SOURCE: Cochrane, Kirsty. “A Civil Conversation of 1582: Gabriel Harvey's Reading of Guazzo.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 78 (November 1992): 1-28.

[In the following essay, Cochrane discusses Harvey's response to Stefano Guazzo's A Civil Conversation, a Renaissance work of moral philosophy, and argues that Harvey considered the work an ideal text for life in the civil service and hoped to use it to achieve his own social success.]

Gabriel Harvey (c.1546-1631), Professor of Rhetoric in Cambridge in 1575, friend of Spenser and Gascoigne, enemy of Nashe, Greene and Lyly, object of satire, industrious scholar in the humanities, believed that reading created the man. In Cambridge he preached the new eloquence, but in his life he was disappointed of preferment. His devotion to classical learning created a fine scholar and teacher. However, the books he annotated most assiduously were not, in general, the classical and contemporary treatises on rhetoric, composition and logic which formed the meat and drink of his professional life, played out as it was amongst the wholly masculine environment of Cambridge colleges, but contemporary dialogues which offered a window on to the manners and behaviours of cultured social life.

Among the most heavily annotated books in his extensive library, which has been so well described by Virginia Stern¹, are found therefore books of phrases and jests with which to enliven social conversation, such as Domenichi's Facetie, Motti et Burle, Guicciardini's Detti, et Fatti, and Erasmus's Parabolae, sive Similia; and, more significantly, books of moral dialogue of such natural liveliness that some parts of them read like forerunners of the novel; foremost among these are Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (1528) and Stefano Guazzo's La Civil Conversatione (1574). Virginia Stern has made clear the quality of detailed attention Harvey paid to the Domenichi and Guicciardini, while Erasmus's and Castiglione's work and influence remain well known today. Guazzo's Civil Conversatione (1574) has not, however, had the readership it deserves since its decades of popularity during the late renaissance. The strength of Harvey's response to this work may allow us to revive some awareness of its vitality and value.

In Stefano Guazzo (1530-1593) Harvey found his supreme exemplar of a pragmatic ideal in eloquence. La Civil Conversatione (1574) is a crucial text for the sixteenth-century history of ideas, particularly for moral philosophy and rhetoric. In England in the 1580s its popularity was at its height. As is common for many renaissance works of moral philosophy, it is couched in the form of dialogue.² The fourth book of Guazzo's Civil Conversatione, like the fourth book of The Courtier which preceded it, recounts a social occasion at which ladies, a civilizing influence, are present; in this case, an evening banquet in Casale. Harvey's annotations to this fourth book in particular show something of the process by which he hoped the book might help transform him into a socially adept gentleman, fit for employment at court.

He must have come to know this book almost by heart. It is his ideal text for the civil life. The interest of following Harvey in his reading of Guazzo's fourth book is therefore twofold. We come to see something of Harvey's enthusiasm and hope, as he arms himself for social success; and through his eyes we come to know Guazzo's book better, and to see how it appealed both to his professional and personal interests. The strength of Harvey's response offers a strong affirmation of Guazzo's quality.

Harvey read Guazzo after he had become converted to a new concept of eloquence. First, therefore, we must consider what was indeed new in his teaching in the late 1570s. Harvey's approach to rhetoric had changed after he read Ramus; no longer was Ciceronian style pre-eminently desirable, but rather moral worth of content. This discovery illuminated his reading of Guazzo and profoundly influenced his teaching. Thus his response to Ramus is crucial.

The ‘truth’ which was Ramus's predicate could be arrived at through the processes of logic, or by a series of examples in the manner of rhetoric, with equal validity; it was a matter of presenting the unified whole nature of a person or subject so that language truly projected the speaker's character. Ramus had offered Harvey this insight in respect of Cicero. As Harvey said in an apostrophe to Ramus in his Ciceronianus (1577), ‘you presented a Marcus Tully recognisable not by some wart or by trinkets of identification, but by his whole body and mind.’³ By means of the exegesis which Ramus's unified dialectic made possible, Cicero's character, deeds and thoughts—Ramus's subject-matter—were to be balanced in the same scales as, say, his sentence-structure. Harvey's further lecture Rhetor (1577) points to the revolution which this new method means to him: ‘for who will not now see that Invention, Disposition and Memory belong not to speech, but to reason, not to guage, but to the mind, not to eloquence, but wisdom, not to Rhetoric, but Dialectic?’⁴ Harvey had previously thought of eloquence as arising chiefly from matters of stylistic ornament. The new revelation is of a unity and meaningful juxtaposition among the old scholastic arts. Ramus's ideal of truth in speech, allowing more weight to thought and character than to style, elevated the status of plainness and brevity of language.

Harvey's attitude to ‘truth’ and speech becomes characterised then by a specifically Ramist doctrine that the function of language is to embody thought in its complexity and wholeness, yoked to a personal philosophy which approves ‘practice’ rather than ‘discourse’; although the ‘practice’ in his terms always includes persuasive eloquence. Harvey could see himself as the prototype of an ambitious man in public life; an eager doer, a persuasive speaker: ‘Eloquence, & Industry will acheve all: the two heroical singularityes of Angelus Furius; still excelling all, Peritia, Assuetudine, Zelo’.⁵ Eloquence is only admired for what it can accomplish; man's actions are the only things to value. Consequently, and similarly, when one reads a famous author such as Cicero, one must not merely recognise and understand the ‘sinews in tropes’ and ‘the muscles and tendons in figures’⁶ and nothing else, as too often previously had been his practice. One must now also weight the thought behind the style, and the whole character and accomplishment of the writer. For instance, in Cicero, Harvey ‘began to observe not only the oratorical eloquence … but also consular and senatorial wisdom’ and ‘began to pluck the fruits of reason as well as the flowers of oratory.’⁷ In future he will use a double system of exegesis which will comprise both the new Ramist dialectic, and his rhetoric. He now conceives of style as a complete instrument for conveying personality and ideas. Harvey says: ‘Merely pointing out, as some have done, the ornaments of tropes and the embellishments of figures, without indicating the stores of arguments, the quantities of proofs, and the structural framework, seems to me tantamount to displaying a body that is surpassingly beautiful and lovely but deprived of sense and life.’⁸

Harvey's perception of a necessary mutual relationship between a writer's thoughts and character, and his way of expressing them, was revolutionary in teaching the arts of eloquence. Now every man's style must express his unique self; and his style will not be an artificial one, such as any emulation of Cicero's must now necessarily be seen to be, but a natural outcome of its matter and of its author's personality. Therefore, said Harvey, an ideal Ciceronian of the present day will not be the Roman sort, but ‘yet of the French, German, British or Cisalpine sort.’⁹

In 1582 Harvey added to his personal library two copies of Guazzo's Civil Conversatione, one in the original Italian, and one a recent translation of the first three books only, by George Pettie.¹⁰ Harvey's copy of Pettie's translation contains very little annotation apart from underlinings, but his Italian Guazzo is heavily annotated even in comparison with his own books. Indeed, Book IV of La Civil Conversatione is one of the most copiously marked of any work in Harvey's extensive personal library.¹¹ Every page shows clear evidence of Harvey's close reading, and many pages suggest careful study at several different dates. This treatment is not untypical for Harvey, especially when a book held personal as well as professional interest.¹² Among young men at Cambridge in the 1580's, as Harvey reported to Spenser, Guazzo was ‘neuer so happy’.¹³

Pettie excluded Book IV, the liveliest part of Guazzo's popular work, from his translation because ‘it contayneth much trifling matter in it.’¹⁴ Obviously he recognised that it was different in kind from the books that preceded it. Yet Gabriel Harvey gave this book extraordinarily close attention. Both its neglect by the one and its warm reception by the other indicate a text of considerable interest. What then are the special qualities of La Civil Conversatione, and of its fourth book in particular?

La Civil Conversatione is a work about speech bodying forth the man. Because it expounds and exemplifies a wide understanding of such ‘conversation’ and rhetoric as Harvey himself, inspired by Ramus, had come to follow, Guazzo's text may seem at times to foreshadow Harvey's own ideas. For instance, in Book I, Guazzo defines the word ‘civil’ by saying that ‘to live civilly, is not sayde in respect of the citie, but of the quallities of the minde: so I understand civil conversation not having relation to the citie, but consideration to the manners and conditions which make it civile … Too bee shorte, my meaning is, that civile conversation is an honest commendable and vertuous kinde of living in the worlde’.¹⁵ Thus Harvey is responding to a writer who expresses not only a deeply felt ideal but a lived and practised reality of civil life. Guazzo's is a pragmatic humanism, with a benign vision of a civil society sustained by courteous personal relationships, in which not to communicate is not to participate; a society where all participants find a voice and together create their own reality in a fabric of wisdom.

La Civil Conversatione has a complex structure which reflects both the theoretical and actual manifestations of Guazzo's ideal society. Its ostensible occasion is this: the author's brother Gulielmo Guazzo had been withdrawn from society suffering from melancholia; with leave from his employer Ludovico, Duke of Gonzaga, he spends some days in his home town Cassale, where he has conversations with a physician, Annibale Magnocavalli and it is these his brother Stefano gives to us as the four consecutive books of La Civil Conversatione. The first three are moral dialogues between Gulielmo and Annibale on the fruits to be reaped, and manners and orders to be observed in conversation. In the fourth book Guazzo sets down ‘the fourme of Civile Conversation, by an example of a Banquet, made in Cassale, betweene sixe Lords, and foure Ladies’.¹⁶ Here, at the request of Gulielmo, Annibale demonstrates the forms and processes of civil society by recounting the events and conversations of a recent evening party in Cassale. Neither Annibale Magnocavalli nor Stefano Guazzo is imagined to be present, but among the guests is the author Stefano's wife, Signora Francesca Guazzo.

The whole text has a structure of praise, to which Harvey adds his own. First there are prefatory compliments to the civil rule of the Gonzagas: the evening-party is given in honour of Vespasian Gonzaga, to whom Guazzo dedicates an epistle, hoping he will consider the book truly ‘ours’, and take upon himself the honour of the speeches ascribed to him in it.¹⁷ Then the author Guazzo is praised as a swan who rises in flight to obey Vespasian and whose example outgoes mortal thought or tongue in making a supreme demonstration of praiseworthy life;¹⁸ while Sig. Annibale Magnocavalli, later present as a character in the book, the wise interlocutor of its dialogues (here writing as a fellow-member of the Accademia degli Illustrati which Stefano Guazzo founded in Casale)¹⁹ praises Guazzo's precepts, style, personal morality, speech and works, and cries out extravagantly, ‘This man through his genius and example gives back to earth the Golden Age’.²⁰ Within the book, characters echo these framing praises with more praise of Vespasian Gonzaga and Stefano Guazzo, while at the conclusion of each demonstration the character Gulielmo Guazzo praises his mentor Annibale. During and after all these instances of praise Harvey adds concurring emphasis.

Harvey, reading the prefatory ardent reference to the Golden Age, marks it with the astrological symbol for Apollo or the sun. His own civil conversation with Guazzo's book then begins. At the title-page, ‘voci, et cyvile’, ‘voices, moreover civil ones’, he writes alongside the blurred device. In this positive frame of mind he begins his reading. He is the ideal student, willing to learn, taking to heart the teacher's words, and making them his own. What he seeks, however, is not so much doctrine, as social example; and this is found above all in the ‘example of a banquet’ in the fourth book. This example is one appropriate to his own status. Whereas Castiglione's characters were distinguished noblemen and women from of a vanished age, Guazzo's are modern ladies and gentlemen, and therefore offer a more accessible, more pragmatic, and above all more contemporary model. Guazzo celebrates participants who are still alive in Harvey's world. Offering exclamatory praise as he reads, Harvey's role becomes like that of Guazzo's textual character, Gulielmo Guazzo, who praises his mentor, the narrator Annibale, for leading him by means of his ‘daintie and sweet talke’, out of his ‘maladie of solitarinesse’. It arouses in Harvey as in Gulielmo an appetite to taste ‘the fruite of Conversation’ and thus to participate more fully in the fabric of society.²¹

Harvey, as taught by Ramus, looks carefully and appreciatively at structure, subject-matter and expression. Indeed Guazzo is a pleasure to read. He offers not only ideas and example, but style; his balanced prose is sustained by pervasive metaphors of sovereignty, language, music and vision which enhance and embody the kind of civil life he extolls. His characters are his own old friends and close relatives; including his wife, and the warmth and conviction with which they are presented is strong because of the author's love.

Harvey's annotations show one means by which he laboured to master the book and equip himself better to achieve his social ambitions. His conversation with Stefano Guazzo is carried on in his tiny octavo copy of La Civil Conversatione interlineally, and vertically and horizontally in the margins. The marginalia are of three main kinds.²² First, there are arbitrary symbols of emphasis, such as underlinings, crosses, cross-references and lines marking structural divisions. There is a very frequent use of marginal quotation marks, showing perhaps passages thought worthy of being committed to memory, or of quoting in lectures. On some sequences of pages the rash of marginal quotation marks and pothooks is so densely prolific that they look almost like a decorative border.

Then there are signs and sub-headings for quick reference to subject matter. His personal system uses astrological symbols as shorthand: for instance, a noteworthy passage relating to eloquence will have the symbol for Mercury alongside it, while a textual reference to warfare might be noted with the symbol for Mars.²³ The astrological symbol for the sun seems to be his mark for significantly ‘golden’ or ‘Appollonian’ words or matter. Whereas during the dialogues of Books I-III Harvey found five occasions to draw this symbol, and twice drew a complete sun face, with rays shining forth, Book IV gives him cause to draw twenty-four sun symbols and two radiant sun faces. Here also are memoranda or reflections suggested by Guazzo's words. These notes are usually in Italian, in response to Guazzo, but sometimes Latin, occasionally English, and occasionally Greek. The text is intricately worked over. For long sequences of Book IV, it is harder to find any passage without annotation. It will be appreciated then that Book IV was to Harvey a gold-mine of copy.²⁴ This book was to him the supreme discourse of discourses.²⁵ What is there, then, in the fourth book of Guazzo, to take so much energetic attention?

Here is no overt instruction through traditional moral dialogue such as had been used in the first three books, but rather a continuously engaging demonstration of civil life. In reading this book, Harvey demonstrates interest in structure, style, character, inherent ideas and overt concepts of language and behaviour. In order now to give a sense of Guazzo's book as well as of Harvey's response to it, the approach here will be to look at Harvey's annotations to some sequences of text.

Book IV begins with Gulielmo Guazzo, having been persuaded out of melancholy by Annibale, reminding him of his promise to recount some of last year's banquets. (‘Esquisite sententie, come civilis cose argute’, ‘Exquisite notions, as urbane as they are penetrating’,²⁶ exclaims Harvey). Annibale speaks first of society's inclination to ignore the truly virtuous man. The convalescent asks why he mentions this. ‘To no other ende, then to honour and extoll the most renowned Lord Vespasian Gonzaga’.²⁷

Thus Book IV is framed within the text by the interlocutor Annibale's eulogy of Vespasian to Gulielmo, just as La Civil Conversatione as a whole was by commendatory epistles and verses to him, including the historical Annibale's own. By means of this structural device a bridge is created into Annibale's account of ‘certaine discourses and sportes, which were made on a winters night last past, in Ladie Caterines Sacca del Ponte her house’, when Lord Vespasian Gonzaga had been invited to supper. Annibale lists those present on this occasion; he is not among them and soon, indeed, his presence as narrator is forgotten. Harvey is reminded now of a book by Gellius: ‘Noctium Atticarum prima, et ultima …’ he writes, ‘first and last of the Attic nights; discourse of discourses, full of truth, sharpness and pithy wisdom, along with much pleasure’.²⁸ There is some initial pleasantry about the number of guests, since ideally the number of people present should not exceed the number of the nine muses; but Lady Frances (historically the author's wife Francesca) soon resolves the problem by ‘Christian Arithmatike’, pointing out that Lord Bernadine and Lady Jane are man and wife. ‘Hoc lege, quod possis dicere iure, Meum est’! says Harvey: ‘Read this, so you can rightly say: it's mine’!²⁹ Guazzo's text is a hunting-ground for ideas which he takes to heart and makes his own. References to the courtship of ladies, and to marriage, draw his particular interest.

As the procedures of the evening begin, Harvey takes careful note of the order of events, as headnotes such as ‘Avanti La Cena’, ‘before dinner’, and rulings across the page show. The first duty before dinner is ‘to create a Soveraigne Prince’. A prince is found by drawing lots for lines in whatever sonnet ‘a Petrarq, which lay upon the table’,³⁰ should open at, to see which one most suggested rule. Lady Jane was elected queen because she drew the line ‘Oh royall minde, most worthie for to rule’, and thus the processes of the evening can begin. On these pages Harvey draws his sun symbol. ‘Courtly ornament of philosophy's table. Idea of Symposiums,’ he exclaims.³¹ What here begins may be to him the very pattern of symposiums. The fundamental idea of symposiums, after all, is that all participants have an equal voice, and the idea of ‘festive symposiums’, as Rebhorn has shown, is that there is an accompanying inversion of social hierarchy.³² These conditions are now fulfilled. Now that Lord Vespasian has relinquished his authority to Lady Jane, both rank and sex of the ruler are inverted. Apart from Lady Jane's ‘natural wisdome, able enough to have governed a monarchie’, she seemed ‘to draw unto her and command everie heart, though it were neer so barbarous and uncivil: such was the puissant force of her statelie grace and demeanour’.³³ Certainly, Harvey has been captivated by the description of her courtly grace and almost Orphic powers. The new Queen decrees that nothing shall be said or done contrary to the decorum of ‘a private and familiar conversation’, and appoints Lord Vespasian and Cavellero Bottazzo as judges of their evening ‘sportes and pastimes’. The first game she proposes is that everyone should think of a solitary place and offer reasons for staying in it. The question of the social morality of solitariness was also the starting point of La Civil Conversatione in its entirety. Harvey, leading the socially restricted life of a Cambridge scholar, finds relevance in this. At the start of these exchanges he draws the sun sign as a pointer to ‘golden matter’, and notes and numbers each speaker's contribution. His sun symbols continue as this game is played out.

The assumption of these passages of wit is that the civil life is sustained by urbane and literate conversation and company: thus, while they each and all in good fellowship gather enjoyment from presenting their perverse imaginary predicaments, outside their self-created symposium game they are looking forward to a good dinner. This situation is appreciated by the participants, as it is also by Harvey the reader, who places one of his most obscurely personal symbols alongside an urbane speech of Lord John's which concludes ‘you must aske severallie of us a Question, that by our answers we may winde our selves out of this solitarinese, and so go merelie to supper’.³⁴ Perhaps Harvey is hoping to put a question to a lady some day. In this case, wit is necessary to get out of each solitary place, and some of Guazzo's ladies and gentlemen are stretched in their ability to riposte and recover themselves. Each question and each answer in this sequence relates clearly to the cooperative virtues which sustain the civil life; but the tone is light-hearted and courteous, so that in these pages, as in reading Castiglione or Sidney, one can sense the sprezzatura of an informing mind whose art is to conceal art.

Harvey's art, on the other hand, is to discover Guazzo's mastery of form and content, words and character, and in doing so, to reveal something of himself. ‘Fine descant!’ he remarks at the end of this game, where the Cavallero Bottazzo easily turns the talk to the complimentary subject of love, by means of a cleverly sophistical transition through the subject of death; and here, too, Harvey's sun sign heads the page.³⁵ The presence of the women and the urbane nature of this occasion means that this scholarly discussion is quickly turned to a complimentary vein of wit, where Lord Hercules speaks of the ‘daseling and bright beauty of the Gentlewomen’ in this city, which has ‘put to death … more than a thousand lovers’, and adds ‘it may bee Lorde William, that you are one of those dead men’.³⁶ This compliment particularly pleased Lady Lelia, and in consequence, perhaps, Hercules's gallant speech is marked off with quotation marks by Harvey. Wit as it relates to women, after all, is something he has to master, if he is to become more than an academic success. (‘Compiementi’, ‘compliments’, he notes, as the lady of the house apologises for her dinner and the guests praise it.)

Harvey marks off in the text, which is not paragraphed or divided into chapters, each new stage of the evening's discourse. After the table-cloth is laid, he writes a heading to indicate that the meal itself is beginning. ‘2. La Cena.’ ‘Symposium of symposiums, or, rather, dinner of the Sun’. Then he draws an elaborate, radiant sun-face.³⁷ Clearly this is the start of a passage he considers significant. Soon an anecdote is told by the Cavellero about a wife who promised her husband she would never kiss anyone else while he was away, but then, keeping to the letter of her promise, told her lover, ‘Concerning the other parts of my bodie, I … make thee ful lord over them, and leave to thee ample authoritie to dispose of everie one, as thou thinkest best thy selfe’.³⁸ Lady Jane as Queen, while as amused as the rest of them at this anecdote, gives a clear moral direction as to that woman's deceitfulness. While argument continues about whether the woman should be pardoned for simplicity or condemned for ‘malicious subtilty’, the table-cloth was spread and ‘so supper began, which was enterchangeablie relished with sundrie sweet and pleasant speeches’.³⁹ Harvey's underscoring shows his appreciation.

The language of courtesy depends greatly on compliment, and almost every topic gives an opportunity for some. The topic now broached is that of what sort of meals and food are appropriate for the different stages of life, and many poets' words and proverbs are adduced as authority. ‘Ipsa Coena’, says Harvey, ‘the dinner itself!’⁴⁰ He finds much here that is worth noting, especially a complimentary speech of the Cavallero's mentioning these ‘pleasant discourses’ which he gives almost all his typical marks of emphasis to: ‘a spare diet was ever commended, and all the delights of this supper shall not depend on the sweet talk of meates, but of the pleasant discourses of this worthie assemblie’.⁴¹ He marks the phrase ‘piaceuoli ragionamenti’, ‘pleasant discourses’, with a cross. These emphases are further reinforced at the top of the page by another sun symbol and large quotation marks. His intense interest in such a passage suggests that for Harvey, who taught rhetoric and sought himself to be eloquent, any contribution to his understanding of how himself to achieve an ideal personal eloquence is to be valued. Therefore, among the questions and topics which the civil life pursues, those pertaining to the manifestations and efficacy of eloquence will be paramount.

Over dessert, a mention of Apollo⁴² prefigures a heightening of eloquence soon to be achieved by means of a Musician and his song. There is no mistaking the importance Harvey gives to this section. The witty speeches preceding the musician's entry are marked with underlinings, bracketings, quotation marks, and short sloping lines indicating the start of each new speaker. Marking off the end of these interchanges and the beginning of descriptive narrative, Harvey draws not only a long vertical line, but a short sloping line, and a horizontal marginal line as well. Harvey's quotation marks also emphasise the value he places on this evocative sequence, and a bold sun symbol heads the page.

While they were passing the time in these pleasantries, lo, a Musician entered, with a lira in his hand; who, after he had caused a sudden silence with its most sweet sound, and had made everyone very willing to listen, looked at Lord Vespasian, and bowing to him, put to the low sound of his lira-viol the clear song of the following verses.⁴³

Guazzo's Italian is here poetical and moving. The balance of his sentences is appreciated by Harvey, who underlines his separate phrases and brackets the balanced clauses of the last two lines. The musician's entry makes a pause in the ladies' and gentlemen's evening talk; and it comes at a moment when comfort and goodwill are felt by all. Everyone is attentive. They listen in silence. Structurally, silence is important at several points of transition in Book IV. Here it overtly and actively invokes the creative condition of listening. Harvey heads the song that follows—and which marks this book's most formal demonstration of civil and courteous eloquence at work—with one of his frequent marks of emphasis, the double capital SS. He accepts as right and proper what is happening here to the symposium hierarchy. For what has become now of the sovereignty of the evening's Queen, Lady Jane? This musician, appearing from outside the self-created world of play, has made his bow not to her but to Lord Vespasian, and turns his eyes to this most noble of the guests as he sings his clear song. Day-time hierarchy has been temporarily re-established, and symposium order suspended during the musician's formal song of praise.

Harvey pays attention not only to the placing of the poem within the evening's proceedings, but also to its content, its form, terza rima, and its poetic devices; there is no doubt that the rhetoric of praise is, of all the arts, one that will offer most pragmatic help to an ambitious civil servant or courtier. The first verse is extravagant in its comparisons. ‘My lord, my humble voice is not capable of singing your high honour; wherefore Orpheus with his divine style must return to the world’:

Cantar vostr' alti honor meia voce humile
Non può Signore; onde conuien che torni
Al mondo Orfeo col suo diuino stile.(44)

The singer expresses his inadequacy to praise the noble lord; Orpheus himself must return to do it. It would be hard to think of a more effective presentation for an unironical song of praise than this.⁴⁵ The singer himself imitates Orpheus, both in his appearance, since he sings to the stringed ‘lira’, and in his ability to command silence with his music. All eyes and ears are drawn to him. Now, in this Orphic role, he must move his audience to agree with the concepts he offers. His words are made more potent by their rhythm, intertwined rhyme, and the seductive ‘basso suono della lira’ that accompanies them. The strategy of praise in the song's structure puts the most exalted comparisons with the Lord addressed at the beginning. Thus the singer's disclaimer and reference to Orpheus's divine style places the occasion immediately within the rich context of Orphic eloquence; an eloquence always to be used for morally worthy ends.⁴⁶ The Orphic voice, transmitted through the Musician, thus offers first of all the very highest mythical context for a singer of praise, Orpheus himself.

The song creates a context of high fame and achievement for the listening Lord Vespasian Gonzaga, and Harvey underlines the famous names its verses contain: Orpheus, Mars, Charles, Philip, Achilles, Aeneas, Laura; he makes marginal reinforcement, drawing the astrological sign for Mars, for instance, alongside the line that contains it; he underlines phrases that refer to style, for example Orpheus's ‘divino stile’, Lord Vespasian's ‘diuerso stile’ (varied style) and ‘lingua possente’ (potent tongue). He draws another sun symbol on top of the next page, on which the poem ends. Here is its penultimate verse: ‘You with potent tongue, who can draw every soul from pain, work to such effect that the world wills and won'ts as is your will’:

Voi con lingua possente, che di doglia
Può trarre ogn' alma, oprate sì, chè'l mondo
Com'è il vostro voler voglia, ò disuoglia.

Teacher of rhetoric, he is attracted by rhetorical schemes which neatly express ideas. The line ‘Com'è il vostro voler voglia, ò disvoglia’ he underlines; to the right he adds quotation marks, and to the left draws a mysterious double symbol, which could be interpreted as large Ps, perhaps denoting the figure of speech used rather skilfully in this line, paronomasia (the same word or stem used in different cases). He marks off the end of the poem with a horizontal line, as he did the prose passage leading up to it.

Harvey notes the characters' response to the musician with careful attention. He underlines the speakers' names and their honourable titles. In their response the characters use a blend of their symposium roles and real selves. Lady Jane as Queen is the first to speak, and significantly she commends not the musician, but his mistress Lady Caterine (whose house they are in) for honouring Lord Vespasian in such a ‘gentil maniera’, in such a civil way. Harvey welcomes this phrase with emphatic double SSs in the margin. By means of the poem, Lady Caterine, the ‘real’ host, has made an offering in courtesy to the ‘real’ Lord and guest of honour, and everyone appreciates this. Harvey brackets and marks off a speech by Lord Vespasian disclaiming the amount of worth which has been put upon him. Vespasian is very amiable and gracious in accepting all homage, and so the decorums of praise are maintained. Harvey marks Vespasian's courteous pleasantry with large and small crosses, and underlines key phrases. Harvey notes a jest about ‘Love, the bloodsucker, and the bottle’ (with a pun on the Cavallero Bottazo's name, which means ‘bottle’)⁴⁷ with a large marginal symbol that may represent Cupid's bow. After this, the tablecloth was removed, and the participants at the banquet gave thanks to God. This grace marks the end of the meal.

Here Harvey draws a wavy horizontal line across the page. As always, he is interested in the structure of the book, which follows the stages of the evening party; now the party has reached a significant moment. Here, narrative of the banquet stops and the reader is returned to the framing situation of dialogue between Annibale (who has inconspicuously been narrator all this while) and Gulielmo Guazzo, his patient. Gulielmo Guazzo now speaks. His is another role within the rhetoric of praise, and his words here have a practical pedagogic function also. Praising first Annibale's ‘dolci ragionamenti’ (sweet discourse), he suggests how beneficial it would be to everyone, if these discourses were gathered into one volume.⁴⁸ Thus he prefigures the existence of the physical book, and shows its authority through this verification of its ‘real’ origin. The interpolation gives him an opportunity to make explicit to Annibale and through him to the reader the moral significance of this particular account of a banquet. ‘By the fourme of this Banquette, menne should learne to avoyde confused disorder and ryotte, used commonlie in Banquettes’. Casale's positive example can be a practical help to society everywhere. Harvey's sun sign is drawn above this thought, and ‘alla Aretinesca’ (in the manner of Aretino) written in the margin.⁴⁹ Such banquets in the manner of Aretino, a famous writer of scurrilous dialogues, whose book Harvey also owned, are what a truly civil life would avoid.

Gulielmo is now prompted to ask Annibale to continue his ‘brave and delectable Historie’, and the narration recommences. Harvey marks this as the third phase of the evening. ‘3. Dopo La Cena’ (after dinner), is his heading, with a curling, decorated cross at the top of the page.⁵⁰ At this point the topics of discussion move on from silence to the almost-silence of melancholy. Lord Vespasian says that the chief ways of keeping one's spirits up are ‘these pleasing and honest conversations’. Harvey underlines and brackets this. The topic of how to keep melancholy thoughts at bay mimics the theme of La Civil Conversatione as a whole, and recalls once more Gulielmo's withdrawal from society at the beginning of Book I. It seems that Annibale, in his sense of audience, is cleverly reinforcing his own earlier advice through the agency of the noble and authoritative Lord Vespasian's words. Both subject and tone of talk are now much more serious than before the tablecloths were removed. Fundamental moral questions are being overtly addressed, and here the style of discourse becomes close to that of the dialogues in Books I-III. The social decorums of speech are basic to Guazzo's pragmatic humanist belief in the perfectibility of man as a social being. This great topic of ‘honest conversation’, initiated from silence, prefaced by melancholy, comes to rest once more in silence, where its profundity is remarked on by the acute intelligence of Lady Frances (the absent author's wife); and then the tone changes again to mirth and quizzing. Harvey as a reader is sensitive to formal and tonal changes, and marks them in. Where Lord Vespasian makes a significant summary statement: ‘it is no lesse vertue to keepe joye, as to get it, and to preserve it, there is no better meanes, than this vertuous and noble companie’, he meets it with ‘fondemento diamantino’ (adamantine foundation).⁵¹

The remark which follows this, naive in utterance, complex in significance, is Lady Frances Guazzo's mention of this very book we are now reading, and the topics which surround it. She says she misses her husband on this occasion. ‘I would my husband were heere, sayd Ladie Frances, to heare these sweete and sage discourses, that he might adjoyne them to a certain booke which he [is writing] in the subject of conversation’.⁵² Here the author's wife must be referring to La Civil Conversatione in the making, or perhaps to Books I-III of it, to which this very conversation and its surrounding occasion are indeed now ‘adjoined’. Ignoring the self-reflective ironies of her remark, Lord John's response is jocular and complimentary: ‘I beleeve you would rather wish him here, to write on your booke than his owne. Take it as you please (sayde shee) for the book is his all in all and everie part’.⁵³ Harvey's customary underlinings accompany the words ‘mio consorte’ (my husband), ‘questi ragionamenti’ (these discourses), ‘vn certo suo libro’ (a certain book of his), ‘soggetto di conuersatione’, ‘scriuere sopra il vostro libro’, ‘il libro è suo’; he adds also marginal quotation marks and a cross-reference.⁵⁴ He is being reminded, within the fiction, that the book is fashioned by an author, and that its conversations are not autonomous but re-created by the author's art. The effect of Lady Frances in her present moment wishing for something the readers looking back can see has come about, is extraordinarily potent, since the suspension of disbelief is broken and the reader external to the text is made aware of the layers of time and authorship which intervene. Guazzo's artistry is displayed in so forestalling and manipulating the reader's response. A reader naturally pauses here. So do the characters, who may seem to imitate this response. Silence occurs. This silence, strongly marked by Harvey's vertical line, allows time for reflection, and is only broken artificially, by the Queen (responsible for social cohesion) who demands ‘mirth’. Such has been the quality of reflection that this is not immediately forthcoming, so she herself, after another silence, and moving towards the fire, proposes a topic. Since the maintenance of their happiness itself depends on conversation, she suggests now replacing the ‘game of solitude’ with the ‘game of conversation’.⁵⁵ Her proposal marks the start of another new phase of the evening, and book. Harvey's horizontal marginal line again emphasises the division, while his bracketings emphasise the new physical position of the speakers, who have moved from the dinner-table and are now around the hearth.

The two fundamental topics addressed and practised in Book IV, solitude and conversation, are the two ends of a continuum of civil life, and form the parameters of La Civil Conversatione. Gulielmo was led by means of the conversations of the book to pass from the one, to a state where he can now appreciate the significance of the other. Equally, the guests at the banquet, through its observed stages, imitate this progress. From their separate and courteous selves, as they were when they assembled before dinner, they have come to make by means of the pact which their symposium conversations imply, a creative model for civil society. Having come together and maintained this through the ceremonies and discussions of dinner, they are now in a position to demonstrate its beneficial continuance.

Seated in warmth and contentment around the hearth, their topic becomes that which will sustain their civil life, conversation itself. Here marginal crosses, a double SS heading, and underlinings mark Harvey's reading. And here begins ‘the game of conversation’, in which everyone first has to imagine something formed from two other things joined together. Such things will be of course metaphors for the function of conversation within the civil life. For instance: ‘A fish is taken with two things joyned together, which are, the bait, and the hooke. Where upon I may saie, I present you with a fish which I have taken, the hooke and the baite conversing together’.⁵⁶ According to their capabilities and willingness, everyone contributes. The imagery sought here is of polarities joined for a beneficial purpose, which is then to be explained in terms that allude to the civilising function of the great creating subject, speech. This is an appropriate metaphysical game of wit with an inherently serious subject at its heart, for the warm expansiveness of after-dinner mood.

Harvey follows ‘the game of conversation’ meticulously, numbering each speaker's contribution. After the game, topics progress by natural stages from love, to the function of the eyes and tongue, to madrigals of praise, and back to love again. Harvey pays close attention to this sequence, but, typically, he is most interested in the specifics of eloquence and praise. For instance he finds noteworthy the idea that the tongue rather than the eyes is the principal means by which love and favour are acquired.⁵⁷ He underlines key phrases and draws the astrological symbol for Mercury in the margin. The ‘forza de la lingua’⁵⁸, the power of the tongue, he willingly accepts.

The end of the supper-party in Casale is not the end of the book. Before this may happen, we are returned once more to Gulielmo and Annibale, the first interlocutors, and find that Gulielmo Guazzo anticipates with his praise the reader's response to what has just passed. Harvey annotates his words with a dense layering of his emphatic marks: horizontal underlinings, crosses, cross-references, and bracketings. Gulielmo Guazzo says that Annibale's narrative has woken him from a pleasant dream. He has been converted to society.⁵⁹

In the margin alongside words he has underlined, ‘la vera forma della conversatione’ (the true model of conversation), Harvey draws his emphatic sun symbol which has previously appeared only at the top of a page. Harvey has indeed found ‘the true forme and paterne’ of a pragmatic social ideal in the design and civil conversations of Guazzo's Book IV. He has noted its structural framework, as Ramus had advised, and the actions, thoughts and quality of its characters, as Ramus had also advised. On its penultimate page he is recording cryptically his discovery of a personal truth in his ‘true model’. He notes the idea that ‘the order and substance of this Banquette, … is the seale and conclusion of all our former talke’ firmly with underlinings, brackets, and bold double SS in the margin. Guazzo could have desired no more ardent reader than Harvey, who responds invariably in accord with his own moral direction, willingly led by the text's interlocutors.

But there is more. The book's persuasive structure is still at work on Harvey. On the last page, textual levels of moral persuasion are yet unfolding to him. Gulielmo Guazzo, former solitary depressive, for whose benefit these demonstrations of civil life are being made, says that his reformation will be demonstrated by his future practice, and promises Annibale that ‘letters from mee, to holde you still in talke, … shall represent … Cavallero Guazzo, who wilbe whollie yours … to talke and converse with …’⁶⁰ With this foreshadowing of texts to come, the reader is made aware that this very book of discourse and conversation is conceived as written talk, and at the very moment when he is about to leave it behind, is drawn into the process by which the book both expresses and will demonstrate its own continuing virtue. Annibale the guide hopes that God will be Gulielmo's ‘guide in the waie, as I meane to be your follower in thought’.⁶¹ These, the very last words of the book, offer in a prayer of dedication a complimentary final reversal of status between teacher and pupil, imitating that which has just been demonstrated in the symposium games as benefitting urbane social cohesion and understanding. They look forward to a beneficial continuation of civility.

Yet even with these last words, the levels of enticement which this copy of Guazzo offers Harvey have not been plumbed. Another layer is revealed in the typographic layout of the last lines, which, shaped like a spearhead, point towards the colophon of a happy amiable face on an urn. And here Harvey continues his dialogue with Guazzo. His memoranda on the last page provide a context in which to read the book. He lists other notable works, by Sansovivo. L'Unico, Domenichi, and brackets six Italian authors; three moral philosophers in one line, and three poets in another: Castiglione, Macchiavelli, and Aretino, linked together with Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso. Harvey is reminding himself where Guazzo belongs. Finally he writes, ‘plus Artis, et Virtutis’ (more of Art, and Virtue). Then, at the very bottom of the page, he draws for the last time in this book his sun sign; and his last full-stop.

Harvey read Guazzo's Civil Conversatione as a pragmatic guide to life. The particular attention he paid to this fourth book may reflect a growing general sense of the value of example rather than precept during the 1580s in England. In following attentively characters and subjects of discourse as well as style and manner of discourse, Harvey practised something of the double exegesis he had learnt from Ramus. He met Guazzo first as a man, speaker and friend, and took good note of his precepts, principles of organisation, and virtues of his style. The sense of conversation created by the interplay between Guazzo's text and Harvey's annotations shows something of the process by which Harvey through his reading was making himself ready for worldly society.

What might Harvey have learnt from Book IV of Guazzo? He encountered various aspects of social decorum, through an example which differs in tone and emphasis from that of book four of Castiglione's Courtier. Instead of Castiglione's mystical neoplatonic vision of holy love as the supreme force creating ‘the most sweete bond of the world’⁶², a bond celebrated and invoked finally with prayerful religious fervour by members of Urbino's courtly society, Guazzo offers a wholly practical and accessible ideal for civil life, expressed by Gulielmo Guazzo's final realisation that ‘all sportes and shewes whatsoever, are nothing in comparison with that great ioye and pleasure, which is felt and taken in vsinge the companie and conuersation of honest and learned men’.⁶³ ‘Civil conversation’, the company and discourse of gentlefolk, preserves and prolongs a peaceful civil society. While observing this in action, Harvey has learned never to forget in ‘sport’ who is the real lord; he has observed that tactful gentle teasing is appropriate on social occasions when ladies are present; he has seen that social favour may be won and given through discreet and gentle compliments. He has learnt how and when to make a literary compliment in the civil life. To that end he has admired well-turned phrases and sentences of urbane wit and verbal dexterity, and noted a store of anecdotes, puns and proverbs with which to enhance self-presentation. He has seen how to praise judicially, and how to win praise. He has witnessed the civilising function of women in society, and the kind of complimentary conversation offered to them. He is aware of the structure of an orderly social dinner-party and what is appropriate when. More fundamentally, he has seen what self can be presented and how it may be presented in gentle society.

Most fundamentally of all, he has been confirmed in his understanding of language as the creator and bond of civil society, and of civil conversation and courteous manners as the means of sustaining it. Through his attentive reading he has been a participant in an evening's discourse during which the civilizing function of language has been its chief subject and pervasive purpose, as well as its process. In following Guazzo, something of the complex means by which language makes society has been witnessed. La Civil Conversatione has indubitably become part of Harvey's life, now to be practised. It has become his. ‘Meum est’,⁶⁴ ‘it's mine’, he said.

Despite Harvey's great learning and his demonstrably assiduous pursuit of the manners and material that comprise the social arts of eloquence, his ambition for preferment within the university and in public affairs remained disappointed. His theoretical understanding of social grace and rhetorical decorum did not help him. Even Guazzo's Civil Conversation, arguably the greatest renaissance work on social discourse and the civil life, made in the end no practical difference. Its ethos, words and phrases he knew. But understanding and practising the theory of eloquence in the decorum of the lecture or the familiar witty letter or even in the margins of an eloquent book was one thing. Embodying the truly eloquent man within the decorums of the civil life was another. Harvey never married, nor achieved his ambition of an appointment at court, and as the pedant in love was riotously satirised in the Cambridge college Latin play Pedantius.⁶⁵ His personal habit seems to have been to over-inflate his conversation with pedantry, which appeared mere affectation. The character Pedantius offers a bold hint of this style: ‘I confess I love, for I am not one born of a flint or a tiger. Just as according to Virgil Aeneas is, in the judgement of angry Dido, or rather Didûs, second Greek declension, Sappho Sapphûs, circumflex over the ûs. But I do not love after the manner of youthful excess, or in the highest kind, but (if I have any powers of judgement at all) Philosophically’.⁶⁶ Harvey expressed his own sense of failure; in a worldly sense, his life lacked deeds. ‘[I have progressed] to some extent towards a man of learning but what [have I accomplished] towards the man Gabriel Harvey? Without industry of one's own there are no topics for discussion’.⁶⁷ He looked in his heart to find the man and found mere words.

Books were his topics and sources of topics; books were the core of his life. The sustenance, delight and hope he took from Guazzo is clear. However in Gabriel Harvey's life, sadly, the gap between theory and practice was never bridged. Books and life remained worlds apart.

Notes

1. See Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey, A Study of his Life Marginalia and Library (Oxford, 1979). See pp. vii; 137-149. Virginia Stern establishes that Gabriel Harvey must be the most prolific Elizabethan annotator of books known.

2. Its influence in England has been well documented by J. L. Lievsay in his Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance (Chapel Hill, 1961). Its German history is related by Emilio Bonfatti, ‘La “Civil Conversazione” In Germania,’ Letteratura del comportamento da Stefano Guazzo a Adolph Knigge 1574-1788 (Udine, 1979).

3. Gabriel Harvey's Ciceronianus, intro. H. S. Wilson, tr. C. A. Forbes (Lincoln: Neb., 1945), p. 75.

4. Gabrielis Harveii (London: Rhetor), 1577, sig. Eiv-sig.F: ‘… iam quisque non videt, inuentionem, Dispositionem, Memoriam, non orationis, sed rationis, non linguae, sed mentis, non eloquentiae, sed sapientiae, non Rhetoricae esse, sed Dialecticae?’

5. Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), p. 155.

6. Ciceronianus, op.cit., p. 53.

7. Ibid., p. 79.

8. Ibid., p. 87

9. Ibid., p. 83.

10. Two extant copies owned by Harvey are both signed and dated 1582: a Venetian edition of 1581 (in the British Library); and George Pettie's 1581 English translation of the first three books (in the Newberry Library, Chicago). The only modern edition is The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo. The first three books translated by George Pettie, Anno 1581, and the fourth by Barth. Young, Anno 1586. The Tudor Translations, Second Series, Nos. VII-VIII, 2 vols., ed. Sir Edward Sullivan (New York, 1925). English textual quotations are from this edition, except where for stylistic reasons the Italian needs to be translated literally. There is no modern Italian edition. Quotations from the Italian text are from Harvey's personal copy, La Civil conversatione del S. Stefano Guazzo (Venice, 1581), (B.L.C.60.a.1).

11. Although relatively short in relation to La Civil Conversatione as a whole, the fourth book is still substantial, amounting to approximately 35,000 words.

12. Virginia Stern has traced and described more than 180 books that belonged to him, and has analysed typical examples of his marginalia, especially from his most copiously annotated extant books, which include Cicero's Epistolae, Castiglione's Il Libro Del Cortegiano, Demosthenes' Gnomologiae sive sententiae, Lodovico Domenichi's Facetie, Motti, et Burle, Erasmus's Parabolae, Sive Similia, Guicciardini's Detti et Fatti Piacevoli, et Gravi, Hugkel's De Semeiotice Medicinae, Oldendorf's Loci Communes Juris Civilis, and Frontinus's Strategemes … of warre (translated by Richard Morysine); and, from his English contemporaries, Florio his first fruites and Gascoigne's Posies; see Stern, op. cit., pp. 198-241 (Catalogue).

13. Three Proper and wittie, familiar Letters (London, 1580); quoted by Lievsay, op. cit., p. 89. One might speculate that Bartholomew Young, who did translate the fourth book, which was published with the second English edition of 1586, could have been one of these young men. Lievsay draws attention to Harvey's enthusiasm for Guazzo by listing citations of him in marginalia in his copies of Domenichi and Guiccardini (Lievsay, pp. 90-92; pp. 92-96).

14. Sullivan, op. cit., I, p. 12. Lievsay speculates that Pettie was discouraged by the amount of verse in it. In the second English edition of 1586, Book IV is included in a translation by Bartholomew Young from an unrevised Italian edition. Young, already working on the verse-filled Diana by the Spaniard Montemayor, was, Lievsay considers, more confident in dealing with verse. Lievsay, op. cit., p. 55.

15. Sullivan, op. cit., I, pp. 55-56. In this article I have chosen to quote wherever possible from the only available modern edition, which is of the sixteenth century English translation by Pettie and Young, and to use their English versions of names of participants at the banquet.

16. Sullivan, op. cit., II, p. 115.

17. La Civ. Conv., op. cit., Sig.+3-+3^v: ‘questo mio dialogo della ciuil Conueratione; il quale tanto piu le doura esser caro, quanto io presi errore chiamandolo mio; poiche hauendomi essa dato cagione di scriuerlo, ha da esser piu suo, che mio, ma veramente nostro e si come quella parte, doueio hauro seguito i vestigi di lei sara ascritta all' Illustriss. S. Vespasiano, come sua propria, & suo sara l'honore.’

18. Ibid., sig. +4^v.

    Mirate come s'alzi Cigno a volo
    Per ubidirvi, e'n su la destra riva
    Del Po, con dolce note hor ne descriva
    Quale sia ‘l conversar, qual l'esser solo.

19. Lievsay, op. cit., 6; p. 26.

20. La Civ. Conv., sig. +5^r.

    Di stupor si m'empie,
    Ch'io grido, Con l'ingegno, e con l'essemplo
    Questi ne rende in terra il secol d'Oro.

21. Sullivan, op. cit., II, p. 116.

22. His method with Guazzo is very much the same as he used with his other copiously annotated books on the social arts; see Virginia F. Stern, op. cit., pp. 137-148. She suggests (147, n.) that marginalia may have been Harvey's substitute for a common-place book.

23. Harvey's use of astrological symbols has been well described by Harold S. Wilson, ‘Gabriel Harvey's Method of Annotating His Books’ HLB II, 3, Autumn 1948, pp. 354-458 passim.

24. It should perhaps be emphasised that he does not read Guazzo as a language text. He already possessed Lentulo's grammar and Florio his First Fruites (see Stern, op. cit., catalogue).

25. ‘Discorso de' discorsi, Il quarto di Guazzo,’ he wrote in his copy of Domenichi; Lievsay, op. cit., p. 93.

26. La Civ. Conv., fol. 226^r.

27. Sullivan, op. cit., II, p. 118

28. La Civ. Conv. fols. 226^v-227^r. ‘Noctium Atticarum prima, et ultima. Discorso delli discorsi; pieno di verita, acutezza, e sententiosa breuità, con molta piaceuolezza.’

29. Ibid., fol. 228^r.

30. Sullivan, op. cit., II, p. 121.

31. La Civ. Conv., op. cit., fol. 229^r: ‘Mensae philosophicae aulica exornatio. Symposiorum Idea’

32. Wayne C. Rebhorn, Courtly Performances (Detroit, 1978).

33. Sullivan, II, p. 122.

34. Sullivan, II, p. 126; La Civ. Conv., fol. 321^r. The idea of asking a question, and particularly of asking a lady a question sometimes prompts this mysterious symbol from Harvey: it looks somewhat like a trident surmounted by the number 3. Wilson (op. cit., p. 358) identifies this symbol as ‘the most secret of his signs’ and considers it might represent Hermes Trismegistus. One can speculate that for Harvey it might relate to that kind of eloquence useful to persuade a lady to favour the gentleman who makes her a request.

35. La Civ. Conv., fol. 232^r-232^v; Sullivan, II, 128.

36. Sullivan, II, pp. 128-9.

37. ‘Symposium Symposiorum: vel cæna Solis.’ La Civ. Conv., fol. 235^r.

38. Sullivan, II, p. 132.

39. Ibid., II, p. 133.

40. La Civ. Conv., fol. 235^r.

41. Sullivan, II, p. 134; La Civ. Conv., fol. 234^v: ‘Il viuer parco fu sempre commendato; e l diletto di questa cena non s'hauerà à misurare secondo la soauità de' cibi; ma secondo i piaceuoli ragionamenti di questa gratiosa compagnia.’ Harvey's marks here are small, and giant, marginal quotation marks, brackets, and underlinings.

42. Sullivan, II, p. 156.

43. La Civ. Conv., fol. 248^r: Mentre passauano fra loro il tempo intorno a queste piaccuolesse; ecco entrare un Musico, con una lira in mano; il quale dopo l'hauer, con soauissimo suono, generato un subito silentio, & disposti tutti ad vna gratissima udienza; rivolti gli occhi al signior Vespasiano, & fattagli riuerenza, interpose nel basso suono della lira, il chiaro canto dei seguenti versi.' See Sullivan, II, p. 156: ‘While they passed the time so merelie at supper with these pretie and plesaunt taunts on either parties, behold, a Musician comes in place, with a Harpe in his hand, and after he had with the sweete sound of it, invited them all to suddaine silence, and all of them disposed to bend their willing eares to his Musicke, he came to Lord Vespasian, and with making a low curtesie, to the tune of his Harpe did sing these verses following.’ Young's translation diminishes the pictorial quality of the scene by simplifying the verbs, omitting adjectives, and failing to recognise the ‘ira’ as a member of the Viol family. On the use of the ‘lira’, see Nino Pirrotta, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 22-29.

44. La Civ. Conv., fol. 248^r. Bartholomew Young (Sullivan, II, p. 156) makes rather pedestrian ballad quatrains of this:

    To sing of all your worthie deedes
                                            your honours great and hie,
              My humble voice (thrise noble Lord)
                                            cannot itself applie.
    Orpheus must retourne againe,
                                            who with his stile divine,
              Must praise you, and your vertues rare,
                                            which like the Sunne doe shine.

45. It may imitate to some degree a scene in Poliziano's Orfeo, described in N. Pirrotta, op. cit., pp. 7-18.

46. See Kirsty Cochrane, ‘Orpheus applied: some instances of his importance in the humanist view of language,’ RES NS XIX, 1968.

47. La Civ. Conv., fol. 250^r; Sullivan, II, p. 161.

48. Sullivan, II, p. 161.

49. La Civ. Conv., fol. 250^v.

50. Ibid., fol. 251^r.

51. Sullivan, op. cit., II, p. 165; fol. 252^r-252^v: ‘non è minor virtù il conseruare, che lo acquistare la allegrezza; & per conseruarla non vi è miglior mezo di questa virtuosa conuersatione.’

52. Sullivan, II, p. 165. Young here mistranslates the tense of ‘scriue’ as ‘made’, where it should be present continuous. La Civ. Conv., fol.252^v: ‘Io vorrei che il mio consorte fusse quì ad vdire questi ragionamenti, per potergli aggiungere ad vn certo suo libro, che egli scriue in soggetto di conuersatione.’

53. Ibid.: ‘Io credo, che vorreste, che egli fusse quì piutosto per scriuere sopra il vostro libro, che sopra il suo. Et ella; Pigliatela come volete, che il libro è suo ad ogni modo.’

54. ‘S^a., 145b.’ The reference is to the last pages of Book II. Discussion there concerned the primary place which easy and familiar supper-parties hold in society: ‘che sono proposti da vn Poeta per beatitudine della vita’ (‘which a poet has put forward as the supreme happinesses of life’). In relation to these sorts of occasions laws and customs exist, and Annibale comments ‘Non hanno mancato alcuni valorosi scrittori di proporre molti vtili maniere, appartenenti alla conuersatione de' conuiti’ (145^v). This reference to those writers who have written on the manners to be observed at such gatherings is marked and bracketed by Harvey, who adds in the margin ‘LL’, signifying ‘Leges’, laws. The reference foreshadows albeit obliquely Guazzo's Book IV.

55. La Civ. Conv., fol. 254^r-254^v: ‘Poi che per commun parere dipende da questa conuersatione il mantenimento della nostra allegrezza; io non so vedere; perche in cambio del giuoco della solitudine fatto auanti cena, non si debbia fare hora il giuoco della conuersatione.’ Sullivan, II, pp. 168-169: ‘For so much as the maintenance and continuing of our sporte doth by common opinion depend on this conversation and good companie, I cannot see, why in exchange of the sport of solitariness made before supper, there should not now some pretie meriment of Conversation be devised.’ (Young's tonal shifts are substantial here.)

56. Sullivan, II, p. 169.

57. ‘… la lingua; la quale essendo gouernata dallo spirito d'amore, opera miracolosi effetti, & fa ben spesso mutar pensieri, & negar la propria volontà: perce ella truoua a luogo, & tempo certi sillogismi cosi inuincibili, che Aristotele non ui saprebbe contradire.’ La Civ. Conv., fol. 263^r; Sullivan, II, pp. 184-185: ‘the tongue, … governed by the spirit of love, works mervailous effects, and often-times makes an alteration in our minds and thoughts, and to denie our own proper wils, because it finds out at place and time, certain sillogimes so invincible which Aristotle himselfe could hardlie dissolve.’

58. La Civ. Conv., fol. 263^r, textual marginal sub-heading.

59. La Civ. Conv., fols. 279^v-280^r; II, pp. 214-215. ‘Now I perceave, that our communication … these three days past, were not perfect, if that the discourses of this fourth, had not been adjoyned to them, because as those conteine in them, the preceptes and institutions of conversation, so these putting a great parte of them in practise, by a livelie kinde of demonstration, have represented unto mee the verie true forme and paterne of conversation, whereupon I reste both satisfied and content, having shaken of my olde and false opinions of Solitarinesse.’

60. Sullivan, II, p. 216; La Civ. Conv., fol. 280^r: ‘E mi prometto dalla cortesia vostra, che uoi lo mirerete con occhio gratioso, & non sdegnerete nel medesimo modo di ragionare, & conuersar meco.’

61. Ibid., La Civ. Conv., fol. 280^v: ‘Cosi egli sia a uoi guida in questo uaggio, come io sarò à voi seguace col pensiero.’

62. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby (Dent, 1928), p. 321; Il Libro del Cortegiano, ed. Ettore Bonora. (Mursia, 1976), p. 348, ch. LXX: ‘… O Amor santissimo. … Tu dulcissimo vincolo del mondo …’

63. Sullivan, II, pp. 214-215.

64. La Civ. Conv., fol. 228^v.

65. Ed. G. C. Moore Smith, in Materialen zur Kunde des alteren Englischen Dramas, ed. W. Bang (Louvain, 1905).

66. Op. cit., Act II, sc. ii, ll, pp. 860-869.

67. Quoted and translated from a memorandum in his copy of The Strategemes … of Warre by Virginia F. Stern, op. cit., p. 143.