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Machiavelli's Mandragola: A Day and a Night in the Life of a Citizen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Mark Hulliung
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Extract

Machiavelli, one of the most famous of political writers, wrote a play which many critics regard as one of the best comedies of the Italian Renaissance. The question which inevitably arises is whether there is a connection between the serious and the comic works of Machiavelli, whether the Mandragola stands alone, a tribute pure and simple to the versatility of Machiavelli's mind, or whether the themes of the Mandragola are an extension of the themes found in the bulk of his writings. Is there, in short, a political message, cleverly disguised, in the Mandragola? Some of Machiavelli's commentators think so, but they flatly contradict one another. Alessandro Parronchi regards the Mandragola as an “allegoria del ritorno dei Medici in Firenze,” while Theodore Sumberg interprets the play as a call to overthrow the Medici. Not surprisingly, then, the literary critic is apt to insist that students of politics should mind their own business: literary studies should be left to literary critics, political studies to political critics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 32 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1978

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References

* The plot of Mandragola may be briefly summarized. After living abroad most of his life, Callimaco decides to return to his native Florence. Love is his motive—he has heard that Madonna Lucrezia, wife of the aged Messer Nicia Calfucci, is the most beautiful woman in the world. No sooner does he lay eyes on Lucrezia, moreover, than he knows he must have her, for all the superlatives he has heard spoken in her behalf hardly do her justice. Unfortunately, her exceptional virtue, above all her fidelity, stands in his way; and he is too lovesick to know how to exploit the three openings he sees in the door barring him from her bedroom: the stupidity of her husband, the frustrated hope of the couple for children, and the easily compromised virtue of Sostrata, mother of Lucrezia.

In direct contrast to Callimaco, the trickster Ligurio does not suffer from the excesses of love; he knows perfectly well how to get an ill deed done, and is more than willing to engineer the seduction of Lucrezia when he learns that a permanent place at another man's table will be his reward. Following Ligurio's directions, Callimaco poses as a renowned physician. A doctor with a cure for every malady, Callimaco offers to concoct a potion from a mandragola plant which will induce fertility. But since the first man to have intercourse with Lucrezia after she has drunk the potion runs the risk of death, Nicia agrees that he will not be that man. A young vagabond—Callimaco in disguise—is kidnapped and forced to bed down for a night with Lucrezia, whose scruples have been worn down, though not entirely eliminated, by the urgent pleas of her mother and the expert casuistry of Frate Timoteo. As the play ends, everyone is happy: Callimaco has won his prize, Lucrezia has enjoyed the feel of youthful male flesh, Ligurio has gained the meal ticket he covets, Nicia and his mother-in-law await an heir, and the confessor has enriched either his church or his purse by three hundred ducats.

For references to the works of Machiavelli in the Italian, see Tutte le opere, ed. Martelli, M. (Florence, 1971)Google Scholar; for English translations, see Hale, J., The Literary Works of Machiavelli (Oxford, 1961)Google Scholar; and Gilbert, Allan, Machiavelli: The Chief Works, 3 vols. (Durham, N.C., 1965)Google Scholar.

1 Parronchi, Alessandro, “La prima rappresentazione della ‘Mandragola,’“ La Bibliofila, 64 (1962), 37–86Google Scholar; Sumberg, Theodore, “‘La Mandragola’: An Interpretation,” Journal of Politics, 23 (1961), 320–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Hale's introduction to Literary Works for a plea that Machiavelli's plays and letters be treated as works of art rather than as material to be ransacked for political content.

3 Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua, p. 929. It should be noted that some scholars have expressed doubts as to whether the Dialogue was written by Machiavelli; it seems fair to say, however, that so far they have not succeeded in eliminating it from the corpus.

4 Clizia, prologue.

5 Discorso o dialogo, p. 929.

6 When Terence and Plautus borrowed plots from Meander and other Greek dramatists, they borrowed the Athenian setting as well. In truth, however, the setting is so general that it more readily brings to mind the idea of “the city-state” rather than of Athens, or Rome, or any specific city-state.

7 Clizia, prologue.

8 Ibid., II. 4.

9 See Segal, Erich W., Roman Laughter (New York, 1971), pp. 53–56Google Scholar.

10 Possibly Cicero's On the Commonwealth contained a systematic account of the household. We shall never know: the incomplete copy which survives is extremely tattered at precisely the point where these matters would have been considered.

11 Discorsi, III. 6; Mandragola, I. 1.

12 Croce, Benedetto, Elementi di politica. (Bari, 1925), pp. 59–67Google Scholar.

13 Discorsi, I. 26.

14 In Western literature the morality of social roles goes back as far as Homer. See MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics (New York, 1966), chap. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Mandragola I. 1.

16 Clizia, II. 4.

17 Herrick, Marvin, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, 1964) p. 131Google Scholar.

18 Cf. Bergson, Henri, Le rire (Paris, 1940)Google Scholar.

19 Leviathan, chap. 11.

20 Duckworth, George Eckel, The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, 1952), chap. 6Google Scholar.

21 Clizia, prologue.

22 Mandragola, I. 1; 2; II. 4.

23 Poetics 1448a.

24 Mandragola, IV. 1.

25 Ibid., III. 1; III. 10.

26 Ibid., III. 4.

27 Ibid., III. 1.

28 Ibid., III. 11.

29 Ibid., III. 9.

30 Ibid., IV. 6.

31 Ibid., V. 4.

32 Ibid., V. 2. Allan Gilbert's translation is more literal: “I am not used to being made to take fireflies for lanterns.”

33 Clizia, IV, Canzona.

34 Mandragola, IV. 4.

35 Plautus, , The Ghost, in The Rope and Other Plays (Penguin Books, 1964), p. 52Google Scholar.

36 Quoted by Herrick, , Comic Theory, p. 73Google Scholar.

37 Against our proposition that Machiavelli chose the comic genre because it was Machiavellian, it may be argued that the comic genre compelled Machiavelli to sound immoral or Machiavellian. But this counterproposition will not do. In his private correspondence Machiavelli was free to speak of whatever he pleased, and it was adulterous love which was one of his two favorite topics, the other being politics.

38 There are only two references to adultery in the Discorsi, and they do not add up to anything (I, 10; I, 18). “How a State Falls Because of Women,” III, 26, is not concerned with adultery. Rather, its aim is to warn political rulers against the folly of forcibly seizing other men's women.

39 Clizia, I, 1.

40 Ibid., I, 2.

41 Ovid, Amores 1. 9. 1–20Google Scholar.

42 Lettere, 239.

43 Segal, op. cit., gives a systematic and delightful statement of this view.

44 Herrick, Comic Theory, passim. See also Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas, The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1969)Google Scholar, introduction.

45 Il Principe, chap. 15.

46 Segal, Roman Laughter, chap. 5.

47 Mandragola, V. 4–5.

48 Scaglione, Aldo D., Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1963)Google Scholar, convincingly develops this interpretation of Boccaccio.

49 Ibid., p. 81.

50 See, e.g., the stories of the fourth day of the Decameron.

51 Lettere, 239. See also the very beginning of Dell'Arte Della Guerra, where Machiavelli says that Cosimo Rucellai wrote love poetry because he had nothing better to do.

52 Discorsi, II, opening comments.

53 Clizia, prologue.

54 The passage in Clizia comparing the soldier and the lover is pertinent here (I, 2).

55 Herrick, Marvin, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana, 1960), chap. 5Google Scholar.

56 Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens (Boston, 1955), chap. 1Google Scholar; Clizia, I, 2.

57 Rousseau, , Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles, trans. Bloom, A. under the title, Politics and the Arts (Ithaca, 1960), p. 79Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., p. 20.

59 Ibid., pp. 34–35.

60 Du Contrat Social, III, 6; cf. Mattingly, Garrett, “Machiavelli's Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?” The American Scholar, 27 (1958), 482–491Google Scholar.

61 Bloom, , Politics and the Arts, p. 36Google Scholar.

62 Rawson, Elizabeth, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford 1969)Google Scholar.

63 Dell'Arte Della Guerra, beginning of book 1.