Critisism on Machiavelli
The master figure of Elizabethan drama is Machiavelli. He was only known through the French of Gentillet, if that: but he was the great character of supreme intrigue that, however taken, was at the back of every tudor mind. Elizabethan drama--"the first terror-stricken meeting of the England of Elizabeth with the Italy of the late renaissance"--was more terrified of Machiavelli than of anybody. The Borgias, Sforzas, Baglionis, Malatestas, Riartes were of far more importance to the Elizabethan dramatists than any of their own eminent countrymen. Familiarity bred contempt in the long run. But during its flourishing period the English stage went constantly to the schoolmaster of manslaughter, Machiavelli--and his political paradigms chosen in conformity with his Borgia worship--for its thrills.... Mr Edward Meyer has catalogued three hundred and ninety-five references to Machiavelli in Elizabethan literature. As to his influence in England, Dr Grosart wrote: I have suggested to the biographer of the renowned Machiavelli (Professor Villari of Florence) that an odd chapter might be written on the scare his name was for long in England: so much so that he came to be regarded as an incarnation of the Evil
The prince, according to Machiavelli, should adopt the animals inevitably reigning in his human composition with some care: and of all possible combinations a compound of the fox and of the lion is proved by experience to be the best. We are half beasts--that we must always remember. The apologue of the centaur Chiron, for instance, is designed to show "that, as they (the greek princes) had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and to understand that one without the other is not durable." ... The strange honesty that characterizes Machiavelli reminds you of a similar honesty often found in the Jew; it would be called a childlike honesty. The German imperialist philosophers of the late nineteenth century also displayed this to most people startling predilection for truth--for calling war murder, with no feeling for decency in the composition of their military textbooks--which made them such sensational reading; they developed such a way of publicly and gratuitously confessing to the necessity of violence and fraud. Western opinion at the time was genuinely scandalized; in America it caused an even deeper indignation, and this clumsy truthfulness resulted in military defeat. As war it was good but as diplomacy it was bad. It was substituting Machiavelli for Cesare Borgia: the philosophy for the fact: the pedantry and exposition for the action. Nietzsche as an expounder of "aristocratic" dogma, with his childlike enthusiasm, suffered from a similar tendency to put the cart before the horse. How the diabolical honesty of Nicolo Machiavelli should have shocked the world at large, and earned him an almost infamous notoriety, is easy to understand. Every organized duplicity felt itself unmasked by one of its own servants. It is doubly easy to see how in England the ungentlemanly frankness of this logician should have been regarded as a first-class scandal. Here was a political philosopher, trained in a small-scale imperialistic school amongst the little factious states of Italy, giving away the whole position of the ruler, and revealing even the very nature of all authority. The meaning of all political conquest, and the character of the people engaged in it, transpired with a startling simplicity in the pages of this pedant of crude "power." With Darwin's Origin of Species, [The Prince] is a book that forces civilization to face about and confront the grinning shadow of its Past, and acknowledge the terrible nature of its true destiny. In his cold handbook of the True Politic Method of Enslavement and Expropriation the real meaning of life by conquest and management, and almost the real meaning in a further analysis of life itself, was shown with that convincing simplicity, in a tone of engaging harmlessness, reminding you of Defoe's style of narration when a cutpurse is speaking.... But Machiavelli, "the bible of the queen-mother" (Catherine de' Medici), the bugbear of the Elizabethan stage, was at the same time the great formative influence, at once philosophic and political, throughout Europe; although it was only in England that he found a herd of poets to echo and
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Approximate Word count = 2144
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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