Machiavelli’s The Prince as a Modern Political Guidebook Essay

The Prince as a Modern Political Guidebook       "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   (Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV 111.1.31) Kingship and leadership is a human concept.   Contraptions and   fiction invented by human beings that hold the fabric of   society together.   It is the job of the leader to make the fiction work for the good of all.   The quote above evokes the overall feeling about kingship held by both Prince Hal and his father in Shakespeare's Henry plays.   Being a leader is perhaps the most difficult position one can ever attain.   And in the same vein that King Henry IV says this above line, so does his son King Henry V offer this lament:      The slave, a member of the country's peace, Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wots What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace, Whose hours the peasant best advantages.   (Henry V:   IV.i 280-4)    Shakespeare was acutely aware that there was little difference between a real king and a player-king.   He gives us Henry V, a prince who knows how to be both.   We see him as a politician dealing with ambassadors and a diplomat dealing with his advisors.   He dispenses justice and mercy.   He must know when to execute traitors and thieves and when to free drunks who insult him in the streets.   He is a warrior and an oratorical wizard.   He inspires courage in the face of desperate circumstances and perhaps most importantly he knows how to seem one thing while he is another.   All these qualities make Hal Shakespeare's quintessential prince and these are the qualities that Niccolo Machiavelli saw as necessities for any "good" leader of a people.        Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Prince, written in Florence in the year 1513, by Machiavelli, is one of t... ...cause he didn't teach anything that wasn't already known to powerful leaders.   In fact, in his address to Lorenzo de Medici, as I noted earlier, he states that the conclusions he makes are drawn from his knowledge of history.   Throughout the book he makes references to historical situations and events that employ the very means to political success he describes.   What is great about The Prince is not its original content but that it mirrors the politics of his time as well as our time.   The book is a product of the Italian Renaissance in that it attempts to explain how things really are rather than how they are perceived.    WORKS   CITED Machiavelli, Niccolo.   The Prince.   Trans.   Christian E. Detmold.   New York:   Airmont, 1965. Strauss, Leo.   "Machiavelli the Immoralist."   The Prince:   A Norton Critical Edition.   New York:   W.W. Norton, 1977.   180-185.