Masks of the State

This book is dedicated to the many relationships between German drama and a professionalising European diplomacy in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Already in the Italian Renaissance, the practice of permanent foreign policy representation is found as a cornerstone of modern diplomacy, but it was not until the 17th century that interstate communication by means of legations became established as binding for large parts of Europe. It was precisely the special case of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation under constitutional and international law that became the practical field of European diplomacy during the Thirty Years War and after the Peace of Westphalia. This institutionalisation of diplomacy is closely linked to scholarly culture and the cultural field. Not only do scholars and poets appear as envoys, residents, secretaries or theoreticians of diplomacy. In an epoch that undertakes a comprehensive theatricalisation of political and courtly culture to affirm sovereignty, drama, ballet and opera become legible as media of diplomatic ceremonial, ne- gotiation and reflection on international relations. Based on the correlation of micro- and macro-theatre, the book unfolds configurations of diplomatic practices and dramatic genres: from opera as a theatre of sovereignty at the imperial court, to the connection between peace congress and peace plays in Sigmund von Birken et al, via Andreas Gryphius Silesian Trauerspiele, which place the envoys in the post-Westphalian context as privileged witnesses of royal martyrdom, and Daniel Caspers von Lohenstein, whose African dramas can be read as play arrangements of diplomatic negotiation, to the religious theatre of the Jesuits and Benedictines or the various forms of ceremonial theatre around 1700. While research on German Baroque theatre has often focused on political theology and legal discourses, this study is the first to focus on praxeological, performativity and actor-theoretical aspects of the connection between drama and diplomacy. Drama of the 17th and early 18th century participates in the theat- ricalisation of political sovereignty; at the same time, envoys and diplomatic configurations become models for reflection of their own literary and theatrical mediality.