Readers of this article may well regard it as old-fashioned and disappointing. It has no subtle and ingenious connections to make between Shakespeare and Machiavelli, indeed the opposite. No indisputable borrowing from Machiavelli has so far been discovered in Shakespeare – certainly nothing remotely resembling the clear and detailed use of Florio's translation of Montaigne in The Tempest – and I believe that scholars have been too ready to invoke Machiavelli's influence on seriously inadequate grounds.

Until about the middle of the twentieth century Machiavelli was not a particularly important presence in scholarly discussions of Shakespeare. He hardly figures, for example, in the standard accounts of Shakespeare's sources by Kenneth Muir and Geoffrey Bullough. In Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), a book once regarded as authoritative, but now mentioned only to be patronizingly dismissed, E. M. W. Tillyard asserted that Machiavelli ignored what for the Elizabethans was a central issue in discussion of politics:

Tillyard was of course aware that Machiavelli was read and quoted in the period, but for him ‘the age, while making much use of certain details of his writing, either ignored or refused to face what the man fundamentally stood for’. He ended on a dismissive note: