The Prince

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 a

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s are no longer stable: “A wise prince then should act in like manner, and should never be idle in times of peace, but should industriously lay up stores of which to avail himself in times of adversity; so that, when Fortune abandon him, he may be prepared to resist her blows” (Machiavelli 75). One can see in our last discussion why Machiavelli has for so long been synonymous with evil. Being one thing while seeming another just doesn’t seem to fit with the conventional moral ideals of one who is in possession of the “good” or one who acts according to his love of God. Or perhaps, in reality, this was the secret of all those who seemingly held sole knowledge of the “good” or acted according to their love of God. And perhaps history and the political world never forgave Machiavelli for exposing these realities. One must keep this possibility in mind lest one fall into the trap that Leo Strauss did when he called Machiavelli “a teacher of evil” (Strauss 180). What Strauss fails to realize, however, is that what Machiavelli teaches is not evil but necessity and Strauss’ attack says more about Strauss than Machiavelli. Strauss was a pleaser, one who like his era labeled necessity with evil. What Machiavelli taught was th
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Approximate Word count = 2067
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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