INTRODUCTION
1. Clarendon: Selections from “The History of the Rebellion” and “The Life by Himself”, ed. Gertrude Huehns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 304–305.
2. In the coda to this book, I consider the implications of my argument for contemporary discussion of the relationship between rhetoric and the critique of ideology.
3. On Garin, see the appendix. Rhetoric was linked to imitation and to politics broadly conceived as the realm of civic affairs in most Renaissance theory and practice. To begin with, like the rhetorical notion of decorum, the term imitation could have both a literary and an ethical or political valence: depending on the text, it could refer not only to the literary imitation of previous authors or the artist’s representation of nature but also to the audience’s response. In this last case, imitation is simply another name for the rhetorical effect of the text. Renaissance poetics was thus rhetorical in that it aimed not only to delight but also to move and instruct the audience; rhetoric, both as the codification of schemes and tropes as well as a theory of persuasive argument, was the model for poetics. Conversely, rhetoric involved an element of imitation because the skills of persuasion were acquired by imitating the ancients and because the orator learned to represent himself in a compelling way to his audience. Furthermore, as with poetry, the reader or hearer of a rhetorical performance was invited to imitate the examples in the text or speech and his response was judged to have ethical and political consequences.
On the centrality of the terms decorum and imitation to both humanist rhetoric and moral philosophy, see Hannah Holborn Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497–514, esp. 506; and Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), chaps. 3, 4, and 9.
4. On classical republicanism see Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1945); Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959); and the introduction to her edition of Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation 1500–1700 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), who tends rather to identify Machiavellism with secular political thought; J.G.A. Pocock, “‘The Onely Politician’: Machiavelli, Harrington, and Felix Raab,” Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand 12 (1965): 265–95; The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); and the introduction to his edition of The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), esp. 15–42. Pocock has over time revised his equation of Machiavellism with secular republicanism. See note 7 below. Finally, see Blair Worden, “Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution,” in History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 182–200. Although Worden acknowledges that many classical republicans were Arminians, he nevertheless tries to maintain a separation between classical republicanism, which rejected the political goals of the puritans, and what he calls puritan republicanism.
There are, of course, important exceptions to the secular-republican reading of Machiavelli, and I have been influenced by these studies; but the authors have not generally discussed the Renaissance reception of Machiavelli’s work and so have not seen the implications of their focus on the other Machiavelli—the Machiavelli of force and fraud, the analyst of political necessity—for the history of Machiavellism. See, among others, Gennaro Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli: Storia del suo pensiero politico (1958; Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980); Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York and London: Columbia University Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 90–144; Federico Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance, trans. David Moore (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), and Scritti su Machiavelli (Turin: Einaudi, 1964); Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). One important author who has discussed the Renaissance reception of this dimension of Machiavelli’s thought is Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (1924; Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1984). Yet none of these authors, including Meinecke, makes the rhetorical tradition central to his interpretation.
5. The claim that the Machiavel signals an uninformed reading is supported by the well-known fact that the condemnation of “Machiavel” did not depend on firsthand knowledge of Machiavelli’s texts, and is often difficult to separate from Tacitism or Senecanism in the Renaissance. On Tacitus, see Peter Burke, “Tacitism,” in Tacitus, ed. T. A. Dorey (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 149–71; Mary F. Tenney, “Tacitus in the Politics of Early Stuart England,” Classical Journal 37 (1941): 151–63; Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Giuseppe Toffanin, Machiavelli e il tacitismo (Padua, 1921); André Stegmann, “Tacitisme: Programme pour un nouvel essai de définition,” in Machiavellismo e antimachiavellici nel cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1969), 117–30; Arnaldo Momigliano, “Tacitus and the Tacitist Tradition,” in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 109–31; J.H.M. Salmon, “Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 199–225; and Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Not all of these works discuss the relation of Machiavellism to Tacitism; but the features characteristic of Tacitism and the attacks and defenses of Tacitism in this period are identical to those of Machiavellism. Supposed anti-Machiavellians such as Botero, Lipsius, and Boccalini regularly link Tacitus and Machiavelli. I discuss this link in chapter 3.
6. See, for example, Emile Gasquet, Le Courant machiavélien dans la pensée et la littérature anglaises du XVIe siècle (Paris: Didier, 1975), esp. the conclusion, 415–20. The literature on the Machiavel in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature is extensive; see, among others, Edward Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama (Weimar: Emil Felber, 1897); Mario Praz, “Machiavelli and the Elizabethans,” Proceedings of the British Academy 13 (1928): 49–97; W. A. Armstrong, “The Influence of Seneca and Machiavelli on the Elizabethan Tyrant,” Review of English Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 19–35; Daniel C. Boughner, The Devil’s Disciple: Ben Jonson’s Debt to Machiavelli (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968); Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981); Margaret Scott, “Machiavelli and the Machiavel,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 15 (1984): 147–74, who argues correctly that the Machiavel is not a misreading of Machiavelli’s work; Julia Lupton, “Truant Dispositions: Hamlet and Machiavelli,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987): 59–82; and Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Some historians also comment on the emergence of classical republican ideas in literary texts. Whereas Raab and Pocock only briefly mention literary figures in their accounts, Zera Fink, Caroline Robbins, and Blair Worden all note that “classical republicanism of the Puritan revolution is a literary as well as a political phenomenon” (Worden, “Classical Republicanism,” 190). In their accounts, what is literary about the republicanism of these authors is that republican tenets—faith in reason, the belief that “all power derived originally from the people and could be resumed by the people” (Worden, 193)—appear as themes in their literary works. I challenge this purely thematic reading in the chapters on Milton below. On delegitimized politics, see MM, 163; cf. Raab, 118.
7. In JH, Pocock maintains the equation of Machiavellism with republicanism but seems to have recognized the inadequacy of the equation of republicanism with secular political thought. He notes that Marvell mixes the language of Machiavellism with that of millenarianism and biblical prophecy in his depiction of Cromwell in “An Horatian Ode”; even Harrington “seems to have discerned messianic and apocalyptic possibilities for his republic.” In the course of the seventeenth century the language of Machiavellism came to be used in puritan religious debate as well. In Pocock’s revised analysis, the problem faced by both secular and religious thinkers of the seventeenth century was that of legitimating authority in a world of de facto political power. Although the language of republicanism was less suited to this task than were millenarian beliefs, it was nevertheless “available” (33). In a witty remark that Machiavelli might have appreciated, Pocock admits, “The Florentine secretary was also among the prophets, who had interested him” (JH, 41). I take up the theological context of Machiavellism particularly in chapters 3 and 5. For an important argument for the compatibility of Machiavellian republicanism and Christianity in Italy, see William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), esp. chap. 1.
8. In his many programmatic statements about the historiography of political discourse, Pocock suggests that a political language is, by definition, a locus of ideological conflict: a political language is spoken by more than one speaker, often to heterogeneous ends. See, for example, “Introduction: The state of the art,” in J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–34; and J.G.A. Pocock, “The concept of language and the métier d’historien: some considerations on practice,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 19–38. In this second essay, Pocock also stresses “the antinomian use of language: . . . the use by the ruled of the language of the rulers in such a way as to empty it of its meanings and reverse its effects. Appropriation and expropriation are important aspects of what we have to study” (24). He even imagines a history of a “Machiavellian or anti-Machiavellian rhetoric,” which would consider “how it became an idiom or language available for the purposes of others besides Machiavelli” (35). Individual speech acts (“paroles” rather than “langues,” in Pocock’s Saussurean vocabulary) are also potentially heterogeneous, capable of drawing on or participating in a variety of different languages (23, 30). Yet, Pocock’s reading of Machiavelli’s speech act—for all its interest in the formal character of virtù—is remarkably univocal. Conflict and ambivalence become a function of the reception of Machiavelli rather than, as I argue, a function of Machiavelli’s own ambivalent rhetoric. It is telling in this context that, when Pocock argues in the introduction to Virtue, Commerce, and History that “political language is by its nature ambivalent,” he is referring to “the generalized language of discourse at any time,” that is, the sum total of available discourses at a given moment; here, too, ambivalence seems to be located between discourses rather than in a specific political discourse (8; my emphasis). I believe this discrepancy between methodological principle and practice may be observed in Quentin Skinner’s work as well. A selection of Skinner’s essays on methodology and of responses by his critics is collected in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a brief discussion of my objections to Skinner’s reading of Machiavelli, see the appendix.
9. See Cicero, De officiis, 3, 47.
10. I have discussed these assumptions in chapter 2 of Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).
11. See Meinecke, Machiavellism, 30; and Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). Of the crisis in political thinking in Florence in the late fifteenth century, Gilbert writes: “In these years, as men were altering their opinions about the qualities needed by a successful leader, there was also a change in the views about the means by which man could control the course of events. Force, which previously had been thought to be just one of the several factors which determined politics, now came to be regarded as the decisive factor” (128–29); see also Quentin Skinner, “Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 432: “As we have seen, the early humanists had often drawn a strong contrast between virtus and vis, between manly qualities and sheer brute force. By contrast, Machiavelli treats the willingness to exercise force as an absolutely central feature of good princely government.”
12. I owe this sentence to an incisive critique of a draft of this chapter by Lorna Hutson of the University of London.
PART ONE
MACHIAVELLI
1. One of the best examples of this recognition is provided by Agostino Nifo, who plagiarized Machiavelli’s Prince before it was published in 1532 in a work entitled De regnandi peritia (1523). As a number of critics have noted, Nifo restored the signs of a typical humanist treatise on politics by adding references to authoritative classical authors, such as Cicero and Aristotle, and by writing a final chapter in which he recommends the traditional virtues to the prince. He also excused his examples of tyrannical behavior by offering moralizing conclusions and by saying that he was describing both the poison of tyranny and the remedy of virtuous behavior. In short, he revised The Prince to make it look as much like a traditional mirror of princes as possible. The Latin text and a French translation of Nifo’s treatise exist in a modern edition: Une Reécriture du Prince de Machiavel: Le De regnandi peritia de Agostino Nifo, ed. and trans. Simone Pernet-Beau and Paul Larivaille, Documents du Centre de Recherche de Langue et Littérature Italiennes (Paris: Université Paris X-Nanterre, 1987). On Nifo, see Procacci, 3–26; and Robert Hariman, “Composing Modernity in Machiavelli’s Prince,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 3–29.
2. In a letter to Benedetto Varchi, quoted in Luigi Firpo, “Le origini dell’antimachiavellismo,” in Machiavellismo e antimachiavellici nel cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1969), 27. In his edition of Il Principe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), L. Arthur Burd argues that Busini is reporting his own view in 1549 rather than Florentine opinion in 1527.
3. Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, in Francesco Guicciardini, Scritti politici e Ricordi, ed. Roberto Palmarrochi (Bari: Laterza, 1933), 33.
4. Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi (Milan: Garzanti, 1975), ricordi C110 and C117; translation by Mario Domandi, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 69, 71.
5. See Mario Martelli, “Schede sulla cultura di Machiavelli,” Interpres 6 (1985–86): 283–330, esp. 287–88; and Carlo Dionisotti, “Machiavelli letterato,” in Machiavellerie (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 227–66; reprinted in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 17–51.
6. On Machiavelli’s humanist education and learning, see the appendix in Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 318–22; Armando Verde, “Niccolò Machiavelli studente,” Memorie domenicane, n.s. 4 (1973): 404–408; Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli, Past Masters Series (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Skinner conjectures that this humanist education helped Machiavelli gain the post of second chancellor of Florence: “The prevalence of these [humanist] ideals [in Florence] helps to explain how Machiavelli came to be appointed at a relatively early age to a position of considerable responsibility in the administration of the republic. For his family, though neither rich nor highly aristocratic, was closely connected with some of the city’s most exalted humanist circles. . . . It is also evident from Bernardo’s Diary that, in spite of the large expense involved—which he anxiously itemised—he was careful to provide his son with an excellent grounding in the studia humanitatis” (4, 5).
7. On the relationship of The Prince to the mirror of princes, see, in particular, Felix Gilbert, “The Humanist Concept of the Prince and the ‘Prince’ of Machiavelli,” Journal of Modern History 11 (1939): 449–83; and Allan H. Gilbert, Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1938). On Machiavelli’s attack on the humanist rhetoric and politics of consensus, see chapter 2 below.
8. I borrow the phrase “immanent critique” from Adorno and Horkheimer who used it to describe a mode of dialectical thinking that exposes the internal contradictions of a given ideology, historical situation, or philosophical system. Specifically, an immanent critique confronts “the existent, in its historical context, with the claim of its conceptual principles, in order to criticize the relation between the two” (Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason [New York: Continuum, 1987], 182).
9. On the rhetorical dimension of Machiavelli’s political thought see, among others, Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Michael McCanles, The Discourse of ‘Il Principe’ (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1983); Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 62–80; John D. Lyons, who discusses Machiavelli’s use of examples in Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 35–71; A. J. Parel, “Machiavelli’s Use of Civic Humanist Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 8 (1990): 119–36; Wayne Rebhorn, Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), who discusses Machiavelli’s rhetoric in particular on pages 113–16 and 192–227; Barbara Spackman, “Machiavelli and Maxims,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 137–55; John F. Tinkler, “Praise and Advice: Rhetorical Approaches in More’s Utopia and Machiavelli’s The Prince,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 187–207; William E. Wiethoff, “Machiavelli’s The Prince: Rhetorical Influence in Civil Philosophy,” Western Speech 38 (1974): 98–107; and the collection of essays by Italian and English scholars in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). In thinking about Machiavelli’s rhetoric, I have benefited in particular from Nancy Struever’s unpublished paper, “Machiavelli and the Critique of the Available Languages of Morality in the Sixteenth Century,” published in a revised version in her Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147–81. With the exception of a few pages in Struever, these critics have not extended their insights to the history of Renaissance Machiavellism.
Despite the above bibliography, some historians of Machiavelli still neglect the rhetorical dimension of his work. August Buck usefully surveys recent interpretations of Machiavelli’s work in Machiavelli, Erträge der Forschung, vol. 226 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), and, with the exception of a brief discussion of the mirror of princes, does not mention humanist rhetoric.
10. Kenneth Burke, in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 158–66, and Garver, in Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, also analyze Machiavelli’s works in terms of rhetorical topics, though not the ones I isolate here. Whereas Garver focuses on Machiavelli’s relation to Cicero’s and Aristotle’s topics, I am chiefly concerned with the topics that emerge in the Renaissance reception of Machiavelli.
11. Garver, in Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, also argues that rhetorical problems cannot be solved by applying fixed moral principles or brute force (71, 88), and notes the connection between political innovation and rhetorical invention (27).
CHAPTER ONE
THE PRINCE
1. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 224.
2. Idealism and instrumentalism are complementary, for the ideal or absolute makes all action merely instrumental to its realization. Eugene Garver also notes this connection in Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3–26. Garver also discusses Machiavelli’s critique of ideology (see his index), as does Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies 104, 107, 114–15. I take up the relationship between rhetoric and the critique of ideology in the coda below.
3. In Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, Eugene Garver discusses Machiavelli’s inclusion of atechnical arguments within his political rhetoric. Also relevant to this discussion of Machiavelli’s inclusion of force within his rhetorical paradigm is Michael McCanles’s discussion of Machiavelli’s “textualizing” of the realm of politics in The Discourse of ‘Il Principe’, xv, 7, and passim.
4. Recent interpretations of The Prince in the context of the humanist notion of imitation include Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence; Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. 130–67; Hanna Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 268ff.; Thomas M. Greene, “The End of Discourse in Machiavelli’s ‘Prince,’” Yale French Studies 67 (1984): 57–71; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1: 152–86; Gennaro Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli: Storia del suo pensiero politico (Naples, 1958; rev. ed. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980); Giuseppe Toffanin, Il Cinquecento in Storia della letteratura d’Italia, 6th ed. (Milan: F. Vallardi, 1960), 388–89. For earlier discussions of Machiavelli’s relation to humanism, see Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), and the introduction to part 1, note 7. On exemplarity in Machiavelli, see the introduction to part 1, note 9.
5. Machiavelli’s use of prudente and prudenzia is almost as frequent as his use of virtù and has a similar effect of subverting the traditional humanist moral connotations of the term. The two terms are also frequently linked in a single phrase. See, in addition to the passage cited in the text, the Italian text of P, 3.22 (“della virtù e prudenzia loro”); 7.34 (“uno prudente e virtuoso uomo”); 8.50 (“uno principe prudente”); 9.55 (“Paolo Vitelli . . . uomo prudentissimo”); 15.66; 16.67; 18.72; 21.92; 22.93; 23.95–96; 24.97; 25.98–101. As contemporaries did, Machiavelli sometimes gave the name astuzia to this demoralized concept of prudence. For a similar argument about Machiavelli’s “demoralization” of prudence, see Martin Fleischer, “A Passion for Politics: The Vital Core of the World of Machiavelli,” in Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, ed. Martin Fleischer (New York: Athenaeum, 1972), esp. 139. On Machiavellian prudence, see also Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence.
6. On ruse, see the discussion by Pierre Manent, Naissances de la politique moderne: Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau (Paris: Payot, 1977), 19.
7. See Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, 87, for a different reading of this image.
8. On the link between imitation and self-knowledge, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 142, 172, 184.
9. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision, 227, and Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 95, also comment on Machiavelli’s conception of the intrinsic irony of politics.
10. The refusal to act in the face of such ironies Machiavelli called literature; see Florentine Histories, book 5, chap. 1; in Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, 137.
11. As Hulliung (Citizen Machiavelli, 158–59) and Sydney Anglo (in Machiavelli [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969], 244–49) have remarked, Machiavelli’s rejection of mediocritas or the middle way is also reflected in his antithetical, either/or style of arguing. I take up the question of Machiavelli’s antitheses in the following chapter on the Discourses.
12. See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 8.6.5; 9.2.44–47.
13. Nancy Struever also discusses the dereification of virtù in Theory as Practice, 155. See also Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, 92.
14. Alfredo Bonadeo, Corruption, Conflict and Power in the Works and Times of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 82; J. H. Whitfield, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 80, 108; Claude Lefort, Le Travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 376, though Lefort remarks on the “réserve troublante” that qualifies Machiavelli’s condemnation. Another representative of this first position is Jerrold Seigel, “Virtù in and since the Renaissance,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 5 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1968), 4:476–86.
15. See Gennaro Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, 296ff; Gabriele Pepe, La politica dei Borgia (Naples: Ricciardi, 1945), 281–82; and Ugo Dotti, Niccolò Machiavelli: La fenomenologia del potere (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), 179ff. for the first position; for the second, see Pocock, MM, 152, 167.
16. Greene, “The End of Discourse in Machiavelli’s ‘Prince,’” notes the tenuousness of the distinction between Borgia and Agathocles (65) but sees this as evidence of a breakdown in the concept of virtù rather than as a deliberate strategy; Manent, Naissances de la politique, 16, however, sees the distinction as deliberately false. See also Nathan Tarcov, “Quentin Skinner’s Method and Machiavelli’s Prince,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988): 194–203, esp. 201 on Agathocles.
17. Russell Price, “The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli,” Renaissance Quarterly 30 (1977): 588–631.
18. See Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca, where Castruccio is described as equaling Philip of Macedon and Scipio, even though he rose from an obscure beginning (Niccolò Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli [Florence: Sansoni, 1971], 615, 628). It is also notable that Machiavelli describes himself as “uno uomo di basso et infimo stato” (a man of low social rank) in his prefatory letter to The Prince (13, 3).
19. See chapter 12 on the pseudo-distinction between laws and arms, as well as chapter 19 on arms and friends.
20. Struever also discusses the conflation of the ethical good and the amoral well in The Prince in Theory as Practice, 157; McCanles, The Discourse of ‘Il Principe’, 63–65, discusses Machiavelli’s deliberate invocation of two registers of “bene” in this passage.
21. Discussing prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: “It is this kind of deliberation which is good deliberation, a correctness that attains what is good” (NE, 1141b 20; trans. Martin Ostwald [New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1962]). My definition of virtù as functional excellence is taken from Hulliung’s discussion of the similarity between virtù and aretē: “Since the Latin word virtus meant almost exactly what aretē had meant in popular Greek usage, simply to use the Latin language as it had always been used had the effect, whether intended or unintended, of undoing the Platonic and Aristotelian effort of reworking and philosophizing pagan values. Once again, ‘excellence’ was synonymous with all that is heroic, noble, warlike, great” (Citizen Machiavelli, 136–37). Other readers of Machiavelli have also drawn the analogy between virtù and aretē: see Bernard Crick in his preface to the Penguin edition of the Discourses, 59. On Machiavelli’s critique of stoicism, see Hulliung 195ff., 253, and passim, as well as Quentin Skinner’s discussion of Machiavelli’s relation to Cicero in Machiavelli. For an argument that Cicero is a proto-Machiavellian, see Marcia Colish, “Cicero’s De officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince,” Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978): 81–93.
22. This opposition is taken from J. H. Whitfield, Machiavelli (Oxford: Blackwell, 1947), 117.
23. Roland Barthes, “Le Discours de l’histoire,” Social Science Information 6 (1967): 6. I owe this reference to Struever, “Machiavelli and the Available Languages.” See also Tinkler, “Praise and Advice,” on Machiavelli’s replacing of the usual demonstrative rhetoric of handbooks for princes with a deliberative approach, with its consideration of utilitas, and its emphasis on the topos of necessity (195–201). For a reading of chapter 8 similar to the one offered here, see McCanles, The Discourse of ‘Il Principe’, 59–69.
24. In Foxes and Lions, Wayne Rebhorn also discusses Machiavelli’s manipulation of his audience, although he does not discuss Agathocles; see 118–23, 212–27.
25. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 120.
26. Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, 84, also discusses how virtù confounds the distinction between means and end.
27. Hulliung also makes this point in Citizen Machiavelli, 56, 82, 231. See also Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 288–89; Manent, Naissances de la politique, 19–25; and The Prince, chapter 9 on the necessity of relying on the people, and chapter 19 for Machiavelli’s remarks on the origin of the French parliament. In MM, Pocock discusses the prince as a man of virtù without fellow citizens (157).
28. See Manent, Naissances de la politique, 9–10, 35–39, for a more positive reading of the willing of necessity in The Prince.
29. Pitkin makes this point in Fortune Is a Woman, 292.
30. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964).
31. On parataxis in The Prince see Fredi Chiappelli, Studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1952). See also McCanles, The Discourse of ‘Il Principe’, 13.
32. On the sublime “inciting to action,” see Fletcher, Allegory, 249, 246. Fletcher quotes Schiller: “For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate representation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation” (251–52). See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 88, 101 (paragraphs 25, 28). The Machiavellism of Milton’s use of allegory and of the sublime is discussed in chapter 8.
33. Pocock makes a similar point in MM, 171: “We must not say that divine inspiration is being lowered to the level of realpolitik without adding that realpolitik is being raised to the level of divine inspiration.” See Lefort, Le Travail de l’oeuvre, 447, on chapter 26 as Machiavelli’s example to the Medici of the kind of rhetoric that is useful when addressing the people.
34. In “Machiavelli’s Gift of Counsel” (in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993]: 219–57), Albert Russell Ascoli argues that in chapter 26 of The Prince Machiavelli acknowledges that his treatise “is likely to prove no more effective in reshaping history than Petrarch’s canzone,” four lines of which appear as the last words of The Prince. “The real message of the final clash between prudent pragmatism and utopian prophecy in The Prince, however, is . . . another. . . . Once the wide gap between Machiavelli’s foresight and the Medici princes’ power has been recognized, once his own hidden identification with the Savonarolian profeta disarmato has become apparent, once he admits that ‘what is’ matters to him far less than ‘what (could and) should be,’ a fundamental mystification inherent in his conceptual and rhetorical pragmatism is made apparent. . . . ‘Pragmatism’ is itself profoundly utopian” (256). On the collapse of Machiavelli’s treatise into literary idealism, see Thomas M. Greene, “The End of Discourse in Machiavelli’s Prince.”
35. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 126–27.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DISCOURSES
1. On original sin, see Pocock, MM, 167: “On the one hand virtù is that by which we innovate, and so let loose sequences of contingency beyond our prediction or control so that we become prey to fortuna; on the other hand virtù is that internal to ourselves by which we resist fortuna and impose upon her patterns of order, which may even become patterns of moral order. This seems to be the heart of Machiavellian ambiguities. It explains why innovation is supremely difficult, being formally self-destructive; and it explains why there is incompatibility between action—and so between politics defined in terms of action rather than tradition—and moral order. The politicization of virtue had arrived at the discovery of a politicized version of original sin.” See also Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), on the Discourses as Machiavelli’s “political utopia” (192). Describing the superior judgment of the people as compared to a prince, Machiavelli writes, “Not without good reason is the voice of the populace likened to that of God” (D, 1.58.264, 255).
2. For Machiavelli’s use of the words reducere, reducersi, and so forth, see also, in the Italian edition, pages 131, 142, 155, 160, 177, 179, 185, 193, 224, 233, 265, 293, 340, 379, 381, 385, 450; in a negative sense, see 215. The lawyers’ and doctors’ methodical codification of decisions may have suggested rhetoric to contemporaries. In Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), Walter J. Ong, S.J., argues that Renaissance medicine was “shot through with rhetoric, partly . . . because in the Hippocratic writings and elsewhere medical lore was preserved and studied in aphorisms (Bacon’s interest in method and his interest in aphorisms go together)” (226). I take up the issue of method and its relation to aphorisms in chapter 4.
3. Throughout the Discourses Machiavelli emphasizes the availability of examples for use on both sides of a question; see 3.21 and 3.22. On Machiavelli’s examples, see Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 167; and the introduction to part 1, note 9.
4. I discuss the humanist rhetoric of consensus in Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). On the institutional equivalent of such rhetoric of consensus, see John M. Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280–1400 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), especially the introduction and epilogue. Najemy suggests a quattrocento analogue for Machiavelli’s rhetoric of conflict in the political practice of the Florentine guilds. See also his two articles: “‘Arti’ and ‘Ordini’ in Machiavelli’s Istorie,” in Essays Presented to Myron P.Gilmore, ed. Sergio Bertelli and Gloria Ramakus, vol. 1: History (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978), 161–91, esp. 167–68; and “Machiavelli and the Medici: The Lessons of Florentine History,” Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982): 551–76. For examples of the contemporary rhetoric of political union or consensus, see the remarks from the Florentine Pratiche (meetings of citizens to advise the Great Council and the Council of Eighty), quoted by Felix Gilbert in “Florentine Political Assumptions in the Period of Savonarola and Soderini,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957): 187–214. Gilbert argues that Florence in the sixteenth century was “a society deeply riven by personal rivalries, by difference in wealth and education, and torn by internal conflicts. These dissensions came up for discussion in many meetings of the Pratiche. The inability to grasp their significance was reflected in the manner in which the question about which the advice of the Pratica was sought was formulated: ‘Che modi e vie siano da tenere circa l’unione dei cittadini a fargli concordi insieme’” (212–13). See also the passages quoted by Gennaro Sasso in Niccolò Machiavelli: Storia del suo pensiero politico (1958; Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980), 476 n. 46. Also exemplary is Bernardo Rucellai’s discussion of the necessity of civic concord in his De bello italico, and his condemnation of the sedition that arises when the people (“plebi”) are allowed to participate in government. The relevant passages are cited by Mario Santoro, Fortune, ragione, e prudenza nella civiltà letteraria del cinquecento, rev. ed. (Naples: Liguori, 1978), 175–76.
5. On Machiavelli’s reading of Livy, and his misunderstanding of Livian fortuna as chance, see Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 46.
6. This interpretation is also carried out through Machiavelli’s counterpointing of Livy and Polybius. As many readers have noted, in explaining Rome’s transition from a monarchy to a republic with a mixed constitution, Machiavelli invokes the Polybian theory of natural cycles of government; but he reduces nature to fortune in the case of Rome. In so doing, he criticizes one strain of classical political theory and thereby makes the active assumption of responsibility possible both in reading and in politics (since not everything is determined by nature, there is room for human deliberation and action). But Machiavelli does not stop with the Livian attribution of Roman excellence to fortuna (interpreted as chance), since in the act of reducing Polybian nature to chance, he also redefines chance as disunion. By this circuitous route Machiavelli ends up subscribing to Polybius’s theory of the mixed constitution. On Machiavelli’s reading of Polybius, see Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the “Discourses on Livy” (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 35ff.; Paul Larivaille, La Pensée politique de Machiavel (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1982), 101ff.; Gennaro Sasso, “La Teoria dell’anacyclosis,” Studi su Machiavelli (Naples: Morano, 1967), 161–222, esp. 199.
7. Giovanni Villani, Cronica, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), book 1, chap. 28; see also book 8, chap. 39.
8. Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), preface, 7. Machiavelli’s attitude toward Florentine factions is ambivalent in this preface since he distinguishes Florentine divisions from those that contributed to the continuance of ancient Rome but argues that Florence’s survival of these divisions testifies to its power.
9. See Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:58–59.
10. See Guicciardini’s remarks on the Discourses, 1.4, in his Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli, in Francesco Guicciardini, Scritti politici e Ricordi, ed. Roberto Palmarocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1933), 10–11.
11. For a Renaissance reading of these chapters, which reproduces Machiavelli’s arguing on both sides of the question and his finally settling on Rome, see Antonio Brucioli, Dialogi (Rome, 1538), “Dialogo della repubblica”; and Procacci’s discussion of Brucioli’s borrowings from Machiavelli, 29–43. On Brucioli, see also Delio Cantimori, “Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937): 83–102; Carlo Dionisotti, “La testimonianza del Brucioli,” in his Machiavellerie: Storia e fortuna di Machiavelli (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 193–226, and Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 201–209.
12. In D, 1.58.264, 255, Machiavelli describes the superior prudence of the people as compared to a prince in rhetorical terms: “Quanto al guidicare le cose, si vede radissime volte, quando egli [il popolo] ode duo concionanti che tendino in diverse parti, quando ei sono di eguale virtù, che non pigli la opinione migliore, e che non sia capace di quella veritù che egli ode” (With regard to [the people’s] judgment, when two speakers of equal skill are heard advocating different alternatives, very rarely does one find the populace failing to adopt the better view or incapable of appreciating the truth of what it hears).
13. Machiavelli could thus be said to use the collapsible distinction between Rome and Sparta as the chief rhetorical paradigm of his text. For, as in The Prince, so in the Discourses Machiavelli sets up a variety of oppositions (e.g., force/fraud; states that expand/states that do not; fortuna/virtù, etc.), only then to show that the opposition is contained within each term. The most important of these is that between Florence and Rome: while Machiavelli begins by distinguishing between the two in terms of the corruption of the first and the lack of corruption of the second, as we read further we see that no state is completely lacking in corruption and that a completely corrupt state would be incapable of regeneration (see 1.16.173–74, 154). For even republican Rome required an individual of virtù periodically to remind the corrupt citizens of the original principles of government, whereas in a completely corrupt state no such individual could exist. One effect of this demystification of Rome, as Claude Lefort has argued, is to make Rome a more suitable object of imitation for Florence (Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel, 585).
14. Relevant here is Machiavelli’s discussion of Manlius Torquatus as an example of civic virtù. Manlius’s “way of behaving was entirely in the public interest and was in no way affected by private ambition, for it is impossible to gain partisans if one is harsh in one’s dealing with everybody and is wholly devoted to the common good, because by doing this one does not acquire particular friends or—as I have just called them—partisans” (3.22.452, 469).
15. In the introduction to his translation of The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950), Leslie Walker sums up this tension within Machiavelli’s method when he writes that Machiavelli “does not give advice to tyrants because he likes tyranny, for he makes it perfectly plain that he loathes tyranny. . . . He advises all and sundry because he desires to convince his readers that his new method is universal in its applicability” (1:73).
With the examples of Numa and especially Brutus we can begin to see how Machiavelli’s Discourses could be assimilated, along with The Prince, to Renaissance Tacitism. For Guicciardini’s insight about Tacitus in the Ricordi applies equally well to Machiavelli: “Cornelius Tacitus teaches those who live under tyrants how to live and act prudently; just as he teaches tyrants ways to secure their tyranny” (Maxims and Reflections, trans. Mario Domandi [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965], C18, 45). My analysis in this and the preceding chapter should suggest that Renaissance readers saw Machiavelli as Tacitean because Machiavelli read Livy the way Renaissance readers, including Guicciardini, read Tacitus.
CHAPTER THREE
RHETORIC AND REASON OF STATE: BOTERO’S READING OF MACHIAVELLI
1. See Adolph Gerber, Niccolò Machiavelli, Die Handschriften, Ausgaben und Ubersetzungen seiner Werke im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Luigi Firpo, 3 parts (Gotha: Andreas Perthes, 1912; Turin: Bottega D’Erasmo, 1962), part 2, 3–4, 22–27.
2. For an introduction to reason of state, see Meinecke, Machiavellism, and note 5 below; Rodolfo de Mattei, Il problema della ‘ragion di stato’ nell’età della Controriforma (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1979); and Peter Burke, “Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 479–98. Burke reminds us that the term had positive as well as negative connotations in the Renaissance: true reason of state was sometimes defined as political prudence in conformity with ethical or religious norms, false reason of state as reasoning in “the pursuit of self-interest” (480). See also Michel Senellart, Machiavélisme et raison d’état (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), who is particularly concerned to recover the economic dimension of reason of state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), who provides useful English paraphrases of many Italian treatises on reason of state; and Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), which appeared when the present book was in press.
3. In Storia dell’età barocca in Italia (1929; Bari: Laterza, 1946), Benedetto Croce argued that Botero was by temperament “incapable of producing a science, which requires precise distinctions and definitions of concepts” (80). For other derogatory comments about Botero, see Federico Chabod, Giovanni Botero (Rome: Anonima Romana Editoriale, 1934), 56–57, 67; Rodolfo de Mattei, Il problema della ‘ragion di stato’, who refers to Botero’s lack of philosophical discipline (54); Luigi Firpo, in his introduction to Giovanni Botero, Ragion di stato (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1948). See also William F. Church, Richilieu and Reason of State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 63ff. For an acute evaluation of Botero in the context of Counter-Reformation discussions of reason of state, see William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), esp. 293–338, 444–49. In The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), George L. Mosse provides a complimentary, brief discussion of the importance of Botero for the analysis of reason of state in English Protestant treatises on casuistry. Quentin Skinner also has a few kind words for Botero in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:248–49.
4. This point is well made by Salvo Mastellone, “Antimachiavellismo, machiavellismo, tacitismo,” in Cultura e scuola 9 (1970): 132–36; although Mastellone argues that, for this reason, Machiavellism should not be confused with a legitimate reading of Machiavelli’s works.
5. In Meinecke’s view, sixteenth-century discussions of reason of state grew out of Machiavelli’s discourse of necessity, his analysis of the way in which abstract moral rules are modified and justified by the consideration of historical circumstances. Counter-Reformation readers correctly saw that Machiavelli’s openness regarding the dictates of necessity gave rise to an ambiguity regarding appropriate means and an indeterminacy of Machiavellian ends. Sixteenth-century readers were thus right to see Machiavelli as a theorist of reason of state—even if such readers then went on to distinguish between a good reason of state (which is subordinate to religious ends) and a bad, Machiavellian reason of state (which is not). They took a wrong turn, however, according to Meinecke, when they lost sight of the idealism implicit in Machiavelli’s notion of virtù, his hope for the regeneration of the Florentine republic. While preserving Machiavelli’s insights into the role of necessity in the maintaining of state power, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers one-sidedly condemned Machiavelli for “having prepared the poison of autocracy” (45).
6. As this formulation suggests, and as a number of critics have pointed out, Machiavelli’s vision of politics is, to some extent, compatible with Saint Augustine’s. In Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, William Bouwsma writes, “The central problem of Renaissance politics was precisely how to survive in the earthly city. Those who, like Machiavelli, preferred ‘politics’ to ‘principle’ (as the issue would be disparagingly represented by spiritual authority) were thus, perhaps, in an important sense on the side of Augustine. On a certain level, therefore, the essential difference between medieval and Renaissance politics may be seen as a conflict over the implications of the Augustinian dichotomy” (28–29).
7. Meinecke’s description of reason of state as an ambiguous, dualistic concept, situated at the convergence of what he called kratos and ethos, or power politics and ethics, expediency and the good, suggests the rhetorical dimension of Machiavelli’s politics and of subsequent reflection on Machiavelli’s work; yet, Meinecke did not analyze the way in which reason of state emerges from and articulates a crisis in the assumptions of humanist rhetoric and imitation. See, however, Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Bireley argues, as I do, that the Counter-Reformation reception of Machiavelli was basically on target; he analyzes reason-of-state literature in terms of a series of topics, or common themes: (1) the relationship between virtue, reputation, and power; (2) the uses of deceit; (3) economic development; (4) war and the role of the military; (5) the place of religion and toleration in the state; (6) the role of fortune or providence in history (x). He does not, however, connect his thematic analysis to the humanist rhetorical tradition as I do here. Nor does he provide a close rhetorical analysis of treatises on reason of state.
8. See de Mattei, Il problema della ‘ragion di stato’, chap. 5, “Obbiezioni e correzioni secentesche alla ‘Ragion di Stato’ del Botero.” On the comparison to Tasso, see Carlo Morandi, ed., Della ragion di stato; Delle cause della grandezza delle città (Bologna: Cappelli, 1930), xxxviii. In Counter-Reformation Prince, Bireley writes that Botero’s “Reason of State was an immediate and undoubted success from its publication in 1589. Fifteen Italian editions appeared before 1700, ten before the death of the author in 1617. Translations followed, into Spanish (Madrid, 1591; six editions by 1606), French (Paris, 1599–1606), Latin (Altdorf, 1602; three more editions by 1666), and, much later, German (Frankfurt, 1657–1664). From 1589 on, . . . [Botero’s] the Causes of Greatness of Cities was often printed with it, and after 1598 the Additions to the Reason of State, five essays elaborating on themes of the Reason of State, was added” (50). On the knowledge of Botero’s works in England, see chapter 4, note 11, below.
9. In La fine dell’Umanesimo (Milan: Fratelli Bocca, 1920), Giuseppe Toffanin notes that Aristotle’s Poetics became an instrument in the Counter-Reformation struggle against Renaissance humanism and the Reformation (1–15). I follow here the account of Marc Fumaroli, L’Age de l’éloquence: Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980), esp. 116–61, who also notes that Counter-Reformation writers turned to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics to reformulate the relationship of rhetoric and Catholic theology after the Council of Trent; but he stresses the continuities between Counter-Reformation and humanist rhetoric (116–40). For related arguments for continuity, see the history of Jesuit education in the sixteenth century by François de Dainville, La Naissance de l’humanisme moderne (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940), esp. chap. 2; Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), chap. 2, esp. 79; and John Monfasani, “Humanism and Rhetoric,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert Rabil, Jr., 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 3:171–236.
10. Quoted in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961; Midway reprint, 1974), 1:10. For quattrocento arguments for the civic dimension of rhetoric and poetics, see also the appendix below, as well as Monfasani, “Humanism and Rhetoric”; Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli, “Humanism and Poetics,” in Renaissance Humanism, 3:85–169; and Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), chap. 2.
11. Giacopo Mazzoni, On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante, Introduction and Summary, trans. Robert L. Montgomery (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 101, 91. Francesco Patrizi made the same point in his Discussiones peripateticae (1571), cited in Weinberg, History, 1:21.
12. Weinberg, History, 1:17.
13. The whole passage reads: “Since the civil faculty seeks to implant in the minds of humble citizens obedience to their superiors, so that out of desire for novelties they should not be moved to disobedience and rebellion, and so that they should always remain content with their condition, it gave birth to comedy, in which the humble life is shown to be happy, fortunate, and capable of infinite solace. On the other hand, since the more powerful and all those raised to the mastery of others have not had to pay too much attention to their fortune, and consequently have become insupportable and insolent in their rule, the civil faculty wished to create tragedy, which would function as an adequate counterweight to the insolence of prosperous fortune. Hence all those who find themselves in such a condition will be able to extract useful instruction in moderating the pride characteristic of their state. . . .We can conclude that those two kinds of poems are directed by the civil faculty to the extinguishing of sedition and the preservation of peace” (On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante, 105–106). For a similar argument about the classification of genre according to its ability to reinforce social hierarchy, see Giason Denores, Discorso, in Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinquecento, ed. Bernard Weinberg, 4 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1970–74), 3:377ff.
14. See Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962; repr. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), 205–302, on the debate over catharsis. Two interpretations of catharsis were popular in this period: the Mithradatic interpretation of Robertello, according to which tragedy inures the spectator to changes of fortune by means of the purgation of pity and fear, and the interpretation associated with Vincenzo Maggi, according to which pity and fear are not purged, but used to provide object lessons about other passions, such as wrath and lust (221–23, 243).
Hathaway argues that the debate was influenced by Trissino’s Poetica, books 5 and 6 (composed in the 1540s, published 1563), which related Aristotle’s discussion of catharsis in the Poetics to his discussion of the political uses—and dangers—of pity and fear in the Rhetoric. And, along with Allan Gilbert, he detects in Trissino an “exploration of the ethics of self-interest,” and of the uses of catharsis to control such self-interest, that is reminiscent of Machiavelli (211, n. 10). See Allan Gilbert, Literary Criticism, Plato to Dryden (New York: American Book Company, 1940), on the similarity between Trissino’s discussion of fear and those of “Italian political writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, above all Machiavelli” (218 n. 10).
15. Giason Denores, Discorso, in Weinberg, Trattati, 3:391; Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1978), 1:85.
16. See Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism, 230; see 233 on Speroni’s view of purgation as having “civil utility.” It is interesting to see that Speroni used the concept of catharis to defend himself against charges of heresy: “When, in his old age, Speroni was hailed before the Inquisition in Rome to defend himself against charges that the dialogues he had published thirty-five years before were full of heresies and immoralities, he on three occasions referred to literary effects as purgation and obviously intended his judges to understand that he was defending his dialogues because of their purgative value” (232).
17. Quoted by Monfasani, “Humanism and Rhetoric,” 210. The list in the next sentence is taken from Monfasani, 209, who points out that these treatises are all published in Bernard Weinberg’s Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinquecento.
18. On sacred rhetoric, see Monfasani, “Humanism and Rhetoric”; Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric; and Fumaroli, L’Age de l’éloquence. Monfasani notes: “Without question, the Jesuits created the most successful school system of the early modern period, with 306 colleges in 1608 and more than 600 colleges by 1710 in Europe, America, and even the Far East. In the master plan, the Ratio studiorum, of the Jesuit colleges, rhetoric held a privileged place as the culminating subject in the curriculum after grammar and ‘the humanities.’ Not only was great stress laid on declamation and other oratorical practices, but the rhetoric that the Jesuits taught was essentially classical in structure. A leading textbook of the Jesuit colleges, De arte rhetorica libri tres ex Aristotele, Cicerone, et Quintiliano praecipue deprompti by Cypriano Soarez, S.J. (first printed in 1562) was premised on the view that rhetoric was the art of persuasion and not merely of style (‘Rhetoricae officium est dicere apposite ad persuasionem, finis persuadere dictione’)” (204–205). See also de Dainville, La Naissance, chap. 2.
19. On Segni, see Weinberg, History, 1:404–406. The information in this paragraph is paraphrased from Procacci, 47–51. On comparisons between Machiavelli and Aristotle, see also de Mattei, Il problema della ‘ragion di stato’, chaps. 3 and 5.
20. The relevant passage in book 5 of Aristotle’s Politics is 1314a 30–1315b 10. Rebecca W. Bushnell discusses the pertinence of the Politics to Renaissance discussions of mimesis and theatricality in Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), chaps. 2 and 3. I quote from pages 27–28. Bushnell notes that ambivalence about the stage was often linked to the fear of tyranny both in antiquity and the Renaissance. Plato describes the tyrant as a figure of passion and a hypocritical dissembler—an actor who misrepresents himself as well as the interests of the state. Plato’s view of the tyrant is thus intimately linked to his anxieties about imitation, its ability to stir up the passions and to seduce through misrepresentation. His moral censure of tyranny is an attempt to distinguish in ethical terms what cannot be distinguished in the realm of mimesis. For the tyrant is capable of appearing to be good. In contrast, Aristotle’s Politics “at once adopts and completely undermines Plato’s sexual and theatrical model of the tyrant” (26). Aristotle does not censure mimesis nor does he see the tyrant in simple moral terms. Rather, a king is distinguished from a tyrant only in coming “to power by either succession or election” (26).
21. Le Roy and Botero cited in Procacci, 50, 55.
22. Casuistry was the art of applying general moral principles to specific cases or adjudicating between conflicting moral principles, such as the prohibitions against lying and against abjuring one’s faith. As J. P. Sommerville writes, “The task of the casuists was to construct a means whereby a man could at once avoid lying and prevent the harmful results which truth or silence would bring” (“The ‘New Art of Lying’: Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Casuistry,” in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1988], 166–67). Although the casuists condemned lying, they argued that the Christian was justified in exploiting the ambiguity of language to mislead an interlocutor; to qualify or subvert mentally a verbal statement was also permissible. Although both Protestants and Catholics wrote treatises on casuistry, the casuistical doctrines of verbal equivocation and mental reservation came to be associated particularly with the Jesuits—and with Machiavellism—in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although opponents of the Jesuits sometimes allowed verbal ambiguity, they condemned mental reservation as a Machiavellian instrument of reason of state. Sommerville observes that there was some truth to this: “Catholic casuists abhorred Machiavelli, the atheist politician; but working within a tradition quite separate from Renaissance ‘reason of state,’ they reached conclusions not that far from the Florentine’s” (167). On the connection between casuistry and reason of state, see also George L. Mosse, Holy Pretence. I take up the issue of casuistry in part 2 below.
23. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 169. Zagorin discusses Navarrus on pages 153–85. See also Sommerville, “The ‘New Art of Lying,’” 173–74; and de Mattei, “‘Ragion di Stato’ e ‘Mendacio,’” in Il problema della ‘ragion di stato’, 187–214.
24. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, 93–94; see also Rita Belladona, “Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Religious Dissimulation: Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini’s Trattati nove della prudenza,” in Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform, ed. Joseph C. McLelland (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1980), 29–41. The Trattati were written sometime in the mid-cinquecento and were not published. Belladona calls attention to Carli’s secular description of prudence, which is much closer to Machiavelli’s prudence than to Aristotle’s: “For [Carli] prudence and dissimulation form the basis of outward ethical behavior; they also regulate the prudent man’s attitude toward official religion, which is viewed as an exclusively socio-political phenomenon and, as such, becomes a source of fraud. In the religious context, as in all other spheres of life, the prudente can survive the surrounding corruption by using simulation, while at the same time preserving and guarding the secrecy of his own private inner world” (36).
25. I quote from the partial Italian translation by Luigi Firpo, in Il pensiero politico del Rinascimento e della Controriforma (Milan: Mazorati, 1966), 616. Later in the century the Jesuit Antonio Possevino condemned Machiavelli in similar terms in his Iudicium (1592, printed with the Telius Latin translation of The Prince [Ursellis, 1600]). Possevino appears not to have read Machiavelli but to have borrowed his attack from Innocent Gentillet’s Discours contre Machiavel of 1576 (Latin translation, 1577), at the same time that he condemned the Huguenot Gentillet as himself a Machiavellian. Referring to the Discours, Possevino remarks, “In that work, the author educes certain arguments from ancient history, which may be used to combat Machiavelli: but where he attacks the Catholic church, or gives occasion to do so, he easily equals or surpasses Machiavelli in blasphemy” (202).
26. Jeronimo Osorio, The Five books . . . of Civill and Christian Nobilitie, trans. William Blandie (London, 1576), 89, 97–98, 109. In general, Osorio’s point, like Augustine’s in The City of God, is that Christianity is not responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire, and that Christianity does not lead to martial meekness.
27. I quote from the English translation of William Jones, Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, Written in Latine by Iustus Lipsius (London, 1594), book 4, chap. 1, p. 60.
28. In contrast, in Atheismus triumphatus (Atheism Conquered; published 1631, I quote from the Paris edition of 1636), Tommaso Campanella used the vocabulary of rhetoric to condemn Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics. Campanella considered the use of “simulatio,” “opinio,” and lying, and rejected the argument that Machiavelli’s teaching on these matters in The Prince and the Discourses conforms to Aristotle’s in book 5 of the Politics and Thomas Aquinas’s. According to Campanella, Aristotle and Aquinas did not recommend tyrannical behavior; they simply described it in order to teach how it may be ameliorated. In contrast, Machiavelli teaches neither an art nor “prudentia politica” but “astutia scelerosa.” Campanella then went on to insist that although all arts, including that of politics, can be used well or badly, the criteria of right use—of praise or blame—are part of the art; hence the condemnation of tyranny is, strictly speaking, what the classical rhetoricians would call an “artistic” or intrinsic argument (251). See Campanella, “Argumenta admiratoris contra reprehensores Macchiavellismi” and “Responsio” (Arguments of the admirer against the detractors of Machiavellism and Response), 240–41, 243.
29. Bireley, Counter-Reformation Prince, 79. On “Lipsius Proteus,” see Mark Morford, Stoics and Neostoics: Rubens and the Circle of Lipsius (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 136. The frequent accusation of inconstancy punned on the title of Lipsius’s other important treatise, De constantia (1584).
30. Lodovico Zuccolo, Della ragione di stato (1621), in Politici e moralisti del seicento, ed. Benedetto Croce and Santio Caramella (Bari: Laterza, 1930), 27–28; see 39 on interests. De Mattei discusses Zuccolo and those who held similar positions in Il problema della ‘ragion di stato’, 109–28. In Zuccolo’s treatise we begin to see the connection between reason of state and historicism: reason of state is not a norm, but a means of reasoning about particular historical conditions, historically particular states. That Machiavellism gave rise to historicism is one of the themes of Meinecke’s Machiavellism.
31. This biographical material is drawn from Bireley, Counter-Reformation Prince, 46–47; and from Fumaroli, L’Age de l’éloquence, 142. Francesco Patrizi was the author of a commentary on Aristotle, Discussiones peripateticae (Venice, 1571), as well as of several works on poetics, including Della poetica di Francesco Patrici la deca disputata (Ferrara, 1586). On the relevance of this treatise to Botero, see note 38 below. In the following pages I quote from the Italian edition of Ragion di stato, ed. Luigi Firpo (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1948), and then from The Reason of State, trans. P.J. and D.P. Waley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956). Parenthetical references are to chapter and page in the Italian text, and to page in the English translation.
32. For the linking of Machiavelli and Reformers, see, in addition to Possevino’s Iudicium and Osorio’s De nobilitate christiana, Tommaso Campanella, Atheismus triumphatus, preface, where Machaivelli is associated with Calvin, “heretics . . . pseudopoliticians”; and Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Tratado de la religión y virtudes que dever tener el Príncipe, para governar y servar sus Estatos. Contro lo que Nicolas Machiavelo y los Politicos deste tiempo enseñan (Madrid, 1595), preface, where Machiavelli is linked not only with the teachings of Tacitus and Bodin but also with French Huguenots such as Duplessis Mornay and de la Noue. A partial English translation exists by George Albert Moore, Religion and the Virtues of a Christian Prince (Washington, D.C.: Country Dollar Press, 1949).
33. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975), book 1, chap. 10, pp. 150–51.
34. Significantly, this argument from interest became more prominent in the second edition of the treatise. In the first edition, Botero insisted that the prince be guided by prudential considerations of interest: “Tenga per cosa risoluta, che nelle deliberazioni de’ prencipi l’interesse è quello che vince ogni partito” (It should be taken for certain that in decisions made by princes interest will always override every other argument [2.6.104, 41]); but, in a later chapter in the same edition, he condemned interest as astuteness rather than prudence:
First [the prince] must make a reputation for prudence rather than astuteness, prudence being a virtue whose function is to seek and to find convenient means to bring about a given end. Astuteness has the same object, but differs from prudence in this: in the choice of means, prudence follows what is honest rather than what is useful, astuteness takes nothing into account but interest. (2.8.114 n. 2, 49 n.)
Botero deleted this passage in subsequent editions, thereby tacitly acknowledging that the criterion of effective representation in the realm of politics is inseparable from the concept of interest. Such a deletion also suggests that Botero found the distinction between prudence and astuteness in terms of means impossible to maintain. For both make use of imitation and rhetoric, of misrepresentation and coercion; both take interests into account. The difference must rather be one of ends and of results. The effect of this deletion was to highlight the pragmatic argument for the superior effectiveness of Christianity in the realm of practical politics. In Storia dell’età barocca in Italia, Benedetto Croce notices this shift in Botero’s argument but takes it as evidence of his intellectual sloppiness (87). Peter Burke, in “Tacitism,” notes that for many Renaissance writers interest was synonymous with reason of state (482).
35. In Counter-Reformation Prince, Bireley calls this kind of argument “intrinsic pragmatism,” which “argued from the nature of the act itself, apart from any divine intervention. Moral action by its very nature was useful; immoral action was counterproductive” (31). Gentillet made the same argument in his Discours contre Machiavel, as did English Renaissance critics of Machiavelli.
36. Rhetorical politics makes even real piety and real virtues appear in quotation marks. Thus when Botero recommends that the prince seek the guidance of religious counselors before pursuing any policy, it is difficult to know exactly how to interpret his comments:
A prince should never bring a matter before a Council of State without first submitting it to a spiritual Council. . . . Nor should this seem strange; the Romans never undertook anything without first examining the auspices and auguries, and the Turk today never declares war or makes any important decision without consulting the Mufti and obtaining written advice from him. Why then should a Christian prince close the door of his secret councilchamber against Christ and the Gospels and set up a reason of State contrary to God’s law, as though it were a rival altar? (2.15.135, 64)
In the Discourses Machiavelli had discussed the Roman use of auspices and auguries to deceive the people into accepting reason of state as divine reason. Here, it is impossible to tell whether Botero is recommending a similar pragmatic use of religion, or whether he is suggesting that, while reason of state is a supplement to reason tout court (1.1), it is underwritten by a divine sovereign who is a true Machiavel, or both.
37. The Italian text is taken from Della riputatione del prencipe, in Della ragion di stato libri dieci . . . accresciuti di diversi Discorsi (Venice, 1659). The English translations are from Giovanni Botero, Practical Politics trans. George Albert Moore (Washington, D.C.: Country Dollar Press, 1949), 221–46. Parenthetical page references are to the Italian text first, then to the English translation.
38. On the use of the term sublime in Renaissance treatises on rhetoric, see Fumaroli, L’Age de l’éloquence, 148–52 (a discussion of Botero’s De praedicatore verbi dei); and Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, for whom the Christian “grand style” is essentially a sublime style, with the characteristics of forcefulness, emotional intensity, grandness of conception, plainness (in contrast to the classical grand style), and sometimes harshness. See also Aguzzi-Barbagli, “Humanism and Poetics,” who points out that Longinus’s treatise on the sublime was translated by Robortello in 1554, and who notes that Botero’s acquaintance, Patrizi, demonstrates familiarity with Longinus in his Della poetica (“Humanism and Poetics,” in Renaissance Humanism 3:157 n. 151). Patrizi may have communicated this knowledge to Botero.
39. See Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles Singleton (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), book 1, pp. 43, 46, for a similar discussion of the difficulty of understanding the ease with which the effect of sprezzatura (the courtier’s graceful behavior) is produced.
40. The history of Machiavellian reason of state in Italy illustrates this. See William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty; J. Ferrari, Histoire de la raison d’état (Paris: Michel Levy, 1860), chap. 4, “Revanche des républicains de Venise, 1576–1649”; and Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 94–104. Ferrari and Tuck discuss the appropriation of Machiavellian reason of state by writers such as Sarpi and Paruta.
41. Cited in Etienne Thuau, Raison d’état et pensée politique à l’époque de Richilieu (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), 403.
PART TWO
ENGLISH MACHIAVELLISM
1. Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, Pars I (Brescia, 1744), 136; quoted in L. Arthur Burd, ed., Il Principe (1891; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Although Pole’s text was not printed until the eighteenth century, the letter is summarized in detail in contemporary diplomatic correspondence; see Letters and Papers (Foreign and Domestic) of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, James Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie, 21 vols. (London: Longmans, 1862–1910), vol. 14 (1), no. 200. The Latin text of the chapters on Machiavelli appears as an appendix in Heinrich Lutz, Ragione di Stato und Christliche Staatsethik in 16. Jahrhundert (Münster: Aschendorrfer Buchdruckerei, 1961), 48–62. In The Counter-Reformation Prince (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), Robert Bireley writes that Pole did not actually read The Prince until a later visit to Florence (15). On Pole’s account of his conversation with Cromwell, see also Peter S. Donaldson, “Machiavelli and Antichrist: Prophetic Typology in Reginald Pole’s De Unitate and Apologia ad Carolum Quintum,” in his Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–35.
2. See also Letters and Papers, vol. 10, nos. 974 and 975 (a summary of Pole’s De unitate ecclesiastica, in which Pole compares Henry to Nero and Domitian). For an English translation of this text, see Pole’s Defense of the Unity of the Church, trans. Joseph G. Dwyer (Maryland: Westminster, 1965).
3. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Stephen R. Cattley (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1838), 6:56, 7:585–97.
4. The difference here is one of emphasis or degree rather than kind. On the lesser influence of humanist doctrines of imitation in England than on the continent, and the correspondingly greater influence of rhetorical argument by topic or commonplace, see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). English anxiety about rhetoric has been treated extensively by, among others, Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), who notes that rhetorical figures are often discussed in terms of social and political relations—the chief rhetorical figure for Puttenham is the “courtly” figure of allegoria or “false semblant”; Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), who discusses the Machiavel in chapter 4; Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), who also ties the anxiety about rhetoric to an anxiety about social mobility; Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies (London: Methuen, 1987), esp. chaps. 6 and 7; Wayne A. Rebhorn, “‘The Emperour of Mens Minds’: The Renaissance Trickster as Homo Rhetoricus,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: MRTS, 1992), 31–66.
5. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, A Facsimile Reproduction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 308. On the distinction between moral art and immoral technique, and the corresponding fear of the abuse of rhetoric, see also Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593) (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954), who cautions on almost every page against the moral and social abuse of rhetorical figures; and Thomas Wilson, who, in Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), discusses rhetoric as a morally neutral technique in the prologue to the reader, the preface, and the discussions of disposition; but he also insists that eloquence is linked to right reason (preface) and that “the wicked can not speake wel” (222). On the equation of rhetorical abuse and political and religious subversion, see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 100–101; Steven Mullaney, “Lying like Truth: Riddle, Representation and Treason in Renaissance England,” ELH 47 (1980): 32–47, on the association of the figure of amphibology or ambiguous speech with treason. This conflict was later taken up by Jonson and Hobbes. See Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 8:593; and Thomas Hobbes, De cive in English Works, ed. Sir Thomas Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: J. Bohn, 1839–45), 2:xiii, as well as Leviathan, chap. 17.
On courtesy books (including those translated from the Italian, such as Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano), see Whigham, Social Tropes, who notes their Machiavellian aspects. Specifically, the “vocabulary of combat” one finds in these treatises “operates in a social region of conflict, rather than in the moral and epistemological realm of truth and falsehood” (145) and can thus be characterized as an “investigation in the rhetorical foundations of value.” On the courtier’s virtù, see 48, 93, 98.
6. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. R. J. Shoeck (Don Mills, Ontario: Dent, 1966), 70. The following passage also illustrates the association of the abuse of eloquence with the Italianate courtier:
Our English Italians [are] . . . common discoursers of all matters, busy searchers of most secret affairs, open flatterers of great men, privy mislikers of good men, fair speakers with smiling countenances, and much courtesy openly to all men; ready backbiters, sore nippers, and spiteful reporters privily of good men. And being brought up in Italy in some free city, as all cities be there; where a man may freely discourse against what he will, against whom he lust, against any prince, against any government, yea, against God himself and his whole religion; where he [is] . . . always compelled to be of some party, of some faction, he shall never be compelled to be of any religion: and if he meddle not overmuch with Christ’s true religion, he shall have free liberty to embrace all religions, and become if he lust, at once, without any let or punishment, Jewish, Turkish, papish, and devilish. (72)
Whigham, Social Tropes, 176, calls our attention to Gabriel Harvey’s “Speculum Tuscanismi” as another portrayal of the Italianate Englishman, described as a “peerlesse . . . Discourser for Tongue . . . and Lynx, to spie out secretes, and privities of States” (Spenser’s Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924], 626). The lineaments of Ascham’s and Harvey’s rhetorical Machiavel are still apparent much later in John Melton’s A Sixe-folde Politician together with a Sixe-folde Precept of Policy (London, 1609), for example. According to Melton, whereas the good politician follows the rule of decorum and policy, adapting his actions “as the necessitie and circumstance of time, place, and persons do require” (117), the bad politician is one who, like Richard III, engages in “fox-like windings and turnings” (15, 20) and uses rhetoric to deceive. In this, he is like the poet who uses rhetorical indirection to convey political messages (37).
By the second half of the sixteenth century, Machiavelli’s Italian origins had become an even greater liability than before. His pragmatic political counsel was read in terms of the perceived papal (Catholic) threat to English sovereignty and was thus increasingly allied with the defense of idolatry, tyranny, or illegitimate and immoral rule. As Whigham notes, “The queen’s excommunication in 1570 and the later discovery of the role played by the Florentine Ridolfi in the Norfolk conspiracy were contemporaneous with the publication of Ascham’s work” (Social Tropes, 177).
7. On casuistry, see Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert and Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); George L. Mosse, The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957); Johann P. Sommerville, “The ‘New Art of Lying’: Equivocation, Mental Reservation and Casuistry,” in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1988), 159–84, on Barnes, Morton and Mason; and the works cited in note 12 below.
8. A Treatise of Treasons against Q. Elizabeth and the Croune of England . . . (n.p., 1572), “The Preface to the Reader.” The author of this treatise in defense of Mary, Queen of Scots, claims not to impugn Elizabeth’s authority while associating recent “mutations” and “innovations” in government with Machiavellian tendencies.
9. Slights, The Casuistical Tradition, 15, and, quoting Perkins, 15–16.
10. According to Slights, in The Casuistical Tradition, one “fundamental assumption of the Renaissance English casuist is that the circumstances of human affairs are so varied that no action can be defined categorically as sinful or virtuous. The infinite variety of cases is due to differences in circumstances and not to moral relativity. What is just for one man would be just for all men in like circumstances.” According to Jeremy Taylor, these circumstances include an individual’s “own acts and relations, . . . [and] understanding” (15).
11. Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, trans. P. J. and D. P. Waley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 3.
12. Ames is cited by Mosse, Holy Pretence, 73. Mosse discusses God as a Machiavellian politician on pages 42, 103, and 140–41. In “The ‘New Art of Lying,’” Sommerville takes issue with Mosse’s view that casuistical argument involved justifying Machiavellian means by Christian intentions on page 180, note 40. Yet, on page 181 he seems to qualify this point by arguing that there was substance to the charge that Jesuits followed “Machiavellian rules.” Also in this volume, see Margaret Sampson, “Laxity and liberty in seventeenth-century English political thought,” 72–118; as well as John M.Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), chap. 1, on the importance of casuistry during the Engagement Controversy; and Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). In chapter 5 I take up in greater depth the theological and political uses of casuistry and the doctrine of indifference.
13. Thomas Fitzherbert, The First Part of a Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (Douai, 1606), title page; see also chaps. 25–27, 36; and chap. 4 below, note 64.
14. The role of theater and of theatricality in creating or undermining sovereignty is now something of a commonplace in Renaissance studies. See, among others, Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975); Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice; Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London: Methuen, 1986); Timothy Murray, Theatrical Legitimation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); and the works on the Machiavel cited in the introduction to this book, note 6.
15. Plato and Aristotle offer classical precedents for these two views of the Machiavellian dimension of the theater. See chap. 3 above, note 20.
CHAPTER FOUR
READING MACHIAVELLI, 1550–1640
1. The Art of War was translated by Peter Whitehorne and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth in 1560, and The Florentine Historie was translated by Thomas Bedingfield and dedicated to Christopher Hatton in 1595.
2. The quotation, from Harvey’s Letter-Book, is cited in Christopher Morris, “Machiavelli’s Reputation in Tudor England,” Machiavellismo e antimachiavellici nel cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1969), 88–105, from which I have drawn much of the information in this paragraph. Harvey owned Wolfe’s 1584 edition of the Discourses and the Art of War, and may have owned an earlier Italian edition of Machiavelli’s work. (His annotated copy of Machiavelli’s Art of War is now in the Rare Books collection of Princeton University’s Firestone Library.) We know that he read Machiavelli along with Livy in the early 1580s, with Thomas Preston at Trinity Hall; his marginal comments in the text of Livy occasionally refer to Machiavelli’s Discourses. Harvey also referred to the Discourses in his commonplace book, and made extensive marginalia in the 1573 edition of Peter Whitehorne’s translation of the Art of War. On Harvey, see also note 33 below.
3. On Wolfe, see Napoleone Orsini, “Le traduzioni elisabettiane inedite di Machiavelli,” in Studii sul Rinascimento italiano in Inghilterra (Florence: Sansoni, 1937), 4, who writes that censorship explains the false publication information. Raab, 52, writes that the editions of The Prince, Discourses, and Art of War “were illicit being unlicensed; for [the Florentine History and L’Asino d’oro] Wolfe obtained licenses in the normal way. The ban on Machiavelli in England in the sixteenth century seems to have taken the form of a refusal to license the printing of Il principe and I Discorsi. I have been unable to find any evidence of a positive prohibition on reading him to parallel his inclusion in the Pauline Index, confirmed at the Council of Trent.” Christopher Morris, “Machiavelli’s Reputation in Tudor England,” 89, also argues that the false publication information was devised in order to evade the censors. But in Bibliografia Machiavelliana (Verona: Edizioni Valdonega, 1979), Sergio Bertelli argues that Wolfe produced these editions for Italian rather than English consumption (lxxviii). On the Wolfe editions, see also Adolph Gerber, “All of the Five Fictitious Italian Editions of Writings of Machiavelli and Three of Those of Pietro Aretino Printed by John Wolfe of London (1584–1588),” Modern Language Notes 22 (1907), 2–6, 129–35. A chapter on Wolfe also appears in Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 86–110.
On manuscript translations, see, in addition to the study by Orsini cited above, Napoleone Orsini, “Elizabethan Manuscript Translations of Machiavelli’s Prince,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1 (1937–38): 166–69; Hardin Craig, ed., Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’: An Elizabethan Translation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Emile Gasquet, Le Courant machiavélien dans la pensée et la littérature anglaises du XVIe siècle (Paris: Didier, 1974), Appendix C. There seem to have been at least five manuscript English translations of The Prince, based on three separate translations, and four of the Discourses, based on three separate translations.
4. The Telius translation and editions are discussed by Adolph Gerber in Niccolò Machiavelli, Die Handschriften, Ausgaben und Ubersetzungen seiner Werke im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1912–13; reprint, Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), part 3, 60–75. See also the brief discussion by Hardin Craig in the introduction to Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, xv–xvi.
5. Gerber, Niccolò Machiavelli, part 3, 67 n. 1. Gerber judges from Stupanus’s dedication to the Counter-Reformation Bishop Blarer that Stupanus was not aware of the content of the Huguenot works (see 68 n. 2). On Perna’s defense of Machiavelli, see Gerber, part 3, 68–69, n. 2: “What if kings go mad, and rule republics badly and tyrannically, did they learn anything from Machiavelli, [was Machiavelli] the cause and teacher of this crime? as if the doctor were the cause of death.” Yet, Perna goes on to describe the texts bound with The Prince as antidotes for those who do feel that Machiavelli is poisonous: “Those who judge him poisonous have an antidote for curing poison.” Agostino Nifo first put forward the “antidote” way of dealing with Machiavelli in the preface to his 1523 De regnandi peritia (the first four books of which translate much of The Prince). As these brief remarks indicate, the Telius editions deserve a separate study of their own.
6. See Pierre Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh, Ecrivain (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), 229.
7. “The Epistle Dedicatorie” (1577) also appeared in the English Renaissance translation: A Discourse upon the Meanes of Wel Governing and Maintaining in Good Peace, A Kingdome, or other Principalitie, trans. Simon Patericke (London, 1602). In “Machiavelli, Satan, and the Gospel,” Yearbook of Italian Studies (1971): 156–77, Antonio D’Andrea suggests that the letter was written by a French Huguenot, probably Lambert Daneau, who had met Hastings and Bacon in Geneva. Edward Bacon was the half brother of Francis Bacon; Francis Hastings was also of a prominent Elizabethan family. D’Andrea documents the Protestant beliefs of both and their relations with Huguenots in Geneva.
8. Innocent Gentillet, Discours contre Machiavel, ed. A. D’Andrea and P. D. Stewart (Florence: Casalini Libri), preface to part 1. I quote from the Renaissance English translation. Gentillet comments on Machiavelli’s method of arguing from maxims: “Yet although the Maximes & general rules of the Politike Art, may something serve to know well to guide and governe a publicke estate (whether it bee principalitie or free cittie:) yet can they not bee so certaine as the Maximes of the Mathematicians, but are rules rather very dangerous, yea, pernitious, if men cannot make them serve and apply them unto affaires, as they happen to come, and not to apply the affaires unto these Maximes and rules. For the circumstances, dependences, consequences, and the antecedents of every affaire and particular businesse, are all for the most part divers and contrarie: insomuch, that although two affaires be like, yet must not men therefore conduct and determine them by one same rule or Maxime, because of the diversitie and difference of accidents and circumstances: For experience teacheth us, that in one same act, that which is good in one time, is not in another, but rather hurtfull: and that which is convenient for some nations, is not good for others; and so of other circumstances” (Ai-Aij). In Gentillet’s account, Machiavelli is guilty of insufficient attention to historical and political circumstances, and thus of one-sided maxims: “Nicholas Machiavell . . . understood nothing or little in this Politicke science whereof we speake: and . . . he hath taken Maximes and rules altogether wicked, and hath builded upon them, not a Politicke, but a Tyrannical science” (Aij). I discuss Gentillet’s reading of Machiavelli in “Reading Machiavelli: Innocent Gentillet’s Discourse on Method,” Political Theory (Fall, 1994).
9. N. W. Bawcutt makes this point in his excellent “Machiavelli and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 3 (1970), 14. Bawcutt argues, as I do, that the learned and popular reception of Machiavelli in England often intersected. He also makes the point that Renaissance readers read Machiavelli in ways that were different from, but not necessarily inferior to, our own. This article came to my attention after I had come to similar conclusions.
10. Cited in Nadja Kempner, Raleghs staatstheoretische Schriften (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1928), 30. Kempner also quotes from a 1579 letter of Gabriel Harvey: “His [Aristotle’s] oeconomicks and politicks on oath by rote. You can not stept into a schollars studye but (ten to on) you shall litely finde open ether ‘Bodin de Republica’ or ‘Le Royes Exposition upon Aristotle’s Politiques’ or sum other like Frenche or Italian ‘Politique Discoursed’” (30 n. 4). On Englishmen’s knowledge of Le Roy, see also J.H.M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 24, 167–68.
As Bawcutt notes, John Case also argued, in his Sphaera civitatis (1588), that Machiavelli borrowed from Aristotle’s discussion of tyranny in book 5 of the Politics. Similar arguments were made by Italian critics of Machiavelli; see Procacci, 45–75.
11. Lipsius’s Politics were printed in Latin in 1590 and translated into English as Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine by William Jones in 1594. I discuss one important passage on Machiavelli in chapter 3 above, 67–68. On the knowledge of Botero’s works in England, see George L. Mosse, The Holy Pretence: A Study of Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 116–17; and note 36 below. Mosse shows that Botero was translated by the Protestant Sir Richard Etherington in the late sixteenth century; the manuscript was dedicated to Sir Henry Hobart, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas (35; see also Raab, 275). Mosse traces the influence of Botero on English Protestant and Catholic casuists, including the Jesuits Robert Parsons and Thomas Fitzherbert (39–40). He also notes that “Botero’s thesis did not go unchallenged in England”: in A Sermon Against Self-Policy (London, 1624), the Protestant Isaac Bargrave condemned Botero for his casuistical defense of Machiavellian reason of state and self-interest. One passage, in particular, gives an indication of how Bargrave read Botero:
But if we would have passed the Alpes for our Divinity, wee might have learned, not from hellish Machiavel alone, for private interest to doe things against faith, charity, and Religion, but even those our very accusers, Possevine and Ribadeynira in their Antimachiavels, would have taught us, that it is a poynt of conscience to equivocate in a poynt of State, and that as against the sting of Vipers we may use Triacle; which is made of Vipers flesh: so ’tis Religion, against dissemblers to use dissimulation. And thus Boterus, that common brander of our English and Scottish Nations, and for that happely so much esteemed among the Romanists, he hath it among his Capi di Prudenza for a resolute Principle, that 1. Interesse è quello che vince Ogni partito, that all friendship, leagues, affinitie, all bands of communion what soever, are to be measured by this Sibi, by the line of our owne Interest and commodity. And what is this, but an absolute forsaking of GOD, to sacrifice in the house of Mammon? (A Sermon, 30–31)
12. A Machiavellian Treatise by Stephen Gardiner, ed. and trans. Peter Samuel Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). This edition contains both the original Italian text and a modern English translation; page numbers refer first to the Italian text, and then to the English translation. On Gardiner, see Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State, 36–85. Scholars are currently divided concerning Gardiner’s authorship of the treatise. In his edition of the work, Peter Donaldson argues for Gardiner. In his review of the work in The Historical Journal 19 (1976): 1019–23, Dermot Fenlon argues that Gardiner’s authorship has not been definitively established but makes the pertinent point that, regardless of the author, the treatise is still an important example of English Machiavellism.
13. Donaldson, Introduction to A Machiavellian Treatise, 30. In the quotation concerning alterations the Italian word is accaduti; in the next sentence Stephano refers to the changes (mutationi) in the governance of England.
14. In his introduction to A Machiavellian Treatise Donaldson calls attention to the fact that Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, accuses Gardiner of plotting the assassination of Elizabeth (33). As I noted in the introduction to part 2, in this work Gardiner appears as the archetypal Machiavel.
15. Donaldson, in the introduction to A Machiavellian Treatise, 18–19, notes that Gardiner openly discusses the conflict between religious and political considerations but does not develop the implications of this observation.
16. There are other echoes of Machiavelli’s description of Agathocles. Hengest is described as one of those who “seek by cunning and passage of time to bring to pass that which cannot be done by open force at the first rush”; who “did not omit any kind of cruelty or tyranny that was ever used by Nero or Domitian” (37–38, 116–17).
17. In his introduction to A Machiavellian Treatise Donaldson observes that Gardiner borrows from both The Prince and the Discourses and “where they differ . . . he attempts synthesis” (20).
18. Note also Stephano’s historicist argument, his claim that Alphonso’s arguments are quite out of date. As I noted earlier, Meinecke argues that Machiavellism functions as a nascent historicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England and on the continent.
19. In Machiavelli and Mystery of State, Donaldson tentatively makes a similar argument: “That Nifo, Rosello, and Gardiner all relate Machiavelli’s discussion of whether it is better to be feared or loved to the polarity of the divine attributes [fear and love, mercy and justice] shows . . . that some interpreters of Machiavelli in the sixteenth century could not divorce their reading of Machiavelli from their commitment to this central principle of sacred kingship. They do not take God to be a tyrant, but in their attempt to justify the harsher aspects of Machiavelli’s theories by analogy to the divine nature, they press the principle of analogy to, and perhaps beyond, its limits” (82).
20. Such violence is normalized when, at the end of the dialogue, Stephano links William the Conqueror and Philip II by means of lineal succession:
Hora non mi resta altro da dire di questa materia havendo monstrato quale era il modo di Guilhelmo nel soggiogare il realme d’Ingliterra, et lasciarlo in fede a li suoi successori, fin all’advenimento del potente et clementissimo Philippo figliolo del Carlo quinto imperatore. Questo io non chiamo mutatione, ne alteratione del regno ma successione legitima, confirmata per tutti gli ordini, alla restitutione della religione, honore del regno, et utile delli popoli. (97)
Now nothing remains for me to say on this subject, having shown how William subjugated the realm of England and left it in trust to his successors until the coming of the powerful and most merciful Philip, son of the Emperor Charles V. This I do not call change or alteration in the kingdom, but legitimate succession, confirmed by all orders, for the restoration of religion, the honor of the kingdom and benefit of the people. (149–50)
In the fuzzy antecedent of “This” (“This I do not call change or alteration”), Stephano conflates the alteration of the Norman conquest with the legitimate succession, by marriage, of Philip II. The argument works as much to question the notion of legitimacy, as it does to erase the sense that all power is de facto power.
21. This secular reading of Moses suggests that Gardiner understood the irony of Machiavelli’s reverent treatment of Moses as divinely inspired in chapter 6 of The Prince. As Donaldson notes in his introduction to A Machiavellian Treatise, anti-Machiavellians regularly criticized Machiavelli for his treatment of Moses as a secular prince (18).
22. In MM, Pocock makes a similar observation in commenting on Fulke Greville’s Treatise of Monarchy: “The way is now open to say that because the king shares the imperfection of intellect with his subjects, he should take counsel of their laws and customs and of themselves in occasional and regular assemblies; but that because that authority is, under God, his alone, he can never be obliged to take counsel of law or parliament and does so only because prudence enjoins it” (353). In commenting on Greville, Pocock also provides a gloss on Gardiner’s account of legitimate tyranny: “In a fallen world, even divinely commanded authority has the character of praxis rather than of pure norm. What makes the king’s power absolute is the fact of moral imperfection, and the conclusion seems inescapable that it may share in moral imperfection itself. Through the king, God commands it so; but even the king may not know why. The distance between the king as God’s deputy executing his judgments and the conqueror as God’s scourge executing his punishments is great but not unbridgeable” (MM, 353).
23. Thus Stephano distinguishes Philip from other “new princes,” not only because his succession was “legitimate” (by marriage) but also because the goal of his reign was “restoration of religion” (149).
24. On the knowledge of Machiavelli’s work by Essex and his circle, see Blair Worden, “Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution,” in History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 188–90. The phrase “commonwealth of expansion” appears on page 197. Also relevant to an understanding of the political beliefs of the Essex circle, and of Tacitism in Tudor-Stuart political thought, are J.H.M. Salmon, “Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 199–225; Alan T. Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism and the ‘Utility’ of Tacitus,” Huntington Library Quarterly 46 (1983): 127–55; Mary F. Tenney, “Tacitus in the Politics of Early Stuart England,” Classical Journal 37 (1941): 151–63; and Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 105–19.
25. See Irving Ribner, “Machiavelli and Sidney: The Arcadia of 1590,” Studies in Philology 47 (1950): 152–72. Ribner does not make the case for the direct influence of Machiavelli on Sidney, claiming instead that “the ideas of Machiavelli were a part of the Elizabethan intellectual milieu out of which the philosophy of Sir Philip Sidney inevitably proceeded” (155). See also Ribner, “Machiavelli and Sidney’s Discourse to the Queenes Majesty,” Italica 26 (1949): 177–87.
26. Lipsius recommended Tacitus’s Annals as “a seminary of morall, and a magazine of pollitique discourses, for the provision and ornament of those, that possesse some place in the managing of the world,” and Causabuon attacked readers of Tacitus who did not realize that “ill Examples hurt us” (Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” 128–29).
27. On sixteenth-century debates about rhetorical and dialectical method, see Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), esp. 146–281; Walter J. Ong, S.J., Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958); Neal W.Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); Cesare Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell’umanesimo: ‘Invenzione’ e ‘metodo’ nella cultura del XV e XVI secolo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968); Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), esp. 122–61. I have also discussed the increasing interest in methodizing the teaching of rhetoric in “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), esp. 381–88.
Grafton and Jardine note that “‘Method’ was the catchword of promoters of humanist education from the 1510s onward. This practical emphasis on procedure signals a shift in intellectual focus on the part of pedagogic reformers, from the ideal end-product of a classical education (the perfect orator, perfectly equipped for political life), to the classroom aids (textbooks, manuals and teaching drills) which would comparmentalise the bonae litterae and reduce them to system. It marks a genuinely transitional stage in the institutionalising of Renaissance humanism. It is part of the gradual shift of humanism as the practice of an exemplary individual, to humanism as an institutionalised curriculum subject—a distinctive discipline in the arts” (From Humanism to the Humanities, 124).
28. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 136. On Agricola’s topical logic, see also Ong, Ramus, 98–130; Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 12–18; Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 29–35.
29. Neal Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method, 108. Agricola, Erasmus, and Melancthon were associated with a Christian lay piety that was particularly attractive in England after Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic church. When “Henry VIII’s quarrel with the canon lawyers in the 1530s made a replacement curriculum an urgent necessity, an Erasmian liberal arts program was seized upon by the Tudor Establishment (with the support of Thomas Cromwell) as a politically appropriate substitute for scholasticism in the statutes of Oxford and Cambridge” (Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 141). See also James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) on the influence of Erasmian humanism in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. On Henry’s break with the Catholic Church, see chapter 5 below.
30. On topics and commonplaces in English Renaissance rhetoric and culture more generally, see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
31. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, chap. 7; Kahn, “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory.”
32. In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon writes: “Another error of diverse nature from all the former, is the over-early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into arts and methods; from which time, commonly, sciences receive small or no augmentation. But as young men, when they knit and shape perfectly, do seldom grow to a further stature; so knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations is in growth; but when it once is comprehended in exact methods, it may perchance be further polished and illustrated, and accommodated for use and practice; but it increaseth no more in bulk and substance” (quoted in Gilbert, Concepts of Method, 114). As I show below, Bacon associates aphoristic knowledge with Machiavelli.
33. Stubbes is quoted by Raab, 58; Harvey by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 61. As Jardine and Grafton note, Harvey was particularly interested in “aphoristic history, as crucially policy-forming for the politician; and this is consistent with his commitment to Bodin, Daneau, Hotman and others, associated with contemporary moves to reform the legal systems and political structures of modern states using ancient models” (60). On Harvey’s marginalia, see T. H. Jameson, “The ‘Machiavellianism’ of Gabriel Harvey,” PMLA 56 (1941): 645–56; Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), who mentions Harvey’s reading of Machiavelli along with Livy (150). Grafton and Jardine discuss Harvey’s reading of Machiavelli along with Livy on pages 42–44, and date this activity to 1584. Jameson also discusses the references to Machiavelli in Harvey’s Musarum lachrymae and Gratulationes Valdinenses.
34. Thus in his marginalia to The Art of War, Gabriel Harvey regularly notes the relevance of Machiavelli’s maxims and examples to contemporary political and military affairs. See Jardine and Grafton, “‘Studied for Action,’” 69.
35. I will call the author of both works “Ralegh” for the sake of convenience. See Raab, 71, who assumes Ralegh’s authorship of Maxims of State but not of The Cabinet-Council; Procacci, 214–20, who records the doubts about Ralegh’s authorship of The Cabinet-Council but proceeds to analyze it as an important document in the history of English Machiavellism; Mario Praz, “Un Machiavellico Inglese: Sir W. Ralegh,” in Machiavelli in Inghilterra ed altri saggi, 2d ed. (Rome: Tuminelli, 1941), 158, who argues that Maxims of State is later than Cabinet-Council and a palinode for Ralegh’s activities in Ireland, as well as a general critique of Machiavellism; Antonio D’Andrea, “Aspiring Minds: A Machiavellian Motif from Marlowe to Milton,” Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honor of Perez Zagorin (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1992), who defends Ralegh’s authorship of Maxims of State (217); Ernest Albert Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 161–68, who argues for Ralegh’s authorship of both works; and Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh, 64–70, who rejects Ralegh’s authorship of both works. In “A Note on the Ralegh Canon,” Times Literary Supplement 15 (April 1956): 228, Strathmann revises his earlier opinion and argues that the author of The Cabinet-Council may be Thomas Bedingfield, translator of the Florentine Histories.
36. Ralegh used another commonplace book in composing both works, Sansovino’s Concetti politici, translated into English in 1590 as The Quintessence of Wit. Sansovino borrowed many of his maxims from Machiavelli and Guicciardini. See Nadja Kempner, Raleghs staatstheoretische Schriften; and Vincent Luciani, “Ralegh’s Cabinet-Council and Guicciardini’s Aphorisms,” Studies in Philology 46 (1949): 20–30. In Philosophy and Government, Richard Tuck discusses Ralegh’s borrowings from Botero (116–17). See also Strathmann, Ralegh, who remarks that Ralegh translated extracts of Botero’s Delle cause della grandezza e magnificenza delle città (1589) as Causes of the Magnificency and Opulency of Cities (12); and Kemper, Ralegh, who notes that Ralegh cited the Latin translation of Botero’s Ragion di stato in History of the World (41 n. 6). References to Maxims of State and The Cabinet-Council are to The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt., 8 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1829), vol. 8.
37. See Napoleone Orsini, “‘Policy’ or the Language of Elizabethan Machiavellianism,” Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 9 (1946): 122–34. Kempner believes that Maxims of State is the expanded edition of The Cabinet-Council and suggests that the title was borrowed from French usage; she notes that Botero’s Ragion di stato was translated into French as “Maximes d’estat, militaires et politiques” (2d ed., 1602) (21 n. 1). Perhaps more relevant is Innocent Gentillet’s extended discussion of Machiavelli’s method of arguing by “maxims” in his Discours contre Machiavel (1576). See note 8 above.
38. Bawcutt, “Machiavelli and Marlowe,” also makes this point. I agree as well with Pierre Lefranc’s observation in Sir Walter Ralegh, Ecrivain, 241: “Ralegh clearly perceived that the essential issue for Machiavelli is less a matter of doctrine than method, that this method is the same in the two works, and that it leads to the discovery of the same components and the same forces in a monarchy and a republic.”
39. Maxims of State was published in 1642 and then in the Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1657).
40. On page 8, Ralegh writes, “Mysteries, or sophisms of state, are certain secret practices, either for the avoiding of danger, or averting such effects as tend not to the preservation of the present state, as it is set or founded.” The term sophism or sophismata appears in Aristotle’s Politics 1297a 35 (book 4, chap. 13), among other places, where it is often translated as “devices.”
41. This pragmatic constraint on tyrannical power reemerges in the conclusion to the work, where the author surveys the causes of change in government. Here he warns that sedition is such a cause but may itself be caused by “covetousness or oppression by the magistrate or higher power” (32).
42. Procacci, 218–19, notes Ralegh’s application of chapter 3 of The Prince to England’s conquest of Ireland and draws the obvious comparison to Spenser’s A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland.
43. This is true for the subject as well as the prince: like Bacon, the author sees the special relevance of Machiavelli’s advice to courtiers, and moves easily from discussing the necessity of prudent counselors to the circumspection needed by ministers of state in dealing with their rulers.
44. Procacci argues that Ralegh sees in Machiavelli the description of new absolute forms of government in the West, in contrast, for example, to the Turks; see 213, 219–20. I think Ralegh’s work demonstrates the corollary as well: that politics is rhetorical, in the sense of being dependent on interests and persuasion, as well as on force and fraud, rather than based on natural or divine law.
45. Bacon figures prominently in most histories of Machiavellism for his “unequivocally secular approach to political affairs”: according to Raab, Bacon was not an atheist by modern standards, but like Machiavelli he “realized the patent unreality of a system of theory which attempted to relate political behaviour to a Will of God which was never expressed clearly” (Raab, 76). This is true as far as it goes; but it neglects Bacon’s concern with Machiavelli’s method.
Paolo Rossi also makes this argument about Bacon’s extending his rhetorical reading of politics to the natural world in Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 192–214. Machiavelli’s influence on Bacon is discussed by Napoleone Orsini, Bacone e Machiavelli (Genoa: Emiliano degli Orfini, 1936); Vincent Luciani, “Bacon and Machiavelli,” Italica 24 (1947): 26–40; Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon, 163–68; Emile Gasquet, Le Courant machiavélien dans la pensée et la littérature anglaises du XVIe siècle, 391–412.
46. The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: J. M. Dent, 1973), 122.
47. Helpful discussions of Bacon’s debt to and criticism of Ramus’s views of rhetoric and logic can be found in Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700, 364–75; Rossi, Francis Bacon, 195–201; Jardine, Francis Bacon, 66–75, 169–78, 216–26.
48. Jardine, Francis Bacon, 75. In From Humanism to the Humanities, Grafton and Jardine argue that Ramism “opened the prospect that the purpose of education was to purvey information and skills” (170), and that Ramism involved the separation of the art or technique of rhetoric from the early humanists’ ideal of the vir bonus dicendi peritus (good man skilled in speaking [189–93]). This description of Ramism has obvious affiliations with Machiavellism. I am arguing, however, that Bacon does not need to be a Ramist to be a Machiavellian. For a different account of Ramism, which insists on the ethical dimension of Ramist logic, see Cesare Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica, esp. 392–95, where Vasoli describes how, for Ramus, the arts are not only instruments but ways to divine knowledge. See also Perry Miller in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1939), 300–62. Miller argues that Ramus was a decisive influence on puritan attitudes toward rhetoric: his subordination of rhetorical invention to logic provided the ethical constraint on the rhetorical appeal to the passions that the puritans feared.
49. For a corrective against the anachronistic understanding of “induction” in Bacon, see Margaret L.Wiley, “Francis Bacon: Induction and/or Rhetoric,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 4 (1971): 65–79.
50. In “Rhetoric and Action in Francis Bacon,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 14 (1981): 212–33, Marc Cogan makes a different but related argument about the political dimension of Bacon’s views of rhetoric, arguing that, for Bacon, rhetoric “deals with the composition and arrangement of statements where the ultimate purpose is action” (213).
51. I have discussed Erasmus’s method in “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory.” For Ramus, examples have the status of illustration; see his Logike, book 2, chap. 16, pp. 56–58.
52. See Bacon’s dedication of The Advancement of Learning to James I, where Bacon equates imitation with servility and so describes James I as inimitable: “For, if we note it well, speech that is uttered with labour and difficulty, or speech that savoureth of the affectation of art and precepts, or speech that is framed after the imitation of some pattern of eloquence, though never so excellent; all this hath somewhat servile, and holding of the subject. But your Majesty’s manner of speech is indeed prince-like, flowing as from a fountain, and yet streaming and branching itself into nature’s order, full of facility and felicity, imitating none and inimitable by any” (2).
53. References to the translation of De Augmentis (Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning) are to The Works of Francis Bacon, 15 vols., ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longmans, 1870), here 5:58, 66.
54. For an extended reading of this essay, see Stanley E. Fish’s chapter on Bacon in Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 101–108.
55. Anne Barton, “Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus,’” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 115–29. In “Coriolanus” in Context (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1971), Clifford Chalmers Huffman discusses the Italian sources for Coriolanus, including Machiavelli’s Discourses. In his analysis of the play, however, he does not refer to Machiavelli, and does not make any special claims for Machiavelli’s influence on Shakespeare’s representation of political strife in the play. More recently, Annabel Patterson has argued that Shakespeare drew on Machiavelli for a sympathetic representation of the Roman people, and by analogy, the popular 1607 Midlands uprising. See her “‘Speak, speak!’ The Popular Voice and the Jacobean State,” in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (London: Blackwell, 1989), 120–53.
56. See Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), preface, where Wilson distinguishes between physical coercion and rhetorical persuasion:
When Pirrhus King of the Epirotes made battaile against the Romaines, and could neither by force of armes, not yet by policie winne certaine strong Holdes: He used commonly to send one Cineas (a noble Orator, and sometimes Scholer to Demosthenes) to persuade with the Captaines and people that were in them, that they should yeeld up the saide Hold or Townes without fight or resistaunce. And so it came to passe, that through the pithie eloquence of this noble Orator, divers strong Castelles and Fortresses were peaceably given up into the handes of Pirrhus, which he should have found very hard and tedious to winne by the sworde. (Aij)
This anecdote, which depicts eloquence as a peaceful substitute for “force” and “policie,” is then followed by a story of the origin of human society in rhetorical coercion.
57. Also relevant is Thomas Heywood’s reference to common theatergoers as “the throng who come rather to see than to heare,” and similar remarks by Ben Jonson, cited by Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 4. I owe this reference to Oliver Arnold.
58. Kenneth Burke, “Coriolanus and the Delights of Faction,” in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 89–90.
59. For a compatible analysis of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in terms of the rhetorical dimension of political power, see Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 205–36.
60. In his Apologia, Cardinale Pole reports the view that Machiavelli wrote The Prince only to mislead the Medici and bring about their downfall, but he rejects this defense of Machiavelli as unconvincing.
61. Levett’s preface is reprinted in Napoleone Orsini, Studii sul Rinascimento italiano in Inghilterra (Florence: Sansoni, 1937), 46–47. The date of the preface is 1599. This image may be borrowed from the preface to the 1532 Giunta edition of The Prince. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. L. Arthur Burd (1891; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 36, where the Giunta passage is quoted. See also Julia Lupton, “Truant Dispositions: Hamlet and Machiavelli,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987): 59–82.
62. Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavels Discourses upon the first decade of T. Livius, trans. E. D. (London, 1636), and Nicholas Machiavel’s Prince, trans. E. D. (London, 1640). Dacres’s comments appear in the margins of his translation of the Discourses and at the end of some chapters of The Prince.
63. A similar pragmatic and theological reading of chapter 7, among others, of The Prince appears in the Jesuit Thomas Fitzherbert’s The First Part of a Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (Douai, 1606). Like Dacres, he claims to refute Machiavelli on his own terms, “by reason of state, without the consideration of Gods justice” (381), although he also moralizes his pragmatic critique of examples such as Borgia by glossing their failures as divine punishment. Of Borgia he writes, “Whether we respect true wisdome, or the common craft and subtletie of worldlie men (which is now commonly called machiavellian policie) he erred in the principles of both” (27). Machiavellian reason of state will fail, whereas “reason of religion,” or true Christian “policy” will most often succeed (preface).
64. De legationibus libri tres, trans. Gordon L. Laing, 2 vols. (New York, 1924), 2:156; cited, in part, by Peter S. Donaldson, in “John Wolfe, Machiavelli, and the republican arcana,” in Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 89. The first edition of this text was printed in London, 1585. After commenting on Machiavelli’s examples of failed virtù in his Treatise concerning Policy and Religion, Thomas Fitzherbert also tells us that Machiavelli’s friends explained his ineptness as a deliberate republican strategy. According to his friends, The Prince is a masterpiece of rhetorical indirection, designed to lure the Medici to imitate unworkable examples of political behavior and thus to cause the downfall of the Medici and the reestablishment of the Florentine republic:
some Florentines of no meane judgement his owne cuntrymen, and frends, who in their ordinary discourses concerning his pollicies, doe not stick to confesse that he him selfe knew them to be contrary to true reason of state, and pernicious to princes, & that neverthelesse desiring to overthrow those of the house of Medices which opprest the commmonwealth of Florence in his tyme, he published his pestilent doctrine, hoping that they wold embrace it & ruine theymselves by the practise thereof, whereby the state of Florence might returne to the ould Democracy or popular government wherin it had continued many yere before.
Thus say his frends; but how they befrend him in their excusing him of folly, &excusing him of mallicious impietye, I leave it to the judgment of the discret reader. (412)
While Fitzherbert finds this ironic interpretation of The Prince unconvincing, the fact that he felt the need to refute it suggests that it still had some currency in the early seventeenth century. For a modern version of the argument that Fitzherbert refutes, see Stephen M. Fallon, “Hunting the Fox: Equivocation and Authorial Duplicity in The Prince,” PMLA 107 (1992): 1181–95. In The Scholemaster (1570), ed. R. J. Shoeck (Ontario: Dent, 1966), Roger Ascham argues that the carping rhetoric of the Machiavel is the product of a free city, that is, an Italian republic. He thus suggests, perhaps in spite of himself, that dissembling is less the Machiavel’s natural mode of discourse than it is the form republicanism takes at court (72). In his Discourses upon Cornelius Tacitus, trans. Richard Baker (London, 1642), Virgilio Malvezzi refers to “expert Politicians [living in commonwealths] laying aside Tacitus . . . to write Discourses upon Livy. . . . But now that we are under Princes [we should] learne things of this nature; as the conditions of Princes, the cunning of courtiers, and such like. All this Tacitus expresseth.” Malvezzi suggests that Tacitus provides Machiavellian (republican) insights for those living under princes.
65. “Lo stampatore al benigno lettore,” fol. 2 in I Discorsi di Nicolo Machiavelli, sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio . . . in Palermo appresso gli heredi d’Antoniello degli Antonielli, bound with Il Prencipe di Nicolo Machiavelli . . . con alcune operette; translation modified. The passage is translated in Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State, 93, who misinterprets the plural as the singular and so thinks the preface is only addressed to the Discourses rather than to both The Prince and the Discourses. Wolfe speaks throughout the preface of “gli scritti,” “queste opere.” On Wolfe, see in addition to the chapter in Donaldson, H. R. Hoppe, “John Wolfe, Printer and Publisher, 1579–1601,” The Library, 4th series, 14 (1933): 242–87; S. L. Goldberg, “A Note on John Wolfe, Elizabethan Printer,” Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand 7 (1955): 55–61.
66. In Ignatius his Conclave, Donne gives us two versions of Machiavelli’s two-handedness: “Machiavelli” acts the Machiavel when he praises equivocation, but then goes on to argue that his texts only superficially defend tyranny, while indirectly serving as a weapon against it: “I did not only teach those wayes, by which, through perfidiousnesse, and dissembling of Religion, a man might possesse, and usurpe upon the liberty of free Commonwealths; but also did arme and furnish the people with my instructions, how when they were under this oppression, they might safeliest conspire, and remove a tyrant, or revenge themselves of their Prince, and redeem their former losses; so that from both sides, both from Prince and People, I brought an aboundant harvest, and a noble encrease to this kingdome” (cited in Praz, “Machiavelli and the Elizabethans,” 89). In a comment that echoes Renaissance interpretations of Tacitus, Donne’s Machiavelli provides political weapons in utramque partem. In his Ricordi, Guicciardini writes of Tacitus, “Cornelius Tacitus teaches those who live under tyrants how to live and act prudently; just as he teaches tyrants ways to secure their tyranny” (Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman, trans. Mario Domandi [New York: Harper and Row, 1965], C18, 45).
67. [Anon.], The Atheisticall Politition (n.p., n.d.). On the authorship and publishing history of this tract, see Raab, 120–23, 264–66. The text is dated November 23, 1642, by Thomason. The anonymous author of the English tract entitled Machiavel’s vindication of himself and his writings against the imputation of Impiety, Atheism, and other high Crimes . . . also calls attention to the complicated rhetoric of The Prince. In this text “Machiavelli” denies that he is recommending tyranny: “If I have been a little too punctual in describing [tyrants] . . . and drawn them to the life in all their lineaments and colours, I hope mankind will know them the better, to avoid them, my treatise being both a satire against them and a true character of them” (cited in Burd, ed., Il Principe, 62, who gives as the date of the letter April 1, 1537). The tract appears in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. 1 (1808). The same letter appears as “Nicholas Machiavel’s Letter in Vindication of Himself and His Writings,” the afterword to the 1674 edition of The Works of the Famous Nicholas Machiavel. Raab (Appendix B) argues that the letter, and perhaps the new translations of Machiavelli’s works in this volume, are by Henry Neville, who also defends Machiavelli in his Plato Redivivus (London, 1679).
68. Bovey may have drawn this passage from Traiano Boccalini’s I Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612), where “Machiavelli” argues in his own defense that his error has not been hypocrisy but excessive candor:
Now I ask you, what justice, what reason is there that they who invented that furious and desperate political process described by me should be held sacrosanct, while I, who have simply described it, am called a scoundrel and an atheist? I certainly can’t see any rationale for adoring the original of a thing as sacred, and denouncing the copy as execrable.
This passage, quoted in Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1977), 263, does not appear in the English translation of Boccalini by J. Florio and others, entitled The new-found politike (London, 1626).
69. The Atheisticall Politition, 1. Bovey’s argument is repeated practically verbatim by Francis Osborne in his Politicall Reflections upon the Government of the Turks, Nicholas Machiavel, etc. (London, 1656). Like Bovey, Osborne represents Machiavelli as a disinterested “historian” of the practices of rulers. Furthermore, although acknowledging that Machiavelli teaches tyranny, he argues that the means he recommends can be used to Christian ends: “Worldly wisdome is recommended to us in the person of the unjust steward. . . . Neither are the Rules [Machiavelli] layes down, waved by the best of men, if wise” (138).
70. Raab, 120–23, discusses Bovey’s use of Machiavelli as a secular yardstick against which to measure the failings of Charles I.
CHAPTER FIVE
MACHIAVELLIAN DEBATES, 1530–1660
1. James I, Basilikon Doron, in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1918), 4. All further citations of James’s work are from this edition. In “Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 163–85, Stanley Fish reminds us that the notion of adiaphora is stoic in origin:
Generally speaking, the doctrine of things indifferent comes into two versions, although they are not always precisely differentiated. The first, and stronger, version originates with the Stoics, who identify virtue with the self and believe that self to be sufficient. Consequently all things external to the self are lacking in intrinsic value or disvalue and acquire value only in relation to an inner disposition or intention. Thus the entire external world for the Stoics is a mass of adiaphora, which, depending on the circumstances “could become either good or evil.” The second and more restricted version of the doctrine is theological and depends on the distinction between that which the Scripture explicitly commands or forbids and that concerning which it is silent. (168–69)
2. Conscience here does not simply signify unmediated introspection but rather “a function of joining introspection with knowledge of universal truths,” including those of obligation to God and one’s sovereign. See Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition in Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert and Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 15–16. On Luther, Melancthon, and their followers in England in relation to the adiaphora controversy, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2:9, 68–69, 103–104; C. L. Manschreck, “The Role of Melancthon in the Adiaphora Controversy,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 47 (1957): 165–82; as well as the works cited in note 11 below.
3. G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 166.
4. See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983), 2:136: “the use of things indifferent . . . is . . . perversely interpreted by those who use it as a cloak for their lusts, and [who think] they may licentiously abuse the good gifts of God. . . . Let them, therefore, suppress immoderate desire, immoderate profusion, vanity and arrogance, that they may use the gifts of God with a pure conscience. When their mind is brought to this state of soberness, they will be able to regulate the legitimate use.” This accusation was not made only by Protestants; Thomas More criticized Luther’s adiaphorism as licentious (Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean, 115–16). This fear of the licentious use of conscience becomes in the seventeenth-century the fear of antinomianism.
5. Letters and Papers (Foreign and Domestic) of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47, ed. J. S. Brewer, James Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie, 21 vols. (London: Longmans, 1862–1910), vol. 14, no. 285. This letter, dated 1540 in Letters and Papers, is redated to 1537 by later scholars. See W.Gordon Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), 186 n. 86 and Raab, 49. See also John Wesley Horrocks, “Machiavelli in Tudor Opinion and Discussion,” unpublished D. Lit. thesis, University of London, 1908.
6. Letters and Papers, vol. 15, no. 721.
7. W. Gordon Zeeveld, “Richard Morison, Official Apologist for Henry VIII,” PMLA 55 (1940): 407.
8. In “Richard Morison,” Zeeveld makes a great deal of these references as evidence of the formative influence of Machiavelli on Henrician policy. I think they are more important as evidence of Morison’s knowledge of Machiavelli, since the citations do not have a prominent role in the argument of the treatises.
9. Thomas’s letter is published in J. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), vol. 2, part 1, 157–61. On Thomas, see Raab, 40–48; and Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 40–44; as well as E. R. Adair, “William Thomas,” in Tudor Studies Presented to . . . Albert Frederick Pollard, ed. R. W. Seton-Watson (London: Longmans, 1924), 133–60. Adair notes that in 1552 Thomas published Il Pellegrino Inglese (The English pilgrim), which is “an undiluted eulogy of Henry VIII and his actions, especially those concerned with the divorce of Catherine of Aragon and the breach with Rome” (138).
10. Raab, 31, also makes this point.
11. In Foundations of Tudor Policy, Zeeveld argues that Starkey was influenced by “Melancthon’s Loci communes theologici, just dedicated to Henry VIII, in which he identified adiaphora, or things indifferent for salvation, with human or positive law under the law of nature. Melancthon’s Christian adiaphorism, presented in that work as the philosophical basis for Protestant church unity, became, through Starkey, the direct ideological forbear of the Anglican polity. Starkey was sufficiently perspicacious to see the political implications of the idea; and it was through him that it became anglicized in the form in which it appeared in the Thirty-nine Articles, in Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and in Laud” (129). On page 152, note 69, Zeeveld provides references to support his claim that “after Starkey, adiaphorism became an integral part of the Anglican polity.”
For further discussion of the importance of the doctrine of things indifferent in the sixteenth century, see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Arthur E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), 52–59, 95–97; Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens: Ohio University Press; Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1977); and Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979), esp. 171–224. In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner argues that Zeeveld places too much emphasis on Starkey as the exclusive conduit of the doctrine of adiaphorism in England: “The doctrine had already been put into currency some time before Starkey wrote, in particular in the writings of Frith and Barnes. There is no doubt, however, that Starkey was able to make a fruitful use of the concept at a crucial moment, as a means of steering a via media between the position of the radical Lutherans and the traditional Catholics” (2:104).
In the reign of Elizabeth, the controversy regarding the doctrine of things indifferent was replayed in the debate between the Anglican John Whitgift and his opponent, the puritan Thomas Cartwright. In 1572 the Presbyterians among the puritans had attacked the Elizabethan Settlement in An Admonition to Parliament. Whitgift defended the Settlement by distinguishing between the Church’s spiritual government over things “necessary to everlasting life,” and Elizabeth’s external government over “things indifferent” which vary according to historical circumstance (see Ferguson, Clio Unbound, 195–207; I draw here especially on pages 198–99).
12. On Starkey and Cromwell’s propaganda campaign, see, in addition to the works cited in note 11, Franklin Le Van Baumer, The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1940); Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:99–105; G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); and his Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Commonweal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). I quote from the microfilm of the British Museum copy of An Exhortation to the people instructynge theym to unitie and obedience, printed by Thomas Berthelet, the King’s printer, in 1536. The treatise is unsigned and this copy has no title page, place of publication, or date.
13. In Clio Unbound, Arthur Ferguson remarks that “the adiaphoristic principle proved, of course, especially useful to those apologists for the via media who liked to think of themselves as part of a universal Catholic Church, yet had, in the interest of their own national church, to stress the historical necessity of diversity within the broader unity of Christendom” (174).
14. Stephen Gardiner, Of True Obedience, in Obedience in Church and State: Three Political Tracts by Stephen Gardiner, ed. Pierre Janelle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 105. This edition includes the Latin text and a sixteenth-century Protestant translation with marginal glosses.
15. In Reform and Reformation, G. R. Elton writes: “The Protestant exiles greatly embarrassed Gardiner by publishing in 1553 an English translation of his De vera obedientia, and the suspects he interrogated often twitted him with his earlier views” (389 n. 11). And in the notes to Obedience in Church and State, Pierre Janelle remarks that the translation often makes Gardiner seem even more Protestant than he was trying to appear. But in the introduction he argues, “Gardiner’s attack on the Papacy has little in common with that of Tyndale and other Protestant controversialists, who consider the Roman See as the main source of doctrinal errors.” Rather, De vera is closer to “contemporary defenders of the authority of the State, whose opposition to ecclesiastical privileges implied no dislike of the old religion” (lxi). This is not surprising since the purpose of the treatise was to defend the authority of the state.
16. Peter Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State, 76–77.
17. Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, ed. J. M. Cowper, in England in the Reign of King Henry the Eighth, Part 1: Starkey’s Life and Letters, ed. Sidney J. Herrtage, Early English Text Society, no. 32 (London: N. Trübner, 1878), 179. The Dialogue was written in 1532–33 in Padua. In Henry VIII (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), J. J. Scarisbrick argues that both in the statutes concerning royal supremacy and in the pamphlets defending it, there was an “ideological ambiguity” concerning “whether the king enjoyed his Supremacy as a direct, personal divine grant, or whether it was held by the king of Parliament” (393). “This complexity was matched by a similar complexity in the nature of secular sovereignty. English kings were kings Dei gratia, by gift from above, as coronation showed, and by descent; but at the same time, the idea of contract, of responsibility, of ‘ascending’ power was deeply embedded in English thinking. English monarchy was limited by the Aristotelian principle that political power was vested in and sprang from the whole political community, and by the constitutional fact that the highest form of law-making was the statute—which required the consent of the whole nation represented in Parliament” (394). As Scarisbrick suggests (397), the conflict between the ascending and descending views of royal supremacy and sovereignty anticipates conflicts in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
18. On these rebellions, often referred to as the Pilgrimage of Grace, and their relation to economic, social, and religious grievances, see J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 339–48.
19. Quoted by Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy, 255. Not every page of the treatise is paginated; I have supplied pagination where missing.
20. See also sig. I: “This arte of subtiltie of princes (otherwise called policie) consisteth chiefly in this, for a man to appeare outwardly that he is not inwardly . . . till convenient tyme maie be had with least daungier, to execute their conceaved mischief.” Ponet goes on to argue for the devilish influence of “the doctour of practices,” Stephen Gardiner, on the Henrician and Marian “pollicie” of force and especially fraud.
21. Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed, Facsimile Text Society (Geneva, 1558; New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), preface and 36.
22. If the sphere of indifference is the object of James’s Machiavellian absolutism, it also allows Machiavellian considerations of another sort: in Basilikon Doron, James treads the fine line between humanist teaching by moral example and Machiavellian “policie” when he recommends that his son use his behavior in things indifferent to manifest his virtue to the public. Such behavior, he implies, is dictated by virtù as much or more than by virtue: it “will serve . . . to augment or empaire your fame and authoritie at the handes of your people” (4); it may even serve to augment the realm by persuading the English to accept the Scottish monarch (51).
23. On the equation (both positive and negative) of reason of state with royal prerogative in seventeenth-century England, see David S. Berkowitz, “Reason of State and the Petition of Right,” in Staatsräson, ed. Roman Schnur (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1975), 165–212. In Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Richard Tuck discusses the widespread use of the language of reason of state in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeeth-century English political debate (104–19, 222–59).
24. See George L. Mosse, The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), 45, 53–60, and passim on dolus bonus. See also chapters 3 and 4 above.
25. William Bradshaw, A Treatise of Things Indifferent (London, 1605), marginal gloss on 25.
26. See Parker and Goodwin in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 3 vols., ed.William Haller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 2:209–10, 236–37.
27. The association of the appearance of indifference with doing “as we please” is reminiscent of Roger Ascham’s definition of Machiavellism as libertinism or as the doctrine of those who “thincke, say and do what soever may best serve for profit and pleasure.” See Roger Ascham, A Report and Discourse . . . of the affaires and state of Germany (c. 1551), quoted in Raab, 33.
28. On Parker, see MM, 368–71; Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 146–51; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 226–35; and W. K. Jordan, Men of Substance: A Study of the Thought of Two English Revolutionaries, Henry Parker and Henry Robinson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).
29. Referring to the law of the commonwealth as “the transcendent archē of all Politiques,” Parker adds, “Neither can the right of conquest be pleaded to acquit Princes of that which is due to the people as the Authors, or ends of all power, for meere force cannot alter the course of nature, or frustrate the tenour of Law” (Haller, 2:169). Parker is alluding to the defense of absolute sovereignty in terms of the de facto political power established by the Norman conquest. I return to the argument from conquest at the end of this chapter.
It is important to note that Parker did not always condemn reason of state as Machiavellian. In his Contra-Replicant (1642), he discusses reason of state as the legitimate use of extra-legal means to preserve the state in times where the ordinary workings of the law are not enforced or will not suffice: “Lawes ayme at Justice, Reason of state aimes at Safety. . . . To deny to Parliament recourse to reason of State in these miserable times of warre and danger [is] to deny them self-defence” (24–25).
30. According to Parker, consent is a source of legitimate political power, which he describes in Machiavellian vocabulary as “a supply of vertue” to the king (Haller, 2:175). In his much later, enormously popular Advice to a Son (1656; London: David Nutt, 1896), Francis Osborne still equates the determination of things indifferent with the arbitrary exercise of power on the part of king and priesthood: “For as the most subtile Wind got into the narrow and delicate Parts of our Body, is able to act the Stone, Gout, and other most acute Diseases, not really present; so doth Superstition represent in this changeable and Concave Glass of a suborned Conscience, things for Sinful, that are indeed but Natural and Indifferent; and other Pious, that are really Vain and Destructive; the prosecution of which leads readily to Atheism, or an over-biassed Holiness, which prosecutes all that carry the impress of contrary Tenets” (118). Osborne sees the determination of things indifferent as necessary for or contrary to salvation as a theatrical performance designed to aggrandize the power of the church. And, when things indifferent are made a matter of “religious ceremony,” then “custom,” “unquestioned Ancient Tradition,” and “idolatry” are not far behind (119).
31. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975), chap. 42, p. 526; and chap. 41, p. 516; cf. chap 42, pp. 525, 551, 557–58 588, 592, and 596.
32. See the treatises by Lord Brooke, Robinson, and Parker, in Haller, Tracts; and the excerpts from Ancient Bounds, in A.S.P.Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London: Dent, 1938), 247–65. Also see Milton’s remarks in Of Civil Power quoted below, as well as Christian Doctrine, book 1, chap. 15; and chap. 27 in Hughes.
33. Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969). I return to Nedham at the end of this chapter.
In a frequently cited passage, Ernst Cassirer once remarked that Hobbes and the puritans were alike in subordinating faith to “an absolute will based on power.” In his study of radical puritan ideology, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), Michael Walzer arrives at the same conclusion, arguing that “For both Hobbes and the Calvinists, the antidote to wickedness and disorder was arbitrary power” (159). And in Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), Joan S. Bennett, although taking issue with Walzer’s unified interpretation of puritanism, makes the same argument about royalists and some puritans in the seventeenth century (7, 24, 222 n. 18). Yet, what is striking about seventeenth-century political and religious debate—whether from the royalist or parliamentary, Anglican, or puritan point of view—is the consistent effort to distinguish legitimate from arbitrary power.
34. James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, in The Political Works of James I, 67.
35. Sibbes is quoted in William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper and Row, 1938), 160.
36. The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, 23 vols., ed. William Orme (London: James Duncan, 1830), 17:11.
37. The Soul’s Conflict with Itself, in The Works of Richard Sibbs, 3 vols. (Aberdeen: J. Chalmers, 1809), 2:155. See also Sibbes’s preface to volume 1.
38. John Downame, Christian Warfare (1609); quoted in Haller, Rise of Puritanism, 130.
39. Free-Grace: or, The Flowings of Christs Blood Freely to Sinners (London, 1645), epistle dedicatory, and 147; cf. 163.
40. “Right Reformation . . .” (1646), in Several Sermons of William Dell (London, 1652), 120, 122.
41. A.S.P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 250.
42. Quoted in Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 201. See Hughes, 853; cf. 847, 852, as well as The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Hughes, 771–72; and Christian Doctrine, book 1, chaps. 15 and 27.
43. William Haller cites Preston in The Rise of Puritanism, 167. Here and earlier, Haller anticipates Michael Walzer’s argument in The Revolution of the Saints that puritan rhetoric was particularly well suited to forging revolutionary consciousness. According to Haller, by their emphasis on “an aristocracy of the spirit, chosen by God and destined to inherit heaven and earth. . . . the [puritan] preachers were in effect organizing a discontented minority into an opposition” (168). See also Haller’s comments on John Downame’s rhetoric of Christian warfare: “The loyalty which Downame sought . . . to instill in spiritual soldiers would presently be accorded to Captain Cromwell as well as to Captain Christ, and King Charles like Satan would discover that he had a fight on his hands” (158).
44. See L. F. Solt, Saints in Arms: Puritanism and Democracy in Cromwell’s Army (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), esp. 73–88; and Gertrude Huehns, Antinomianism in English History, with special reference to the period 1640–1660 (London: Cresset, 1951), esp. 71–88.
45. Quoted in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 185.
46. On Saltmarsh’s attitude toward “policy,” see John Saltmarsh, The Practice of Policie in a Christian Life (1639). According to Solt, this work provides Machiavellian maxims and opposing views. “The true practice of policy, Saltmarsh claimed, was an accommodation of one’s acts to the model set forth in the Holy Scriptures; such a course would make men capable of philosophy without vanity, oratory without rhetoric, and ‘Policy’ without cunning” (86). Saltmarsh was later critical of such “policy.”
47. See Mario Praz, “Machiavelli and the Elizabethans,” Proceedings of the British Academy 13 (1928), 49–97; and Napoleone Orsini, “‘Policy’ or the Language of Elizabethan Machiavellianism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 9 (1946), 122–34.
48. On Peter, see Haller, Liberty and Reformation, 208–209; on Cromwell, see Haller, Liberty and Reformation, 319–58; Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 105–106; Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), esp. 217–50.
49. Writings and Speeches, 1:365; quoted in Solt, Saints in Arms, 77.
50. For a different reading, see Steven Jablonski, “‘Evil Days’: Providence and Politics in the Thought of John Milton and His Age,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1993. Jablonski argues that Milton tries to have it both ways by emphasizing that success is determined by “justice and victory” (chap. 4).
51. In The Trew Law, James I is also sensitive to the dangers of arguing from success, specifically the success of revolutionaries: “And the smiling successe, that unlawfull rebellions have oftentimes had against Princes in aages past (such hath bene the misery, and iniquitie of the time) hath by way of practise stengthened many in their errour: albeit there cannot be a more deceivable argument; then to judge ay the justnesse of the cause by the event thereof” (54); see also 67–68.
52. William Prynne, The Sword of Christian Magistracy Supported . . . (London, 1653), 88. Dell is Prynne’s chief adversary in this work; see, especially, 88–105 for Prynne’s justification of parliament’s use of force in religious matters.
53. The Writings and Speeches, 4:460. Cromwell’s defense of necessity is analogous to contemporary defenses of rhetoric: the abuse of rhetoric should not cast aspersions on its correct use.
54. See Clarendon, Selections from “The History of the Rebellion” and “The Life by Himself”, ed. Gertrude Huehns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 304–306, quoted as the epigraph to the introduction to this book. Yet, elsewhere Clarendon writes that Cromwell “was not a man of blood, and totally declined Machiavel’s method; which prescribes, upon any alteration of government, as a thing absolutely necessary, to cut off the heads of all those, and extirpate their families, who are friends to the old one” (358).
On contemporary discussions of Cromwell as Machiavellian, see Raab, 130–54; Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “Cromwell as Machiavellian Prince in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode,’” in his Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 166–82; Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman, 265–66; Blair Worden, “Andrew Marvell, Oliver Cromwell, and the Horatian Ode,” in Politics of Discourse, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 147–80, esp. 162–68. Worden gives references to Nedham’s remarks on the Machiavellian Cromwell in Mercurius Politicus.
55. On Lilburne’s shifting appreciation of Machiavelli, see Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 18; and George L. Mosse, The Holy Pretence, 29–30. The anonymous The Levellers (Falsly so called) Vindicated (n.d., n.p.), reprinted in A. L. Morton, ed., Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1975), also describes the behavior of the leaders of the army, presumably including Cromwell, in Machiavellian terms: “All their successes, and advancements over the People, gain’d by their perjury, fraud, equivocations, treacheries and deceipts they ascribe to the immediate approving hand of God” (313). Solt calls our attention to the related criticism by “the anonymous author of Anti-Machiavell, or Honesty against Policy” (1647), who “attested to the Machiavellian ‘policy’ of the New Model Army as ‘a mixt body cemented together, with the human mortar of interests’ and activated by ‘an Independent intelligence or spirit’” (84–85).
56. In the following pages I rely on John Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution; a series of articles by Quentin Skinner: “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” The Historical Journal 8 (1965): 151–78; “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” Historical Journal 98 (1966): 286–317; “The Context of Hobbes’ Theory of Political Obligation,” in Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Cranston and R. S. Peters (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1972), 109–42; “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, ed. G. E. Aylmer (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 79–98; J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 306–34; and Blair Worden, “Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,” Past and Present 109 (1985): 55–99.
57. James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, 67.
58. John Wallace distinguishes between newer and older arguments in “The Engagement Controversy 1649–52: An Annotated List of Pamphlets,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 68 (1964): 388–89.
59. There are some exceptions. In The Engagement Vindicated (London, 1650), John Lilburne rejects the argument for government by pure conquest (6). In The Case of the Engagement (1650; published 1668), Robert Sanderson also distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate government, at the same time that he argued for the oath of engagement. But the distinction had no practical consequences as long as the government had the power to protect its subjects. See The Works of Robert Sanderson, D.D., ed. William Jacobson, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1854), 5:20–36.
60. John Dury, Considerations Concerning the Present Engagement (1649; Exeter: The Rota, 1979), 15.
61. Francis Osborne, A Perswasive to a Mutuall Compliance under the Present Government, together with A Plea for a Free State compared with Monarchy (London, 1652), 37. The pagination is continuous between the two works.
62. Scholars differ as to whether the parliamentarians among the Engagers simply adopted royalist arguments from the first half of the century to their own purposes or whether their emphasis on force was a significant departure. Wallace, in Destiny His Choice, argued for the presence of arguments from conquest in early divine right theory; he then went on to claim that the appeal to power was the royalists’ fatal error. Zagorin, in A History of Political Thought, also noted the presence of arguments from conquest, but pointed out that the Engagers differed from early royalist arguments by refusing to join the argument of de facto power to other, more conservative arguments for political legitimacy.
63. I have discussed Hobbes’s rhetoric in Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), chap. 6.
64. As Hobbes does in the Leviathan, the Engagers displace virtù from the individual subject to the absolute sovereign, or Protector, at the same time that they relocate it in the subject as reader.
65. In a work of the same title (n.p., 1650).
66. See, for example, Robert Sanderson, The Case of the Engagement, esp. 25.
67. In the last chapter of The Case of the Commonwealth, Stated, Nedham draws a parallel between England in 1650 and Machiavelli’s account in the Discourses of societies that have become so corrupt that they can only be regenerated through the virtù of an extraordinary individual or—in the case of the commonwealth—of “a party” of “men of valor and virtue”; see 111–14.
68. For Machiavelli’s influence on Nedham, see Zagorin, History of Political Thought, 121–27; Raab, 159–64, who traces Nedham’s various uses of Machiavelli within individual tracts and throughout his career; and Knachel’s introduction to The Case of the Commonwealth, Stated. On Milton’s acquaintance with Nedham, see Blair Worden, “Andrew Marvell, Oliver Cromwell and the Horatian Ode,” and Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 227. Anthony Ascham, Discourse, wherein is examined, what is particularly lawfull during the Confusions and Revolutions of Government (London, 1648), 71, also refers to Machiavelli on private interest.
69. On Bovey, see chapter 4 above.
70. Although Wallace, in Destiny His Choice, does not use the term rhetorical politics, he gives a sympathetic portrait of arguments for the Engagement.
71. See also Pocock, JH; Slights, The Casuistical Tradition; Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
72. The language of necessity is everywhere in Ascham’s treatise. In most cases, it is equivalent to the right of self-preservation (19–20, 30–38, 56, 68). It is also sometimes equated with de facto political power and is a criterion of reason of state (67). Necessity is thus both what leads individuals to obey de facto political power, contrary to their previous oaths; and what justifies that power. According to Ascham, natural laws are not subject to deliberation or interpretation; human laws, reason of state, the realm of politics—and the best response to necessity in any given circumstance—are subject to deliberation (6–7). In this light, necessity may be considered another name for contingency and may be seen as, at least in part, a matter of interpretation. It is precisely this association of necessity with contingency and arbitrary interpretation that reminded contemporaries of Machiavelli.
73. London, 1642; quoted in Wallace, Destiny His Choice, 28 n. 1.
74. See Dury, A Second Parcel, 37–38: “If I should think, that becaus I suppose such an event will follow, that therefore I must not intend my present dutie . . . then I walk not in simplicitie, but according to the wisdom of this world; and I predetermine in my thoughts, the events which are onely in God’s hands.”
75. Note also that, in divorcing intention and effect, this argument also gives an ironic twist to the topic of virtue and success: although the subject’s civic virtue or obedience to the present government is conditional on the recent success of the government, it is no guarantee of future success.
76. In Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651, which appeared when this book was in press, Richard Tuck makes an argument that is complementary to the one I have offered in this chapter. According to Tuck, the republican thinkers of the English civil war were less concerned with constitutional issues than they were with what Tuck calls the “new humanism,” that is, with a Tacitean reason of state: “In a European context the English rebellion was justified in extremely modern terms. All the key words of the new humanism were present in an astonishingly extensive pamphlet literature—‘necessity,’ ‘salus populi,’ ‘reason of state,’ and, above all, interest” (222–223). Tuck correctly notes that “The English [civil] war was waged by humanists, and its public rhetoric . . . was drawn from history and from Tacitism” (225). As I argue throughout this book, the features that Tuck ascribes to Tacitism were also ascribed in the seventeenth century to Machiavelli.
PART THREE
MILTON
1. Felix Raab summarizes the arguments for and against Milton’s knowledge of Machiavelli as a republican theorist, and argues that there is no evidence of such knowledge before the 1651–52 entries in his commonplace book (175–81). On Milton as a classical republican, see also Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1945), 90–122; Joseph Allen Bryant, “A Note on Milton’s Use of Machiavelli’s Discorsi,” Modern Philology 47 (1950): 217–21; Maurice Kelley, “Milton and Machiavelli’s Discorsi,” Studies in Bibliography 4 (1951–52): 123–27; Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 106–20; Zagorin, Milton, Aristocrat and Rebel (Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1992); Blair Worden, “Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution,” in History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 182–200; Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225–46; and Annabel Patterson, “The Good Old Cause,” in her Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 210–75. In MM, Pocock both groups Milton with Harrington and Algernon Sidney (507) as other historians of classical republicanism do, and recognizes that Milton’s aim was to set up an “aristocracy of saints” (414). In the usual accounts of Milton’s Machiavellism, his references to the stereotypical “Machiavell” are judged to be of little significance, little more than a commonplace term of abuse. See the index to Milton’s Commonplace Book in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol. 1; and Ruth Mohl, John Milton and His Commonplace Book (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969).
2. John Aubrey, Collections for the Life of Milton, in Hughes, 1024. In “Milton’s Republicanism,” Worden usefully summarizes the Machiavellian (classical republican) topics of Milton’s prose: “In the references to Machiavelli in the commonplace book for 1651–52, and even in the pamphlets, we can glimpse Milton’s interest in Machiavelli’s arguments about the evils of hereditary rule; about the greater willingness of republics to honour virtue; about the appropriateness of armed resistance to tyranny; about the role of political and military participation in the fulfillment of citizenship; about the military benefits of frugality, the domestic consequences of military expansion, the benefits of tumults . . . , the advantages of constitutional renewal” (233).
3. Worden also makes this point in “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” 230. Yet, by the end of the essay, he once again distinguishes between religious and secular, political vocabulary, claiming, “It is the archfiend’s false application of political vocabulary, not of religious vocabulary that Milton exposes” (243). And he suggests that Milton gives Satan a republican vocabulary not only to express Milton’s disappointment with Cromwell but also to register his doubts concerning his own claims for “the language of secular politics” (244, my emphasis).
4. I owe much of this formulation to an incisive comment by Joan Bennett on an earlier version of this chapter.
CHAPTER SIX
A RHETORIC OF INDIFFERENCE
1. Thomas Fitzherbert, The First Part of a Treatise concerning policy and religion (Douai, 1606), 27.
2. John Milton, Commonplace Book, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1:475–77.
3. See The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2 (1643–48), ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1959). Commenting on Of Reformation (1641), Sirluck writes: “Dealing with the objection that the speedy establishment of Presbyterianism might be politically dangerous, he had asked: ‘Who should oppose it? The Papists? They dare not. The Protestants otherwise affected. They were mad. There is nothing will be remoov’d but what to them is profess’dly indifferent.’ Again, to the Episcopalian argument that the church was empowered to decide in things indifferent, he had not replied that in such things the individual Christian was at liberty to decide for himself; rather, he had insisted that the things at issue were not matters of indifference but of prescription” (181–82).
4. In The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press; Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1977), Bernard J. Verkamp notes that Milton’s “opinion that adiaphora are by nature beyond legislation . . . [was] an opinion which few, if any, earlier adiaphorists had shared” (132). For a rhetorical argument related to the one presented here, see Nigel Smith, “Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–45,” in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 103–21, who discusses Milton’s use of Sarpi and Davanzati contrary to their intentions.
5. Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 86, quoting Milton’s Ready and Easy Way.
6. In “Driving from the letter: truth and indeterminacy in Milton’s Areopagitica,” in Re-membering Milton, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 234–54. Stanley Fish argues that Milton takes an antinomian position in Areopagitica (251). I have been suggesting that this is only one pole of Milton’s argument.
7. This seems to be one of the functions of the refusal to extend toleration to Catholics at the end of the treatise. This conclusion functions rhetorically like the end of Machiavelli’s The Prince: it puts a check on the contingency and indifference that have been stressed up to this point by asserting that Truth is the ultimate censor and that Catholicism is simply falsehood.
8. On allegorical personification, see Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Neil Saccamano, “The Sublime Force of Words in Addison’s ‘Pleasures,’” ELH 58 (1991): 98–103; and chapter 8 below.
9. As we have seen in chapter 5, once force is admitted into discussion, the question of fraud inevitably follows. As Henry Robinson remarked in Liberty of Conscience (1643) in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 3 vols., ed. William Haller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), “We see by daily experience that men are by nothing so much obliged and engaged, as by courtesie and affable proceedings, these both win and keep the heart fast, whilst violence and constraint can at best, but prevaile upon the body, the soul even in that instant so much more alienated, as the body and outward man was forced to play the hypocrite and yeeld obedience” (3:130). In Milton’s case this seems to apply equally to the force of truth.
10. Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason (London, 1553), 42.
11. Christ is apostrophied as “thou . . . who didst redeem us from being servants of men,” in The Ready and Easy Way (Hughes, 898). Hughes comments: “Christ has redeemed us from ‘being servants of men’ either on the religious level or the political, because ‘in Christ we are alike all priests’ (Christian Doctrine 1, xxviii . . . ) and because the whole political meaning of the gospel is that God ‘human left from human free’ (PL, 12.71)” (898n.122).
CHAPTER SEVEN
VIRTUE AND VIRTÙ IN COMUS
1. Angus Fletcher makes this point in The Transcendental Masque (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 175.
2. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 40.
3. This is now a commonplace of Renaissance studies. See the works cited in the introduction to part 2, nn. 4 and 5.
4. See Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Louis Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH 50 (1983): 415–59.
5. See Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 251, on the parallels between handbooks on how to become a gentleman and puritan texts on how to achieve a sense of merit or godliness. On English Arminianism, see, among others, Maurice Kelley’s introduction to Milton’s Christian Doctrine in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 6:74–85; Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Peter Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635,” Past and Present 114 (1987): 32–76; and Steven Jablonski, “‘Evil Days’: Providence and Politics in the Thought of John Milton,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1993.
6. See Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (1965; New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 152, 165.
7. Stephen Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 169, 171, 185. It is perhaps worth noting that Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue failed at court, reportedly because of too little dancing and Inigo Jones’s unsatisfactory spectacle (Orgel, Jonsonian Masque, 70–71). Perhaps it also failed to please because of its criticism of the court. The masque was subsequently revised as For the Honour of Wales. Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue is quoted from Ben Jonson: Selected Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970); Coelum Britannicum from The Poems of Thomas Carew with His Masque ‘Coelum Britannicum’, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (London: Oxford University Press, 1949).
8. Jennifer Chibnall, “‘To that secure fix’d state’: The function of the Caroline masque form,” in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 82, quoting Lawrence Stone.
9. On the specific political conditions that contributed to this tension between active and passive virtue, see Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 21–45.
10. See Maryann Cale McGuire, Milton’s Puritan Masque (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983); Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), 253.
11. S. R. Gardiner, ed., Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660 (1889; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 100.
12. Marcus gives the report of the Venetian ambassador in “The Occasion of Ben Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,” SEL 19 (1979): 283. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 253, discusses the charge of idolatry.
13. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. R. J. Schoeck (Don Mills, Ontario: Dent, 1966), 62.
14. Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, A Discourse opening the nature of episcopacy (1642), in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–1647, 3 vols., ed. William Haller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 2:59.
15. I owe these references to Stephen Kogan, The Hieroglyphic King: Wisdom and Idolatry in the Seventeenth-Century Masque (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986), 263–64.
16. See Marcus, The Politics of Mirth, 198. I am in substantial agreement with Marcus’s analysis of Comus as Milton’s intervention in the debate concerning the “Declaration of Sports” and the indifference of holiday pastimes. She argues that “the masque turns Anglican ritual against the Anglican establishment, symbolically freeing the church from the powerful influence of Laud” (177). She does not, however, tie the debate concerning things indifferent either to rhetoric or to Machiavellism. See also the work of Maryann Cale McGuire and Norbrook, cited in note 10 above.
17. On the occasion and political significance of the masque, see Michael Wilding, “Milton’s ‘A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634’: Theatre and Politics on the Border,” Milton Quarterly 21 (1987), 37. See also, in the same issue, Cedric. C. Brown, “Presidential Travels and Instructive Augury in Milton’s Ludlow Masque,” 1–12; Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, “The Earl of Bridgewater’s Legal Life: Notes toward a Political Reading of Comus,” 13–23; and The Politics of Mirth where Marcus notes that the readings for this holiday from the Book of Common Prayer were particularly concerned with the right use of the things of nature (201–202); as well as John Creaser, “‘The Present Aid of This Occasion’: The Setting of Comus,” in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 111–34; James G. Taaffe, “Michaelmas, the ‘Lawless Hour,’ and the Occasion of Milton’s Comus,” English Language Notes 6 (1969): 257–62; and William B. Hunter, “The Liturgical Context of Comus,” English Language Notes 10 (1972): 11–15.
The Earl’s political leanings are subject to debate. The DNB entry is inconclusive; Creaser argues that the Earl was a follower of Buckingham; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, discusses Bridgewater’s puritan leanings (43). Marcus, in The Politics of Mirth, describes the Earl as a loyal servant of the king but also as anti-Catholic and anti-Arminian (174). In Marcus’s persuasive account, the Earl is both a representative of royal authority and a figure of resistance; the Attendant Spirit is not simply addressing Bridgewater as the symbol of royal power and virtù but is also encouraging him to resist the arbitrary exercise of power increasingly characteristic of Charles and Archbishop Laud. However we understand the Earl’s political allegiances, the Attendant Spirit’s initial compliment takes the form of praising the Earl’s nobility and power, his virtue and virtù.
18. In The Politics of Mirth, Marcus compares Comus and Sabrina: “The two figures are comparable, yet utterly unlike. The difference between them is the difference between the power of virtue and the virtue of power” (200). I will argue that it is often difficult to tell—to paraphrase Pleasure Reconcil’d to Virtue—which powers are virtue’s and which are not.
19. On the puritan critique of visibilia, see Maryann Cale McGuire, Milton’s Puritan Masque.
20. Critics are divided over the interpretation of Comus, one group focusing on the allegorical dimension of the masque and on the harmonious vision it presents, the other analyzing the masque’s dramatic elements and its corresponding ambivalence or tensions. Among the first group of critics, see Rosamond Tuve, “Image, Form and Theme in A Mask,” in John S. Diekhoff, “A Masque at Ludlow”: Essays on Milton’s “Comus” (Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1968), 133; Stephen Orgel, Jonsonian Masque; Stanley E. Fish, “Problem-Solving in Comus,” in Illustrious Evidence: Approaches to English Literature of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 115–31. Among the second, see Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque; William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Both groups of readers give an account of the relation of the masque’s allegorical plot to its rhetoric. The first group subordinates the masque’s shifting, “indifferent” rhetoric to the allegorical and theological vision of divine grace, arguing that if the masque presents the earth as the arena of things indifferent, the reader learns to interpret according to the Neoplatonic hierarchy of values, according to which mind is superior to body just as heaven is to earth. The end result is that “an ethic of intention is substituted for an ethic of observable effects” (Fish, 129). The second group of critics stresses the conflict between Comus’s Shakespearean eloquence and the Lady’s Spenserian defense, and sees the masque as resisting its own allegorical plot. Yet, this second reading involves an allegory of its own, according to which the masque stages a contest between Spenser and Shakespeare. In assuming the identity of “moral and stylistic judgments” in the masque (Guillory, 88), according to which Shakespearean eloquence is associated with the evil Comus and Spenserian allegory with the virtuous Lady, this reading allegorizes away the fact of rhetorical indifference noted by the first group of critics. It sees the masque, instead, as opposing Shakespearean song, rhetoric, and magic on the one hand to chastity, reason, and logic on the other. But such a division of rhetorical labor is too simplistic: as I have already suggested in my remarks about the description of Comus, this courtly Machiavel speaks in the language of both Shakespeare and Spenser as, I will argue below, does the Lady.
21. Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, proposes a similar reading of the Lady’s chastity. A number of other critics have argued that the Lady’s chastity registers the tensions between faith and works, obedience and resistance, allegory and irony, that are central to the masque. In “Milton and Sexuality: A Symptomatic Reading of Comus,” in Re-membering Milton, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1988), 43–73, Christopher Kendrick suggests that Milton’s choice of chastity as the theme of the masque is theologically, as well as politically, motivated. Politically, Milton’s chastity involves an obvious criticism of the royal chastity that was “a privileged theme of the court masque” (47). Theologically, chastity was central to Milton’s “personal myth, whose main function was evidently to ‘manage’ the Protestant antinomy between faith and work. The myth did this by providing Milton’s faith with a work (namely chastity) more adequately symptomatic of it than was his real work, which was the—slowly encompassed, potentially idolatrous—study of the classics” (48). See also Richard Halpern, “Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask,” in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 88–105. Halpern argues that the Lady’s chastity reproduces the ideological contradictions of women’s place in puritanism: virginity is required up to a point, but not within marriage where it would appear as a form of resistance. Finally, in “A womb of his own: male Renaissance poets in the female body,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 266–88, Katharine Eisaman Maus describes the Lady’s chastity as the locus of a conflict between two kinds of reading: one that draws an analogy between the Lady’s physical state and her moral state, and one that insists on the lack of correspondence between the material and spiritual realms (277–86). “In the way A Mask . . . represents the body as both separable and inseparable from the soul, dispensable and indispensable for the practice of virtue, it resembles much of Milton’s early work” (282).
22. Fish, “Problem-Solving in Comus,” 118–19, also discusses this passage as an illustration of the indifference of the Lady’s surroundings, but he does so in order to argue that Comus equates virtue with an ethic of intention.
23. On the sense of hearing in the masque, see Donald M. Friedman, “Comus and the Truth of the Ear,” in “The Muses Common-Weale”: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 119–34.
24. See Fletcher, Transcendental Masque, 164–65 and 215–19, on the differences between chastity and virginity in relation to time: Virginity “implies absolute stasis. Chastity . . . can permit the freedom of movement and experiential trial” (165).
25. I owe this reference to David Quint, who discusses Milton’s allusion in Paradise Lost to this biblical passage in Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 210.
26. Fletcher’s remarks, in Transcendental Masque, about the masque’s resistance to allegory could also serve as a description of this deferral or warding off of divine intervention. Fletcher defines allegory as “the conversion of image into idea, of concrete detail into abstract theme, of symbol into significance” (175). In Comus, “on the contrary, transcendence works by the conversion of one medium into another, and the audience never leaves the plane of medial transformations. A given dance does not primarily convert to an allegorical significance derived from the motions of that dance; rather, the dance converts to song, which may convert to a speech, which converts to a scene shift. Each medium ‘mediates,’ not a transcendent meaning but another medium. This convertibility of means is based finally on the function of masking itself. The mask is the transcendental device that entertains but finally rejects a complete shift into allegory. Behind each mask there is only another mask—a mystery that fascinated the major poets of the Renaissance” (175–76).
See also Guillory, Poetic Authority, who comments on the Lady’s speech: “The Lady’s words anticipate the full epiphany of the ‘superior power,’ but the poet evidently feels that he is not yet ready to channel that power into his verse. The Lady declines to speak in the voice of the higher power, and the epiphany remains incomplete” (89).
27. See Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, 57–58, who also comments on the way Milton revises Spenser’s Garden of Adonis; and E.M.W. Tillyard, “The Action of Comus,” in Diekhoff, “A Mask at Ludlow”: Essays on Milton’s “Comus,” 51–54.
28. On fixity and innovation, see Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, 67.
29. See William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper and Row, 1938), 319.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MACHIAVELLIAN RHETORIC IN PARADISE LOST
1. In thinking about Milton’s rhetoric in Paradise Lost, I have benefited in general from the work of Stanley Fish on things indifferent, cited in chapters 4–7, and from Leslie Brisman, Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973); Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 114–58; William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Sanford Budick, The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton’s Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); and Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Particular debts will be indicated in the notes below.
2. On Satan’s use of republican language and his description of God as a tyrant or absolute monarch, see Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship in “Paradise Lost” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983); Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1979), 365–75; Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 33–58; Blair Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225–46. On Milton’s self-consciousness about the use of the same vocabulary for opposing political purposes, see Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism,” 239, and especially Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “The Politics of Paradise Lost,” in Politics of Discourse, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 216.
3. Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism,” 240, 243; Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 365–75.
4. Worden, “Milton’s Republicanism,” 243; Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship in “Paradise Lost”; Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden (1965; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 103–11.
5. Radzinowicz, “The Politics of Paradise Lost,” 209–11; Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 24–26, and chaps. 2 and 3.
6. Radzinowicz, “The Politics of Paradise Lost,” 217.
7. In his note on this passage, Alastair Fowler suggests this reading. He glosses “lest . . . boast” as “so that men ought not to boast,” and refers the reader to Eph. ii, 8f: “by grace are ye saved . . . Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler [London: Longman, 1968]).
8. In considering the Sin and Death episode, I have benefited in particular from the following works: Philip J. Gallagher, “‘Real or Allegoric’: The Ontology of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost,” ELR 6 (1976): 317–35; Kenneth Knoespel, “The Limits of Allegory: Textual Expansion of Narcissus in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 22 (1986): 79–99; Stephen M. Fallon, “Milton’s Sin and Death: The Ontology of Allegory in Paradise Lost,” ELR 17 (1987): 329–50; John S. Tanner, “‘Say First What Cause’: Ricoeur and the Etiology of Evil in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 103 (1988): 45–56; Ruth H. Lindeborg, “Imagination, Inspiration and the Problem of Human Agency in Paradise Lost,” unpublished paper; Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). I have also discussed this episode in “Allegory and the Sublime in Paradise Lost,” in Milton, ed. Annabel Patterson (Longman: London, 1992), 185–201.
9. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964), 68.
10. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 197.
11. This discussion of Puttenham is indebted to an unpublished paper on book 1 of The Faerie Queene by Neil Saccamano.
12. Cited by Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 160. The quotation is from Gerardi Joannis Vossi commentariorum rhetoricorum, sive oratorium institutionum libri sex (1606).
13. See the note to this passage in Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler.
14. On the Hebrew etymology of sin, see Kenneth Knoespel, “The Limits of Allegory,” 82. In Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), Maureen Quilligan also discusses this passage in terms of etymological wordplay, but does not note the Hebrew meaning of sin. For the association of sin and sign, Merritt Hughes refers us to Dante’s “trapassar del segno” in Paradiso, 26.115–17 (“Beyond Disobedience,” in Approaches to “Paradise Lost”, ed. C. A. Patrides [London: Edward Arnold, 1968], 188–89).
15. I was helped to see this point by the unpublished paper of Ruth H. Lindeborg. See also Maureen Quilligan’s chapter, “The Sin of Originality,” in Milton’s Spenser.
16. On Sin’s birth as a “linguistic event,” see Knoespel, “The Limits of Allegory,” 82.
17. See Luther’s remarks in his Lectures on Genesis (Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan [Saint Louis: Concordia, 1955], 1:166), on the sins which are so fully ingrained “that they not only cannot be fully removed but are not even recognized as sin.”
18. John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 108.
19. James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 84, 87–88. Turner glances at the Sin and Death episode when he writes in a discussion of the allegorical interpretations of German mysticism and Neoplatonism, “Indeed, the grotesque figure of Sin [in Paradise Lost] . . . may parody the excesses of neo-Gnostic myth making” (155).
20. On the identification of Pelagianism and Arminianism by seventeenth-century Calvinists, see, for example, A.S.P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London: Dent, 1938), 54.
21. “Introduction to the Epistle of Saint James and Saint Jude” (1545), in Works of Martin Luther, 55 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1932), 6:478.
22. John S. Tanner, “‘Say First What Cause,’” 48.
23. In “‘Say First What Cause,’” Tanner makes a similar point, though he does not comment on the significance of the allegorical form of Sin and Death in this context: “Milton’s myth thus exposes the irrationalism that lies at the core of ostensibly rational free-will explanations. It acknowledges that, at the deepest level, complete self-determination begins to look more like compulsion than free choice” (49).
24. Quoted in Milton 1732–1801: The Critical Heritage, ed. John T. Shawcross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 236.
25. Quoted in Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, 8.
26. Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1961), 141. The passage recalls Botero’s description of the sublime in his Aggiunta on reputation. See chapter 3 above.
27. Annabel Patterson, “The Good Old Cause,” in Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 256. Patterson discusses the seventeenth-century editions and translations of Longinus, and the political dimension of Longinus’s discussion of the sublime, on pages 258–66. The evidence for the direct influence of Longinus on Milton is circumstantial; Patterson notes that John Hall’s translation was dedicated to Bulstrode Whitelocke, “one of the most important, though moderate, members of the revolutionary council of state,” and a friend and colleague of Milton.
On the republican dimension of Marvell’s poem, see also Andrew Eric Shifflett, “Paradox and Politics in English Neostoic Literature,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1993. Shifflett demonstrates that Marvell is echoing Ben Jonson’s poem to Thomas May (“To My chosen friend, . . . Thomas May”), the translator of Lucan’s republican epic, the Pharsalia. Shifflett, following Christopher Hill, reads “That Majesty which through thy Work doth Reign” as a joke shared by the republicans Marvell and Milton (161).
28. The political significance of this indifference may be clarified by noting that the battle between Satan and Death is an Oedipal struggle. It was a commonplace of seventeenth-century political theory—most famously articulated by Filmer’s Patriarcha—not only that the king was a metaphorical father to his people but that his power had its origin in the actual power of the father over his family, a power that descended from father to son. In the conflict between Sin and Death, we have instead a father and son each claiming absolute authority, and neither recognizing the other. In making the Oedipal conflict of Satan and Death into a conflict of de facto political powers, Milton mocks the patriarchal model of political authority.
29. See Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 40–41; Neil Hertz, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 71–76; and Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, 74ff. On prophecy as exegesis, see John Milton, Christian Doctrine, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 6:582 and 584 (book 1, chap. 30). I am grateful to Victoria Silver for calling my attention to this definition of prophecy in the seventeenth century.
30. Donald E. Pease, “Sublime Politics,” boundary 2 12/13 (1984): 264.
31. Cf. Jonathan Arac, “The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear,” Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987): 209ff., on the sublime as allowing rebellion or reinforcing conformity; and Ronald Paulson, “Burke’s Sublime and the Representation of Revolution,” in Culture and Politics: From Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 241–69, esp. 248–52, on the political ambivalence of the sublime.
32. Joseph Addison, Critical Essays from the Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), nos. 309 and 273, pp. 102, 68; Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1961), 1:110. Steven Knapp discusses eighteenth-century objections to the Sin and Death episode in Personification and the Sublime, 51–65.
33. Anne Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 116–46. See also Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 95: “Allegory is the genre of the fallen world, for in a prelapsarian world, at one with God, there is no ‘other’ for language to work back to since there has been no fatal division. No distance, no divorce, no distaste between God and man, who has not yet known the coherence of good and evil in the rind of one apple tasted.”
34. For a related argument, see Sanford Budick, The Dividing Muse, 48, 73, 79.
35. This is a traditional understanding of the prohibition. See Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, 154: “It was God’s intention that this command should provide man with an opportunity for obedience and outward worship, and that this tree would be a sort of sign by which man would give evidence that he was obeying God.” See also the gloss on this passage in the Geneva Bible, and Paradise Lost, 3.93–95.
36. William Bradshaw, A Treatise of Things Indifferent (London, 1605), marginal gloss on 25.
37. Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 34.
38. I borrow the phrase “rhetorical theology” from Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1970).
39. Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, 3.
40. Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, 41.
CODA
RHETORIC AND THE CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY
1. See Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).
2. Joseph Anthony Mazzeo describes Machiavelli as a critic of ideology, when he writes in Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964): “In an ironic way Sir Thomas Browne’s definition of man can be applied to Machiavelli’s ruler. He is a great Amphibium who lives in divided and distinguished worlds. But each world relates to the other. The threat of the beast can help preserve the rule of law and the action of the beast may create the condition for its institution if it does not exist. Behind all forms of legitimation of power lies power itself whether as the naked power of coercion, the ideologically and publicly constituted power of authority or the unscrupulous manipulation by rulers of the ruled” (104). He also describes Machiavelli as a critic of ideology when he attributes to him the following insight: “The system of political and social appearances of any society is a form of fraud precisely to the extent that those appearances obscure the true nature of decision and status. The claims of the great human institutions are, in a sense, always partly true and partly false. The cause of freedom and reason is always embedded, so to speak, in the struggle for power within the state and also between states. Furthermore, power and forceful leadership are the indispensable prerequisites for freedom and the exercise of reason. This truth leads to the paradox that, although reason and freedom are intrinsically realized by individuals and not by institutions, special collective structures of power are necessary for the exercise of freedom and reason. They therefore exist in a continual dialogue with force and fraud and this is the eternal condition of their existence” (115). In Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), Eugene Garver also explores the relationship between Machiavelli’s “rhetorical politics” and the critique of ideology. See especially 24, 39–40, 89, 92, 137–38.
3. I have also discussed the relevance of Machiavelli’s critique of humanist rhetoric to modern debates about the critique of ideology in “Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology,” PMLA 105 (1990): 464–76.
4. That is, a dissimulation whose promulgation and reception is not fully governed by intention; see Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 8; “Hermeneutics and the critique of ideology,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981), 85–86. All further references will be to Lectures on Ideology and Utopia.
5. Ricoeur borrows the term rhetoric from Clifford Geertz’s “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Geertz, in turn, is drawing on Kenneth Burke’s work on the rhetoric of motives and symbolic action.
6. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 10; cf. 8, and 144–45 on Althusser. As Althusser recognized, ideology does not distort reality; rather, it distorts the representation of our relation to reality.
7. Truth and Method, quoted in Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the critique of ideology,” 72.
8. See Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982).
APPENDIX
A BRIEF NOTE ON RHETORIC AND REPUBLICANISM
IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
1. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 1 vol., rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966).
2. Quoted by Jerrold Seigel, “‘Civic Humanism’ or Ciceronian Rhetoric,” Past and Present 34 (1966): 4.
3. Eugenio Garin, Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1954); on philology, see in the same volume “Interpretazioni del Rinascimento” and “La storia nel pensiero del Rinascimento,” esp. 203–208; as well as the introduction to L’Umanesimo italiano (Rome, Bari: Laterza, 1978), esp. 11, 22; on conversation, see 180ff. See also the still useful article by Delio Cantimori, “Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1 (1937–38): 83–102; and Hanna Holborn Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497–514.
4. Garin, Medioevo, 134–35.
5. Quoted in Garin, Medioevo, 135.
6. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), and Machiavelli, Past Masters Series (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
7. See Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the pre-humanist origins of republican ideas,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121–42.
8. For a related critique of Skinner, see Nathan Tarcov, “Quentin Skinner’s Method and Machiavelli’s Prince,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 194–203.
9. See Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli, v; and 50–51, where Skinner lists the similarities between The Prince and the Discourses. Pace Skinner, Machiavelli is not silent about religion in The Prince; he just has nothing religious to say about it. See chapter 18.