Shakespeare and Machiavelli: A Caveat

Summary

Readers of this article may well regard it as old-fashioned and disappointing. It has no subtle and ingenious connections to make between Shakespeare and Machiavelli, indeed the opposite. No indisputable borrowing from Machiavelli has so far been discovered in Shakespeare – certainly nothing remotely resembling the clear and detailed use of Florio's translation of Montaigne in The Tempest – and I believe that scholars have been too ready to invoke Machiavelli's influence on seriously inadequate grounds.

Until about the middle of the twentieth century Machiavelli was not a particularly important presence in scholarly discussions of Shakespeare. He hardly figures, for example, in the standard accounts of Shakespeare's sources by Kenneth Muir and Geoffrey Bullough. In Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), a book once regarded as authoritative, but now mentioned only to be patronizingly dismissed, E. M. W. Tillyard asserted that Machiavelli ignored what for the Elizabethans was a central issue in discussion of politics:

Thoughtful Elizabethans agonised over the terrible gaps between the ‘erected wit’ and the ‘infected will’ of man and between the majestic harmony of an ideal state and the habitual chaos of the earthly polity. Machiavelli spared himself such agonisings by cutting out the ‘erected wit’ altogether, thereby making irrelevant the questions that most disturbed men's minds.

Tillyard was of course aware that Machiavelli was read and quoted in the period, but for him ‘the age, while making much use of certain details of his writing, either ignored or refused to face what the man fundamentally stood for’. He ended on a dismissive note:

The conclusion is that in trying to picture how the ordinary educated contemporary of Shakespeare looked on history in the gross we do not need to give much heed to Machiavelli. His day had not yet come.