”.44 Oxenstierna emphasises the a-territoriality of the Latin language which could constitute a free zone and thus a lingua franca, not attached to any national authority. Yet, in certain situations, Latin’s symbolic link with Rome may have raised the issue of another type, spiritual and not temporal, territoriality. The effect of the temporary de-localisation of the speaker’s mother tongue in Latin in a diplomatic context is ambivalent in terms of reception. Celia Millward emphasised that Latin’s “association with the Roman Catholic Church and England’s continental adversaries tended to undermine its status”.45

• 46 Peter Burke, “Heu domine, adsunt Turcae: A Sketch for a Social History of Post-medieval Latin”, In (...)
• 47 For a study of this scene, see in this volume Andrew Hiscock, “‘speak what terrible language you wi (...)

30Albeit Latin’s problematic political affiliations, however, Burke notes that it was still considered as a “neutral mode of communication”.46 This neutrality is favoured onstage by the spectators’ familiarity with Latin’s wording, sometimes its meaning, and at least with its contextual uses. The familiar strangeness of Latin is more reassuring for the audience than a thoroughly inaccessible language as the invented idiom in act 4 scene 1 of Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well (1608).47 Onstage, Latin creates an aural otherness. Hence delocalising Russian into Latin generates a practical neutrality. We should then examine how this neutrality is paired with an absorptive identity and the nature of such absorption.

• 50 See Terence O. Tunberg, “Ciceronian Latin: Longolius and Others”, Journal of Neo-Latin Studies, 46, (...)

32Hotman advises the ambassador to dissimulate his fluency in a foreign language and to adopt a reformed lingua franca, namely a synthetic version of Latin. Then, he puts theory into textual practice and interpolates vernacular language and Latin quotations from Cicero, quotations that he immediately glosses as he plays both ambassador and interpreter. Heywood’s Latin mirrors two of Hotman’s linguistic recommendations: the use of diplomatic multilingualism and brevity. Heywood’s Latin indeed bears a form of directedness of address. As in Hotman’s text, Heywood’s Latin is Ciceronian50 and presented alongside an English translation.

• 51 Burke, “Heu domine…”, p. 23.

35Burke emphasised “the absorption of Latin into English to fill conceptual voids”.51 In Heywood’s play (as in many other plays), this absorption often takes the form of code-switching (the inclusion of foreign words in the middle of a sentence) rather than full-blown multilingualism (as in the ability to switch to another language one is proficient in). Heywood plays on both types of multilingualism and avoids the trap of inkhornism because his multilingualism articulates importation and coalescence. He does import words and phrases, but he also merges English and Latin thanks to their common grammatical and prosodic features.

• 52 See Maria Salmon Arel, English Trade and Adventure to Russia in the Early Modern Era: The Muscovy C (...)

36The first common trait between classical Latin and early modern English lies in the use of tu that we found in Heywood’s cues through the dative tibi or the verb ages. The use of tu in classical Latin was favoured as neutral ground for communication. Besides, it was a characteristic shared with the English language where biblical and legal language also featured a canonical use of “thou”, itself an import from the Norman. Linguistic neutrality is thus subtly redefined as shared community. It overcomes the linguistic strangeness of the Russian ambassador, echoing the use of the language of trade to create diplomatic ties with an ill-known power, Russia.52

• 53 John Cheke, Letter to Thomas Hoby (1557), in Thomas Hoby, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Virginia Co (...)

37Heywood might even go a bit further in making his Latin an acceptable idiom to the likes of John Cheke who advocated a language “clean and pure, unmixt and unmangled with the borrowing of other tongues”, by fully adapting it to the rhythm of the English pentameter.53 Here, I would posit a tentative hypothesis regarding the prosody of the Latin cues as evidence of Heywood’s absorptive approach to linguistic otherness, but an absorption as a coalescence and not an erasure.

• 54 Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre: Locations, Translations and Conflict, London, Routledge, (...)
• 55 The treaty implied that Spain officially abandoned any attempt to restore Catholicism in now Protes (...)

39If we scan [A] as one single shared line, it does indeed form a pentameter: “And them/ in per/son an/swer. ’Tis / most true.” This could suggest the typographical presentation as shared line is not accidental, as the typesetter left other lines as stand-alone short lines and the characters speak in verse. As for what is presented now as a shared line in [B], first, we need to stress that the Merchant’s line that precedes it is a fairly regular iambic pentameter. Now, if we try to scan [B], we come up with a mainly trochaic pentameter articulated around a classical Horatian dactyl (Quanti /valet?/ Mille quin /gentis /minis). The Latin metric tropes are rhythmically adapted to the English melody: both retain their specificity while being merged in a self-contained line. This process matches what Richard Rowland analyses as Heywood’s habit borrowed from Plautus to “modulate between iambic pentameter, blank verse, rhyming couplets and prose, sometimes within a single speech”.54 This non-adversarial handling of the linguistic Other would turn the scene’s diplomatic multilingualism into an instrument that coalesces distinct linguistic identities in fertile ways. This specific treatment of multilingualism may have reflected the hope that the 1604 London treaty would tone down the religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, thus opening an era of more active toleration.55

• 56 For instance, in Freewyll, a play by Francesco de Negri, translated by Henry Cheke (1565–72), the P (...)
• 57 Montgomery, Europe’s Languages…, pp. 127–128.

40Besides, the brevity of the Latin exchange and its adaptation to the rhythm of the poetic vernacular proves dramatically and diplomatically useful. Hotman’s recommendation for brevity matches theatre’s requirement for continuous action and raises the question of how the diplomatic language can achieve this balance between substance and brevity, and more particularly on the stage. The interpreter as embodiment of linguistic otherness in a diplomatic context, although historically accurate, might not be entirely satisfying, dramatically speaking, as shown in Gresham’s both civil and dismissive answer to the Interpreter, “We understand that sign”. The presence of the stock-character of the Interpreter might expand the action to unnecessary length and erase the actual diplomatic presence, or might be confused with it.56 Marianne Montgomery notes that the use of Latin on the English stage hesitates between persistence and erasure and offers a metatheatrical discussion of intelligibility.57 This hesitation might explain why Heywood develops alternative performances of linguistic otherness in a diplomatic context in both scenes featuring ambassadors.

• 58 See note 47 above.

41In his previously quoted definition of the ambassador’s multilingualism, Hotman turns language into play-acting: “And although he [the ambassador] knew the language, I had rather that he should faine, not to vnderstand it”.58 Silencing his multilingualism and resorting to Latin or to speaking in his mother tongue through an interpreter brings out the paradox of the articulation of the said and the unsaid, the visible and invisible in diplomatic communication. Heywood’s play dramatises this paradox in whispers and asides. The ambassador’s linguistic otherness is transformed on the stage into a dramatised cypher, the whisper. This quasi non-verbal performance of diplomatic linguistic otherness makes the ambassador stand out amidst the other characters. While whispering, the stage-ambassador does not need to be mediated by an interpreter. However, we may question the impact of this dramatisation of diplomatic conversation in terms of the vision and the relationship of the audience’s dominant linguistic community with linguistic Others.

• 59 See Valeria Cimmieri, “The Performative Power of Diplomatic Discourse in Italian Tragedies Inspired (...)

42Stage ambassadors in early modern drama were often reduced to silent figures.59 In Heywood’s scene, the ellipsis of the ambassadorial voice is reconfigured as whispering. We cannot really speak of “whispering” as a language per se, as it is merely a manner of communicating. However, on stage, this manner of speaking takes the form of a language as it is a conflation of words, sounds and gestures and is even linked to a territory, the aside. Whispering is a dramatic code that can be interpreted negatively as it relies on a sense of loss for the spectator, but also as the signal of further negotiation.

• 60 Besides, the displacement of the conversation onto the commercial level (even if the transaction ev (...)

44The notorious spat between the French and the Russian ambassadors over precedence during the festivities marking the anniversary of Elizabeth’s coronation in November 1600 might explain why Gresham seems surprised to see “the Russian with the French”. Of course, the merchant is not an ambassador (although in the Jacobean context this is debatable), but the reduction of the characters to metonymic expressions of their countries dramatises diplomatic representation and introduces again the adversarial view of otherness represented by Gresham. Yet, whispering counterweights this tension by introducing the possibility of a negotiation on two levels: whispering solves the problem of characters speaking in languages actors could not speak and spectators would not always understand, thus preserving the swift rhythm of the continuous act, it also initiates a moment of entente as the conversation between two antagonists finally happens.60 The whisper becomes the language of a new territory where Others meet: the aside.

• 61 Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre. Terms, Concepts and Analysis, Toronto, University of Toro (...)
• 62 Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Conventions and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge, Cambri (...)

45The convention of the aside is usually defined as a form of speech, characterised by brevity, physical separation, and its function of revelation.61 It implies the silencing of the action centre-stage and that the audience can hear a character speaking from the symbolic margins of the main action. In a scene involving ambassadors, this configuration is reversed, yet the function of revelation remains.62 Later on, Heywood’s play features an example of such configuration as it stages Elizabeth’s previously advertised multilingualism during a scene at the Royal Exchange:

• 63 There are other instances in the play referring to communication through “dumb” signs (scenes 10, 1 (...)

46The performance of the scene again creates a distancing effect that diminishes the positive aspect of the aside, as stated by Jeremy Lopez and exemplified in other diplomatic scenes in other plays. The Queen’s previously advertised multilingual capacity is limited to a swift transitional moment which could be staged as a dumbshow.63 The diplomatic conversation with the three ambassadors may happen in a semi-aside with the Queen still occupying the space centre-stage with Leicester and Sussex on the one side, and the ambassadors on the other.

• 64 We could compare this with the removal of Latin phrases in subsequent reprints of Jean Hotman’s The (...)

47The hypothesis of a quick aside is backed by the immediate pushing to the side of the ambassadors when the Queen orders “Sussex and Lester [to] place the ambassadours”. The humanist substance of Elizabeth’s multilingualism is reduced to a purely ceremonial function of civility where the Other is but a pretext for self-aggrandisement: the ambassadors are reified; the actual diplomatic conversation is rejected offstage and the action centred on the domestic plot. Although the script says that they are talking, we have no evidence of an actual audible performance of a multilingual conversation. This final set-up betrays a problematic distancing of the audience from the linguistic Other, as well as heralding the decline of Latin as spoken diplomatic lingua franca, because the Latin is eventually unheard in this scene.64

• 65 Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors, London, 1612, C3.

49In 1612, in his Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood pleaded for the political function of theatre. He recalled the classical tradition of training ambassadors to speak in character (progymnasmata) to “embolden them in the delivery of any forraine embassy”.65 It testifies to Heywood’s acquaintance with the articulation of language, diplomacy and the education of ambassadors as actors, but it also suggests that the diplomatic scenes from If you know not me, part 2 dramatise the lesser-known world of ambassadors and test the possibility of a cooperative language culture. These scenes aim to bring the diplomatic perspective to a wider, sometimes multilingual, audience and lead them to experience a political form of otherness. It might also serve as a useful mirror to the foreign ambassadors who discovered thus the English language culture as vehicle for the nation’s geopolitical ambitions.