Abstract
This article concerns ambassadors and spies in seventeenth-century Venice and London. It was the result of attempts to find a form appropriate to a story plagued with riddles, contradictions and uncertainties, in which the author's attempts to interpret the evidence shadowed earlier attempts by seventeenth-century commentators. This is a story in which the conventions of 'empirical' history proved inadequate to answer the questions raised by fragmentary sources. The form is an allegory of the content; in other words, the way the story is told is a commentary on what the story is about. By presenting the relationship between past and present (or form and content) as allegorical or metaphorical, both our distance from the past and our ability to speak meaningfully about it are simultaneously asserted.
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