Shakespeare’s Mavericks and the Machiavellian Moment

Abstract

Niccolò Machiavelli’s works impacted Shakespeare’s context directly through the availability of manuscript translations. There were also a variety of sources where Machiavelli’s impact was indirect – for example, the mirror for princes genre, Innocent Gentillet’s Discours Contre Machiavel (1576) and Marlowe’s plays featuring the stage Machiavel. Shakespeare may also have known Edmund Spenser, who was familiar with The Prince (1532). Machiavelli’s contribution to ideas about politics, across different borders and historical contexts, has been demonstrated by intellectual historians, Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock. They show Machiavelli’s contribution to destabilising accepted myths about monarchical supremacy. This article discusses Hal’s, Hamlet’s and Kent’s exercising of their political will as unique responses to the complicated political intrigues of 1 Henry IV, Hamlet and King Lear. These political mavericks demonstrate coherent psychological responses to poisonous political situations.