Lehal Library

applicable for politicians in certain circumstances; the idea that all human behaviour could be assessed in relation to one set of values was naive and utopian. It was in so far as Machiavelli allowed these dangerous implications to sur- face in his writing that he both unmasked, and himself became identified with, what we might call the unaccept- able face of Renaissance Humanism. How much the presentation of the Machiavellian villain in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, from Kyd and Marlowe, through to Middleton, Shakespeare and ultimately Ben Jonson, owed to Gentillet’s ‘­Anti-­Machiavel’ and how much to a direct knowledge of Machiavelli’s writings is still a matter of academic dispute. In the 1580s an Italian version of The Prince was printed in England, avoiding a publication ban by claiming falsely on the frontispiece that it was printed in Italy. Many educated English people at the time had a good knowledge of Italian. Sir Francis Bacon had certainly read The Prince before its first legal publication in English in 1640, defending the Florentine in the Advancement of Learning (1605) with the remark: ‘We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do and not what they ought to do.’ But the ‘murderous Machiavel’ who gets more than 400 mentions in Elizabethan drama, thus making the Flor- entine’s name synonymous with the idea of villainy for centuries to come, is another matter. The Roman author Seneca had long ago established a tradition in tragic drama that featured an evil, calculating tyrant who would stop at