Marlowe and Machiavelli

Abstract

N THE last fifty years of Renaissance scholarship, few names have been coupled more often and with less agreement than those of Christopher Marlowe and Niccolo Machiavelli. Almost the entire range of critical possibility has been covered. Edward Meyer, who began the serious study of Machiavelli's influence in Elizabethan drama and whose errors continue to persist after more than half a century, held that Machiavelli's writings were an important shaping force upon Marlowe's plays. This has been the predominant notion, and has been echoed with variations by Courthope, Rebora, H. S. Bennett, T. M. Pearce, Una M. Ellis-Fermor, and most recently by Harry Levin; some say that Marlowe knew only Gentillet's corrupt version of Machiavelli, whose actual philosophy he tried to perpetuate in his writings.1 At the other extreme we find Roy W. Battenhouse,2 who tells us that Marlowe, although he knew Machiavelli's works well, violently disagreed with him and attempted to refute his heretical doctrines. And, finally, writers like Leslie Spence and Paul H. Kocher3 tell us that there is no connection whatever between the two figures, that Marlowe probably never even read Machiavelli, and that if he did the Florentine left no distinguishing mark upon his plays. In this welter of contradiction, what shall one believe? Much of the difficulty, it seems to me, springs from certain popular errors and false assumptions which appear, with varying degrees of intensity, in almost everything that is written on the subject of Machiavelli in Elizabethan England. The Marlowe confusion is only part of a greater confusion. There has been, to begin with, a tendency to limit consideration of Machiavelli to The Prince and to treat that book out of its context in the entire body of Machiavelli's political thought. This has led to a lamentable distortion of Machiavelli. For, as Lord Acton