Shakespeare and Machiavelli (review)

"Shakespeare and Machiavelli"—a wonderful topic: two great names, one from the beginning of the sixteenth century, one from the end; the greatest playwright and the greatest political theorist of the period; a topic that is at once familiar and not yet fully mined. Yet the topic also raises an obvious question: do we have any evidence that Shakespeare read Machiavelli? John Roe is fully aware of the problem. He carefully recounts the availability of Machiavelli's writings in the sixteenth century: Italian, Latin, and French versions of The Prince, but no printed English version (though there were manuscript translations in circulation); the Discourses easily available in Italian; The Arte of Warre and the Florentine History in English translations (1560 and 1595 respectively). Roe's argument, however, does not rely on the claim for direct influence. He is uninterested in popular "Machiavellism" but rather seeks to show Shakespeare's "engagement with ideas that are the essence of Machiavelli's thought, wherever he [Shakespeare] found them," whether we "see these in terms of more or less direct influence, or whether we apply the notion of the Zeitgeist" (ix, 17). This seems potentially fruitful and enabling—getting out of the impasse of trying to establish influence—but this project can actually be fruitful only if the author has an interesting and illuminating take on both "the essence of Machiavelli's thought" and on Shakespeare's engagement with this. I am afraid that the book does not live up to these expectations, does not present a sufficiently fresh and interesting picture of either Shakespeare or Machiavelli.

While the "engagement with ideas" approach seems the most promising strategy for the book, Roe is not content with this. He wants there to be some sort of presentational or methodological parallel between Shakespeare and Machiavelli, and he often tries to establish parallels on very specific points that do not rise to the level of "the essence of Machiavelli's thought." Both of these efforts seem to me to be largely unsuccessful. The presentational parallel relies on a view of the mode of Il Principe as "dramatic," its style as improvisational, and its basic approach as perspectival and "evolving" (9-11, 120, 129). This use of "dramatic" is very loose, and Roe acknowledges that "Machiavelli enjoyed presenting himself as a rather different kind of author" from the one Roe postulates (12). The attempt to present The Prince as exploratory in mode strengthens the parallel with Shakespeare (and allows Roe to assert that Shakespeare can help us read Machiavelli [93]), but this attempt entirely misses the actual rhetorical mode of Machiavelli's opusculo, which is fundamentally assertive. From "long experience in contemporary affairs" ("lunga esperienza delle cose moderne") and "continuous study of antiquity," Machiavelli knows how things are and how they work—"la verità effetuale della cosa"—and he is sharing his hard-won knowledge with anyone in or seeking power (Lorenzo de' Medici, locally) who is willing to drop preconceptions and be instructed.¹Il Principe is a work of breathtaking certainty and assurance. Its premise is that everything in the political world, successes as well as failures, can be rationally analyzed and explained—cagioni, to use the key word, can be discerned—and that Machiavelli is the one to do this. The tentative, perspectival Machiavelli that Roe describes is a fiction of Roe's argument. When Machiavelli undermines a distinction—between the virtù of Cesare Borgia and the crudeltà or scelleratezza of Agathocles, for instance—or when he shifts his perspective—on the role of Fortuna, for instance, in chapter 25 (from focusing on her power to focusing on the need for anticipation and provision)—Machiavelli knows exactly what he is doing.

I will return to the matter of specific parallels momentarily, but the mention of Agathocles leads me to a deeper point: Roe's reading of both Shakespeare and Machiavelli tends to take the edge off both. Roe proclaims (in a section on Richard III) Shakespeare's "need to reassert conventional morality...