MACHIAVELLI, Niccolό

Extremely rare surreptitious London edition of Machiavelli’s Il Principe, first published 1532, disguised using a false Sicilian imprint. During the 1580s Wolfe was notorious for pirating books and ignoring royal printing privileges granted to his competitors, much to their chagrin. He was eventually imprisoned, after which he repented and became a fierce advocate for the privileges and for publishers’ rights. Earlier in life he had travelled in Italy and apparently became acquainted with Italian literature, as Gabriel Harvey noted in his New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), describing Wolfe as one who had ‘read and heard so many gallant Florentine discourses,’ of which The Prince was surely one. Indeed, Wolfe’s competitor and long-suffering victim of his piracy, Christopher Barker, exhorted him to ‘leave your Machiavellian devices, and conceit of your foreign wit, which you have gained by gadding from country to country.’  

Bertelli suggested that Wolfe printed these editions for the Italian market, where Machiavelli was difficult to obtain because of restrictions imposed by the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Roman Catholic Church’s list of banned books, on which The Prince had been placed since 1559. Woodfield notes that copies of Wolfe’s edition were sold at Frankfurt Book Fair in 1588. However, it is perhaps more likely that Wolfe’s secrecy was either a response to negative perceptions of Machiavelli in England, negative perceptions of English printing, or simply a part of his vendetta against copyright. Clearly there was a market in England: ‘Wolfe’s editions … reflect one of the high points of Elizabethan England’s interest in Machiavelli’s works’ (Alessandra Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles (Farnham: 2009), p. 30).

In The Prince, ‘Machiavelli founded the science of modern politics on the study of mankind … Politics was a science to be divorced entirely from ethics, and nothing must stand in the way of its machinery. Many of the remedies he proposed for the rescue of Italy were eventually applied. His concept of the qualities demanded from a ruler and the absolute need of a national militia came to fruition in the monarchies of the C17th and their national armies’ (PMM).