Why did Shakespeare dramatise stories from the ancient world? If you asked a late Elizabethan historiographer that question he would probably say that Shakespeare went to Roman history for much the same reason that contemporary historians retold the story of the past, namely, that history is a storehouse of political lessons that can be applied to the modern world. Since human nature was thought to be much the same in all ages, an understanding of the reasons why people behaved as they did in the past could help you to understand the political problems of the modern world. In his Discourses on Livy Machiavelli wrote: ‘If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were. So that, if one examines with diligence the past, it is easy to foresee the future of any commonwealth, and to apply those remedies that were used of old.’ Machiavelli's ‘politic’ historiography was fashionable in England in the final decades of the sixteenth century and had begun to replace the older providentialist school of history that looked for the meaning of events in God's will. ‘You cannot step into a scholar's study but (ten to one) you shall likely find open either Bodin's de Republica or Le Roye's Exposition upon Aristotle's Politics or some other like French or Italian Politic Discourses’, wrote Gabriel Harvey in about 1580.