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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Among the additional manuscripts in the British Library is a nineteenth-century transcript of the diplomatic correspondence of the Florentine agents in London from 1616 to 1679/80. The agents – or Residents, as they were sometimes called – were during this period the Salvetti, father and son. Amerigo wrote the dispatches every week until his death in 1657, after which the task was undertaken by his son Giovanni, though there were at first a few letters also from Giovanni's brother, Amerigo the younger. As befitted people with Florentine connexions, both father and son were interested in the Court theatre, and among their voluminous accounts of the affairs of state there are frequent references to the staging of plays and masques, so frequent indeed that they constitute a useful supplement to the calendars of the period published by G. E. Bentley and W. Van Lennep. In this article I print for the first time translations of the dramatic references culled from the correspondence of 1660–9; passages from the letters of 1670–9 will appear in a later issue. The more methodical notes of Salvetti père on the Jacobean and Caroline Court stage will, I hope, be published elsewhere.
1. B.L. Add. MS 27962 A–W.
2. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (London, 1941–1968), vii. 16–128.Google Scholar
3. The London Stage 1660–1800. Parti: 1660–1700 (Carbondale, Illinois, 1965).Google Scholar
4. For the life of Amerigo Salvetti see the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani under ‘Antelminelli, Alessandro’, and Bongi, Salvatore, Storia di Lucre zia Burnvisi (Lucca, 1864), pp. 162–82.Google Scholar
5. See Webb, E. A., The Records of St. Bartholemew's Priory and of the Church and Parish of St. Bartholemew's the Great, West Smithfield (Oxford, 1921), ii. 282.Google Scholar
6. Calendar of State Papers (Venetian) 1661–1664, pp. 31, 97 and 182.Google Scholar
7. The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg 1659–1661, ed. Sachse, William L.. Camden Society Third Series XCI (London, 1961), p. 97.Google Scholar
8. ibid., p. 99.
9. Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Summers, Montague (London, n.d.), p. 34.Google Scholar
10. Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), ed. Josten, G. H. (Oxford, 1966), ii. 806.Google Scholar
11. The Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies (London, 1912), p. 139.Google Scholar
12. Cited by Boswell, Eleanore, The Restoration Court Stage (1660–1702) (Cambridge, Mass., 1932),p. 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Calendar of State Papers (Domestic) 1661–1662, p. 174.Google Scholar
13. C.S.P. (Venetian) 1661–1664, pp. 40, 42, 45, 152, 157 and 184Google Scholar, and C.S.P. (Domestic) 1661–1662, pp. 2 and 58.Google Scholar
14. ed. Adams, Joseph Quincy (New Haven, 1917), pp. 117–8.Google Scholar
15. P.R.O. L.C. 5/137, p. 389, cited by Boswell, p. 280.Google Scholar
16. An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (London, 1691), p. 208.Google Scholar For George Garrard's newsletter see Knowler, W., The Earl of Strafford's Letters (London, 1739), i. 177.Google Scholar The performance of 1633/4 is also reported by Amerigo Salvetti the father, B.L. Add. MS 27962 G fol. 59r.
17. A ‘comedy’ at Saint James's, acted ‘by the little ladies of the Court’, is noted in a newsletter dated 7 April 1670. See , H. M. G., Fleming MSS, 12th Report, Part VII, p. 70.Google Scholar Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, entered in his diary for 2 April 1670 a performance of The Faithful Shepherdess given by the young Court ladies. Diary, vol. 5, at Chatsworth, cited by Van Lennep, p. 169. It seems probable that both performances were of the same play. Van Lennep supposes that Burlington mistook the date in his diary and that the two records are of a single performance. A song published in Davenant's, WilliamWorks (London, 1673), p. 305Google Scholar, ‘Sung as a Prologue when the faithfull Shepherdess was presented’ alludes to the King and Queen and was evidently provided for a Court production which must however have been earlier than 1668, the year of Davenant's death.
18. Roscius Anglicanus, p. 3.Google Scholar
19. The Life and Times of Anthony Wood …, ed. Clark, Andrew (Oxford, 1891–1900), i. 490–9.Google Scholar
20. P.R.O. L.C. 5/138, p. 156, cited by Boswell, p. 281.
21. The MS reads ‘alberi’.
22. Evelyn's entry is for 4 February; Count Dona's record is in B. L. Sloane MS 1974, fol. 8V; and the newsletter is in B. L. Add. MS 36916, fol. 62r. See Van Lennep, p. 128.
23. Wheatley, Henry K., London Past and Present (London, 1891), iii. 431.Google Scholar
24. B.L. Add. MS 36916 fol.104r.
25. ibid., fol. 107r.
26. p. xxxv.
27. C.S.P. (Domestic) 1671–1672, p. 304.Google Scholar
28. Middlesex County Records London, n.d.), new series iv. 177–8.Google Scholar
29. B. L. Egerton MS 2539, fols 327v–328, cited by Oliver, H. J., Sir Robert Howard 1626–1698 (Durham, North Carolina, 1963), p. 167.Google Scholar
30. B.L. Add. MS 36916, fol. 128r, cited by Van Lennep, p. 157. In his subsequent quotations from Pepys on this affair (p. 158), Van Lennep unfortunately confuses the present play with The Rehearsal.
31. See Van Lennep, , pp. 159 and 160Google Scholar, and Crinò, Anna Maria (ed.), Un principe di Toscana in Inghilterra e in Irlanda nel 1669 (Rome, 1968).Google Scholar
