Niccolo Machiavelli

One of the most important early works dedicated to criticism of Machiavelli, especially The Prince, was that of the Huguenot, Innocent Gentillet, Discourse against Machiavelli, commonly also referred to as Anti-Machiavel, published in Geneva in 1576. He accused Machiavelli of being an atheist and accused politicians of his time by saying that they treated his works as the "Koran of the courtiers" This text was the basis for creation of the Machiavel stereotype in England. However, in addition to writing The Prince about the cynical political manipulations required to secure and maintain state power (which Shakespeare refers to and illustrates in Henry VI-Richard III) Machiavelli wrote several witty comedies analogous the more realistic ones of Shakespeare, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Considering the differences and similarities in Machiavelli's advice to ruthless and tyrannical princes in The Prince and his more republican exhortations in Discourses on Livy, many have concluded that The Prince is actually a satire. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, admired Machiavelli the republican and consequently argued that The Prince is a book for the republicans as it exposes the methods used by princes. If the book were only intended as a manual for tyrannical rulers, it contains a paradox: it would apparently be more effective if the secrets it contains would not be made publicly available. Likewise, Antonio Gramsci argued that Machiavelli's audience for this work is the common people because the rulers already knew these methods through their education. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Machiavelli wrote in Italian, not in Latin (which would have been the language of the ruling elite). Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (Wikipedia).