MACHIAVELLI’S BURDEN:

THE PRINCE AS LITERARY TEXT

Charles D. Tarlton

Hence, if you look for a man’s burden, you will nd the principle that reveals the
structure of his unburdening. . . .
Kenneth Burke1
I did it my own self to gratify.
John Bunyon2
Some time after The Prince had been composed and had circulated in
manuscript among Machiavelli’s friends, he wrote the proem or dedica-
tory letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici. With the text before him, Machia-
velli tried to capture for Lorenzo (and whoever else might read it) the
sense and purpose of what he had written, intimating just what was
most important about the little gift he was sending. When we examine
this belated introduction carefully, three major and tightly interrelated
moments are most conspicuous: 1) the problematic relation between
political ability (knowledge and experience) and success, 2) the awkward-
ness, irony, and unfairness of social and political rank, and 3) fortuna’s
decisive, unpredictable, and deliberate interference in human affairs.
In the months of 1513, post res perditas, when he was writing The Prince,
guilt and dejection over his sudden calamity lay heavily on his mind.
He had fallen, in a shockingly short time, from the heights of success
(as represented by the remarks of a friend, in 1509, who had praised
him excessively for his militia’s brilliant showing at Pisa and compared
him to Quintus Fabius Maximus),3 to become the broken and humili-
ated outcast who could write, in a letter in 1513, that “it is a miracle

1
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana
State University Press, 1941), 92.
2
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Vol. XV, Part 1, The Author’s Apology for his Book.
The Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001),
www.bartleby.com/15/1/ [14 February 2006].
3
James B. Atkinson and David Sices, trans. and ed., Machiavelli and His Friends, Their
Personal Correspondence (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), hereinafter,
Correspondence, Letter 167.
44 charles d. tarlton

that I am alive, because my post was taken from me and I was about to
lose my life . . . I have had to endure all sorts of other evils, both prison
and other kinds.”4 In such situations, human beings need to understand
what has happened to them, to give it a name, and, nearly as often,
nd some means for distancing themselves from its full implications or
so softening those implications that they can salvage the condence to
go on. Some might sacrice themselves in suicidal attempts at revenge,
or try to quiet the murmuring that dogs them by acts of mad daring.
Machiavelli, however, for all his familiarity with the world of violent
men, was himself much gentler—a poet, a dramatist, a writer. The world
of imagination promised the best way for him to seek deliverance from
his agony. How better to achieve that than by writing a pithy, eccen-
tric, and highly personal treatise on politics, at the center of which he
could situate an imaginary and upstart political innovator who thrusts
himself destructively into the middle of Italian politics? Such a vehicle
could serve, moreover, as a setting in which he might dream a highly
symbolic drama in which the ironies that plagued his days could be
re-staged, assaulted, and overcome. Poetry might let him invent just the
cast of surrogates (men and actions) in terms of which he might relive
and improve his political life.5
The Prince is an episodic text, a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress with this
difference—the characters who rise up and drift away in The Prince
can be viewed as recurrences of a single persona; let us call him Il
principe. He is a fantasy political actor who, transmuting from chapter
to chapter, adopts various roles and performs, as it were, in the shift-
ing scenes at the center of each chapter. On the surface, Machiavelli
uses the names of actual historical princes in crucial places, but he
has also brought in the abstract idea of a prince—some prince, any

4
Correspondence, Letter 214.
5
There is a large and growing literature that looks at Machiavelli’s The Prince from
the point of view of literature rather than political science proper. Those writings
that I have found most useful include in this connection are: Thomas M. Greene,
“The End of Discourse in Machiavelli’s Prince,” Yale French Studies 67 (1984), 57–71;
Michael McCanles, The Discourse of “Il Principe,” (Malibu: Udena, 1983); Eugene Garver,
“Machiavelli’s The Prince: A Neglected Rhetorical Classic,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 13
(1980), 99–120; Martin Coyle, ed., Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince:” New Interdisciplinary
Essays (Manchester (UK) and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), especially
John Parkin, “Dialogue in The Prince”; John M. Najemy, “Language and The Prince”;
Andrew Mousley, “The Prince and Textual Politics”; and all of the essays in Albert
Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn, eds., Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).