Theater and its Social Uses. Machiavelli's Mandragola and the Spectacle of Infamy [*].

Long seen as a play that celebrates the new-found freedom of its female protagonist, Mandragola may in fact question the very possibility of theatrical "liberation." Drawing on the foundational myth central to Renaissance thinking about theater, the abduction of the Sabine women, this essay shows how Machiavelli endeavored to make his play a discomfitting experience for characters and audience alike. This conception of comedy as social trap both challenged humanistic notions of the ideal relationship between theater and the city, and accentuated the surveillant norms inherent in humanists' understanding of the role of the stage in society.

As we have learned from the work of Hans Baron, Stephanie Jed, and others, the rape of Lucretia served as a founding myth not only for the Roman republic, but for a humanistic discourse that professed to return to the politics of republican Rome. The extensive references to Lucretia in the literature of the European Renaissance and the numerous portraits of her suicide would seem to bear out the assumption that the violated body of the chaste wife served as a catalyst for the "rising up" of men of letters against tyranny. In this essay, I want to turn to another less noted, but certainly no less known, rape in Roman history, one that proved to be equally central to the shaping not only of political events but of theatrical ones: the rape of the Sabine women. [1] Central to politics, because it procured through "necessary violence" -- the phrase is that of Virgilio Malvezzi, from his seventeenth-century treatise entitled Romolo -- the stability and continuity of the Roman state. [2] Central to theater, because the rape occurred at a spectaculum, glossed by Livy as a ludus or athletic game, glossed by Ovid as a play, complete with actors and musicians. [3]

And it is Ovid's detailed account of the Sabine women's abduction at Rome's first theater that I will use as a point of departure in suggesting the importance of the rape of the Sabines for thinking about Renaissance theater. As I argue in the following pages, one of the most celebrated of Italian comedies, Niccolo Machiavelli's Mandragola (1518), offers us the occasion to consider the relevance of Ovid for Italian drama and its placement in sixteenth-century society. While Ronald Martinez has argued that Machiavelli's play ironically reverses Lucretia's rape and its effects by giving us a Madonna Lucrezia who succumbs willingly to her lover, I propose that we see that other, earlier rape as an equally formative if less obvious subtext. [4] Such a connection between Ovid and Machiavelli will in turn allow me to propose a rather different reading from that which most commentators on the play have elaborated. This elaboration has tended to minimize one of the more chilling moments in Mandragola, articulated b y the parasite and one-time matchmaker ("sensale") Ligurio. Engineer of a plot designed to get the married Lucrezia into bed with young Callimaco, who heard of Madonna Lucrezia's beauty as far away as France, Ligurio emerges early in the play as a figure keenly aware of the various uses which such an affair might serve. Lucrezia and her husband have long wanted a son and Lucrezia's mother a grandson; the cooperative Fra Timoteo needs money in an age of declining faith; Ligurio presumably needs a job. But the use of which Ligurio speaks in the play's fourth act, as he and his lovesick client are making final plans for the disguised Callimaco's midnight venture into Lucrezia's bedroom - a venture which has been agreed to by Lucrezia's stupid husband, Nicia, Lucrezia's mother, and with great reluctance, Lucrezia herself -- seems to extend beyond these immediate "communal" needs into a sphere of extended and subtle control.

In this crucial scene between parasite and client, Callimaco expresses nervous hesitation about not only the elaborate plan Ligurio has devised, but the possibility of its success. As he confronts the waffling Callimaco, Ligurio advises him to do something striking. With an eye to a long-term arrangement that Callimaco has nor even imagined, Ligurio suggests that what he gains in this one night, when he makes love with Lucrezia to "drain" from her the poison of the mandrake which she ingested to become fertile, he might keep forever. Following this absurd ritual, Callimaco has simply to tell Lucrezia about the deception and inform her of his love. More sinisterly, he should then remind her that "without suffering infamy, she can be your friend, and at the great price of her honor, your enemy." [5] With this, it will be "impossible," Ligurio concludes, that Lucrezia will not want to add to this first evening 6 many others in turn. [6] The wide-eyed Callimaco can only respond, "Do you really think so?" [7] Ligurio reaffirms his convictions in such a ploy, and the two set out to find their friends and begin their seige on Lucrezia's bed. [8]

That Lucrezia does, apparently, "agree" to a longstanding affair with Callimaco seems to be the message not only of Callimaco's rapturous monologue the morning after, but of the ending of the play itself, when Lucrezia takes center-stage to announce to Nicia that she wishes to take "Doctor" Callimaco, now in the role of physician rather than sacrificial offering, as her friend. An ardent and apparently naive lover, Callimaco is by all accounts unlikely to turn into the hardened Ligurio and attempt to blackmail his esteemed lady. Ligurio's advice, that is, seems to constitute a road not taken, or better, a road deemed unnecessary to take, given what Callimaco recites as Lucrezia's capitulation: "I take you as my lord, my patron and my guide: you will be my father and my protector, and I will give you everything I have." [9] Yet as this essay will go on to suggest, the status of Ligurio's advice is left purposefully obscure in a play that may not end in as carnivalesque a mode as some critics have suggested. O ther readers have been disturbed by the relative somberness with which Mandragola closes, as Fra Timoteo rushes the participants off into the church and tells us not to wait, since we won't see the players again. Hence Richard Andrews wryly comments, "if we are expected to rejoice with [Lucrezia], Machiavelli has been inefficient about making the fact clear on paper." [10] It is also the case that shortly before repeating for us Lucrezia's fervent response, Callimaco tersely echoes Ligurio's phrase: he says that he informed Lucrezia that he and she will be able to live happily together "sanza infamia alcuna" until Nicia dies. And Machiavelli's surely deliberate echoes of both Livy's and Ovid's account of Lucretia's rape as well as of a Boccaccian novella about fooling a chaste wife into accepting a persistant lover (3.6) give Ligurio's lines a crucial intertextual function in the play. Sextus Tarquinius threatens to stain Lucretia's "fama" by staging a spectacle of her adultery, and Boccaccio's Ricciardo thre atens the virtuous Catella "that her honor and good name will be ruined" if she cries out against him for help: both women capitulate to the threats. [11] What does it mean that Machiavelli has taken these lines threatening to ruin a woman's reputation, ever dependent on public perception, and placed them in the mouth not of his waffling Petrarchan lover but of the director of every spectacle we encounter in Mandragola?

In dividing what in both Boccaccio and the classical sources for the rape of Lucretia is a single character -- the rapist as capocomico (stage director) -- into two characters -- rapist and capocomico -- Machiavelli returns us to the tale of Lucretia by way of the clever Romulus, who orchestrates for his love-hungry men the spectacle in which they can seize the women they desire. He thereby creates a figure who is untouched by the lust that assails the would-be lovers and therefore one who can manipulate the erotic sentiments he himself does not purportedly feel. This is a Romulus, moreover, who insures, as we will see, that the "innocent" Sabines are subject not to their own desires but to what the classical texts Machiavelli knew so well posit as communal necessity: the very utilitas for which the institutions founded by the mythical Romulus were praised. Whether Renaissance theater might also serve useful ends was at the heart of reflections on the stage during Machiavelli's lifetime, reflections in which Machiavelli was fully engaged. Frequenter of the discussions in Bernardo Rucellai's Orti Oricellari, fascinated with the legacy of Aristophanes and Terence as his early (lost) play Le Maschere and his translation of the Andria suggest, intrigued by the vernacular literary forms that dominated sixteenth-century Florence, and probable author of the "Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua," which argues that the goal of drama is to allow men to "enjoy the useful example hidden therein," [12] Machiavelli was long preoccupied with the place of cultural productions in the state. [13]

Thus while in their recent collection of essays on Machiavelli and literature, Albert Ascoli and Victoria Kahn suggest that "literature represents all that Machiavelli opposes in his intellectual and political life," it is not entirely clear that Mandragola is as completely removed from "intellectual and political life" as one might assume (9). [14] Rather, as I will suggest in the following pages, Ligurio's profoundly strategic engagement in the play allows an opportunity to glimpse Machiavelli's own deliberations as to how he might channel "his useless thoughts" (questi vani pensieri) to which he alludes in the Prologo into something of potential value. Even if Ligurio's advice to Callimaco about blackmail constitutes a road not taken -- a statement which, as this essay will make clear, must always remain on the level of an hypothesis -- it must be argued that it is a road with which Machiavelli seriously flirts. For in emerging as the often ruthless master of spectacles, Ligurio also emerges as the princi ple disseminator and withholder of knowledge generated by those spectacles. To threaten to use or not to use such knowledge places the capocomico himself in a privileged relationship to those who have been part of the very spectacles he has commandeered.

This potentially Machiavellian double thus affords us the opportunity to consider the deeply ambivalent place of Machiavelli in Renaissance cultural history. The following consideration of Ligurio's centrality will employ Ovid's tale of spectacle, abduction, and foundational myths to delineate, first, how Machiavelli's contemporaries were anxious to suppress the violent and erotic implications of Ovid's formative account even as they appropriated its political usefulness, and, secondly, how Mandragola can be seen as a response to the idealizing fictions told about Renaissance theater. [15] I will use Ovid not so much as a definitive source for Machiavelli (although Machiavelli's lengthy engagement with the exiled imperial poet has been amply attested) [16] but as an organizing trope for the reading that follows. For as will shortly be seen, Ovid has not one version of the dynamics of the Roman stage but two, both of them critical for understanding the contested place of theater in Italian Renaissance cultura l life. Ovid's passage from the Ars amatoria will thus enable us to illuminate the troubled relationship between theater and other social and political institutions in Machiavelli's Florence and to understand the significance of Ligurio's sinister aside to Callimaco.

HUMANISM AND THEATRICAL EROS 

Theater history was in its infancy during the early Renaissance, suggestively dubbed by Franco Ruffini as a time when the idea of theater outpaced the actual practices of theater. In the Quattrocento treatises of Leon Battista Alberti, Pellegrino Prisciano, Cesare Cesariano, and others, we encounter the period's first attempts to create an historical context for the scanty but suggestive passages on amphitheaters in Vitruvius as well as for the remains of Roman theaters found throughout the Italian peninsula. Following Alberti's lead, this history takes as its starting point the moment elaborated in both Livy and Ovid, the rape of the Sabine women. Livy treats the rape with far more seriousness than Ovid, claiming only that the abduction took place at a spectaculum organized by Romulus. Ovid, however, presents this spectacle as Rome's first stage-play, exclaiming that it was Romulus himself who constructed Rome's earliest theater, albeit a primitive one: "It was you, Romulus, who first stole the show when you staged the Sabine rape to console your lonely men." Ovid continues to elaborate by giving us a portrait of this earliest and most rustic of stages: "There were no marble theaters then, no tented awnings, no platform red with saffron spray. Then branches from the wooded Palatine were simply laid to set a simple stage." [17]

In these few lines the stage's importance for the bene comune was established for a number of Renaissance writers anxious to vindicate theater's importance to society after centuries of neglect. In the crucial eighth book to his De re aedificatoria, the first work to reassert the importance of the architect Vitruvius for the Renaissance city, Leon Battista Alberti cites Ovid's passage in full, as does the Ferrarese dramaturge Pellegrino Prisciano in his unpublished Spectaculum of 1490. Both authors preface the Ovidian passage with glowing references to theater's vital contributions to men's social and political welfare. Hence Prisciano states that "those ancient and wisest of Greeks were the first, and after them the Italians, to institute theaters in their cities, to provide not only recreation and pleasure to their people, but a good deal of profit [utilitate] to their states." [18] Such a paean to Romulus's theater is in large part consistent with the praises Romulus received from others during the Renais sance for his skills as an effective political leader. Petrarch championed his vi et ingenio in fashioning a spectacle that would ultimately guarantee matrimony and the continuation of the Roman state; Giovanni Pontano offers Romulus as a primary example of prudence, given that "the result [of the abduction] was an empire of such magnitude." [19] And Machiavelli, while not explicitly citing the rape, singles out this ruthless leader for his headstrongness and unerring devotion to the foundation of a stable and well-ordered society. [20]

There is, however, far more in Ovid than the celebration of Romulus's exemplary actions that we find in Livy. For if Livy unconditionally subordinates eros and the lives of female witnesses at a spectaculum to the state, Ovid's account in the Ars amatoria, the work that supposedly had him exiled from Augustus's Rome, is far more sardonic, as it questions the degree to which eros can be subordinated to a political program. In fact, Ovid arguably separates what he sees as theater's undeniable engagement in seductive tactics, and its real or potential usefulness to a state. [21] In his account of Romulus, for example, he presents the Roman men as far more "love-sick" than eager to perform glorious and prudent deeds for the future of Rome. More importantly, he situates the rape itself within an account of contemporary imperial theater: a theater which Augustus had recently taken steps to ensure would uphold the moral goals of his regime. Advising young men hopeful of finding willing maidens very different from t he recalcitrant Sabines, Ovid suggests that the theater is the very best place to begin: "Here you will find women to your taste: one for a moment's dalliance, another to fondle and caress, another to have all for your own" (1.90-92). In a telling inversion of one of Virgil's most notable similes, Ovid compares the women who rush to the amphitheaters of Augustus's day to ants. Shortly thereafter he utters what will become one of the most frequently-quoted lines of the Ars amatoria: women of imperial Rome come to the theater not only "to see but to be seen." [22] Thus does Ovid contrast this image of shrewd female spectators who solicit men's gaze with another image from an earlier moment in Roman history, the era of Romulus with its innocent and unsuspecting Sabine maidens. [23]

Ovid's texts circulated widely in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the Ars amatoria, with its racey details about seducing young women in Rome's public places, was no exception. The poem was translated into Italian several times in the course of the Trecento, and the often elaborate commentaries reveal both an anxiety and fascination with the erotically-charged atmosphere of Augustan Rome. It is clear that at least one commentator, thought by some scholars to be Giovanni Boccaccio, takes great delight in rendering Ovid pertinent for his own day. In response to the despair he imagines from one downtrodden reader who laments that Rome's theaters are no more -- "These places don't exist anymore, and those days are gone; where shall I go?" -- he replies, "It's an easy thing to find these very same places today. Our churches are Rome's temples; the ones with famous preachers always draw women, and not a few come not to hear sermons, but to see and to be seen." He goes on to list parties, public acts of p enitence, jousts, and other such public gatherings as occasions that will "offer you as much as your heart might desire" and concludes that the fanciful reader has no need to ask for another Rome: it is still present in "our most excellent and renowned city." [24] Thus although theater per se did not exist in fourteenth-century Italy, its dynamics are to be found in a number of public sites, most notably the church, where women go to "see and be seen." And tellingly, it is this phrase that returns in the Quattrocento treatises alluded to a moment ago -- treatises that attempt to elevate theater as a potentially useful institution, and that accordingly placed Ovid's phrase about theater's erotics into a much different setting.

For if the vernacular translator of the Ars amatoria fully appreciates Ovid's clever comments on the seductive potential of public gatherings, Alberti and the humanist writers who followed him did not. While Ovid's description of Romulus's stage in effect opens Alberti's and Prisciano's discussion of the theater, it is little more than a bit of antiquarian lore in treatises aiming to resurrect the glories of the classical stage. At the same time, Ovid is not left entirely behind. In a move that suggests a utopian vision at work in Quattrocento conceptions of theatrical and urban space, Alberti, Prisciano, Filarete and others go on to characterize their modern theaters in terms that come directly from Ovid's account. Obliquely returning to Ovid's observation about Roman women of the imperial age, Prisciano defines theater as a place where "without any impediment whatsoever one could see and could also be seen," while Filarete suggests that men should sit on the steps, and women near the windows, so that they could "see outside and be seen." [25] In perhaps the most interesting move of all, Alberti, a page before he characterizes his ideal theater as a place of openings or "aperture," declares that the windows in a house should be built "in such a way so that whoever is inside can be seen and see in turn." [26] If Romulus's primitive stage is reduced to a convenient starting point for the history of the stage, Ovid's phrase regarding the immodest Roman women of his own day who go to theater "to see and to be seen" becomes one of the crucial tenets of the theatrical architecture of humanism -- an architecture which, at least for Alberti, potentially transforms even the private space of the household into a public theater, as citizens willingly perform for one another.

Although Alberti's discussion of theater constitutes only one chapter from his De re aedificatoria, theatrical metaphors structure the very essence of Alberti's city and the humanist vision that underlay it, as suggested by the description of the theater as nothing other than "una piazza circondata da gradinate" -- a piazza with steps. [27] This is a vision that trusts in the civic space or open piazza as a place that unproblematically reveals the individual to a public audience. Alberti, of course, was one of the principal creators of such an architecture, one that would facilitate what William Wesrfall has called "conspicuous examples of public morality." [28] Designer of the innovative urban renewal project for the ambitious pope Nicolas V, Alberti strove to fashion stately and, open architectural spaces in which a political actor and his spectators might be framed, so serving as exemplary models of leaders and citizens alike who have nothing to conceal. The portico or loggia central to Alberti's various building projects transforms public spaces into theaters in which the ideal citizen constantly and willingly reveals himself. Indeed, Alberti's discussion of the cittadino hinges on the necessary integrity of the public figure as stated nowhere more clearly than in his well-known dialogue, Della famiglia, where he argues, "To gain fame, we must have virtue; to obtain virtue we must wish to be, not appear to be, what we want others to think we are" (1969a, 145). Having the privilege of looking goes hand in hand with the privilege of being seen, and the ideal citizen provides fellow citizens with a spectacle of morality that will not shame. The public space rather functions to reveal what is best and most memorable about men's actions: "Glory springs up in public squares; reputation is nourished by the voice and judgments of many persons of honor, and in the midst of people. Fame flees from all solitary and private spots to dwell gladly in the arena, where crowds are gathered and celebrity is found; there the n ame is bright and luminous of one who with hard sweat and assiduous toil for noble ends has projected himself up out of silence, darkness, ignorance, and vice" (1969a, 178). [29]

Such musings on spaces where fame finds recognition form part of Alberti's imagining on what the perfect city should be like; and as scholars from Eugenio Garin through Anthony Grafton have argued, Alberti did not always endorse such a view of urban space in his other writings, many of which, like Momus, are overtly satirical. [30] At the same time, his theoretical writings such as Libri della famiglia or De re aedificatoria had enormous influence thoughout northern and central Italy. The images of urban space which they convey are largely free of the dynamics found in Ovid's Ars amatoria and its commentary tradition, to the extent that they could be said to be almost completely de-eroticized. Hence Alberti's recommendation that a good housewife reveal herself to her neighbors as "prudente" and dignified by standing in her doorway: "On a few occasions, in order to teach her a certain air of authority and to have her appear as she should in public, I made her open our own door and go outside practicing self-r estraint and grave demeanor. This led our neighbors to observe her air of discretion and to praise her, which increased the respect of our own servants" (1969a, 229). [31] So speaks the elderly and authoritative Giannozzo from Della famiglia, who goes on to observe that virtue is not recognized unless it is made manifest through some act [32] -- a "manifestation" that can only happen within the public spaces that Alberti details in his later De re aedificatoria and alludes to here in his musings on patricians' wives standing magisterially in the doorways to their homes. For Alberti, the spectacle of a modest woman on the threshold of the public space carries with it nothing challenging or potentially subversive. The harmonious configuration of order and social structure which the occasional public appearance of a citizen's wife reveals, reminiscent of the paintings of Domenico Ghirlandaio in Santa Maria Novella showing contemporary Florentine women serenely observing their beholders, is as far from Ovid's ero tically-charged theater as can be imagined. [33]

Such, too, may be said to be the case with the scenic apparatuses for the first performances of comedy in northern Italy, perhaps based on a set of panels which are well-known to historians of Renaissance theater. These are the so-called Baltimore, Berlin, and Urbino panels, which give us detailed city-scapes of classical, urban scenery. The Urbino panel has even been suggested as a likely "candidate" for the backdrop of Mandragola, if, as several notable scholars have argued, the play was indeed performed at the wedding festivities for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici in September, 1518. [34] Richard Krautheimer, who originally proposed a connection between the panels and Italian theater, has since written a disclaimer, and the status of the panels as a prelude to or imitation of Renaissance scenic design remains highly nebulous. Of interest here, however, is not the Urbino panel per se, but the sum total of the classicizing effects in all three panels, among which one must surely count the miniature vers ion of the Coliseum from the Baltimore painting. These backdrops and buildings clearly have nothing to do with the rape of the Sabines or with Romulus, even less with the dynamics of urban space as Ovid evokes them in his contemporary Rome. But this, perhaps, is precisely the point, insofar as the obvious allusions to Rome and Roman settings continue to evoke the de-eroticized contexts of an Alberti who, as Krautheimer more recently suggests, might be the genius loci of the panels. [35] Machiavelli in fact alludes in the prologue to Mandragola to such a generic urban backdrop for his play: "Look at the scene that now spreads out before you: today this is your Florence; another time, it will be Rome or Pisa." [36] And to this extent, as Martinez suggests, one might consider Mandragola as an ironic counterpoint to the "conspicuously classicizing backdrop for [Machiavelli's] bourgeois comedy" -- a comedy that lets eros back in to the framework of Renaissance theater, as Martinez and others have remarked (1983, 9 ).

Their remarks in turn would seem to place Mandragola within the context of Ovid's contemporary Rome, with its open acknowledgments of women "seeing and being seen," acutely conscious of the seductive opportunities theater offers. Such would appear to be implicit in another moment from Machiavelli's prologue, in which the narrator who has just referred to the setting reveals his hope that the female spectators (spettatrici) will be as "ingannate" as Madonna Lucrezia herself. This inganno has been intrepreted as the product of Madonna Lucrezia's knowing complicity with her persistant lover, Callimaco -- a complicity that enables her to manifest the astuzia and sagezza that are the acclaimed virtues of the Machiavellian hero. In one of the most influential readings of Mandragola to date, Giulio Ferroni argues that the real personification of Machiavellian virtu in the play is not the lover and would-be "prince" Callimaco, who finally succeeds in winning his lady, but Lucrezia herself. [37] Such interpretations depend heavily on the play's final two scenes, in which Lucrezia speaks more lines than anywhere else. Rather than crying out against the trickster Callimaco -- who has gotten into Lucrezia's bed with the help of her dim-witted husband, Nicia, her confessor Frate Timoteo, her mother, Sostrata, and (unbeknownst to Lucrezia), the parasite Ligurio -- Lucrezia agrees to preserve his secret from her husband. She thus allows the lie that has been at the heart of the play, the supposed sacrifice of the young man doomed to sleep with her and ingest the poison of the mandrake, to be perpetuated after the play is theoretically over. Lucrezia's reaction to her violation, at a spectacle engineered by the men of the play, is hardly the one recounted in Ovid's pathetic similes describing the Sabine women. Her closing line to the naive Nicia about Callimaco ("I hold him very dear, and would like him to be our friend") [38] suggests that she has turned the erotic dynamics of Callimaco's theater to her own advantage -- even, in Martinez's account, effecting the transmission of phallic power from Callimaco to herself (1983, 33).

For Lucrezia to end the play in control of its theatrical dynamics is to understand Mandragola as a rejection of the humanist idealization of the stage. It more generally confirms comedy as a genre that willfully introduces into public space the potentially insatiable demands of the "private," hence challenging the possibility of theater's utility, and acknowledging the volatility that is at the heart of Ovid's reflections on the stage. It also signals for Ferroni and Martinez a precipitous arrangement that allows the woman to land on top: to play the "cock," as Nicia, struck by Lucrezia's marvellous "rejuvenation," [39] calls his wife. Such a prioritizing of the volatile feminine may be allegorized, as it is by Ferroni, as Machiavellian acortezza, the adjective used to describe Lucrezia early in the play ("una donna accorta"). But whether or not we allegorize Lucrezia so as to make her conform to Machiavelli's political writings, it is clear on these readings that Machiavelli would persuade us to Ovid's vie w of Augustan theater: one in which women can shape the spectacle to conform to their own desires once they learn its rules. In what would be a distinctively unsettling commentary on the architecture of humanism, theater becomes the mechanism through which woman's private "needs" can be articulated -- a theater into which Madonna Lucrezia has been insistently drawn, and to which she has finally capitulated, to her advantage and delight.

Does, then, Mandragola exist primarily to chart a nightmare from which -- as suggested by the contemporary reference to the Turkish peril in a scene where Fra Timoteo chats with an anxious and unnamed widow -- Florence had yet to awaken in 1518? Such are the implications of readings that take the ending of Mandragola as indicative of Lucrezia's triumph in a corrupt, hopelessly effeminized society. Yet as persuasive as such interpretations of the play may be, they largely fail to take stock of the power of the play's most cunning trickster, Ligurio, in bringing some spectacles into being and suppressing others. While Lucrezia has much to say in the play's final scene, Ligurio himself is uncharacteristically quiet. Indeed, we seem to witness a reversal of roles, as the parasite fades into silence and the formerly-chaste wife takes center stage. At the same time, if Lucrezia is to be in full control, it is notable that Ligurio is the only character onstage to whom she has never talked, and presumably, never bee n introduced. It is striking too that the arrangements for Ligurio's inclusion in the play's "happy ending" are made entirely by her husband. "I want Callimaco and Ligurio to stay with us today to dine with us," [40] Nicia announces, and a moment later, he extends this limited invitation into a long-term arrangement that Ligurio was the first to propose: "And I want to give them the keys to the ground floor room off of the loggia, so that they can return here at their convenience, since they have no women in their own homes and live like beasts." [41] Has Ligurio, indeed, faded in importance next to the reigning "cock" of play's end? Or has he insinuated himself into the very fabric of the play's ending in such a way that he no longer needs to speak in order to call attention to his ongoing orchestration of the Mandragolds events?

The next section will address these questions by returning to Romulus's more brutal, clearly more misogynistic, recipe for theater. Humanism may well have suppressed the dynamics of a stage that allows women specular control, and Machiavelli's challenges to the tenets of civic humanism are well-known. But it is by no means certain that Mandragola liberates its spettatrici, Lucrezia and female audience alike, from servitude to a theatrical violence explicit on Romulus's stage and arguably implicit in Alberti's reformulation of that stage. As the next section will suggest, the extent to which theater can be read as "useful" in Machiavelli's Florence, during a "tristo tempo" when the narrator of Mandragola laments that he can indulge only in "questi vani pensieri," (these useless thoughts) becomes an index of Machiavelli's own conflicted sentiments regarding theater's and his own utility to Florence in 1518. Precisely because of this conflict, it is not entirely clear that Machiavelli is able to give his theate r over to the anarchy of erotic sentiment, women's or men's. Truer than might be realized to his humanist predecessors, he finds in the insistent specularity which public theater enables a means for legislating and divulging private behaviors.

THEATER AS SOCIAL TRAP

At first glance, it would seem that Callimaco is eminently disposed to take on the theater of Romulus. The play opens with Callimaco paralyzed by his love for the proud and chaste -- and as of yet, unseen -- Lucrezia. So proud and so in command of her own desires is Madonna Lucrezia that the Ligurio who comes to Callimaco's aid describes her as fit to govern a kingdom. [42] Ligurio's remarks about Lucrezia's potentially domineering character are verified, as it were, a few scenes later when the audience learns that Lucrezia is at least adept at governing Nicia. As he leaves the house to search out "Dottore" Callimaco, he hurls at her these rebukes: "I've done everything the way you wanted; now it's time for you to do things the way I want." [43] Nicia, to be sure, is presented throughout the play as the foolish and impotent husband who has never been outside of Florence and so compares the Arno to the sea, has his mouth stuffed with wax by a deliberately cruel Ligurio when they are out to find a young man who will sleep with the poisonous Lucrezia, and excitedly "feels how things are going" in the bedroom between Lucrezia and Callimaco. But in emerging steadily throughout the play as a woman of "astuzia," as she is labelled in the prologue, as someone who commands the men around her from the heartsick Callimaco to the dottering Nicia, Lucrezia represents a potential threat to what Machiavelli regarded throughout his life as a necessarily vigorous state grounded in male virtu. [44] Omnipresent in Machiavelli's prose, the word is difficult to translate with exactness, although its etymological link with the Latin vir (male) can elucidate in what way prowess is for Machiavelli a concept that is largely gender-based.

It is perhaps not surprising then that given Lucrezia's superior stature in most of the play -- one enhanced by the fact that while we so rarely see her until the final scene, we hear so much about her -- it is necessary that someone put her in her place. This, perhaps, or so one gathers from an early dialogue between Callimaco and Ligurio, will be Callimaco himself, who declares that in the event that Lucrezia doesn't concede instantly to his demands, he will rape her: he will "play that bestial, cruel, nefarious role." [45] But such physical violence is rejected in a play that may come to depend on a different form of violence altogether. Already in control of the actions of his client, Ligurio does not sanction this virile desire, but replies with lines that underscore the necessity of patience: "stifle this impulse," [46] he commands him, thereby preventing the theater of Romulus from immediately recurring. Ligurio's plan involves something very different: the unfolding of an elaborate spectacle that wil l involve an entire community -- priest, mother-in-law, lover, and husband -- against a proud woman of "astuzia," and, moreover, with that proud woman's consent.

For much of Mandragola is devoted to the meticulous shaping of Lucrezia's volonta, as the series of theatrical ploys that Ligurio engineers places her in the compromising position of which Ligurio alone seems to be aware. To this extent, the climax of the play occurs at its very center when after a thoroughly specious argument by Lucrezia's confessor, Fra Timoteo, regarding the supposed separation of body and soul -- "as for the act, that it is a sin, this is a fiction, because it is the will that sins, not the body" [47] -- Lucrezia consents to sleep with the man who will absorb the poisonous effects of the mandrake, even as she predicts in turn her own death: "I am content, but I don't believe that I will live to see tomorrow." [48] When, several scenes later, Ligurio counsels Callimaco to blackmail this very wealthy woman, in a line we have already seen, he is in effect reminding Lucrezia -- and us -- that she has expressed her approval, and that she is therefore subject to the spectacle of infamy before which another Lucretia, the Roman one, capitulated.

To this extent, Machiavelli is careful not to make the midnight events which transpire in Lucrezia's bedroom sound like a rape. Again it is Ligurio who orchestrates the turn the play will take when he conceives of the elaborate ritual shortly after Callimaco wishes he could "pigliare" Lucrezia by force. For at the heart of this ritual is not only the consent which Lucrezia gives, but her movement from the private space of the home into the public realm of theater. The play hence evolves as a commentary on the vulnerability of chaste women to the public spaces which it has been Lucrezia's efforts throughout her married life to avoid. [49] As we learn in the first scene from the despairing Callimaco, Lucrezia has no relatives who might draw her to the dances and parties where young women go to entertain themselves; she refuses to condone the presence of anyone around her who might serve as a conduit for a lover's affections such as a servant or a maid -- with the result that there is no place for corruption to enter, [50] Callimaco pessimistically concludes. One scene later, Nicia intimates that it will be virtually impossible to persuade Lucrezia to travel to the baths where she might enjoy the effects of waters that could make her fertile (1.2, 64). In act 3 he observes that Lucrezia long ago stopped going to the church to make vows because of the unwelcome attention she was receiving from the friars. [51] Yet the Mandragola is devoted to bringing Lucrezia progressively within the public eye of the play. First her urine is presented, with much fanfare, for inspection by a Callimaco masquerading as a learned physician. Next she is led unwillingly to the church that she has steadfastly avoided and where she will utter the lines that compromise her chastity to Fra Timoteo. Finally, she has her very mode of "iacitura" described for us in detail by her enthusiastic husband -- as well, supposedly, as her unconditional consent to Callimaco's liaison. When Lucrezia thus emerges in the final scene to instruct Nicia how m uch money to pay the priest, she has been fully subjected to the hazardous public space which it had been her greatest virtue, following Ferroni's argument, to avoid.

But whether this is a subjection of Sabine or Augustan cast is the question that Ligurio's presence in the play and his line about infamia force us to question. To those who would argue that the final scene culminates the carnivalesque fanfare that has dominated so much of the play, from the rigorous disregard for "official" hierarchies and social practices emblematic in Fra Timoreo's use of the confessional to convince Lucrezia to commit adultery, to the raucous parade in disguise by Timoteo, Ligurio, and Nicia to find the sacrifical garzonaccio, it is important to respond that the liberatory modes of carnival are rather suppressed throughout a play that is dominated, as Jackson Cope has shown, by an insistence on secrecy. Comic space for Machiavelli's characters can be an intensely discomfitting space, as they try desperately to conceal their actions from others. In Machiavelli's later comedy, Clizia, the elderly Nicomaco expresses his deep sense of shame [52] after suffering through an elaborate bed-trick planned by his wife to reveal his lust for his young ward; his servant Damone consoles him saying he will go to the piazza and the marketplace to try to cover up the story as much as he can. [53] In Mandragola, Nicia has what he believes to be a more pragmatic reason for keeping the goings-on in his household from the gossip mill: he hopes that secrecy will shroud the crime he is about to help commit so that he wont have to come before the Otto of Florence and be apprehended for the death of the young man who will absorb the powerful effects of the poisonous mandrake.54 Callimaco in turn warns his servant to abide by silence. Withholding secrets from others during chance encounters in the piazza ed in mercato is an attempt to shield oneself from the powerful onslaught of other peoples malicious talk u talk which, as Callimaco pointedly notes, has consequences: his goods, his honor, and his life are at stake should the trick involving Lucrezia be revealed.

Such concern with onore and concealing potentially compromising information from others can be found in other Renaissance comedies that lack an unambiguously happy ending in which long-lost relatives are revealed and young lovers are joyously brought together. As Cope observes, the works of Ruzante and Machiavelli lack clear denouements, insofar as they involve secrets to be kept in perpetuity (101), often involving and beseeching the enforced collusion in secrecy of the audience. What we, the viewers, agree to silence is our awareness that events at the end are not closed back in a great circle that creates a renewed social harmony but open onto vistas of disruption and deception that belie the ludic ritualized release and restoration that have been the historic seedbed and pattern of New Comedy (5). In this description of a legacy that arguably constitutes a counter-genre to works that revived New Comedy u Ariostos comedies, Bibbienas La Calandria, Shakespeares early plays u Cope recognizes a ch allenge to carnivalesque merriment that engages an entire community and wreaks no permanent damage. As such, it offers a critical way of setting Machiavelli in relationship to the generic tradition he self-consciously revises.

"Enforced collusion" may well be the appropriate term for this exchange, which hovers between the dismissive and the malicious. Even as the prologue offers us the presumably expansive vista of a Florentine piazza, [61] with a church that may be Santissima Annunziata in the background, [62] it seeks to constrain what is said and seen within that piazza. If this is a peripheral moment in the prologue, however, it has numerous echoes in the play itself, all connected in one way or another to Ligurio. The threat to Lucrezia's good name is the most pernicious, particularly given women's inability to protect themselves from defamation (as a telling remark in Castiglione's Cortegiano attests: Bibbiena declares at the end of book 2 that "dissolute life in us [men] is not a vice, or fault, or disgrace, while in women it means such utter opprobrium and shame that any woman of whom ill is once spoken [quella di chi una volta si parla male] is disgraced forever, whether what is said be calumny or not"). [63] But Lucrezi a's is not the only name that threatens to be shamed in the course of events, suggesting that Ligurio attempts to subject all of his characters to the vulnerable posture of the early modern woman.

At the same time, to remain within Copes largely generic paradigm is to fail to see how the social and political questions about theaters utility might be addressed. The key word in Cope's passage is one he does not take up, enforced collusion. Similarly, the character in Mandragola who is in charge of enforcing collusion and whose raison d'etre is to work beneath the surface in a manner that resists the communal openness of new comedy and Florentine life alike goes largely unremarked. For as his comment to Callimaco about blackmailing Lucrezia suggests, Ligurio is the proponent of the deferred spectacle. He thus generates a pervasive anxiety that if something is exposed in the public space, the community will not diffuse it in carnivalesque revelry. The discomfitting nature of Mandragola's comic space is not simply generic, as Cope might argue, but the product of a single figure whose prominence is foreshadowed in the prologue. The comedy is introduced by a narrator who starts by describing the setting as Florence and the characters as perhaps stock social types [56] and then seeks to excuse himself for stooping to material that is unworthy in its frivolity, particularly for a man who wishes to appear "saggio e grave" (57). Following this, however, he invokes the "virtue" of the present age as one of condemning others, and suggests that if anyone should speak poorly of his play he will be sure to take him on. He too knows how to speak badly of others; [57] in fact, it was among his first talents. [58] Never one to shrink before authority -- "non istima persona" -- the narrator threatens to use his "arte" to malign any one who tries to "threaten or intimidate him" [59] even as he appears to dismiss that threat: "but let whomever wishes speak evil [of the play]." [60]

Central to the conspiracy in which Lucrezia is trapped is Fra Timoteo, who is enlisted to persuade Lucrezia that going to bed with a stranger will not, in fact, constitute a mortal sin. Yet before Fra Timoteo is dragged into the plot by Ligurio, Ligurio must first test him to see if he will comply. The story that Ligurio weaves for him brings a character we never see in the play, a relative of Nicia's named Cammillo Calfucci, directly into the ongoing events. Referring directly to the need for utmost secrecy -- Ligurio suggests that Fra Timoteo speak quietly, lest he want the entire "piazza" to hear of the affair [64] -- he broaches the matter at hand: "I don't know if you're familiar with Cammillo Calfucci, nephew of this gentleman here," [65] to which Fra Timoteo responds that he is. Referring to Calfucci's recent trip to France, [66] Ligurio goes on to say that he left one of his marriageable daughters, "whose name we don't need to mention," in a convent where she has become pregnant, either through the n uns' inattention or the girl's own foolishness. [67] Ligurio professes an interest in taking care of the problem with prudence so that the family will not be dishonored. [68] Nicia himself, Ligurio goes on, has pledged three hundred ducats out of "vergogna" (prompting from the outraged Nicia the muted aside, "Che chiacchiera!"). Fra Timoteo will be drafted to play a part in this fiction as well: he will persuade the Abbess to give a potion to the girl that will cause her to abort. Such a "trick" -- for which Fra Timoteo will be handsomely paid the three hundred ducats -- will have multiple benefits: "you can bring honor to the convent, to the girl and her family; you can render a daughter to her father, you can satisfy Messer Nicia here, and you can make a lot of money." [69] Once Ligurio concludes with the reasonable lines that "I believe that something's good if it does good to the most people, and makes the most people happy," [70] Timoteo says, "In God's name, let it be done!," a willingness that predispo ses him, in Ligurio's eyes, to do something "less burdensome, not as scandalous, more acceptable to us, more useful to you": [71] to induce not an abortion, but a conception, in Lucrezia's bed.

Cammillo Calfucci is forgotten in the scene that intervenes between Ligurio's first and second requests, as Ligurio pretends to go off to speak with a woman who will inform him that Calfucci's daughter has miscarried, and as Timoteo's eagerness to acquire three hundred ducats propels him to agree to assisting in Lucrezia's seduction. But the two requests, despite the patent falsehood of the first, are clearly linked. As with the threat to Lucrezia's reputation, the story of the Calfucci family hinges on the presence of a community that enforces shame and dishonor. Ligurio conjures up a spectacle to defer it, purportedly to annul it, with a deed -- enforced abortion -- that involves both scandal and, given Fra Timoteo's gift of three hundred ducats, immense utility But the story involving Calfucci attests to another aspect of Ligurio's modus operandi that suggests how compromising one's participation in the public space necessarily is. For this mention of Cammillo Calfucci is not the first in the play. Rather , he is brought into the opening scene, when Callimaco tells his servant, Siro, how he first came to hear about the beauty of Madonna Lucrezia. Having escaped the wars in Italy by moving to France, Callimaco happened to meet in Paris un Cammillo Calfucci," who was present at a dispute as to whether Italian or French women were more beautiful. Calfucci takes a vociferous part in the debate, ultimately claiming that "if all Italian women were monsters, it would only rake a relative of his to restore their honor": Madonna Lucrezia, "the wife of messer Nicia Calfucci, whom he praised so highly for both her beauty and her manner that he astonished some of us, and provoked in me such a desire to see her that throwing caution to the wind, I [Callimaco] took it upon myself to come here; and having arrived, I now find that the stories about Madonna Lucrezia pale next to the truth." [72]

Calfucci never appears in the play; his name returns only in the scene with Fra Timoteo. [73] But the fact that he has been instrumental in disseminating Lucrezia's "fama," and in thus leading Callimaco back to Florence -- Callimaco even associates Calfucci with the vagaries of "Fortuna" herself -- suggests that Ligurio's invention of the shame about to fall on Calfucci's family is not an innocent one. Weaving Calfucci back into the fabric of the play and implicating him in a story of scandal, false though it is, implicates this disseminator of fama in someone else's tale, told in supposed whispers in the piazza before Santissima Annunziata. Moreover, Calfucci is implicated in the story while he is far from Florence, unknowingly forced by Ligurio's cryptic novella to become a compromising and even slandered part of a narrative he set in motion.

The threatened disonore of the Calfucci family -- wife, husband, and relative alike -- becomes the central undercurrent of Man dragola as a whole, made pressing by Ligurio's virtually ubiquitous presence. He is onstage for eighteen of the play's thirty-four scenes, far more than any other character, and he is spoken about in almost all of the scenes in which he is absent. Ligurio's -- or more appropriately, Machiavelli's -- public theater thereby becomes a space from which no character or spectator can wing decisively free, in which any entrance into the public space can and will be used against one. From Lucrezia's resistance to entering the public spheres of the street or the church, where as the commentator to the Ars amatoria knew, women were subject to male "lust," to Nicia's laughable provincialism that kept him within the walls of Florence and blissfully ignorant of events in his own household, to what might be called Cammillo Calfucci's and Callimaco's hopes to escape Florentine dynamics by going to France, we encounter a series of failed attempts to remain aloof from the theater of social relations which Ligurio so carefully crafts. As such, the traps that Ligurio prepares catch not only Lucrezia but everyone else within their snares. Thanks to the aggressive prologue, the spectators are similarly swept into such a theater, forced like Lucrezia to speak well of the play so that they are not spoken of badly. Both the Florentine community within the play and the Florentine community assembled to watch the play are thereby placed in an uncomfortably feminized position with regard to the threats of "maldicentia," which may - or may not - be carried out.

THEATER AND ITS USES

To whom, however, can this theater be said to be useful? And to whom is Ligurio playing Romulus? To a certain extent, Mandragola performs the attempts of a community to perpetuate itself at the expense of all else. Such need for perpetuity, embedded in folk rituals to which Machiavelli's mandrake and the raucous festivities surrounding its ingestion and "disperson" ironically glance, is a fundamental feature of new comedy as theorized by C.L. Barber, Francois Laroque, and others. More importantly, it is at the basis of the popular celebrations and disturbances, such as the charivari documented by Natalie Davis and Chrisriane Klapisch-Zuber, designed to disturb households where procreation had not taken place or was unlikely to occur. In what would now be called invasive rituals, the community intercedes in domestic affairs, lampooning shrewish wives and impotent husbands in the interests of effecting procreation and ensuring the community's future.

Clearly the "rituals" that take place in Lucrezia's bed, with an avid Nicia looking on, invoke a charivari, and the carnivalesque features of the evening have not been overlooked by critics. Ligurio suggests a means of bringing those who refuse to offer their services to the good of the community, ever needful of perpetuation - the recalcitrant Sabines, the resistant Lucrezia - within the sway of the public space itself. But the spectacles which Ligurio engineers effect another kind of utility as well, which is tied to neither the venal interests of the play's participants nor the "health" of a community, and which therefore suggests that his role cannot be easily aligned with a reading that champions Mandragolds "generative principle" as decisive. For if Ligurio becomes the instigator of festive activities, however perverse, that permit the regeneration of the community, he is also the enforcer of communal values in a far more unfestive way. While our most influential spokesperson for the carnivalesque, Mik hail Bakhtin, has suggested that in the Renaissance, "literature's sundered tie with the public square is re-established" as it introduced new "forms for making public all unofficial and forbidden spheres of human life"(1983, 163), it is clear from Ligurio's actions that there is a markedly sinister aspect in acts of "making public." [74]

To a large extent, these acts emerge from a humanist sensibility that not only emphasized but, in Alberti's work, enabled the centrality of the public square in civic life. As we have seen, Alberti's and Prisciano's well-ordered and harmonious theaters, characterized by their numerous aperture, are marked by a faith in the eventual coming to light of all human foibles and the essentially moral nature of public action. At the same time, such a theater is based on a constant function of surveillance enforced by other citizens: Alberti's citizens and patricians' wives alike act as morally as they do because they know that they are being watched by others. Alberti, moreover, recommends that the theater in his ideal city be placed near the monasteries, so that the monks will be able to intervene should any licentiousness take place. [75] "Theater" ultimately serves for Alberti as a metaphor for self-policing, and it is the effects of such constraints that allow his city to be as free of messy erotic entanglements as it is. [76]

Through Ligurio, Machiavelli introduces a new aspect to Ovid's and Alberti's insistence on "seeing and being seen." If Alberti depends on a strong communal presence for the success of his public theaters, Ligurio's withholding of information from the public space inverts the idealizing relationship humanism would claim between theater and the city by making the bene comune essentially ineffective in attending to, and supervising, Lucrezia's relationship with Callimaco. To take Ligurio's threat seriously is to witness within the play the demise of a community able to police its own, as Callimaco is encouraged to exploit what would otherwise have been readily available as communal knowledge: his affair with Lucrezia. The prominence of this rootless, inorganic intellectual, [77] variously referred to as "tristo," a "diavolo," and someone adept at "uccellare gli uomini," thereby calls attention to an essentially uncomic aspect of Mandragola, insofar as the play is entirely in the hands of a figure with no clear connections to the community and who preempts the open spaces of the city's theaters by controlling the information disseminated therein. Ongoing access to secret knowledge and the purposeful withholding of it makes Ligurio the superior figure in a play where, as we know from Nicia's pathetically comic ignorance, knowledge is constantly being heralded as power.

Such control has obvious affinities with the wily narrator of the prologue, suggested earlier as a precursor of Ligurio, insofar as he threatens to "dir male" of those who would speak badly of him and his play. He thereby implies that he possesses a special and compromising knowledge which he will disseminate if he is crossed. In turn, the very fact that we finally do not know the impact of Ligurio's line, that we are unable to trace its outcome in a play which insists on the kinds of collusions this essay has discussed, suggests that the shadowy figure named Machiavelli stands behind Ligurio and the narrator alike, as he withholds from an audience "enforced" into collusion the details of the Mandragola's questionable denouement. The thwarting of the audience's desire to control its reaction to the play's unfolding spectacle -- whether that audience be Lucrezia or the spettatrici gathered to watch Mandragola in 1518 -- places all of the power in the hands of the resident director or capicomico. We might see in this capicomico a model for a vicious Cesare Borgia, who as we know from a chilling passage in the Principe, manipulated the public piazza of Cesena for political stability, or a throwback to Romulus, who manipulated the public theater of Rome for imperial ends. [78] At the same time, there is something ironic about the nature of Ligurio's and the narrator's knowledge, insofar as it is limited to the realm of domestic concerns. Once a sensate (matchmaker) in a former life, and in many ways, a sensate in his current life, a man who claims as a companion Lucrezia's chatty and unscrupulous mother, Ligurio inhabits a domain which is occupied largely by women. This may be also the domain to which Mandragola's narrator explicitly calls attention regarding his current fate in post-republican Florence: he has "nowhere else to turn his face," and is barred from "altre imprese." Hence his decision to write his comedy.

This is precisely why Ascoli and Kahn would argue that for Machiavelli the literary is opposed to Machiavelli's "intellectual and political life"(9). And yet, the utility of Mandragola hinges on an act of faith: that such prying into and knowledge of the private domain can have resonance for the public sphere. Theater, and particularly comic theater, is the mechanism whereby this equation might be enforced. Lucrezia's open compliance with Callimaco and her husband in the final scenes and the audience's presumed compliance with the narrator illustrate not only the "enforced collusions" which Machiavelli's theater can enact, but a bid, perhaps a hopeless one, for an exchancellor's usefulness to a new principate that may be willing to deploy his intimate knowledge of his fellow-citizens for its own purposes. Such a bid seems to look back to what Ezio Raimondi has called the "funzione civile del poeta drammatico" (247) as it was conceived among early humanism: one in which satire was felt to have a vital place i n a state, as in the work of the Aristophanes whom Machiavelli so admired. [79] Yet as Raimondi does not note, this is a satire that is withheld, and it is withheld so that the satirist may exact a price for his silence. The dramatist's "civil function" has shrunk in the current age. While he does openly satirize the foolish husband Nicia, his threats are reserved for those who can give him something in return. Clearly, this emulates neither old nor new comic traditions.

Such an offer, however, of a playwright's useful talents, would not be made again, and the contrast between the corrosive comedy of the late 1510s and Machiavelli's last play, Clizia, first performed in 1525, is instructive. When Mandragola was rehearsed that same year for a performance in Faenza that never took place, the historian Francesco Guicciardini, closely involved in the rehearsals, wrote to his friend Machiavelli that "since [the players] are not in agreement about the argument [of the prologue], which would not be understood, they have made another one ... I do not think you can go wrong if you put together another one suited to the low intelligence of the audience, and in which they would be depicted rather than you." [80] We do not know what "disagreements" the prologue to Mandragola provoked, but it is of interest that the prologue of Clizia is very different from that of Mandragola. The narrator of the prologue of Clizia claims to have written the play as a roman a clef for events that happene d "a few years ago" in Florence: "to avoid legal harrassment, he has changed the real names into fake ones." [81] He goes on to take an explicit swipe at Mandragola: although there are "three ways to move spectators to laughter" -- through "words that are either foolish, insulting, or amorous" [82] and thus with "characters who are either foolish, treacherous, or in love" [83] -- he has in this particular play rejected both fools and "persone malediche." "Having foresworn speaking badly of others" [84] -- a phrase that returns us to the prologue to Mandragola, with its cunning author who boasted of being able to "dir male" of others -- the playwright will now create only characters in love, thereby enabling the women in his audience to hear the play "without blushing." [85]

Removed from the threat of "persone malediche," Clizia partakes in a theatrical economy very different from the one which constitutes Mandragola, as its ardent and aging lover, Nicomaco, is shamed openly before his household and forced to give the ward he lusts after to his son. But this is also an economy that forgives him. Dragged into the humiliating public space of the play, Nicomaco is nonetheless reconciled with wife and family when he confesses to the embarrassing circumstances in which he finds himself, and Clizia ends with his reabsorption into the community of the play and the assurance of his son's wedding. In its manipulative deferral of secrets and its refusal to give theater over to the ultimately forgiving forces of society Mandragola must be seen as a very different kind of play. Rather, by positing theatrical space as one in which all may be rendered vulnerable, actors and spectators alike, to the insinuations of "persone malediche," Mandragola can be said to be an early modern and very Mach iavellian version of Rome's first theater.

(*.) This essay has benefitted enormously from the comments of Teodolinda Barolini, Clare Cavanagh, Stephanie Jed, William Klein, Laura Levine, Ronald L. Martinez, and the two anonymous readers for Renaissance Quarterly: my thanks to them for their help.

(1.) See an earlier article in which I discuss the importance of the rape for Renaissance theater; Tylus, 1992. Wofford notes the prominence of rape motifs in Renaissance cassoni, and Cope argues the predominance of rape in Plautine and Renaissance comedy (17). Klapisch-Zuber (247-60) notes the centrality of the rape of the Sabines in one of the first "anthropological" treatises of the Renaissance, Marco Altieri's Li nuptiali, written in 1506-1509.

(2.) Malvezzi, 38: "Colui, che fa violenza per necessita, ha ricevuta egli prima violenza dalla necessita. Ella e una legge, la piu odiosa delle leggi. Ella e una giustitia, la piu rigorosa delle giustitie."

(3.) See Ovid, 1979, Ars amatoria 1.90-132; Livy, Ab urbe 1.9.1-16. One might profitably explore the parallels between the two rapes: the extent to which women are "displayed" either through the rhetoric of Lucrezia's husband or at the Roman spectacle itself; the degree to which the very inaccessibility of the desired women serves only to heighten the desire of the would-be rapists, Tarquinius and the Romans, whose requests to marry the Sabines had been consistently denied; the extent to which, in later literature, both rapes served as foundational moments for formerly illegitimate governments.

(4.) Martinez, 1983, 17-19.

(5.) Act 4, scene 2, page 96 (hereafter notated as "act.scene, page."): "sanza sua infamia la puo essere tua amica, e con sua grande infamia tua nimica." All citations from the Mandragola and Clizia are taken from Franco Gaeta's edition of Machiavelli's Il teatro e tutti gli scritti letterari of Franco Gaeta; translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

(6.) Ibid.: "E impossibile che la non convenghi teco e che la voglia che questa notte sia sola."

(7.) Ibid.: "Credi tu cotesto?"

(8.) This is not at all to say that commentators overlook the line about infamia to which I will turn; they tend, rather, to minimize its importance by glossing it over. Characteristic here are the comments of Giorgio Inglese, who sees the threat as exemplary of the "degradara razionalita" of "ragione politica" and does not pursue it further (1019). Perhaps the reading most willing to consider blackmail as constituting something more than a "road not taken" in Mandragola is one of the few readings based explicitly on the role of gender in the play, Maggie Gunsberg's Gender and the Italian Stage: "Although ... she appears to have enjoyed Callimaco's advances, his unexpected apparition in her bed might just as easily have had an unpleasant outcome. Her collusion with Callimaco may also be based on the fear of losing her good reputation should the night's events become public knowledge. Ligurio's instructions to his master include the use of blackmail if she is uncooperative" (35; emphasis mine). Gunsberg then cites the line in question. In a sense, the rest of the essay is devoted to unpacking the ramifications of Gunsberg's tentative suggestion.

(9.) 5, 4, 109: "io ti prendo per signore, padrone, guida: tu mio padre, tu mio defensore, e tu voglio che sia ogni mio bene; e quello che 'I mio marito ha voluto per una sera, voglio ch'egli abbia sempre."

(10.) The full passage from Andrews on the uncertainty of the final scene is as follows: "there is no textual way of deciding whether Lucrezia is indeed joyfully liberated into sensuality .... All we can say is that if we are expected to rejoice with her, Machiavelli has been inefficient about making the fact clear on paper" (54). Also see Raimondi's sobering comments at the end of his chapter on Mandragola, where he notes the depressing atmosphere that descends on all the characters at play's end, "including Lucrezia, in whom it is difficult to recognize ... the energy of a victorious, albeit tormented, protagonist" (162).

(11.) 215: "che il [suo] onore e la [sua) buona fama fia guasta." The account of the rape of Lucretia is found in Livy, Ab urbe condita 1; and Ovid, 1989, Fasti 2: 813-42. Boccaccio's novella is day 3, tale 6. As noted earlier, Martinez and others have made connections between Livy, Ovid, and Mandragola; other readers such as Barratto and Raimondi have mentioned the importance of Boccaccio's tale on the play, and Inglese cites the relevant passages at length (1022).

(12.) Machiavelli, 1965, 196: "gustino poi l'esemplo utile che vi e sotto."

(13.) For discussions of the cultural climate in early sixteenth-century Florence and Machiavelli's indebtedness to theatrical and literary productions in the vernacular, see, above all, Carlo Dionisotti; for more extended analyses, see Gareffi and Ventrone's wonderful introduction to the theatrical politics of early Renaissance Florence. Especially useful are Ventrone's observations on the performative tradition tied to the herald, who entertained Florentine officials with songs, stories, and moralizing narratives when they reported to the Palazzo Vecchio for as long as two months at a stretch. Into the time of Lorenzo the Younger, numerous private homes served as the privileged spaces for recitations by a single actor, such as the famous Barlecchio, whom Machiavelli knew well, and who often relied on barbs and gossips about Florentine citizens for his "plays." It is possible that Machiavelli's acerbic prologue originates in precisely this local tradition. At the same time, as I will point out, Machiavelli' s narrator achieves power precisely by withholding the gossip he claims to know.

(14.) Kahn and Ascoli continue: "In works such as Mandragola we see that (literature] is also an alternative vocation for him, one to which he is constrained but for which he has obvious talents and affinities"(9).

(15.) For a recent account on ways in which the later Machiavel employs dramatic space to effect social or political change by way of "spectatorial prowess," see Maus, particularly her chapter "Machiavels and Family Men."

(16.) One of the more suggestive accounts of Machiavelli's Ovidian debt has been that of John Najemy. See in particular his chapter on "Poetry and Polities," 313-34, in Najemy, 1993.

(17.) 1979, Ars amatoria 1.101-08.

(18.) Prisciano, 53: "Quelli vecchioni et sapientissimi Greci prima, et doppo li Itali, instituirono li spectaculi in le citate, non solamente per festegiare et dare piacere a li populi, ma per utilitate ancora et non picola certamente de le loro Republice."

(19.) Petrarca, La vita di Romolo, 13 and 25; Pontanus, De Prudentia, ciii.

(20.) Machiavelli, 1960, Discorsi 1.1.19; and 1981 (The Prince), chap. 6. See his comment in Discorsi 1.1.19: "in Roma era necessario che surgesse ne' primi principii suoi un ordinatore del vivere civile, ma era bene poi necessario che gli altri re ripigliassero la virtu di Romobo, altrimenti quella citta sarebbe diventata effeminata, e preda de' suoi vicini"; translated by Walker in Machiavelli, 1991, 1:263.

(21.) For the subversiveness of Ovid's account of theater, see Myerowitz.

(22.) 1.99: "Spectatum veniunt; veniunt spectentur ur ipsae."

(23.) Despite such a contrast, Ovid is insinuating that theater never allows for a posture of invulnerability; its specular dynamic is such that the watcher is always being watched, her look always met and returned. Indeed, as Barbara Freedman has posited, theater, unlike cinema, is precisely the locus where one's gaze is never one's own, where the spectator's supposedly self-assured state has always and already been purloined by an other who is looking back.

(24.) "Ma se tu lettore, phi grosso che lungo, dicessi a. mme, scrittore di questi esempli: 'Questi luoghi non si usano e questi tempi sono ispenti; dove androe?, lieve cosa e ritrovare questi luoghi medesimi. Le chiese sieno i templi e dounque hane uno famoso predicatore ivi tragono le donne, non per udire certo se non alquante poche, ma per vedere ed essere vedute. Le sagre, le feste, le perdonanze, i giuochi famosi come corso di cavallo per merito, giostra di cavaliere per donna, di famosi che vuogliono giuoco e letizia, queste te ne mostreranno tante quante l'animo tuo disidera; ne altra Roma non chiedere che.lla nostra eccellentissima cirtade e chiara." In Ovid, 1987, 2: 689.

(25.) Prisciano, 55: "Senza impedimento alcune vedesse et potesse anche esser visto"; Filarete in Ruffini, 145: "vedere fuori ed essere viste."

(26.) 1988, 28: "Costruite in modo che chi si trovi all'interno possa essere visto e vedere a sua volta."

(27.) 1967, 8.6, 710.

(28.) See the discussion on "Nicholas's Urban Program: Theoretical Background," particularly 54-59, and comments on the extent to which Alberti's "public program" influenced later architects such as Filarete, 161. Joan Kelly Gadol's concluding remarks arc also of interest; see 221-3 1, where she discusses "Alberti's single most important contribution to the humanistic movement [as] these persuasive literary presentations of the renascent conception of the good life as the life of the citizen" (228).

(29.) Cited in an interesting context in Boyer, who comments: "Thus Alberti conceived of an ideal city as an imaginary theater of tragic scenery whose streets were paved and perfectly clean, lined with two identical rows of houses or arcades and porticoes of uniform height. ... Focussing on his city's squares, really theatrical stages surrounded by multistoried arcades, he gave each one a specific function such as a market or a place of exercise" (78).

(30.) See Garin's succinct comments, 74-80, and Grafton's discussion of Alberti, 53-92. Particularly useful for my purposes is Grafton's analysis of the story of the painter Zeuxis in De pictura. Not only does Alberti's version of the classic text illustrate an example of "hermeneutical surgery" (80), but it "scupulously avoids the sexy suggestiveness of the original," effectively de-eroticising the classical sources (82).

(31.) 1969b, 297: "[la] comandando facesse valere se apresso e' suoi, in qualunque modo avendosi per casa come si richiede patrona e maestra di tutti, e fuori di casa ancora cercasse acquistare in se qualche dignita; e per questo qualche volta ancora, per prendere in se qualche autorita e per imparare comparire tra la gente, si porgesse fuori aperto l'uscio con buona conninenza, con modo grave, per quale e' vicini la conoscessoro prudente e pregiassoro, e cosi e' nostri di casa molto la riverissono."

(32.) 1969a, 237, with revisions; 1969b, 208: "la virtu non si conosce se non quando sia per opera manifestata."

(33.) Note, however, that the matron posing outside of the Alberti household is silent. Jordan observes apropos of Alberti's text, "her silence was essential because her status as property, as an object, was in jeopardy if she spoke" (54). The wife's decorous appearances in the world beyond the house attest largely to the marital order to which she is subject rather than to any freedom she possesses as an autonomous agent.

(34.) Above all, see Parronchi, who reiterates his classic 1963 essay in his updated volume of his works on Mandragola, chap. 1.

(35.) After acknowledging that "Buildings and squares, as brought out long ago...are dad in the vocabulary of humanism as perfected by Alberti" (238), Krautheimer goes on to make the more radical suggestion that the patron who commissioned the Urbino panel "(and possibly all three) would therefore have been Federico da Montefeltro." Acknowledging the closeness between the Montefeltro family and Alberti, he then tentatively observes that "One might therefore attribute to Alberti the design and execution of the Urbino panel or indeed, of all three panels. ...A good deal seems to favor such a hypothesis: the vision of an urban setting conceived in the spirit and consistently worked out in the concrete concepts and the vocabulary of an architecture of humanism; the emphatic use of a scientific linear perspective" (256).

(36.) Prologue, 56: "Vedete l'apparato,/ quale or vi si dimostra:/ questa e Firenze vostra; / un'altra volta sara Roma o Pisa."

(37.) Ferroni sees the "wise" Lucrezia overcoming Fortuna. in a number of ways in the play, thereby effecting "that transformation of nature that appeared impossible from the perspective of the theoretical travails of The Prince" (115). Thus does "the Machiavellian sage" find a "literary and symbolic rescue from the evil of the times," as a female character comes to embody everything Machiavelli had at one time hoped to find in an Italian prince.

(38.) 5.6, 111: "Io I'ho molto caro, e vuolsi che sia nostro compare."

(39.) Beecher has also emphasized Mandragola's carnivalesque dimension.

(40.) 5.6, 111: "E voglio che lui [Callimaco] e Ligurio venghino stamani a desinare conesso noi."

(41.) Ibid.: "E vo' dare loro la chiave della camera terrena d'in sulla loggia, perche possino tornarsi quivi a lor commodita, che non hanno donne in ease e stanno come bestie," See Rebhorn's observation that the fact that it is not only Callimaco but Ligurio who gains entrance into Nicia's home "destroys forever the illusory harmony seemingly achieved by [the play's] end" (84).

(42.) 1.3, 66: "atta a governare un regno.

(43.) 2.5, 74: "IO ho fatto d'ogni cosa a tuo modo: di questo vo'io che ru facci a mio."

(44.) See the suggestive reading of Pitkin. Also see Schiesari, particularly her observation that "Machiavelli sees women as nothing more than potential troublemakers whose entrance upon the public stage can only spell downfall for state rulers" (180). Infamia functions largely to keep women in their place, and hence, off of the "public stage."

(45.) 1.3, 67: "pigliare qualche partito bestiale, crudo, nefando."

(46.) Ibid.: "raffrena cotesto inipeto dell' animo."

(47.) 3.11, 89: "Quanto all'atto, che sia peccato, questo e una favola, perche la volonta e quella che pecca, non el corpo."

(48.) 3.11, 90: "Io son contenta, ma non credo mai essere viva domattina."

(49.) This is the inner space occupied by the eponymous female character of Machiavelli's last and very different play, Clizia. As we are informed in the prologue, here, for the sake of onesta, the vergine who is at the center of the drama's action will never be allowed to emerge from the household to expose herself to the dangers associated with the public space of the theater. "This comedy is called Clizia, because this is the name of the girl for whom they are fighting. Don't expect to see her, though, because Sofronia, who has brought her up, doesn't want her to come our for the sake of decorum." (Questa favola si chiama Clizia, perche cosi ha nome la fanciulla che si combatte. Non aspettate di vederla, perche Sofronia che l'ha allevata non vuole per onesta che la venga fuora; Machiavelli, Il Teatro, 117.) On the convention in Roman drama that generally disallowed virtuous female characters from the stage "which means, in public," see Salingar, 126.

(50.) 1.1, 62: "In modo che non ci e' luogo d' alcuna corruzione."

(51.) 3.2, 80: "in modo che la non vi volse piu tornare."

(52.) 5.2, 148: "Ia gran vergogna."

(53.) 5.2, 150: "ti verro ricoprendo el piu ch'io petro. See Martinez's essay on Clizia and his lively discussion of the emphasis on scandal in the play: "The effects of hearsay, rumor, and scandal are constant in the play: the scandal over the outrage to Clizia will destroy the reputation of Nicomaco's household" (125). That this "destruction" does not, in fact, come to pass, seems to be one of the effects of the play's ending, in which Nicomaco's son and the unseen Clizia, revealed at the last minute to be the daughter of a worthy citizen, are to wed. I address Clizia in more detail at the end of this essay.

(54.) 2.6, 76: "Who do you think I'm going to find who will carry our this madness [sleep with Lucrezia in order to drain the potent effect of the mandrake]? If I tell him [that he'll die], he won't do it; if I don't tell him, it becomes a matter for the tribunal court [the Eight]; I don't want to get caught doing such nasty things." (Chi volete voi che io truovi che facci cotesta pazzia? Se io gliene dico, e' non vorra; se io non gliene dico, io lo tradisco, ed e caso da Otto: io non ci voglio capitare sotto male.)

(55.) 4.5, 98: "e cib che tu vedi, senti o odi, hal a tenere secretissimo, per quanro ru stimi la roba, l'onore, la vita mia ed il bene tuo."

(56.) Prologue, 57: "uno amante meschino, / un dottor poco astuto, / un frate mal vissuto, / un parassito di malizia el cucco."

(57.) Ibid., 58: "io lo ammunisco e dico a questo tale / che sa dir male anch'egli."

(58.) Ibid.: "questa fu la sua prim'arte."

(59.) Ibid.: "sbigottirlo o ritirarlo in parte."

(60.) Ibid.: "Ma lascian pur dir male a chiunche vuole."

(61.) Ibid., 56: "Vedete l'apparato, /... questa e Firenze vostra."

(62.) See, however, the response of Inglese, who argues that the church is probably Santa Maria Novella (1013n).

(63.) Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier 2.90; 188 in Singleton; 198 in Cortegiano.

(64.) 3.4, 82: "Turn to speak only to me, father, because if you want him [Nicia] to hear you, you'll have the whole piazza talking about this." (Volgete el parlare a me, padre, perche voi, a volere che vi intedessi, aresti a mettere a romore questa piazza.) The exchange is yet one more demonstration of Ligurio's attempts to manufacture a climate of secrecy and suppression.

(65.) 3.4, 83: "Io non so se voi conoscesti Cammillo Calfucci, nipote qui di messere."

(66.) 3.4, 83: "Costui n'ando per certe sua faccende uno anno fa in Francia."

(67.) 3.4, 83: "o per straccurataggine delle monache o per cervellinaggine della fanciulla."

(68.) Ibid.: "el dottore [Nicia], le monache, la fanciulla, Cammillo, [e] la casa de' Calfucci [non] e vituperata."

(69.) 3.4, 84: "voi manrenete l' onore at moniscero, alla fanciulla, a parenci; rendece at padre una figijuola; sacisface qui a messere INicia] .. .; face ranre elemosine.

(70.) Ibid.: "quel sia bene, che facci bene a phi, e ehe e phi se ne contentino.

(71.) 3.6, 85: "di minor carico, di minor scandoto, piii accetta a noi, e phi utile a vat.

(72.) 1.1, 61-62: "... disse Gammillo quasi che iraro che se rurce le donne iraliane fussino monscri, che una sua parenre era per riavere 1onore 1oro... e nominb madonna Luerezia, moglie di messer Nicia Calfucci, alla quate derre caine laude e di bellezze e di cosrumi che fece restate stupidi qualunche di noi, e in me desto tanto desiderio di vederla che io, lasciato ogni altra deliberazione... mi messi a venire qui: dove arrivato ho trovato la fama di madonna Lucrezia essere minore assai che la verita."

(73.) Nor, it should be added, was Ligurio present during Callimaco's account, although Callimaco has revealed to him his passion ("Io me lo son fatto amico e li ho communicato il mio amore, lui ml ha promesso d'aiutarmi con le mane e co' pie"; 1.1, 63) and Ligurio clearly knows that calfucci has been in France.

(74.) For Bakhtin's influential comments on the public space, see both Rabelais and his World and more concisely, Dialogical Imagination, 162-66.

(75.) See Dr re aedificatoria 5.7, where Alberti observes that theaters should be found near the monasteries of friars who are experts in the "bonae arres" and who can induce spectators from sin through the arts of persuasion; cited in Ponte, 109n.

(76.) This is certainly the case with Alberti's wives in Della famiglia, for whom the instructions given them by the patronizing husband include the warning that they are always being watched; see the remarks on marital obedience in book 3 (esp. 271-89).

(77.) The term is meant to invoke Gramsci, for whom the inorganic intellectual is someone not tied to the community in a traditional way. Relevant as well is Barratto's comment that through the omnipresent Ligurio, Mandragola aspires to "una reale dramaturgia...cioe a un rearro fondaro in primo luogo sui valori del resro, e percio su un rapporro intelleanale tra l'autore e il suo pubblico" (121).

(78.) The shrewd prince will likewise undertake to ward off the grumblings of insubordinates and control the space of the piazza, just as the hero of Machiavelli's political narrative, Cesare Borgia, did shortly after consolidating power in the Romagna. Commenting on the way that Borgia chose to divert criticism for his harsh ruling tactics from himself onto his henchman, Remirro De Orco, Machiavelli notes Borgia's shrewd utilization of public theater and, by extension, his control of public space: "knowing also that the severities of the past had earned him a certain amount of hatred, to purge the minds of the people and to win them over completely he determined to show that if cruelties had been inflicted they were not his doing but prompted by the harsh nature of his minister. This gave Cesare a pretext; then, one morning, Remirro's body was found cut in two pieces on the piazza at Cesena, with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside it. The brutality of this spectacle [quale spettaculo] kept the people of the Romagna for a time appeased and stupefied [satisfatti e stupidi]" (1981, 57-58; 1960, 37). For other recent readings of this famous passage, see Kahn, 208-10; de Grazia, 326-34.

(79.) "See Raimondi's classic essay, "Machiavelli, Giovio e Aristofane," 235-52.

(80.) It is also for this performance that the canzoni between the acts were composed, canzoni which create a Platonic dimension inconsistent with the rest of the play. Machiavelli's additions, and his apparent willingness to omit the prologue, attest to his ability to change his play as circumstance demanded. See Guicciardini's letter in Machiavelli and his Friends, 1996, 372 (letter of 26 December 1525).

(81.) Prologue, 116: "lo autore, per fuggire carico, ha convertiti i nomi veri in nomi fitti."

(82.) Ibid., 117-18: "le parole che ... sono o sciocche a iniuriose a amorose."

(83.) Ibid., 118: "le persone sciocche, malediche o innamorate."

(84.) Ibid.: "Essendosi rimasto di dire male."

(85.) Ibid.: "sanza arrossire." Raimondi also observes the differences between the two prologues, 218ff.

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