The Courtier

What It Is

A dialogue in four books, set over four evenings at the court of Urbino in 1507 and published in Venice in 1528, the year before Castiglione died. The speakers are real people, named, most of them dead by the time the book appeared. They are trying to define the perfect courtier, and they cannot agree.

Castiglione was a soldier and a diplomat who served the Gonzaga, the Montefeltro and eventually the Pope. Urbino under Duke Guidobaldo was among the most cultivated courts in Europe, and Castiglione wrote about it from twenty years' distance, after the wars had begun to take Italy apart.

Expect talk. Elegant, competitive, digressive talk, with jokes, needling and long set speeches. It is an argument, and it is enjoying itself.

Why It Matters

It gave the West a word it still has no English for: sprezzatura, the studied nonchalance that hides the labour behind an accomplishment. The gentleman, the amateur, the person who is effortlessly good at things, the whole modern performance of looking relaxed under scrutiny: all of it starts in Book I of this book, and we still organise our social lives around it.

It was one of the bestsellers of the sixteenth century, and its influence on England was direct. Thomas Hoby translated it in 1561, and Elizabeth's courtiers read it as an instruction manual. Shakespeare's witty aristocrats owe it their manners and much of their conversation.

Read it beside Machiavelli, written in the same decade, and you have the two halves of the Renaissance argument about power. Machiavelli asks what a ruler must do. Castiglione asks what a civilised person owes a ruler, and what happens to a man of judgment when his living depends on pleasing someone stupider than he is. That question has not aged.

Book III, in which the company argues about the worth of women, became the most-cited text in that debate for a century.

Before You Read

Around 350 pages, eight to ten hours, and nothing in the sentences will trouble you. The difficulty is holding the cast in your head. Bull's edition prints a list of speakers; use it, and treat them as characters rather than positions.

Book II contains a long treatise on humour with an anthology of Renaissance jokes attached. It is the deadest stretch in the book for a modern reader, and moving briskly through it costs you nothing.

Know that the world it describes was already gone. Urbino's court dispersed, Rome was sacked in 1527, and Castiglione was publishing an elegy dressed as a manual.

Which Translation to Read

• George Bull (Penguin Classics, 1967, revised 1976) — recommended. The best English version to actually read: alert to shifts of tone, from the barbed aside to the high rhetoric of the final book, and it keeps the conversation moving. The introduction and the list of speakers do exactly what a first-time reader needs. The cost: Bull smooths. Where the Italian is knotted he simplifies, and the apparatus is light. View on Amazon →
• Charles Singleton (Norton Critical Edition, edited by Daniel Javitch, 2002). The most accurate English text, packaged with contemporary documents and a century of criticism. Take it to study the book. The cost: Singleton's prose is more careful than lively, and the apparatus is a seminar.
• Thomas Hoby (1561). The Tudor translation, the one Shakespeare's generation actually read, and a monument of Elizabethan prose in its own right. The cost: sixteenth-century spelling and vocabulary, and Hoby is often closer to his own idiom than to Castiglione's. A period document, not a first reading.

Take Bull to read it, Singleton to argue about it, Hoby to see what England made of it.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as performance rather than doctrine. Every speech is being made by someone with something to gain, in front of people whose favour he needs, and the book is quietly showing you that as it goes.

Bull's introduction is historical rather than a walk-through, so it is safe to read first, and the context genuinely helps.

The commonest mistake is to treat this as an etiquette manual and abandon it once the advice runs out. The book changes register before it is done, and that late turn is where Castiglione stops being charming and starts being serious. Readers who quit at the jokes never find that out.