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Shakespeare and Machiavelli: A Caveat
- Edited by Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 November 2010
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- 14 October 2010, pp 237-248
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Summary
Readers of this article may well regard it as old-fashioned and disappointing. It has no subtle and ingenious connections to make between Shakespeare and Machiavelli, indeed the opposite. No indisputable borrowing from Machiavelli has so far been discovered in Shakespeare – certainly nothing remotely resembling the clear and detailed use of Florio's translation of Montaigne in The Tempest – and I believe that scholars have been too ready to invoke Machiavelli's influence on seriously inadequate grounds.
Until about the middle of the twentieth century Machiavelli was not a particularly important presence in scholarly discussions of Shakespeare. He hardly figures, for example, in the standard accounts of Shakespeare's sources by Kenneth Muir and Geoffrey Bullough. In Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), a book once regarded as authoritative, but now mentioned only to be patronizingly dismissed, E. M. W. Tillyard asserted that Machiavelli ignored what for the Elizabethans was a central issue in discussion of politics:
Thoughtful Elizabethans agonised over the terrible gaps between the ‘erected wit’ and the ‘infected will’ of man and between the majestic harmony of an ideal state and the habitual chaos of the earthly polity. Machiavelli spared himself such agonisings by cutting out the ‘erected wit’ altogether, thereby making irrelevant the questions that most disturbed men's minds.
Tillyard was of course aware that Machiavelli was read and quoted in the period, but for him ‘the age, while making much use of certain details of his writing, either ignored or refused to face what the man fundamentally stood for’. He ended on a dismissive note:
The conclusion is that in trying to picture how the ordinary educated contemporary of Shakespeare looked on history in the gross we do not need to give much heed to Machiavelli. His day had not yet come.
‘He who the sword of heaven will bear’: The Duke versus Angelo in Measure for Measure
- Edited by Stanley Wells
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 06 December 1984, pp 89-98
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‘Law’, ‘Mercy’, and ‘Justice’ are three of the main concepts repeatedly used in Measure for Measure. There are no simple deductions to be made from this fact: the meaning of the play cannot be summed up as a kind of mathematical equation, Law plus Mercy equals Justice. The words themselves are not presented unambiguously. ‘Law’ is usually qualified by adjectives implying that Viennese law is harsh by its very nature – ‘strict statutes and most biting laws’ (1.3.19), ‘the hideous law’ (1.4.63), ‘the angry law’ (3.1.201) – but there is also a series of striking, sometimes faintly ludicrous, images suggesting that the law is despised and ineffective. Law is like ‘an o’er-grown lion in a cave / That goes not out to prey’ (1.3.22–3) or the ‘threatening twigs of birch’ (1.3.24) used to whip children; if not applied effectively it will be like the motionless scarecrow that the birds of prey regard as ‘Their perch, and not their terror’ (2.1.4), or will ‘Stand like the forfeits in a barber’s shop, / As much in mock as mark’ (5.1.319–20). The result is a paradoxical double image: the law can frequently be ignored with impunity, but may suddenly and unpredictably inflict savage punishment, with a kind of arbitrariness that is half accepted and half resented, as in the opening speeches of Claudio.
2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 17 November 1977, pp 191-203
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This year there are fewer full-length books to review in this section than is normally the case, though of course articles continue to appear in large numbers. There is little to report on the biographical side. Parvin Kujoory deals with the development of Shakespearian biography from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, from casual anecdotes to the scholarly approach of Malone. His essay contains no fresh material, however, and adds nothing to Samuel Schoenbaum’s magisterial Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford, 1970), which Kujoory, rather surprisingly, does not mention.
One way of placing an author in his 'times' is to ask what the relation is between the artistic culture of a given age and the state of its politics. Joel Hurstfield suggests that the greatest period of Elizabethan society was ending as Shakespeare came to maturity, and goes on to debate what is meant when we describe late Elizabethan and early Jacobean political life as corrupt. Administrators of the time expected a fee for their service which must not necessarily be considered a bribe. The deepest corruption came in the later Jacobean period, when the king's favourites failed to consider the national interest as well as their personal interest. Hurstfield's discussion, though not primarily a piece of literary criticism, should be read by all literary students who are interested in Shakespeare's political themes.
2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 07 October 1976, pp 168-177
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Pride of place in this year’s review must undoubtedly go to Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. Schoen-baum laid the groundwork for this biography in his earlier book, Shakespeare’s Lives (enthusiastically reviewed in Survey 25, 1972), where he examined the gradual growth of knowledge about Shakespeare over the centuries, and gave us many fascinating sidelights into the history of Shakespearian scholarship. It was inevitable that he should go on to produce a biography of his own, and the result is a handsome and sumptuously-produced volume, though perhaps somewhat awkward to handle because of its sheer size and weight.
The most striking feature of the book is its wealth of facsimiles of early documents. There are more than two hundred, and they include legal documents of all kinds, private letters and journals, title-pages and quotations from books, and reproductions of prints and engravings. What distinguishes this collection from the conventional kind of illustrated biography is Schoenbaum's concern for authenticity and relevance; nothing is included simply because it is picturesque or typical of the age.
2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 20 November 1975, pp 164-173
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Literary scholarship is not an exact science, and there are few occasions on which a scholarly argument is so powerfully set out that we cannot possibly refuse assent to it. But this does not mean that all arguments are equally valid, and one of the most valuable qualities of a good scholar is a strongly developed awareness of the difference between provable fact, reasonable hypothesis, and mere speculation. These remarks are prompted by two book-length studies of aspects of Shakespeare’s life, both written by academics, which seem to the present reviewer to be seriously lacking in balanced judgement.
The first of these is W. Nicholas Knight'sS hakespeare’s Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1959). The aim of Knight's book is to prove that Shakespeare was a lawyer's scribe during the late 1580s and early 1590s, and that he had a deep personal interest in the administration and reform of the law. Knight looks first at the legal troubles which overtook Shakespeare's father from 1577 onwards and which caused the loss of property Shakespeare might have expected to inherit from his mother. Then Knight discusses what he considers to be an authentic Shakespeare signature in a law-book by William Lambarde now in the Folger Shakespeare Library. He concludes with a consideration of Shakespeare's legal attitudes as exhibited in his plays and in his will.