The Prince Read online

  From this point on, Machiavelli’s name escaped from the restricted circle of intellectual reflection and became a popular term of denigration. ‘Mach Evil’ and ‘Match-a-villain’ were typical English corruptions, ‘Mitchell Wylie’ a Scottish. Many critics would not bother reading his work in the original but take their information from Gentillet, whose ‘Anti-Machiavel’, as his book became known, was quickly translated into Latin for English readers and then, some twenty years later, directly into English. At this point (the end of the sixteenth century) the first English translation of Machiavelli’s work was yet to appear.

  Ironically, in the years after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as Catherine de’ Medici struggled to find some solution to France’s civil wars, and in particular to convince Catholics of the need to tolerate the existence of the Huguenots, if only in Huguenot enclaves, both she and her supposed mentor Machiavelli once again came under attack, this time from the Catholic side. The accusation now was that, in the attempt to avoid conflict, religious truths of supreme importance were being subordinated to questions of political convenience, something that would eventually transform France, the Catholics feared, into a secular state.

  Here the criticism comes closer to the real spirit of Machiavelli. Renaissance Humanism in general had shifted the focus of intellectual reflection from questions of theology and metaphysical truth to matters of immediate and practical human interest. In general, however, lip service had always been paid to the ultimate superiority of religious matters and writers had avoided suggesting that there might be a profound incompatibility between rival value systems: it was perfectly possible, that is, to be a good Christian and an effective political leader.

  Machiavelli, on the contrary, made it clear that, as he saw it, Christian principles and effective political leadership were not always compatible; situations would arise where one was bound to choose between the two. It was not, as his critics claimed, that he rejected all ethical values outright; the strength, unity and independence of a people and state certainly constituted goals worth fighting for (‘I love my country more than my soul’, Machiavelli declared in a letter to fellow historian Francesco Guicciardini). But such goals could not always be achieved without abandoning Christian principles; two value-systems were at loggerheads. To make matters worse, Machiavelli did not appear to be concerned about this. He took it as an evident truth: Christian principles were admirable, but not applicable for politicians in certain circumstances; the idea that all human behaviour could be assessed in relation to one set of values was naive and utopian. It was in so far as Machiavelli allowed these dangerous implications to surface in his writing that he both unmasked, and himself became identified with, what we might call the unacceptable face of Renaissance Humanism.

  How much the presentation of the Machiavellian villain in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, from Kyd and Marlowe, through to Middleton, Shakespeare and ultimately Ben Jonson, owed to Gentillet’s ‘Anti-Machiavel’ and how much to a direct knowledge of Machiavelli’s writings is still a matter of academic dispute. In the 1580s an Italian version of The Prince was printed in England, avoiding a publication ban by claiming falsely on the frontispiece that it was printed in Italy. Many educated English people at the time had a good knowledge of Italian. Sir Francis Bacon had certainly read The Prince before its first legal publication in English in 1640, defending the Florentine in the Advancement of Learning (1605) with the remark: ‘We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do and not what they ought to do.’

  But the ‘murderous Machiavel’ who gets more than 400 mentions in Elizabethan drama, thus making the Florentine’s name synonymous with the idea of villainy for centuries to come, is another matter. The Roman author Seneca had long ago established a tradition in tragic drama that featured an evil, calculating tyrant who would stop at nothing to grasp all the power he could. Renaissance Italian theatre had updated this type of villain with elements from Machiavelli, transforming the character into an unscrupulous courtier who takes pleasure in wicked calculation and cruelty. It was from this model that the English theatre developed its endless manifestations of the devious rogue (pander, miser, or revengeful cuckold) who administers poisons with aplomb and is never without a dagger beneath his cloak.

  From the point of view of the dramatist, an unscrupulous character who has a secret agenda and relies on his presumed intellectual superiority to dupe those around him is obviously an exciting proposition. Such a figure can be depended upon to create tension, keep the plot moving and allow for resolutions where the larger group’s benign order once again imposes itself after the tragic disturbance caused by the wicked, scheming individual. Beyond a superficial repulsion that the audience feels towards such a character, be it Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Webster’s Flamineo in The White Devil, or Shakespeare’s Iago, there is also an undercurrent of excitement at the thought that it might be possible to take life entirely into one’s hands, manipulate people and circumstances at will and generally pursue one’s selfish goals without a thought for moral codes or eternal damnation: in this sense the Machiavellian villain looks ahead to the worst of modern individualism.

  Then there was also, of course, the contrasting pleasure of seeing the clever schemer ‘hoist with his own petard’. As the years passed and the high tension of Jacobean tragedy relaxed into the comedies of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries, the evil Machiavel became a pathetic failure whose complacently wicked designs inevitably and reassuringly led to his making a fool of himself. Fading out of British drama in the mid-seventeenth century, this stock figure is still resurrected from time to time, most recently and hilariously in Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, a character who adds a visceral cowardice to the already long list of Machiavel’s vices.

  To a great extent, no doubt, it was this identification of Machiavelli’s name with everything that was evil which kept The Prince in print and guaranteed that, despite the papal ban, it would be widely read. But there was more. As medieval Christianity and scholasticism sank into the past and science and reason made their slow, often unwelcome advances, as Europe got used to religious schism and competing versions of the truth, the overriding question for any modern ruler inevitably became: how can I convince people that I have a legitimate, reasonable right to hold power and to govern? In England Charles Stuart would insist on the notion that kings had a divine right, this at a time when so many English monarchs had seized their crowns by force and cunning. Curiously enough, Charles’s great antagonist Cromwell felt that he too had a direct line to God and legitimacy, but through belief and piety rather than family and inheritance. Officially a parliamentarian, Cromwell frequently governed without parliament or elections for fear the people might not see things God’s way.

  Meantime, across Europe, the princes and princesses of ancient noble families took to marrying and remarrying each other in an ever-thickening web of defensive alliances, as if density of blood and lineage might offer protection against the threat of usurpers or, worse still, republicanism and democracy. No family was more practised at this up-market dating game than the Medici, who, partly thanks to an extraordinary network of connections, would hang on in Florence in a client-state twilight lasting more than 200 undistinguished years. Meantime, from Paris to Madrid to Naples, the court clothes became finer, the statues and monuments more pompous and the whole royal charade more colourful and more solemn, as though people might somehow be dazzled into believing that a king or a duke really did have a right to rule. Many prestigious works of art were commissioned with precisely this idea in mind.

  But most of all Europe’s rulers worked hard to put a halo round their crowned heads, to appear religious and at all costs to uphold the Faith, sensing that this too would bolster their position and draw attention away from the mystery of their privileges. Later still, particularly after the French Revolution had destroyed any illusions about the rights of monarchs, the rather desperate card of ‘respectability’ was played. Mem
bers of court, Napoleon ordered, shortly after usurping power, must attend soirées with their wives, to appear respectable and avoid gossip. ‘The death of conversation’, Talleyrand opined. Certainly, when a leader has to rely on appearing respectable to claim legitimacy, he is on thin ice indeed.

  To this long-drawn-out conspiracy of pomp and pious circumstance, Machiavelli’s little book was a constant threat. It reminded people that power is always up for grabs, always a question of what can be taken by force or treachery, and always, despite all protests to the contrary, the prime concern of any ruler. In their attempt to discredit The Prince, both religious and state authorities played up the author’s admiration for the ruthless Borgia, and never mentioned his perception that in the long run a ruler must avoid being hated by his people and must always put their interests before those of the aristocracy; the people are so many, Machiavelli reflected, that power ultimately lies with them.

  Liberal and left-wing thinkers were not slow to pick up on this aspect of the book. As Rousseau saw it, the whole of The Prince was itself a Machiavellian ruse: the author had only pretended to give lessons to kings whereas in fact his real aim was to teach people to be free by showing them that royal power was no more than subterfuge. Both Spinoza and, later, the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo saw it the same way: The Prince was a cautionary tale about how power really worked, the underlying intention being to deprive those who held it of dignity and glamour and teach the people as a whole how to resist it; Machiavelli after all declared himself a republican and a libertarian. The communist leader Antonio Gramsci would even see The Prince as looking forward to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  Others took a more traditional view: Bertrand Russell described The Prince as ‘a handbook for gangsters’, and in so doing did no more than repeat the position of Frederick the Great, who wrote a book to refute Machiavelli and present a more idealistic vision of monarchical government. Others again (Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Meinecke) found a space between denigration and admiration to suggest that the novelty of Machiavelli was to present leadership and nation-building as creative processes that should be judged not morally but aesthetically; in a manner that looked forward to Nietzsche the charismatic leader made a work of art of himself and his government. Mussolini simply took the book at face value: it was a useful ‘vade mecum for statesmen’, he enthused.

  But whatever our interpretation of his intentions, one reaction that Machiavelli never seems to provoke is indifference. Reading The Prince it is impossible not to engage with the disturbing notion that politics cannot be governed by the ethical codes that most of us seek to observe in our ordinary lives. And however we react to this idea, once we have closed the book it will be very hard to go on thinking of our own leaders in quite the same way as we did before.

  Translator’s Note

  Translations have a way of gathering dust. This isn’t true of an original text. When we read Chaucer or Shakespeare we may need a gloss, or in the case of Chaucer a modern translation, but we only look at these things so that we can then enjoy the work as it was first written. And we’re struck by its immediacy and freshness, as if we had been able to learn a foreign language in a very short space of time with little effort and maximum reward.

  This is not the case with an old translation. If we read Pope’s translation of Homer today, we read it because we want to read Pope, not Homer. Linguistically, the translation draws our attention more to the language and poetry of our eighteenth century than to Homer or ancient Greece.

  So to attempt a new translation of Machiavelli is not to dismiss previous translations as poor. We are just acknowledging that these older versions now draw attention to themselves as moments in the English language. My efforts of course will some day meet the same fate. Such distractions are particularly unfortunate with Machiavelli, who insisted that he was only interested in style in so far as it could deliver content without frills or distraction. ‘I haven’t prettified the book,’ he tells us, ‘or padded it out with long sentences or pompous, pretentious words, or any of the irrelevant flourishes and attractions so many writers use; I didn’t want it to please for anything but the range and seriousness of its subject matter.’ I have taken that statement of intention as my guide in this translation, attempting wherever possible to free the text from the archaisms and corrosive quaintness of older English versions, to get to the essential meaning of the original and deliver it, as we say today, but perhaps not tomorrow, straight.

  It isn’t easy. The first problem, and one that sets up all the others, is already there in the title: The Prince. What is a prince for Machiavelli? Well, a duke is a prince. The pope is a prince. A Roman emperor is a prince. The King of France is a prince. The Lord of Imola is a prince.

  This won’t work in modern English. The English have Prince Charles. And the thing about Prince Charles is that he is not King Charles and probably never will be. And even if he were king he would wield no real power, not even the kind of power the pope wields, and we never think of the pope as a king or prince.

  The only other idea we have of ‘the prince’, in English, is Prince Charming. This concept is a long way from the ageing Prince Charles and even further from the kind of prince Machiavelli was talking about. Machiavelli’s word ‘prince’ does not mean ‘the son of the king’, and even less ‘an attractive young suitor’. Machiavelli’s ‘principe’ refers generically to men of power, men who rule a state. The prince is the first, or principal, man.

  So the translator is tempted to use the word ‘king’. At least in the past a king stood at the apex of a hierarchical system, he was the man who mattered. But it is difficult, translating Machiavelli, to use the word ‘king’ to refer to the lord of Imola, or a pope, or a Roman emperor. In the end, as far as possible, I have resolved this problem by using the rather unattractive word ‘ruler’, or even the more generic ‘leader’, though always making it clear that we’re talking about the political leader of a state. The book’s famous title, however, must be left as it is.

  Even harder to solve is the translation of ‘virtù’, together with a number of other words that cluster round it. It would be so easy to write the English cognate ‘virtue’, meaning the opposite of vice, but this is not what Machiavelli was talking about. He was not interested in the polarity ‘good’/‘evil’, but in winning and losing, strength and weakness, success and failure. For Machiavelli ‘virtù’ was any quality of character that enabled you to take political power or to hold on to it; in short, a winning trait. It could be courage in battle, or strength of personality, or political cunning, or it might even be the kind of ruthless cruelty that lets your subjects know you mean business. But one can hardly write ‘cunning’ or ‘cruelty’ for ‘virtù’, even if one knows that in this context that is what the text means; because then you would lose the sense that although Machiavelli is not talking about the moral virtues he nevertheless wants to give a positive connotation to the particular qualities he is talking about: this cruelty is aimed at solving problems, retaining power, keeping a state strong, hence, in this context it is a ‘virtù’.

  Ugly though it may sound, then, I have sometimes been obliged to translate ‘virtù’ as ‘positive qualities’ or ‘strength of character’, except of course on those occasions - because there are some - when Machiavelli does mean ‘virtues’ in the moral sense: in which case he’s usually talking about the importance of faking them even if you may not have them. Faking, of course, when cunningly deployed for an appropriate end, is another important virtù. The spin doctor was not a notion invented in the 1990s.

  Related to both these particular problems - prince, virtue - is the more general difficulty that so many of the key words Machiavelli uses have English cognates through Latin - fortuna, audace, circospetto, malignità, diligente, etc. In some cases they are true cognates - prudente/prudent, for example - but even then to use the cognate pulls us back to a rather dusty, archaic style. Aren’t the words ‘careful’ or ‘cautious’ or
‘considered’ more often used now than the word ‘prudent’?

  Something of the same difficulty can occur where there is no cognate in English but a traditional and consolidated dictionary equivalent for an old Italian term. Machiavelli frequently uses the word ‘savio’, which has usually been translated ‘wise’, but again this invites the English version to drift towards that slightly stilted archaic style so often used to render great texts from the past; ‘sensible’ or on other occasions ‘shrewd’ are choices that, depending on the context, can combine accuracy with a prose that draws less attention to itself as a translation.

  So the constantly recurring question as one translates The Prince is: what words would we use today to describe the qualities and situations Machiavelli is talking about? Of course sometimes there are no modern words, because there are certain things - siege engines, cavalry attacks - that we don’t talk about any more. On the whole, though, Machiavelli is chiefly interested in psychology or, rather, in the interaction of different personalities in crisis situations, and here, so long as the translator avoids the temptation to introduce misleading contemporary jargon, a great deal can be done to get The Prince into clear, contemporary English.

  However, the difficulty of these lexical choices is infinitely compounded by Machiavelli’s wayward grammar and extremely flexible syntax. Written in 1513, The Prince is not easily comprehensible to Italians today. Recent editions of the work are usually parallel texts with a modern Italian translation printed beside the original. The obstacle for the Italian reader, however, is hardly lexical at all - in the end he can understand a good ninety per cent of the words Machiavelli is using - rather it has to do with a combination of extreme compression of thought, obsolete, sometimes erratic grammar, and, above all, a syntax where subordinate and pre-modifying clauses abound in ways that the modern reader is not used to.