GOSLICIUS, Laurentius Grimalius.

De optimo senatore libri duo. In quibus magistratuum officia, civium vita beata, rerumpub. fœlicitas explicantur.

Venice, Giordano Ziletti, 1568. Small 4to (200 x 145 mm), ff. [4], 83, [5]; title slightly stained,but a very good, unsophisticated copy in contemporary limp vellum (soiled), from the library of the dukes of Arenberg with the Nordkirchen bookplate. First edition. The Polish statesman ‘Wawrzyniec Goslicki (Laurentius Goslicius), author of De optimo senatore (1568), a treatise popular throughout Europe, accepted . . . a definition of the commonwealth based on Aristotle and enriched with Ciceronian elements . . . . [He] was not an enthusiast of the democratic system. On the other hand, since he was not an admirer of pure monarchy or aristocracy, he opted for a res publica mixta which emphasised both civic virtue and the representation of the three orders, king, senate, and people . . . . Nevertheless, monarchia mixta, as proposed by Goslicki, denotes a state in which predominance belongs indubitably to the senate . . . . The perfect state . . . is . . . attained when the people are content. Since contentment is the outcome of virtue, it follows that the state should be ruled by people inclined towards virtue, happiness and nobility of spirit. Neither peasants, nor merchants or artisans are suitable since, in the opinion of Goslicki, their life is mundane and not conducive to virtue. Nonetheless, particular representatives of the plebs, owing to their virtues, could be promoted to the civic status’ (Opalinski, ‘The Polish Renaissance’, in van Gelderen & Skinner, Republicanism I pp. 157–62). Goslicki was one of many Polish intellectuals who, before seeking employment in the royal chancellor’s office in Cracow, went to Italy to complete their education ‘and came under the spell of the Venetian constitutional arrangement, saw parallels between Venice and Poland, and wanted to introduce further innovations at home along the Venetian model . . . . The ideal which Goslicki sets up for his senator has the polish of an international, Italian-inspired, education and the political sophistication of a Venetian patrician, yet at the same time his is not a cosmopolitan completely bereft of the national traditions, that should mark him out as a senator of Poland’ (Baluk-Ulewiczowa, ‘The Senator of Wawrzyniec Goslicki and the Elizabethan Counsellor’, in Fiszman, Polish Renaissance in its European context p. 261).De optimo senatore was especially well received in England, where it circulated in the original Latin (it is, for example, referred to in Gabriel Harvey’s Pierces supererogation, 1593), and in translation, first appearing in print, as The counsellor, in 1598, with further editions in 1607, 1660 and 1733 (and in Scotland in 1723). The fact that it was ‘written and first published in Italy must have been of crucial importance to its reaching England. In Italy it could well have gained the attention of Englishmen, influential personalities like Sir Philip Sidney (resident in Venice, 1573), who . . . was also intimately interested in Polish affairs, particularly in the royal elections [and rumored] as a candidate to the Polish throne’ (Baluk-Ulewiczowa p. 258 and n.3). The counsellor has been identified as one of Shakespeare’s sources for Hamlet: his naming the king’s counsellor Polonius could only echo the ‘Polonian’ or Pole, while ‘the verbose style of the translation and somewhat commonplace worldly wisdom of the contents make it almost certain that Shakespeare enlarged the part of the spying courtier in the light of it, mocking where it praised the statesman’s wariness, sententiousness and gravity’ (Bullough, Narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare VII pp. 44–5; see also Gollancz, A book of homage to Shakespeare pp. 173–5). For the book’s political impact, see Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism in English political thought pp. 102–11, and for the 1598 English translator’s adaption of the Latin text to English circumstances by omitting Goslicki’s enthusiasm for elective monarchy and his condemnation of the Reformation, see Baluk-Ulewiczowa pp. 265–72.Adams G1260 (under ‘Grimalius Goslicius, Laurentius’).

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