Written during his Catholic years, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1603) portrays the tyrannical regime of the Roman Emperor Tiberius and his favourite Sejanus, who aggressively lay claim to the inward secrets of their political opponents. Despite the play’s ostentatious historical accuracy, its concerns and vocabulary are thus frequently reminiscent of Elizabethan Catholic complaints about religious persecution under Elizabeth I. However, rather than simply condemning dissimulation as a response to persecution, Sejanus His Fall offers a rationale for prudent accommodation of a tyrannical regime that is grounded in a neo-Stoicist disjunction between inward and outward self and in a differentiated understanding of parrhesia, the rhetoric of free speech. Even though Jonson’s attitude towards dissimulation thus merits reconsideration, Sejanus simultaneously expresses deep distrust in theatricality, which is grounded not only in neo-Stoicist ethics but also in the Platonic association of the theatre with tyranny and the inherent theatricality of Machiavellian power politics.

This chapter focuses on the oeuvre and actions of Virgilio Malvezzi, the Bolognese historian who had a prominent career in the service of Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares. Following Malvezzi to the Low Countries and his small-scale diplomacy with French nobles conspiring against the King of France, it traces how in his letters he reflected on necessity and the moral legitimacy of political action. Through the ordering of information, he reported circumstances in such a way that they legitimized the application of unorthodox strategies such as dissimulation and pretence. As we can observe in the emergence of one of his published historical works from a newly discovered manuscript draft, the practice of ordering historical particulars and aphorism-like observations was also present in Malvezzi’s writing techniques. It shows how the method of ordering could also be at the base of a chronological narrative and how extenuating necessity could then be used in the context of an apologetic political history. The oeuvre and well-documented career of Virgilio Malvezzi thus provide a rare opportunity to address the limitations and opportunities of the continuity between theory and political practice in reason-of-state discourse.