Northrop Frye and Niccolò Machiavelli

By Robert D. Denham

This essay seeks to answer the questions, how can we explain the numerous references in Frye’s notebooks and elsewhere to the political theory in Machiavelli’s The Prince? What in Machiavelli’s thought did Frye believe deserved our attention, and…

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This essay seeks to answer the questions, how can we explain the numerous references in Frye’s notebooks and elsewhere to the political theory in Machiavelli’s The Prince? What in Machiavelli’s thought did Frye believe deserved our attention, and why? Toward this end the essay examines the Renaissance idea of the Machiavellian villain, the concept of virtù, and the idea of hypocrisy.

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  • Denham, R. D., (2025), "Northrop Frye and Niccolò Machiavelli", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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Original publication: Denham, Robert D. "Northrop Frye and Niccolò Machiavelli." Quaderni d'italianistica 35 (1): 2015. 41-53. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v35i1.22351. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.

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