160359 VO Machiavelli and Machiavellianism in the Works of Montaigne and Shakespeare (2009S)

This lecture course will not be concerned primarily with the works of Machiavelli himself; we would need at least an entire semester to approach them properly. Instead, we will concentrate on the uses and misuses of Machiavelli's writings which led to the establishment, within a generation of the posthumous publication of Il Principe in 1532, of a doctrine known as Machiavellianism which was by no means always identical with the ideas of the Florentine philosopher and historian. Approximately 60 years after the first appearance of Machiavelli's most famous work, Montaigne and Shakespeare both conduct a detailed analysis of the usefulness and the morality of Machiavellianism: Montaigne in the first chapter of the third volume of his Essais ("De l'utile et de l'honnête"), and Shakespeare in the second tetralogy of his history plays, of which we will read the first two (Richard II and Henry IV part one).