Machiavelli (9780674425217) by Celenza Christopher

Author:Celenza, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674416123
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

6

The Comedy of Life

LETTERS AND PLAYS, WIVES AND LOVERS

“Di cosa nasce cosa”—“One thing begets another.” This line appears in Machiavelli’s comic play Mandragola (The Mandrake Root), on which he was working alongside the Discourses. The title refers to a plant that was associated with fertility and appears in the Bible.1 And the comedy shows us another side of Machiavelli, even as it allows insight into the same Machiavelli we know from his other works. Yes, alongside the hardnosed theorist there resided a person of an essentially comic temperament. But that comic temperament emerged from Machiavelli’s appreciation of chance, fortune, individuals, and misunderstanding. The play is by turns funny, scabrous, and by our standards completely—but typically for Machiavelli’s era—politically incorrect.

Here is the basic story. A young Florentine man, Callimaco, has spent twenty years in France. Hearing that there is a marvelous beauty back home in Florence, he is inspired to go see her for himself. He returns, gets a look, and is inflamed with an unquenchable passion for Lucrezia, the virtuous daughter of her formerly not so virtuous mother, Sostrata. Callimaco simply must have her: “I am on fire with such a great desire to see her that I can find no peace.”2 The problem is that she is already married, as it happens, to a rather slow, grumpy lawyer, who is much older than she, named Messer Nicia (“Messer” was an honorific title used to indicate that the person so called had a certain status in Florence—not noble, but very respectable).

Messer Nicia is having problems of his own, since, despite trying, he and Lucrezia have not been able to have a child. A former matchmaker whom Callimaco has befriended, and with whom poor old Nicia was close, has convinced Nicia to take Lucrezia to the baths, in the hope of helping their fertility problem. Callimaco decides to meet them there, he tells his friend Ligurio, since after all di cosa nasce cosa—“one things begets another” and il tempo lo governa—“time is the master.” But then Callimaco comes up with an even better plan, with Ligurio’s aid: Callimaco will pretend to be a doctor with expertise in fertility, since Nicia is so slow that by speaking a few words of Latin to him, Callimaco believes he can pass himself off as a doctor. It works, and the following scheme is set in motion, agreed to by Nicia and helped along by Lucrezia’s mother: Lucrezia will take a special potion. The first man with whom she makes love after taking the potion—so “doctor” Callimaco tells Nicia—will die. But thereafter she will be fertile, and they will conceive a child. Nicia simply must agree to this one-time cuckolding (and to sending a dupe in to make love to his wife, a dupe who will die, he believes), and then all will be well. Of course Callimaco, having concocted this story, is planning to be the man himself, in disguise. He, Ligurio, and—surprise—a corruptible friar, Fra Timoteo, Lucrezia’s confessor, hatch an elaborate scheme of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.