Shakespeare and Machiavelli.

John Roe. Shakespeare and Machiavelli.

Studies in Renaissance Literature 9. Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, Inc., 2002. xiii + 218 pp. index. bibl. $75. ISBN: 0-8599-1764-9.

Our use of the term "Machiavellian" to describe the actions of a political leader who ignores claims of conscience and instead justifies the ends by the means represents just one aspect of the famous Renaissance thinker who lived from 1469 to 1527. The Prince, Machiavelli's most famous work, circulated in manuscript in the Florence of the Medici, to whom it was dedicated despite the ill-treatment the author received at the hands of the famous family of bankers and popes after their return to Florence in 1512. It was first printed in 1532, placed on the Papal Index in 1559, and not translated into English until 1640. An Italian edition was printed in London in 1584, however, eight years after it was attacked by the Huguenot commentator Innocent Gentillet in his Discours contre Machiavel. Gentillet was responding to the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572 and perhaps to his perception of a link between that event and the French translation by Jacques Gohory in 1571. The reference to Machiavelli in Marlowe's Massacre at Paris naturally followed. Like Lucretia Borgia, the rather innocent third wife of Alfonso, duke of Ferrara, whose reputation was forever sullied by Gregorovius, the Florentine's reputation grew out of the bitter polemics of the Reformation.

John Roe's lucid and coherent study looks for the Machiavellian moment in figures like Henry V and Richard III. But the book's thesis is that a broader reading, which includes works like the Discorsi, the Istorie fiorentine, and Machiavelli's play La Mandragola, allows us to see how both Machiavelli and Shakespeare create complex contexts for our traditional understanding of what it means to be Machiavellian. Even The Prince can be contradictory, as Machiavelli admits that circumstances can make one ruler's magnanimity looks like another's foolishness. Teachers who assign The Prince in conjunction with Shakespeare may be disappointed that there is no easy parallel among the texts, but scholars can only applaud the way Roe has managed to sharpen our understanding of a long-standing topic in Renaissance studies. The method of the book is to identify several elements in Machiavelli's thought and then compare and contrast them with examples from Henry V, Richard II, King John, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. These elements include Machiavelli's famously difficult term virtu; his image of Fortune (who needs to be beaten like a woman); his sober analysis of the fickle mob (he refers to the "people" as the tristi); a rhetorical style in both writers that allows sudden switches in sentiment and sympathy; and the recognition of the ease with which a virtue may be depicted as a vice, a vice made to look like a virtue (the trope of paradiastole, 33). The contrasts between the two writers are equally telling. Machiavelli ignores the claims of conscience, a theme that haunts Shakespeare's work and explains the running references to Macbeth throughout the book. For his part, Shakespeare fails to recognize the political strength of republicanism and instead relies, somewhat to his detriment, on the heroic virtues of the monarchy as a bulwark against evil.

By keeping these elements and these contrasts firmly to the fore, Roe avoids the problem that might have plagued this book, the fact that Shakespeare offers a wealth of lions and foxes, cruel hypocrites, and deceits. The book provides a cogent reading of Richard II's relationship to Mowbray, whom he must dispose of as Cesare Borgia disposed of Remirro de Orco. It tackles the problem of Henry V's killing his prisoners and banishing Falstaff. It argues that the true Machiavelli in King John is Shakespeare himself and, more daringly, that Brutus in Julius Caesar shows how much more difficult it is to be Machiavellian as a republican than as a tyrant. The final chapter makes the odd case that Cleopatra's suicide reveals her ability as a politic dissembler to frustrate Caesar (204), but it also suggests a strong connection between the Antony whose rhetoric appeals to the mob and the figure of Mars who revels in Egypt. Both are men of expedition.

Unlike much that is published by the major university presses, which fails to convince us that any sixteenth-century person could possibly share the concerns of modern critics, this book makes points that seem relevant both to the period of the works under discussion and to today. I would have liked more annotations in the index, but otherwise the book is almost flawlessly edited. If this is what has replaced the university presses in our current crisis in publishing, then there is no crisis. This is a fine book, uncluttered by jargon. It tells an important story from beginning to end.

CHARLES ROSS 

Purdue University