Word: machiavellis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lenin owes nearly as much to Machiavelli and Von Clausewitz as to Marx. He passionately believed in Marxism-but he also believed in using any means to help it win. Thus what he did is at least as important as what he said. In the last analysis, Leninism is Lenin's life. He remains pertinent not only because his successors keep invoking him, but because he epitomizes in his career so much of later Communist history and so much of what is unchanging in Communism's nature...
...Social Sciences, it suggested a course it called "Western Thought and Institutions," which would cover social thought from the Greeks, though "Aquinas, Machiavelli, Luther, Bodin, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Mill," to the present day. The course would also include enough history to enable students to understand what they read in its proper historical context...
...first sign of what modern minds have wrought comes in the opening moments. In a short prologue, Machiavelli (played by Schmidt) introduces Gitter as Barabas, the wily Jew. An appearance by the "odious" Italian was usually enough to terrify Elizabethans for the evening. But let Schmidt merely change one word in the script, let him say "I come not to read a lecture here in Cambridge," and Presto! The audence laughs and the fun begins...
...highlighting the plays ribaldry and underplaying Barabas' vengeful character, Schmidt chose the proper touch, for The Jew of Malta was quite distinctly written for an Elizabethan audience. When Marlowe so immediately linked Barabas with Machiavelli, he captured both the notoriety of The Prince and the legend of the Jew in England. Barabas was a complete steretoype, done with all of Marlowe's unbelievable extravagance. Sacrificing even his daughter to his lust for money and revenge, Barabas embodied such a total immorality that the Elizabethans could only have flinched in fear of his craft...
...Machiavelli and the typical Jewish usurer convey little to a modern audience, however, and the play needs a touch of the ham to be saved from mediocrity. The actors play slapstick so well that the production's one weak moment is an off-spring of their own success. In the last act, Barabas gets caught in his own plot and sinks to a painful death in a "deep pit past recovery." His wile has betrayed him, and his snarling vengeance ("Damn'd Christians, dogs, and Turkish Infidels,") echoes across the stage. Having avoided the serious side of Barabas' treachery until...