Elizabethan Manuscript Translations of Machiavelli's Prince

Abstract

political or historical subjects for his dialogues -as his brother had done ten years earlier1 -but rather should concentrate on religious, philosophical, and scientific questions. However, this, dialogue chiefly deserves our attention by reason of the choice of Machiavelli as one of its participants. This proves that Luigi Guicciardini, although he, like most of his contemporaries, saw mainly the paradoxical and contradictory features in Machiavelli's theories, nevertheless was aware of something more behind this mask of foolery. Thus it appears that the living Machiavelli already cast on men that enigmatic spell of which the full force has been revealed only by time.