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Vickie B. Sullivan, ed. The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works.

Article Excerpt
New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

The eight contributors to this collection of scholarly essays focus mostly on the question of whether Machiavelli's vision of the world is comic or tragic, that is, whether he believes that humans can, at times, control their rate, or whether their efforts are insufficient against the crushing forces of life. Fodder for this seemingly irreconcilable paradox is found in two of Machiavelli's letters, one to Vettori and the other to Francesco Guicciardini. In the first letter, he comments on the light and the grave aspects of Vettori's character and of his own, noting that a reader of their correspondence would be quite astonished to learn how fickle and lascivious they can be. In the letter to Guicciardini, he identifies himself as, "Niccolo Machiavelli historico, comico, et tragico." The attributes historico and comico are appropriate and well deserved for a man who authored the history of Florence and several comedies. It is the adjective tragico that puzzles most readers, since Machiavelli never wrote a tragedy. The question begging answers, then, is in what sense did Machiavelli, a writer of comedies, consider himself tragico? The urge to weigh in on either side of this apparent contradiction is not new among...

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