The Prince in England, or the English Prince? Negotiating Ideology in the Seventeenth-Century Translations of Machiavelli's The Prince

The seventeenth century was a crucial moment in the English reception of Niccolò Machiavelli, perhaps the most controversial Italian writer in England, and his The Prince, for at least three reasons: first, The Prince became widely available in English, due to the first two published translations, by Edward Dacres (1640), and Henry Neville (1675), while the text had earlier been known only through either the Italian original or French translations and commentaries; second, these two translations appeared during a period of intense flourishing of translations and translation theory; third, the texts of Dacres and Neville were published nearly at the two ends of a momentous period, which included the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s brief republican experiment, and the Restoration of the Stuarts. My paper analyses the first two published English translations of the Prince and their importance within both seventeenth-century translation theory and the complex ideology of the time. Neither Dacres nor Neville were admirers of the Florentine writers, but their approach to the text was deeply different. Dacres was very loyal to the original text, as he kept as close as possible to the original Italian grammatical structure and, when he had several lexical options available, he always chose the option which was the closest to the Italian form (e.g. “Principato” – “Principality”; “Repubblica” – “Republiques”; “Stato” – “State”). Interestingly, Dacres confined his negative views on Machiavelli to five short essays or “animadversions” mixed with the translated text. A wholly different text emerges from Neville’s translation. Neville anglicises Machiavelli’s work both linguistically and culturally: he adapts it to the English syntax and lexis, but he also transposes the most crucial elements of the original text into the English political language, thus making the text coherent with a specific ideological aspect of the culture of the target language, i.e., the heated contemporary debate on English institutions (e.g. “Principato” – “Monarchy”; “Repubblica” – “Commonwealth”; “Stato” – “Throne”). The texts of Dacres and Neville address, each in their own way, the contemporary debate on the function and nature of translation, a debate which itself resonated with the ideology of the time. During the seventeenth century, the growing tendency to make foreign texts fluent was parallel to an increasing preference to use translations in support of specific political issues. Thus, translation was not just an exercise in learning, but literally “spoke” to the translator’s age, transforming (often radically) the source text in its structure and meaning and at the same time becoming a springboard for ideological struggles in England. Thus, Dacres and Neville negotiate Machiavelli’s text in ways similar to Thomas May’s Lucan (1627), Thomas Hobbes’s Thucydides (1629) and John Denham’s The Destruction of Troy (1656): the first and the second texts resonated with their explicit support to, respectively, (English) republican and monarchist ideas, while the royalist Denham at times makes Virgil’s text an echo of contemporary English events and concerns. In his translation, Dacres apparently resisted this drive towards cultural homogeneity as his Prince bordered on a literal, word-for-word approach, or what Dryden would, a few years later, call “metaphrase”, but instead actualises the text through his own commentaries. Neville, on the other hand, drew The Prince much closer to contemporary readers by both anglicising the text’s language and by placing Machiavelli’s text in the ideological context of the time, allowing the republic vs monarchy debate to be explored by the text itself.