House of Cards

The show's method is Machiavelli's: politics described as it is practised rather than as it is justified. Frank Underwood's asides to camera are a running commentary on how power is actually acquired and kept, which is the form of The Prince, a manual addressed to a ruler about means. The specific inheritance is the separation of effectiveness from virtue. Machiavelli's argument that a prince must learn how not to be good, and use it according to necessity, is the premise the series dramatises and then tests to destruction. The debt runs through the British original and Dobbs's novel as well as directly.

Beau Willimon has named Shakespeare as the model for the series, Richard III for Frank's asides to camera and Macbeth for the marriage. Frank and Claire are written as a couple whose ambition is shared rather than one partner's, who plan murder together and then pay for it in how they see each other, which is the Macbeths' story moved to Washington.