ABSTRACT

What is a prince? In Renaissance English, “prince,” from princeps, meaning “first” (as in the German Fürst), could refer to the monarch as such, regardless of gender; Elizabeth was often called “prince.” More often in Shakespeare’s lexicon, however, a prince is a monarch-in-waiting, a future king: the Henriad is Shakespeare’s royal Bildungsroman, charting the education of Hal from prentice prince to successful sovereign. Other princes in Shakespeare live in order to die, the very word coming to evoke the tender shoot of a blasted future, from the slaughtered princes of Richard III to young Mamillius of The Winter’s Tale. To these sovereign, developmental, and elegiac senses of the prince we must add the distinctively Machiavellian turn impressed on the word by Renaissance political philosophy. For Machiavelli, il principe is he who makes a beginning—Machiavelli addresses the new prince, an innovator in search of legitimacy through the tactics of fear and love. The word itself derives from the Roman emperors, who called themselves princeps, meaning “first citizen,” in order to retain a nominal relation to the constitutional order their office had eclipsed.