A significant number of audience members likely knew Machiavelli, or thought they knew Machiavelli, from his depictions on the English stage. Not too long before the Henry VIs premiered, another playwright was namedropping Machiavelli as the archetypal political schemer in the prologue of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.

MACHIAVEL Albeit the world think Machiavel is dead,

Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps; [...]

To some perhaps my name is odious;

But such as love me, guard me from their tongues,

And let them know that I am Machiavel,

And weigh not men, and therefore not men's words.

Admir'd I am of those that hate me most:

Though some speak openly against my books,

Yet will they read me, and thereby attain

To Peter's chair; and, when they cast me off,

Are poison'd by my climbing followers.

I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Yep, that's Niccolò Machiavelli himself back from the dead sixty-three years later to deliver the prologue to a play about a murderous irreligious schemer and to brag about the heights that the adherents of his political method can achieve. Shakespeare's Richard III has a bit of a Marlovian flavor as far as outrageously amoral political machinations go; whether or not you hold that Marlowe and Shakespeare collaborated on the Henry VIs, it's not a stretch to think that Shakespeare had Marlowe on the brain when writing Gloucester's wily ascent to the throne -- and by extension, that he had in mind all the other English commentators who found it necessary to add in their two cents on the controversial but not yet widely-read works of Machiavelli. In that sense, Shakespeare's "Machiavellian" characters reflect the popular image of the man and his purported politics, rather than direct inspiration by the man and his books.

I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,

Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,

And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.

I can add colours to the chameleon,

Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,

And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?

Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.

• Henry VI Part 3, Act 3 Scene 2

Machiavelli's writings had been a hot topic in the English court of a generation or two earlier, and while Italian was hardly the language of choice for scholars in the British Isles and the writings most pertinent to his reputation as a godless mastermind (The Prince and Discourses on Livy) were not yet broadly read in English translation during the Elizabethan era, those translated editions do seem to have existed in circulation. Likewise, French- and Latin-language translations of these texts made their way into the hands of curious English readers, two more languages likelier to be in the Elizabethan reader's repertoire. Within Shakespeare's lifetime were a number of spirited responses to Machiavelli (often styled as rebuttals -- one is famously called the Anti-Machiavel) using Machiavelli's political writings as a springboard for the exploration of historical and contemporary political vice and virtue; a number of earlier Henrician critics had engaged with Machiavelli's writings to varying degrees. In short, the average scholarly Elizabethan could certainly read plenty about Machiavelli; they knew of him, even if what they thought they knew in terms of political rhetoric and biographical facts falls short of what a casual reader now has access to in almost any language. In addition to primary texts by Machiavelli in translation or in their original Italian, a number of English commentators discussing Machiavelli in both negative and cautiously-positive terms existed contemporary to Shakespeare and would have been available for the curious or interested. Even assuming Shakespeare couldn't get his hands on one of the translated editions of The Prince, he'd certainly have access to plenty of other people writing about The Prince, and would have known what the salient characteristics of Machiavelli's political positions were understood to be.

Critics in the second half of the 16th century characterized Machiavelli's political philosophy as endorsing a sinister subtlety and an unfettered ambition -- the ideal Machiavellian actor employed lies, deceit, and irreligious conduct to achieve his ends, in a manner at odds with traditional Christian virtue as well as traditional heroics. (This is quite apart from any question of whether The Prince is a frank endorsement of such actions or whether this is a fair characterization of Machiavelli as a political thinker.) These characteristics play well with the developing figure of the antihero in English drama -- while you might not want to be governed by a Machiavel, it's still fun to watch one on stage -- and it's not hard to see the fingerprints of the political controversy surrounding Machiavelli in his literary descendant, the stage Machiavel. The foreignness of the Machiavel figure (continental, antisocial, tricky, suspiciously Catholic) plays well with the English enthusiasm for plays set in foreign political climes, and the association between Machiavellianism, Italian-ness, and wanton murder lent itself to shocking bits of stagecraft, opening the door to fearful poisons and bravura assassinations:

LIGHTBORN You shall not need to give instructions;

'Tis not the first time I have kill'd a man:

I learn'd in Naples how to poison flowers;

To strangle with a lawn thrust down the throat;

To pierce the wind pipe with a needle's point;

Or, whilst one is asleep, to take a quill,

And blow a little powder in his ears;

Or open his mouth, and pour quick-silver down.

But yet I have a braver way than these.

• Edward II Act 5 Scene 4

All this sometimes gets a little silly with Machiavel figures who claim to do evil not only for political expediency but sometimes just for the hell of it, like Marlowe's Barabas who "walk[s] abroad o' nights / And kill[s] sick people groaning under walls" -- never mind that unnecessary violence is hardly a hallmark of Machiavelli's ideal Prince even in the most jaundiced interpretation. Shakespeare and Marlowe didn't have an exclusive patent on the Machiavel archetype, either; the Machiavel's literary DNA turns up in characters penned by Middleton, Webster, Kyd, Barnes and God knows who else well into the next century. These depictions and their allusions to concepts attributed to Machiavelli reinforced the same pop-culture idea of Machiavellianism from which they were drawn in the first place, similar to how many people today have likely heard a person (real or fictional) described as Machiavellian with a cloud of political and personal connotations even if they've never cracked open a copy of Discourses on Livy. Even among those with no firsthand experience of Machiavelli's work, literary-minded Elizabethans (like Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as some portion of his audience) would know of Machiavelli by reputation and through the presentation of his ideas in the kind of largely-condemnatory critical dialogue that threatened to make the adjective "politic" a dirty word. To evoke Machiavelli on stage, or the political tactics associated with the man and his writings, was to evoke a whole cloud of associations and expectations in one's audience; it was to suggest a person whose actions and innermost thoughts ran counter to commonly-accepted societal attitudes about goodness, and to announce that a mess of political intrigue was shortly to follow. Would audience members have noticed or at least suspected an anachronism in having Gloucester boasting about schooling a Florentine diplomat whose most famous and relevant works wouldn't be published until decades after Gloucester's death? Maybe -- but it wouldn't be Shakespeare's first anachronism for the sake of a great reference. In the first half of the 1590s, the Machiavel was having a real moment on the Elizabethan stage -- from Barabas to Lightborn to Lorenzo to Richard III -- and that name would have been fresher in the playgoing imagination than perhaps ever before.

Some reading:

• 'Machiavel and Machiavelli', George Watson and 'The "Myth of Gentillet" Reconsidered: An Aspect of Elizabethan Machiavellianism', N.W. Bawcutt (both responding at least in part to Edward Meyer's Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama, which was written under the understanding that Machiavelli's major works wouldn't have been available to Elizabethan and Jacobean readers except by reputation)

• 'Machiavelli, Policy, and "The Devil's Charter"' Jacqueline Latham (for a Jacobean play starring a post-1595 Machiavel, and a Borgia to boot)