“‘A Treatise of several forms of Government’: A Sixteenth-Century English Translation of The Prince

In his 1944 edition of a late-sixteenth-century English manuscript translation of Machiavelli’s Prince (now Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Eng. 1014), Hardin Craig mentioned, almost in passing, another manuscript that has hitherto received little or no attention: it is Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 251, and, among the extant early modern English versions of the Prince (four different versions appeared in manuscript before the publication of Edward Dacres’ translation in 1640), it is both the most mysterious and the most satisfying from a literary point of view. Donated to Queen’s College in the late seventeenth century, it has remained hidden for centuries among the theological treatises and collections of sermons which formed the bulk of the donation, and successive catalogues of the Library, possibly misled by the absence of a frontispiece, have referred to it simply as ‘A Treatise of several forms of Government’. MS 251 is a small, neat and compact manuscript, containing solely the translation of Machiavelli’s work, without the name of the author or Machiavelli’s dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici, but including, after the translation, a tentative index of names and concepts that suggests the text was meant to be searched for specific information or for the value of individual, gnomic sentences. The codex has no pretence at beauty or richness, but it is extremely clear and readable, showing how the scribe paid particular attention to the presence of historical or Biblical names, or to historical allusions in the text. Besides, it is evident that the translator has consciously attempted to imitate Machiavelli’s own elegant swiftness, as is evident in passages such as the opening lines of chapter 18: ‘How Lawdable yt is, a Prince to howld his faithe; and liue Justly: and not to vse disaight: eche man can conseaue.’ This translation has now been edited and briefly discussed in my Machiavelli in the British Isles (2009): drawing on this earlier work, in the present paper I would suggest some hypotheses on the manuscript’s provenance, reconstructing the available external evidence and analysing a number of features of the codex – from the watermark, to the binding, to the nature and the relation of the two hands appearing in the Machiavelli translation. At the same time, I would like to discuss the translation itself, comparing it with three contemporary translations (two English, one Scottish) and proposing an identification of the edition used by the translator. Besides, by analysing this translation, I will formulate a number of hypotheses on its use and intended audience, proposing a comparison between translations of the Prince intended solely as exercise for language learning (as in the case of William Fowler’s Scottish version), translations meant as collections of dicta (as in the Latin abridgement extant in British Library, Harley MS 966), and translations relying on the readers’ awareness of the spreading and sometimes misleading fame of Niccolò Machiavelli in the British Isles.