The
Cardinal:
We first
see the Cardinal as he walks in with his siblings, and boy has Antonio got some
choice words to describe him:
He is
a melancholy churchman.
[…]
Where his is jealous of any man he lays worse plots
for them than ever was imposed on Hercules, for he strews
in his sway flatterers, panders, intelligencers, atheists, and a
thousand such political monsters.
The
Cardinal comes off as the evil-doing mirror image of Ferdinand: he's smooth,
calm, and emotionally detached. Where Ferdinand is passionate, turbulent, and
frequently linked with images of fire, the Cardinal seems totally devoid of
emotion, which both makes him an effective villain, but also a kind of
confusing one for this play.
In fact,
the Cardinal is probably the only character in this play who isn't motivated by
passion, and the fact that he's a smooth
criminal actually makes his involvement with Ferdinand's vendetta
against the Duchess difficult to understand.
there was a lot of popular anxiety over the decay of
traditional Christian ethics, and people largely blamed a guy named Niccolo
Machiavelli, a 15th-century Italian political philosopher whose basic message
was "screw morals; do what you gotta do to stay in power." Although
Ferdinand's all down with the plotting, he's too ruled by his passions to be a
true Machiavellian villain.
The Cardinal, though, has got all of Machiavelli's
favorite personality traits: he's manipulative, ruthless, creative (poisoned
bible, anyone?), has a gift for the wheeling-and-dealing of treacherous
secrets, and most of all he's able to do it all with a level head, unperturbed
by passion or remorse.
As a "melancholy churchman," the Cardinal
in particular illustrates the division of power and good old Christian morality,
which people figured was going the way of VHS and the floppy disk. One of
Machiavelli's main messages was that we have to look like we've got religion,
even though we can't let ourselves be tied down by all of the pesky moral stuff
that could get in the way of our achievement of power.
The Cardinal has all of the political power that
comes with his religious position—he eventually pulls some strings with the
Pope to both seize the Duchess's lands and get her banished from Ancona—and
none of the moral obligations that traditionally bound priests. It's a pretty
sweet deal for a cold-blooded megalomaniac like the Cardinal, and a pretty bad
deal for… basically everybody else.
As good as the Cardinal
is at scheming and plotting, we're thinking that in the end he would get voted
off the island on Survivor: Machiavellian Villain Edition. Or, rather, he'd be
betrayed by the other contestants he thought he was manipulating and then
forced to throw himself into shark-infested waters.
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