chapter 1 Machiavelli’s Background
1.1 Machiavellism
Sedulo curavi, humanas actiones non ridere, non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere. baruch de spinoza, Tractatus Politicus i.4.
Perhaps in a larger degree than any other political author in the last five hun- dred years, Machiavelli has been subject to a vast number of interpretations. So much has been written that in his book The Myth of the State, published posthumously in 1946, Ernst Cassirer struggled to trace the turbulent historiog- raphy of the Florentine author. In his study, Cassirer reminded us of how Machiavelli’s fortune has moved like a pendulum from one end of the interpre- tative spectrum to the other.1 His writings have suffered all kinds of vicissitudes – from periods of severe condemnation, which began almost immediately after his writings were published, to eras of veneration. There is no denial that what readers have understood as “Machiavellism” has taken a great variety of forms over the years. The first period of censure was initiated in France and continued in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 It began after the
1 Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 116. For a more updated historiographical study see, Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli;” Giuliano Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna (Rome: Laterza, 1995) and Davide De Camilli, Machiavelli nel tempo: la crit- ica machiavelliana dal cinquecento a oggi (Pisa: Edizioni ets, 2000). 2 For more on the reception of Machiavelli’s writings see, Sidney Anglo, Machiavelli: The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Brian Richardson, “The Prince and its early Italian readers” in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Martin Coyle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). For the following centuries see, Donald W. Bleznick, “Spanish Reaction to Machiavelli in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19.4 (1958): 542–550; Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 1964); Rodolfo De Mattei, Dal premachiavel- lismo all’antimachiavellismo Europeo del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1969); Franco Fido, Machiavelli (Palermo: Palumbo, 1975); Edmond M. Beame, “The Use and Abuse of Machiavelli: The Sixteenth-Century French Adaptation,” Journal of the History of Ideas 43.1 (1982): 33–54; Faustino Oncina Coves, “Maquiavelismo y Antimaquiavelismo: Estrategia
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St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre3 of the Huguenots in France in 1572 was blamed on Caterina de’ Medici. Although she was the mother of Charles ix, Caterina was effectively ruling France at the time. By “usurping” the power of the King and acting in cruel ways, she was perceived as an agent of wicked Italian politics, in no small part because she was a “reader of Machiavelli.”4 Such a view soon took root among Protestant countries thanks to Innocent Gentillet’s book Contre Machiavel (1576). This rather oblique accusation, how- ever, inspired both Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare to use the word “Machiavel” in their plays as the incarnation of political cunning, hypoc- risy, cruelty, and crime.5 Given the immense popularity and influence of their writings, Marlowe and Shakespeare had effectively branded the name of Machiavelli as a synonym for “evil.” On the other side of the “interpretative pendulum” was Francis Bacon, who appreciated Machiavelli as a supreme realist and as an author who knew how
o Estratagema en el Esplendor y el Ocaso de la Ilustración Alemana” in La Herencia de Maquiavelo: Modernidad y Voluntad de Poder, ed. Roberto R. Aramayo and José Luis Villacañas (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999); Gennaro Maria Barbuto, Machiavelli e i totalitarismi (Naples: Guida 2005); Paolo Carta and Xavier Tabet, ed., Machiavelli nel XIX e XX secolo (Padua: Antonio Milani, 2007); Juan Manuel Forte and Pablo López Álvarez, ed., Maquiavelo y España: Maquiavelismo y Antimaquiavelismo en la Cultura Española de los Siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2008); Victoria Kahn, “Machiavelli’s Afterlife and Reputation to the Eighteenth century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John M. Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 239–255; Jérémie Barthas, “Machiavelli in political thought from the Age of Revolutions to the present,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, pp. 256–273; Giovanni Giorgini, “Five Hundred Years of Italian Scholarship on Machiavelli’s Prince,” The Review of Politics 75.4 (2013): 625–640; Miguel Vatter, Machiavelli’s The Prince: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), Chapter 9 and Jacob Soll, “The Reception of The Prince 1513–1700, or Why We Understand Machiavelli the Way We Do,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 81.1 (2014): 31–60. 3 See Anglo, Machiavelli: The First Century, Chapter 8. 4 Robert M. Adams, trans., Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), p. 238. 5 Marlowe refers to Machiavelli in the Prologue to the “Jew of Malta.” Cf. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Shakespeare refers to Machiavelli in “Henry vi,” part i, v. 4. 74; part iii, iii.3.193 and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” iii.1.93. Cf. William Shakespeare, The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002). See also, John Alan Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002) and Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard ii to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).