The Juggler: A play about Machiavelli, Pace, Keats and the meaning of everything
In 2004, while on sabbatical in Rome, I wondered into the Keats-Shelley House at the foot of the famous stairs in Piazza di Spagna. While unsuccessfully trying to engage the knowledgable lady in charge of the museum in a personal conversation, my mind started to imagine this play. This was something I had not experienced before. For the following two weeks my life consisted of nothing else but writing, visiting the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma located at Castro Pretorio, and avidly reading whatever I could about the details of the lives of Machiavelli and Richard Pace. Richard Pace was an important English diplomat during the Tudor period, a younger contemporary of Machiavelli. The meeting described in the play never took place, or did it? At any rate, the aging and broken Machiavelli opens his heart to Pace. This is the beginning of the story.