Renaissance Florence

Machiavelli was a Florentine like many of the most sophisticated minds of the period. Shakespeare makes the survivor in Othello " a great arithmetician,/ One Michael Cassio, a Florentine" (I.i.19-20). As a civil servant Machiavelli was passionately devoted to his city and perhaps wry about the Medici seizure of power, so that his treatise, The Prince, may be a satire on how to overthrow the kind of democracy to the preservation of which he was basically committed. Shakespeare seems to endorse a kind of "white Machiavel" in Sonnet 94 when he praises:

They that have pow'r to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who moving others are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense.