ONCE he had brought the Henriad to its triumphal conclusion, Shake- speare resumed his interest in Roman themes, as seen earlier in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece. Both those works demonstrate the importance to him of the theme of violation, and the implications it carries for such questions as tyranny and personal freedom. Julius Caesar pursues similar speculations in the larger arena of political debate (involving members of the senate directly in the action) and again dramatically portrays the tension between tyranny and liberty, in particular liberty of conscience. The play may also, if only to a limited extent, raise thoughts nearer home about the relationship of monarchy to republicanism. This aspect of Julius Caesar in turn requires that we extend our comparison with Machiavelli beyond the Principe and the Discorsi to include his Istorie Fiorentine, which reflects a similar and thought-provoking conflict between republicanism and monarchy.

Critics have also remarked on similarities between Julius Caesar and Elizabeth I, both of them strong and popular, yet both of them prone to individual weaknesses, he physically infirm, she aging, and each of them wilfully precipitating a crisis in political affairs. How far Shakespeare wished to pursue the analogy is difficult to say. Robert S. Miola notes one kind of parallel by identifying those Catholics who wished to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. However, this affords an analogy with the succession crisis rather than with republicanism.

Did Machiavelli influence Shakespeare directly, or did the Machiavellism that occurs in the plays derive from other sources? This is an old question which can never be decided with certainty; nor do I intend to try and provide an answer in this book. Though I examine the matter of influence as far as I am able, my purpose rather is to explore the various ways in which Shakespeare and Machiavelli may be brought together for comparison: that is, putting one author in the context of the other. A limited, melodramatic kind of ‘Machiavillainy’ may be traced here and there in Shakespeare, but it is far more interesting, and challenging, to contemplate his engagement with ideas that are the essence of Machiavelli's thought, wherever he found them. Because some of these ideas test the very foundations underlying the moral convictions of the age, they inevitably became confused with their sham, or shadow, version, identified as a devotion to evil, and portrayed on the stage in the figure of the ‘Machiavel'. In this study I try to maintain the distinction between ‘Machiavel’ and ‘Machiavellian’ to denote the difference between the popular, often deliberate, misconception and the more reflective response to Machiavelli's thinking.

Machiavelli, it has often been observed, voiced with unprecedented confidence a view that others had suspected might be true but which they were fearful of either announcing or confronting fully. This view is that the world in its operations is amoral, that none of the laws held to be essential for the governing of ethical behaviour exists in fact, and that the sole effective determinant in human affairs is the ability to exercise power. The mention of ‘others', incidentally, gives rise to an immediate objection. Why speak particularly of Machiavelli's influence, when his examples, as any annotated edition reveals, derive from classical authors such as Aristotle, Tacitus, Cicero, Plutarch, or Livy, all of whom he studied carefully? Such authors, now fully incorporated into the humanist tradition to which Shakespeare belonged, were available without the need for Machiavelli's intervention. One answer to this has just been given: Machiavelli drew from his authorities lessons which they themselves were reluctant to drive home. Another is that no ancient author remains in his original place, unaffected by the attentions of the humanist movement to which I refer.

MACHIAVELLI: IL PRINCIPE

DESPITE so much work on the topic, the relationship of Shakespeare to Machiavelli remains a matter of vagueness and perplexity. It used to be thought that the darker, immoral implications of Machiavellian political strategy, those which make Chapters 17 and 18 of Il Principe so notorious, occurred only selectively in Shakespeare's characters - in such obvious and flamboyant villains as Richard III, Iago, and Edmund. But this handy way of identifying Machiavels gave way some time ago to a claim, perhaps an acknowledgment even, that positive heroes too might make use of Machia- velli to obtain their ends. Black and white have long ceased to be clearly distinct from one another and approximate now to a median shade of grey. To take one example: Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure has relin- quished his position as sage and saviour and is seen to be problematic at the very least, and in the eyes of not a few critics, even damnable.

KING JOHN has been described appropriately as a transitional or ‘interstitial’ play, standing as it does between two tetralogies. It may be regarded as among the most Machiavellian of Shakespeare's histories, simply because it contains several characters who at various points express themselves in familiar Machiavellian terms: the king himself, both Philip and Lewis of France, Pandulph, the Papal emissary, Queen Eleanor, and of course Philip Falconbridge, otherwise known as the Bastard. But it is Machiavellian for other reasons than this. King John, like all the histories, is a play which locates the problem of conscience within the element of action and continu- ing change. We see this happening particularly as the initiative switches from one character to another, testing each of them in turn. We see it at the opening of the play when the kings of England and France pledge a trust to each other before the gates of the disputed city of Angiers. Even the city has a Machiavellian role to play insofar as it must consider what strategy to adopt when beset by two powerful, conflicting princes. We see it again when first Philip, and then John, finds he is gaining an advantage that necessarily involves a breach of faith. Such situations are familiar enough to the student of Il Principe. On the one hand this sacrifice of conscience and trust produces an instant denunciation, nowhere more roundly or vehemently expressed than in the Bastard's scathing analysis of the principles of Commodity which ends Act Two. On the other hand, by its constant change of focus and sympathy the play seems to meditate on the fragmented and fragmenting relationship of conscience and power rather than merely condemning it.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA may not strike us immediately as a play that lends itself to interpretation along Machiavellian lines. Understandably, despite the political arena in which it conducts its actions, it has commanded attention principally as the last of Shakespeare's great tragedies of love. We habitually regard the erotic as inimical to politics, and the great majority of approaches to the play conceive of Antony as relinquishing his hold on power by subjugating his will to that of the charming Cleopatra, to his eventual cost in the battle for empire. Critics, then, either interpret the play as a painful study in evasion, the preference of illusion over ineluctable temporal exigency, or conversely – especially those of a more traditional school – as the triumph of sensibility over the mean-minded constraints of ambition (in Dryden's phrase, ‘the world well lost’). Neither of these opposing approaches sees the play as a demonstration of the political integrated with the erotic, though I think it may be appropriate to do so.

Via its hero and heroine, the play contemplates the relationship of virtù (Antony) to fortuna (Cleopatra), which often though not invariably Machia- velli conceives of as a conflict, particularly in Il Principe. How Antony and Cleopatra perform vis-à-vis one another on the virtù-fortuna axis has significance for the play as a whole. Yet another Machiavellian concept which has important bearing on the action and theme of Antony and Cleopatra is that of magnanimity which, in this most expansive of all of Shakespeare's tragedies, characterizes both of the major figures. As we know already, grandezza dello animo, which Machiavelli often applies in its ancient sense, may encompass diverse or opposing meanings, from selfless generosity to self-serving cruelty and ruthlessness. Comparing Shakespeare's under- standing of the term with that of Machiavelli will take us once more into the republican arguments of the Discorsi, as well as obliging us to extend our discussion briefly to assess that other great Roman example of magnanimity, Coriolanus.

Machiavelli treats the erotic in only a small number of works, these being principally his dramas, the Mandragola and the Clizia. Commentators have from a very early period in productions of the former expressed reserva- tions at the apparent cynicism with which the theme of adultery is presented. Young Callimaco is enamoured of Lucrezia (a name famously emblematic of married chastity), who is the wife of Messer Nicia.

HAL AND HENRY V

LATE in the fourth act of Henry V occurs an incident which has gone down as one of the most controversial episodes in the whole of Shakespeare's drama of warfare. It concerns the Battle of Agincourt, and the scene is the English side of the field at the height of the conflict. The Earl of Exeter is giving the king's camp a moving account of the brave deaths of the Earls of Suffolk and York, in language which evokes the unmitigated pathos of the narratives of death found in the earlier tetralogy:

The king professes himself moved to tears:

Suddenly the alarm sounds: the French have regrouped for a fresh attack, and in response Henry gives a command, based on expediency, which seems all the more brutal in contrast to the mood of compassion which he has just indulged:

Juxtaposing sorrow with severity in this stark way enlivens the drama but, as a representation of Henry (described as a ‘gallant king’ in the play, and a ‘valiant knight’ by Holinshed), it calls his humanity into question. Machia- velli of course would have had no difficulty in endorsing Henry's swift, decisive action. Readiness to cope with the exigencies of circumstance, which as we have seen already from our analysis of passages in Il Principe threaten constant change, must take precedence over everything else. From the Machiavellian perspective, Henry, like Cesare Borgia, is a leader who can combine virtù with ferocità as the occasion demands, and who possesses accordingly a Borgian grandezza dello animo.

li uomini sdimenticano più presto la morte del padre che la perdita del patrimonio.

(Il Principe; B 54-5; ‘Men are quicker to forget the death of a father than the loss of a patrimony', A 46.)

THE Second Tetralogy, or Henriad, manifests Machiavellism in a variety of ways. The plays in this sequence of histories present no single figure who acts out the kind of villainy that popularly distinguishes Richard III. Instead, attention switches to what might be called the Machiavellian dynamic. From the crisis precipitated by Richard II's peremptory actions in the first of these plays, this tetralogy concerns itself with the operations of power, its shifts and circumstances. As the various plots unravel and give way to one another, the dramatist observes the interplay of human ambition and the limiting force of circumstances, while, in accordance with the historical accounts he has consulted, he keeps always in mind the idea of a providential outcome.

Beginning with Richard II, Shakespeare's way of applying precepts made familiar by Machiavelli undergoes a subtle change from what we have seen in Richard III. The action of Richard II turns on the conflict between two figures who, in dramatic terms at least, are equal to one another. Neither of them resembles Richard III with his crafty, calculated asides inviting the audience to share his confidence. Such soliloquies as the play gives us come deep in its latter half when a disconsolate, defeated Richard communes with himself in our hearing. These speeches convey nothing of a mind going through its machinations, as in Richard III, for the straightforward reason that Richard, the prisoner of Pomfret, is without power and without the ambition to power.

Incest, like identity, involves a tension between sameness and difference; where identity implies the establishment of categories and definitions, however, incest implies their collapse. Identification means both identifying as, placing the subject within presupposed categories, and identifying against, differentiating that subject from others. Incest dissolves boundaries and confuses categories, and so can be regarded as a denial or negation of identity. It is therefore fitting that the late fourteenth-century Middle English verse romance Emaré begins with the threat of incest, for Emaré can be read as a narrative of lost and recovered identity, and in examining the ways in which incest subverts identity we can also explore some ways in which this text defines and affirms the structures on which identity depends.

The idea of incest presupposes certain social categories and relationships, kinship structures that identify a person in terms of position within a family and prescribe the conduct expected of that person towards others. Again, these relationships depend on the recognition of sameness and difference: a woman and her daughter share a common identity through kinship but occupy different positions in the family system and are therefore expected to stand in different relationships to, say, a man who is the woman's husband and her daughter's father. Incest transgresses these categories and subverts these relationships; a father who marries his daughter, for example, denies both their kinship and her difference, her prerogative to marry outside of the family. Thus incest undermines both the collective identity of the family and the carefully differentiated identities of its members, pretending difference where it should recognize affinity and establishing affinity where it should assert difference.

Incest riddles illustrate this point well because they typically depend on a confusion of identities. An Old English riddle in the Exeter Book, for example, begins:

and ends by telling us that the total number of individuals in question is only five. The answer is “Lot and his family”; the riddle works because the nine identities in question, kinship terms that ordinarily categorize different individuals, collapse into only five when we realize that Lot had children by his daughters, who are therefore also his wives, so that his sons are also his grandsons.

And yet, and yet. The Legend of Good Women can be no more than a provisional response to antifeminism, contradicting but not obliterating it. Created as antifeminism's mirror-image, it derives the very substance of its being from its antagonist's power, and relies on that power to justify its own extremism. There thus arises the danger acutely described by Elaine Showalter:

This comes dangerously close to a celebration of the opportunities of victimisation, the seduction of betrayal. (1979, 28) The focus on victimisation in the Legend carries not only this risk, but also the risk of stasis: the polarisation of male treachery and female suffering immobilizes not only the women in the legends, but also the poetic discourse itself, perennially arrested by pity. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer solves this problem by setting both antifeminism and ‘wommanly pitee’ within dynamic structures that enable him to go beyond the old stereotyped polarities even while acknowledging their powerful grip on human lives. And the first step is to turn away from the mirror-image to engage directly with antifeminism itself. This direct engagement is apparent above all in the Merchant's Tale and the Wife of Bath's Prologue, which will form the focus of attention in this chapter.

For Chaucer, the éminence grise behind the medieval tradition of antifeminist literature was St Jerome, whose treatise Against Jovinian offered a rich stock of materials on which misogynist writings throughout the Middle Ages drew. Jerome's work is a polemic directed against ‘a certain Jovinian’, who had (among various other heretical arguments) denied that virginity was a state superior to marriage. Women are thus not the primary target of the polemic, but are as it were civilian casualties sacrificed to Jerome's saturation bombing. Thus, since Jovinian had instanced the much-married Solomon in support of his case, Jerome replies by quoting antifeminist proverbs from the Solomonic books of the Bible as ‘evidence’ of what Solomon's experience of women had taught him: (for example) ‘It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house [Prov. 21:9]’ (Adv. Jov. I.28).

Stories and Histories

L’Estoire de Lancelot, as the epilogue of the Mort Artu seems to call the entire Lancelot-Grail Cycle, is indeed a long story. From its beginnings that merge with the origins of Christianity in the Holy Land under the Roman emperor Vespasian, to its end de vers Occident with the passing of Arthur in the year 542 at Avalon, what we tend to see as a ‘romance’ shares much of its action with what medieval readers probably would have not hesitated to call ‘history.’ In particular the stories of Utherpendragon, the account of Arthur's youth, the Saxon and Roman wars, and the treason of Mordred have all been told by ‘historians’ such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace. There is no doubt that the Lancelot-Grail draws on this historiographic model, at least in part, but it does so in order to create something entirely new.

Ostensibly historical, yet overtly merveilleux, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle shifts from story to history and combines the two modes of narration as well as the two kinds of source material. This is not unusual. In British, and especially Anglo-Norman historiography the dividing line between romance and chronicle has always been ill-defined, and the issue has not been neglected by scholars, but the fact is that it involves most of the early literary narratives in the vernacular that deal with historical matters. A prime example is Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, which draws on sources that are unimpeachably ‘historical’: the reports of two ‘eye-witnesses’ recording the Trojan war in the most trustworthy manner imaginable – in Latin (originally Greek) prose.

In this particular context, it is worth remembering that the matter of Britain was not necessarily perceived as pure fiction, despite Jehan Bodel's early thirteenth-century claim that ‘Li conte de Bretaigne si sont vain et plaisant/ Et cil de Ronme sage et de sens aprendant.’ There is no need to search for the ‘historical’ Arthur, when manuscript compilation offers ample evidence that the Arthurian material was considered non-fiction. For example, the Brut is either preceded or directly followed by texts that are indisputably ‘historical,’ such as Geoffrey Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, the chronicles of Pierre de Langtoft or Jordan Fantosme, genealogies, annals, etc. The Arthurian chronicles might therefore claim the same status as any historical text.

Mit diesen Worten beendet Hans Sachs seine Bühnenfassung des Wilhelm von Österreich, eines Romans, der nicht den geringsten Zweifel an der Vorbildlichkeit der Minne seiner Protagonisten lässt, einer Minne, die so stark ist, dass sie in ihrer Idealität sogar den Totschlag am Freund rechtfertigt. Wo Johann von Würzburg die adelige Heiratspolitik als die falsche Liebe von der welt gitsære (W.v.Ö, V.4237) mit Verachtung straft, resümiert Hans Sachs:

Die Sentenz Und spar dien lieb biß in die eh/ Denn hab ein lieb und keine meh ist aus einigen Tragödien und Komödien des Hans Sachs bekannt. Immer wieder propagiert er die der Zunftordnung und der göttlichen Ordnung entsprechende eheliche Liebe gegenüber der höfischen Minne. Hierzu arbeitet er eine Anzahl von höfischen Romanen für die Meistersängerbühne um. Als Vorlage bedient er sich in der Regel der Prosadrucke nachklassischer oder nicht-arthurischer Romane, die in ihrer Struktur weit formbarer sind als die klassischen Artusromane.

Besondere Beachtung verdienen im gegebenen Kontext die Dramatisierungen von Flore und Blanscheflur (1551), von Tristrant (1553), Wilhelm von Österreich (1556), Pontus und Sidonia (1558) und Willehalm von Orlens (1559). In diesen Texten geht es um voreheliche Liebesverhältnisse oder, um bei der höfischen Terminologie zu bleiben, um stæte triuwe, die gesellschaftlichen Hindernissen begegnet. Hans Sachs ist in der Forschung wiederholt vorgeworfen worden, dass er seinen Vorlagen sklavisch folge, dass er zwar kürze, aber nicht sinnvoll verändernd eingreife, dass er die Handlung willkürlich auf eine beliebige Anzahl von Akten verteile und schließlich im Epilog den „Dramen” eine Moral aufsetze, die nicht aus der Handlung entwickelt sei. Dies würde bedeuten, dass die Handlung weiterhin stæte triuwe vorführe, sie nur hinterher von Sachs als unerlaubte voreheliche Liebe verurteilt werde.

Die genannten fünf Dramatisierungen höfischer Minneromane sind sehr unterschiedlich, doch auf keine trifft dieses Verdikt zu. Sie folgen zwar nicht den formalen Vorschriften des klassisch antiken Dramas – es handelt sich um Sieben-Akter–, die Akteinteilung ist aber bewusst gesetzt und mit dem Handlungsund Spannungsverlauf korreliert.

Childhood as an object of study has been seen as the creation of Philippe Ariès (1914–84), a French agricultural development expert by profession and free-lance historian in his spare time. His L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, first published in 1960, was issued two years later in English, under the misleading title Centuries of Childhood – misleading because to English-speaking readers it appeared to be a study of childhood in isolation, rather than a study of the child in the family. Where other historians of the family have sought to identify the development of affectivity primarily by studying the relations between husband and wife, Ariès, unconstrained by the conventions of professional academic history, had the brilliant idea of tracing changes in family structures via the emotional relations between parents and children.

The book was an attempt to answer the question whether the idea of the family has diminished in the face of the twin processes of modernization and industrialization as divorce, once unknown, proliferates and parental authority is eroded. Ariès’s answer is that as ‘a value, a theme of expression, an occasion of emotions’, the family only arrived in the early nineteenth century. Physical changes in domestic housing allowed the modern nuclear family, which Ariès sees as emerging at this period, to cut itself off from the world. Publicness, defined as sociability, is therefore held to characterize the Ancien Régime, while privacy, defined as the retreat into the home and into self-sufficient family relationships, is seen as a modern condition.

Privacy now is ideological: it gives priority to the particularistic relations between parents and children which are a hallmark of modernity. For Ariès, the pre-modern family is an institution for securing the continuation of the patrimony, for providing training in conduct and thereby inculcating respect for the good order of society. None of this requires the emotional bonds between its members that characterize the modern family, which understands itself as organized round its love for the children. Ariès generally acknowledges that parents loved their children in the pre-modern era, but argues that parental love was not thought of as a defining feature of family life.

The biography of William Marshal, composed c. 1226, is still available only in the edition published by Paul Meyer at the turn of the last century as L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. It is a work described by Dominica Legge as one of the great glories of Anglo-Norman biography and few will disagree with her conclusion: “From every point of view this is one of the outstanding productions in Old French. It is well known to historians, less well known to students of literature, and this is a pity” (306–08). Historians have indeed acknowledged the importance of the Histoire as the primary source of information about a man who rose from relatively obscure birth in the 1140s to become Regent of England from 1216 until his death in 1219. Besides its interest for the political history of both England and France, the text also offers a rich quarry of information on numerous aspects of social history, from family relationships to tournaments. As regards literary history, it is significant as being the earliest known example of a genre – the biography of an individual who was neither a king nor a saint. It is moreover an excellent read. The warmly partisan tone of the biographer carries the reader along over nearly twenty thousand lines of verse, culminating in the magnificent and uplifting deathbed scene.

It is obviously of the highest interest to establish the identity of the author, but the hypothesis put forward by Paul Meyer, though it has been universally accepted, is quite unconvincing on close examination. Meyer attributed the authorship of the text to a phantom figure who appears in the epilogue. The relevant text runs as follows: