INTRO- much as the Civile Conversation was a work that appealed at DUCTION once to Shakespeare, and one from which, for many good

reasons, he never hesitated to borrow during the whole time in which he was engaged in dramatic composition.

The work itself is, to begin with, a most admirable and highly finished piece of prose composition; simple and stately in expression; dignified without any trace of pedantry, and colloquial without vulgarity; full of racy idiom, terse and telling illustration; and crowded from beginning to end with the proverbs and sayings of the time free from the Euphuism,1 the diffusiveness, and the overdone Latinity which mar so many of the writings of the period quaintly humorous at times; and at times eloquent as English may be the whole work being characterised by a style in which almost every sentence flows evenly and naturally with the rhythmical and balanced cadence which forms so distinguishing a feature of Shakespeare's prose. Next, it is a picture, minute in every detail, of Italian life and morals, both public and domestic, during the second half of the sixteenth century, which could not fail to interest largely the numerous young Englishmen of station whose custom it then was to make the journey to Italy a part of their social education, and an almost necessary preliminary to taking any share in public life in their own country. Many, too, outside this

1 When Dr. A. W. Ward says, 'In general manner of diction, including the illustration fetched from accommodating repertories of strange facts in the natural world, Pettie, so far as I can judge, is the precise exemplar of Euphues,' it is obvious that he cannot have made himself familiar with Pettie's greatest work, the Civile Conversation. (A History of English Dramatic Literature, 1899, vol. i. p. 280-1.)

special and not very numerous class must have hailed

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with delight a volume which brought home to them the DUCTION fact that after all there was but little to choose between the England of their day and the Italy of which they had heard so much, in the matter of the foibles, petty vices, and general shortcomings of the peoples of both countries in their everyday domestic life. Other likely readers of the book would no doubt have been the large Italian population that crowded London at that time; the many dramatists whose plays had to do with Italy and its social code; and the host of writers in prose and poetry whose works had for many years before come to be affected by the all-pervading Italian influence.1 At any rate, from whatsoever cause it may have happened, the first edition of the Civile Conversation was speedily absorbed, and within five years a second edition was, apparently, as quickly exhausted; the result of which to-day is that extremely few copies of either the first or the second edition are known to be in existence.2

One of the strong features of Guazzo's work is that Courtly life and the etiquette demanded in such exacting circles are all but excluded from the first three Books. That subject, in all its bearings, had been already so fitly dealt with by Castiglione in his Courtier that there was no room for another treatise of the kind. Guazzo tells us as much himself, as the following extract shows: 'It now cometh in my head, that we have not ordered our 1 See an excellent chapter, 'The Italian Renaissance in England,' in Prof. Mary Scott's Elizabethan Translations from the Italian, 1916.

• The last copy sold in London of the first edition, and not quite perfect, was secured by an American buyer for £130, at Sotheby's, April 1924.

INTRO-'matters as we should have done . . . wee shoulde fyrst DUCTION have spoken of the Conversation betweene Princes and 'the Courtyer'; to which Anniball replies: 'We sayd yesterday, that Princes had no neede of our instructions,

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and therefore it is not needeful to prescribe unto them any orders how to entertayne their traine: for they ' behave themselves in their courtes honourablye, peacibly, ' and quietly. William Guazzo continues to press his Doctor friend to prescribe some order at least to their servants'; but Anniball makes answer: You 'know we are eased of this labour by him who with his learned penne hath most perfectly fourmed the Courtier' (Bk. 111. 111). The allusion to Castiglione's great work is unmistakable, but assurance is made double sure by the first edition of the Italian original, where the name is printed in full in the shoulder-note beside the passage. The truth is, that Guazzo never intended his book to be regarded as anything but a treatise that confined itself strictly to the great middle classes as distinguished from the patricians of a higher social order: and herein lies. the reason of its popularity at the date of its publication. There are other references to its scope elsewhere in its pages, such, for instance, as :- ANNIBALL. I neither can, neither ought in these discourses to followe the steps of 'the auncient Philosophers, for albeit their reasons be at this day the same, that they were a thousand yeere since, yet neither the times, the men, nor the manners are like. . . . Wherefore you must not mervayle . if in the discourse of civile conversation, I intreate rather of matters, which in my opinion are necessary for the

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present tyme, than of matters written in Bookes, and

' used in tyme past, and if I speake rather lyke a meere Citizen, then a Philosopher' (Bk. ii. 110).

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Many as were the Courtesy-books current in England at the time of the publication of Pettie's work, there were only two that had any great repute, both being Italian in their origin. These were Hoby's Courtier, 1561, and Peterson's Galateo, 1576. The latter was the only one that before Pettie's Civile Conversation could be regarded as a help to the socially uneducated amongst such English people as were desirous of obtaining a knowledge of correct behaviour, coupled with a higher standard in æsthetic precept touching the many irregularities then prevalent in everyday society. The Courtier, as its very name implies, was the manual of persons of much superior rank, already refined by long-established tradition and such reading as tended to stabilise the social practices of the distinguished company in which they moved.

So far as behaviour was concerned the Galateo warns its readers against such ill-bred actions as follow:

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Cautions to servants against 'dirty practices '—some of them better left unmentioned here. Directions to persons in company: not to be lolling asleepe'; not to buskell them selves, reache, streach and yawn'; not to pull out their knives or their scisers and doe nothing els but pare their nailes'; not to pounch with the elbowe-by way of emphasis in conversation; not to 'chide at the table.' These are only a selection from what the author himself describes as those beastly

INTRODUCTION

INTRO- behaviours and fashions." Certain passages through DUCTION the volume are left in their original Italian, as being too

obscene to print in English: Dante is frequently quoted, but largely for the purpose of showing how vulgar and indecent he too could be. Towards the end of the work the tone improves; and, indeed, there are some passages comparable with Pettie's Guazzo, as in the directions for effective speaking, but lacking Pettie's power in mastery of English. These, then, being the two best recognised works on Courtesy in the country at the time when Pettie's Civile Conversation first saw the light, we can see at once that the place of the last-named work fell naturally midway between the Courtier of Sir Thomas Hoby and the Galateo of Robert Peterson-if anything, it came nearer to Hoby's work than to Peterson's, for its pages are never blemished with descriptions of the more or less disgusting practices which so unpleasantly crowd the earlier part of Della Casa's treatise. And yet Mr. J. E. Spingarn tells us, in his recent, and charmingly printed, edition of the Galateo,1that of all the mere courtesy-books, the Galateo alone survives.' It is true he takes the phrase ' courtesybook' to mean something different from what is usually associated with its meaning in the English of to-day; and even goes so far as to say of Castiglione's work that it is in no sense a courtesy-book; it is concerned with ' principles of social conduct rather than with details of ' etiquette.' This narrow distinction will hardly commend itself to other writers on such treatises; and certainly

1 Galateo of Manners and Behaviours by Giovanni Della Casa, 1914, Boston: Introduction by J. E. Spingarn.