Machiavelli Theater

Theater and Its Social Uses: Machiavelli's Mandragola and the Spectacle of Infamy
Author(s): Jane Tylus

Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 656-686
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
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Theater and its Social Uses:
Machiavellis Mandragola
and the Spectacle oflInfamy*
by JANE TYLUS
Long seen as a play that celebrates the new-foundfreedom of its female protagonist, Mandrago
may in fact question the very possibility of theatrical "liberation. "Drawing on the foundation
myth central to Renaissance thinking about theater, the abduction of the Sabine women, this essa
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.
A s we have learned from the work of Hans Baron, Stephanie Jed, and
Lothers, 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 litera-
ture 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.'
Central to politics, because it procured through "necessary violence" the
phrase is that of Virgilio Malvezzi, from his seventeenth-century treatise enti-
tled Romolo the stability and continuity of the Roman state.' 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
*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.
'See an earlier article in which I discuss the importance of the rape for Renaissance the-
ater; 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 "anthropo-
logical" treatises of the Renaissance, Marco Altieri's Li nuptiali, written in 1506-1509.
2Malvezzi, 38: "Colui, che f& violenza per necessity, ha ricevuta egli prima violenza dalla
necessita'. Ella e una legge, la piui odiosa delle leggi. Ella e una giustitia, la piii rigorosa delle
giustitie."
3See 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
Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 656-86 [ 656 ]
THEATER AND ITS SOCIAL USES 657
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 the-
ater. 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 six-
teenth-century society. While Ronald Martinez has argued that
Machiavelli's play ironically reverses Lucretia's rape and its effects by g
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 by 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 Ma-
donna 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 Ligu-
rio 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 hus-
band, 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 ner-
vous hesitation about not only the elaborate plan Ligurio has devised, but the
possibility of its success. As he confronts the waffling Callimaco, Ligurio ad-
vises him to do something striking. With an eye to a long-term arrangement
that Callimaco has not even imagined, Ligurio suggests that what he gains in
this one night, when he makes love with Lucrezia to "drain" from her the poi-
son of the mandrake which she ingested to become fertile, he might keep
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.
4Martinez, 1983, 17-19.
658 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
forever. Following this absurd ritual

about the deception and inform her
then remind her that "without suffer
at the great price of her honor, you
ble," Ligurio concludes, that Lucrezia
many others in turn.6 The wide-eyed
really think so?"7 Ligurio reaffirms h
set out to find their friends and begi
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 Lu
crezia takes center-stage to announce to Nicia that she wishes to take
"Doctor" Callimaco, now in the role of physician rather than sacrificial of-
fering, 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 pa-
tron 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
5Act 4, scene 2, page 96 (hereafter notated as "act.scene, page."): "sanza sua infamia la
pub essere tua amica, e con sua grande infamia tua nimica." All citations from the Man-
dragola 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.
6Ibid.: "T impossibile che la non convenghi teco e che la voglia che questa notte sia sola."
7Ibid.: "Credi tu cotesto?"
8This 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 "degradata ra-
zionalita" 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, Mag-
gie 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). Guns-
berg 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.
95.4, 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."
carnivalesque a mode as some critics have suggested. Other 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 Ni-
cia 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 cru-
cial intertextual function in the play. Sextus Tarquinius threatens to stain
Lucretia's "fama" by staging a spectacle of her adultery, and Boccaccio's Ric-
ciardo threatens 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 threat-
ening 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 in-
sures, as we will see, that the "innocent" Sabines are subject not to their own
"0The 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 sensu-
ality. . .. 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 com-
ments 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).
11215: "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 be-
tween 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 pas-
sages at length (1022).
desires but to what the classical texts M

munal necessity: the very utilitas for
mythical Romulus were praised. Whether Renaissance theater might also
serve useful ends was at the heart of reflections on the stage during Machia-
velli's lifetime, reflections in which Machiavelli was fully engaged.
Frequenter of the discussions in Bernardo Rucellai's Orti Oricellari, fasci-
nated with the legacy of Aristophanes and Terence as his early (lost) play Le
Maschere and his translation of the Andria suggest, intrigued by the vernac-
ular 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,""2 Machiavelli was long preoccupied with the place of cultural pro-
ductions in the state.'3
Thus while in their recent collection of essays on Machiavelli and liter-
ature, Albert Ascoli and Victoria Kahn suggest that "literature represents all
that Machiavelli opposes in his intellectual and political life," it is not en-
tirely clear that Mandragola is as completely removed from "intellectual and
political life" as one might assume (9).4 Rather, as I will suggest in the fol-
lowing 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 al-
ludes in the Prologo into something of potential value. Even if Ligurio's
advice to Callimaco about blackmail constitutes a road not taken - a state-
ment 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,
"Machiavelli, 1965, 196: "gustino poi l'esemplo utile che vi e sotto."

3For discussions of the cultural climate in early sixteenth-century Florence and Machi-
avelli'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 introduc-
tion 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 of-
ficials 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, numer-
ous 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 orig-
inates 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.
"4Kahn 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 ob-
vious talents and affinities"(9).
Ligurio also emerges as the principle dissem

edge 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 cul-
tural 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 appropri-
ated its political usefulness, and, secondly, how Mandragola can be seen as a
response to the idealizing fictions told about Renaissance theater."5 I will use
Ovid not so much as a definitive source for Machiavelli (although Machia-
velli'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 cultural life. Ovid's passage from the Ars ama-
toria 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,

dubbed by Franco Ruffini as a time when the idea of theater ou
actual practices of theater. In the Quattrocento treatises of Leon
berti, Pellegrino Prisciano, Cesare Cesariano, and others, we enc
period's first attempts to create an historical context for the sc
gestive passages on amphitheaters in Vitruvius as well as for th
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 con-
15For 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."
160ne of the more suggestive accounts of Machiavelli's Ovidian debt has been that of
John Najemy. See in particular his chapter on "Poetry and Politics," 313-34, in Najemy, 1993.
structed Rome's earliest theater, albeit a primitive one: "It was you,
Romulus, who first stole the show when you staged the Sabine rape to con-
sole 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 estab-
lished 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 ar-
chitect Vitruvius for the Renaissance city, Leon Battista Alberti cites
Ovid's passage in full, as does the Ferrarese dramaturge Pellegrino Pri-
sciano 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 an-
cient 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 Renaissance for his skills as an
effective political leader. Petrarch championed his vi et ingenio in fashion-
ing 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 cit-
ing 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 subordi-
nates 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
171979, Ars amatoria 1. 101-08.

18Prisciano, 53: "Quelli vecchioni et sapientissimi Greci prima, et doppo li Itali, insti-
tuirono li spectaculi in le citate, non solarnente per festegiare et dare piacere a li populi, ma
per utilitate ancora et non picola certamente de le loro Republice."
19Petrarca, La vita di Romolo, 13 and 25; Pontanus, De Prudentia, ciii.
20Machiavelli, 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 Romolo, al-
trimenti quella citta' sarebbe diventata effeminata, e preda de' suoi vicini"; translated by
Walker in Machiavelli, 1991, 1:263.
Augustus's Rome, is far more sardonic, as it questions the degree to which

eras can be subordinated to a political program. In fact, Ovid arguably sepa-
rates what he sees as theater's undeniable engagement in seductive tactics,
and its real or potential usefulness to a state.2" 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 impor-
tantly, 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 find-
ing willing maidens very different from the 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 ca-
ress, 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 Ital-
ian 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 commen-
tator, thought by some scholars to be Giovanni Boccaccio, takes great
delight in rendering Ovid pertinent for his own day. In response to the de-
spair 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 Igo?" he replies, "It's an easy thing to find these
very same places today. Our churches are Rome's temples; the ones with fa-
mous preachers always draw women, and not a few come not to hear
21 For the subversiveness of Ovid's account of theater, see Myerowitz.

221.99: "Spectatum veniunt; veniunt spectentur ut ipsae."
23Despite 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 cin-
ema, is precisely the locus where one's gaze is never one's own, where the spectator's
supposedly self-assured stare has always and already been purloined by an other who is look-
ing back.
sermons, but to see and to be seen." He

penitence, jousts, and other such publi
fer you as much as your heart might
reader has no need to ask for another
excellent and renowned city."24 Thus a
fourteenth-century Italy, its dynamic
sites, most notably the church, where
tellingly, it is this phrase that returns
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, Al-
berti 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 dis-
cussion 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 vi-
sion 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 return-
ing to Ovid's observation about Roman women of the imperial age,
Prisciano defines theater as a place where "without any impediment whatso
ever 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, Al-
berti, 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
24 "Ma se tu lettore, piu grosso che lungo, dicessi a. mme, scrittore di questi esempli:
'Questi luoghi non si usano e questi tempi sono ispenti; dove androe?', lieve cosa d 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 cittade
e chiara." In Ovid, 1987, 2: 689.
25Prisciano, 55: "Senza impedimento alcune vedesse et potesse anche esser visto"; Fila-
rete in Ruffini, 145: "vedere fuori ed essere viste."
261988, 28: "Costruite in modo che chi si trovi all'interno possa essere visto e vedere a
sua volta."
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 te-
nets of the theatrical architecture of humanism an architecture which, at
least for Alberti, potentially transforms even the private space of the house-
hold 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 Westfall has
called "conspicuous examples of public morality."28 Designer of the innova-
tive 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 lead-
ers 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 integ-
rity 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 memora-
ble 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 name is bright and luminous of one who with hard sweat and assiduous
271967, 8.6, 710.

28See the discussion on "Nicholas's Urban Program: Theoretical Background," particu-
larly 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 are also of interest; see
221-31, 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).
toil for noble ends has projected himse

rance, and vice" (1 969a, 178).29
Such musings on spaces where fame finds recognition form part of Al-
berti's imagining on what the perfect city should be like; and as scholars from
Eugenio Garin through Anthony Grafton have argued, Alberti did not al-
ways 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 dellafamiglia or De re aedificatoria had enormous in-
fluence thoughout northern and central Italy. The images of urban space
which they convey are largely free of the dynamics found in Ovid's Ars ama-
toria 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 cer-
tain 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-restraint and grave de-
meanor. 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 act32 -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 door-
ways to their homes. For Alberti, the spectacle of a modest woman on the
29Cited 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).
30See Garin's succinct comments, 74-80, and Grafton's discussion of Alberti, 53-92. Par-
ticularly 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 "hermeneu-
tical surgery" (80), but it "scupulously avoids the sexy suggestiveness of the original,"
effectively de-eroticising the classical sources (82).
311969b, 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 ac-
quistare 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 con-
tinenza, con modo grave, per quale e' vicini la conoscessoro prudente e pregiassoro, e cosi e'
nostri di casa molto la riverissono.
321 969a, 237, with revisions; 1 969b, 208: "la virtu non si conosce se non quando sia per
opera manifestata."
threshold of the public space carries with it nothing challenging or poten-

tially subversive. The harmonious configuration of order and social structure
which the occasional public appearance of a citizen's wife reveals, reminis-
cent of the paintings of Domenico Ghirlandaio in Santa Maria Novella
showing contemporary Florentine women serenely observing their behold-
ers, is as far from Ovid's erotically-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 sug-
gested as a likely "candidate" for the backdrop of Mandragola, if, as several
notable scholars have argued, the play was indeed performed at the wed-
ding festivities for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici in September,
1518. Richard Krautheimer, who originally proposed a connection be-
tween 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 version of the Coliseum from
the Baltimore painting. These backdrops and buildings clearly have noth-
ing 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 Man-
dragola to such a generic urban backdrop for his play: "Look at the scene
33Note, however, that the matron posing outside of the Alberti household is silent. Jor-
dan 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.
34Above all, see Parronchi, who reiterates his classic 1963 essay in his updated volume of
his works on Mandragola, chap. 1.
35After acknowledging that "Buildings and squares, as brought out long ago ... are clad
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 possi-
bly 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
that now spreads out before you: today

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 con-
text of Ovid's contemporary Rome, with its open acknowledgments of
women "seeing and being seen," acutely conscious of the seductive oppor-
tunities 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 in-
trepreted 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 virtii 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 hus-
band, Nicia, her confessor Frate Timoteo, her mother, Sostrata, and
(unbeknownst to Lucrezia), the parasite Ligurio - Lucrezia agrees to pre-
serve 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 pa-
thetic similes describing the Sabine women. Her closing line to the naive
conceived in the spirit and consistently worked out in the concrete concepts and the vocabu-
lary of an architecture of humanism; the emphatic use of a scientific linear perspective" (256).
36Prologue, 56: "Vedete l'apparato,/ quale or vi si dimostra:/ questa e Firenze vostra; /
un'altra volta sard Roma o Pisa."
37Ferroni 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 perspec-
tive of the theoretical travails of The Prince" (1 15). Thus does "the Machiavellian sage" find a
"literary and symbolic rescue from the evil of the times," as a female character comes to em-
body everything Machiavelli had at one time hoped to find in an Italian prince.
Nicia about Callimaco ("I hold him very dear,

friend")38 suggests that she has turned the e
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 intro-
duces 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 adjec-
tive 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 Machi-
avelli's political writings, it is clear on these readings that Machiavelli would
persuade us to Ovid's view 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 pri-
vate "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 interpreta-
tions 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 be-
ing 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 been introduced. It is striking too
38 5.6, 1 1 1: "lo Iho molto caro, e vuolsi che sia nostro compare."
39Beecher has also emphasized Mandragola's carnivalesque dimension.
that the arrangements for Ligurio's in

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 conve-
nience, 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 atten-
tion 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 spet-
tatrici, Lucrezia and female audience alike, from servitude to a theatrical
violence explicit on Romulus's stage and arguably implicit in Alberti's refor-
mulation 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 Ma-
chiavelli'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 theater over to the anarchy of erotic sen-
timent, women's or men's. Truer than might be realized to his humanist
predecessors, he finds in the insistent specularity which public theater en-
ables 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
405.6, 1 11: "E voglio che lui [Callimaco] e Ligurio venghino stamani a desinare con
esso noi."
41Ibid.: "E vo' dare loro la chiave della camera terrena d'in sulla loggia, perche possino tor-
narsi quivi a lor commodita, che non hanno donne in case e stanno come bestie." See Rebhorn's
observation that the fact that it is not only Callimaco but Ligurio who gains entrance into Ni-
cia's home "destroys forever the illusory harmony seemingly achieved by [the play's] end" (84).
who comes to Callimaco's aid describes her

gurio'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 hus-
band 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, Lucre-
zia represents a potential threat to what Machiavelli regarded throughout his
life as a necessarily vigorous state grounded in male virt'.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 im-
mediately recurring. Ligurio's plan involves something very different: the
unfolding of an elaborate spectacle that will involve an entire community
421.3, 66: "atta a governare un regno."
432.5, 74: "lo ho fatto d'ogni cosa a tuo modo: di questo vo'io che tu facci a mio."
44See 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."
451.3, 67: "pigliare qualche partito bestiale, crudo, nefando."
46Ibid.: "raffrena cotesto impeto dell'animo."
- 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 Lucre-
zia's volontit, 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 thor-
oughly 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 elabo-
rate 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 vulnerabil-
ity 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 re-
fuses to condone the presence of anyone around her who might serve as a
47 3.11, 89: "Quanto all'atto, che sia peccato, questo e una favola, perche la volonta e
quella che pecca, non el corpo."
483.11, 90: "lo son contenta, ma non credo mai essere viva domattina."
49This 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 out for the sake of decorum." (Questa favola si chiama Clizia, perch6 cosif
ha nome la fanciulla che si combatte. Non aspettate di vederla, perche Sofronia che l'ha alle-
vata non vuole per onesta che la venga fuora; Machiavelli, II Teatro, 117.) On the convention
in Roman drama that generally disallowed virtuous female characters from the stage "which
means, in public," see Salingar, 126.
conduit for a lover's affections such as a serva

that there is no place for corruption to enter,
cludes. One scene later, Nicia intimates that i
persuade Lucrezia to travel to the baths wher
waters that could make her fertile (1.2, 64). I
zia long ago stopped going to the church to make vows because of the
unwelcome attention she was receiving from the friars.5' 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 Cal-
limaco 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 Lu-
crezia thus emerges in the final scene to instruct Nicia how much 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 ques-
tion 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 car-
nivalesque fanfare that has dominated so much of the play, from the
rigorous disregard for "official" hierarchies and social practices emblematic
in Fra Timoteo'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 com-
edy, Clizia, the elderly Nicomaco expresses his deep sense of shame52 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 rea-
501. 1, 62: "In modo che non ci e luogo d' alcuna corruzione."
513.2, 80: "in modo che la non vi volse pid tornare."
525.2, 148: "la gran vergogna."
53 5.2, 150: "ti verrb ricoprendo el piu ch'io potrb." 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
repu-
son 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 won't 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 poi-
sonous mandrake.54 Callimaco in turn warns his servant to abide by
silence.55 Withholding secrets from others during chance encounters in the
"piazza ed in mercato" is an attempt to shield oneself from the powerful on-
slaught of other people's malicious talk - 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 in-
formation 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 resto-
ration 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 - Ariosto's comedies, Bibbiena's La Ca-
landria, Shakespeare's early plays - Cope recognizes a challenge 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.
At the same time, to remain within Cope's largely generic paradigm is to
fail to see how the social and political questions about theater's utility might
tation 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 un-
seen 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.
52.6, 76: "Who do you think I'm going to find who will carry out 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.)
554.5, 98: "e cio che tu vedi, senti o odi, hai a tenere secretissimo, per quanto tu stimi la
roba, l'onore, la vita mia ed il bene tuo."
be addressed. The key word in Cope's passage

forced collusion. Similarly, the character in Mandragola who is in charge of
enforcing collusion and whose raison detre is to work beneath the surface in
a manner that resists the communal openness of new comedy and Floren-
tine life alike goes largely unremarked. For as his comment to Callimaco
about blackmailing Lucrezia suggests, Ligurio is the proponent of the de-
ferred spectacle. He thus generates a pervasive anxiety that ifsomething is
exposed in the public space, the community will not diffuse it in carni-
valesque revelry. The discomfitting nature of Mandragolds 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 intro-
duced by a narrator who starts by describing the setting as Florence and the
characters as perhaps stock social types56 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 in-
vokes 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 per-
sona" the narrator threatens to use his "arte" to malign anyone 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
"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 mo-
ment 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
56Prologue, 57: "uno amante meschino, / un dottor poco astuto, / un frate mal vissuto, /
un parassito di malizia el cucco."
57Ibid., 58: "io lo ammunisco e dico a questo tale / che sa dir male anch'egli."
58Ibid.: "questa fu la sua prim'arte."

59Ibid.: "sbigottirlo o ritirarlo in parte."
60Ibid.: "Ma lascian pur dir male a chiunche vuole."

6"Ibid., 56: "Vedete l'apparato, / ... questa e Firenze vostra."
62See, however, the response of Inglese, who argues that the church is probably Santa
Maria Novella (10 13n).
attests: Bibbiena declares at the end of

is not a vice, or fault, or disgrace, wh
brium 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 Lucrezia'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.
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 ongo-
ing 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 affair64- 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 nuns' inattention or the girl's
own foolishness.67 Ligurio professes an interest in taking care of the prob-
lem with prudence so that the family will not be dishonored.68 Nicia
himself, Ligurio goes on, has pledged three hundred ducats out of "vergo-
gna" (prompting from the outraged Nicia the muted aside, "Che
chiacchiera!"). Fra Timoteo will be drafted to play a part in this fiction a
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
63Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier 2.90; 188 in Singleton; 198 in Cortegiano.
643.4, 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, perch' 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.
653.4, 83: "lo non so se voi conoscesti Cammillo Calfucci, nipote qui di messere."
663.4, 83: "Costui n'ando per certe sua faccende uno anno fa in Francia."
673.4, 83: "o per straccurataggine delle monache o per cervellinaggine della fanciulla."
68Ibid.: "el dottore [Nicia], le monache, la fanciulla, Cammillo, [e] la casa de' Calfucci
[non] e vituperata."
a lot of money."69 Once Ligurio concludes

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 predisposes 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 Lucre-
zia's reputation, the story of the Calfucci family hinges on the presence of a
community that enforces shame and dishonor. Ligurio conjures up a specta-
cle 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 Cam-
millo 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 It-
aly 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 take 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
693.4, 84: "voi mantenete l'onore al monistero, alla fanciulla, a' parenti; rendete al padre
una figliuola; satisfate qui a messere [Nicia] ... .; fate tante elemosine."
70Ibid.: "quel sia bene, che facci bene a' piu, e che e piu se ne contentino."
7'3.6, 85: "di minor carico, di minor scandolo, piu accetta a noi, e piu utile a voi."
72 1.1, 61-62: ". . . disse Cammillo quasi che irato che se tutte le donne italiane fussino
monstri, che una sua parente era per riavere l'onore loro . . . e nomino madonna Lucrezia,
moglie di messer Nicia Calfucci, alla quale dette tante laude e di bellezze e di costumi che fe-
Calfucci never appears in the play;

with Fra Timoteo.73 But the fact that he has been instrumental in dissemi-
nating Lucrezia's "fama," and in thus leading Callimaco back to Florence
Callimaco even associates Calfucci with the vagaries of "Fortuna" her-
self 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 offama in someone else's tale, told in sup-
posed whispers in the piazza before Santissima Annunziata. Moreover,
Calfucci is implicated in the story while he is far from Florence, unknow-
ingly 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 Mandragola as a
whole, made pressing by Ligurio's virtually ubiquitous presence. He is on-
stage 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 de
cisively 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 provincial-
ism 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
ce restare stupidi qualunche di noi, e in me destb tanto desiderio di vederla che io, lasciato
ogni altra deliberazione ... mi messi a venire qui: dove arrivato ho trovato la fama di ma-
donna Lucrezia essere minore assai che la veriti."
73Nor, it should be added, was Ligurio present during Callimaco's account, although
Callimaco has revealed to him his passion ("lo me lo son fatto amico e li ho communicato il
mio amore, lui mi ha promesso d'aiutarmi con le mane e co' pie"; 1. 1, 63) and Ligurio clearly
knows that Calfucci has been in France.
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 w

gurio 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 man-
drake and the raucous festivities surrounding its ingestion and "disperson"
ironically glance, is a fundamental feature of new comedy as theorized by
C.L. Barber, Fran~ois Laroque, and others. More importantly, it is at the basis
of the popular celebrations and disturbances, such as the charivari docu-
mented by Natalie Davis and Christiane 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 Mandragolas "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 com-
munal values in a far more unfestive way. While our most influential
spokesperson for the carnivalesque, Mikhail Bakhtin, has suggested that in
the Renaissance, "literature's sundered tie with the public square is re-estab-
lished" as it introduced new "forms for making public all unofficial and
forbidden spheres of human life"(1983, 163), it is clear from Ligurio's ac-
tions 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
74For Bakhtin's influential comments on the public space, see both Rabelais and his
World and more concisely, Dialogical Imagination, 162-66.
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 the-
ater 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, more-
over, recommends that the theater in his ideal city be placed near the
monasteries, so that the monks will be able to intervene should any licen-
tiousness 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 re-
lationship humanism would claim between theater and the city by making
the bene comune essentially ineffective in attending to, and supervising, Lu-
crezia'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 con-
trolling 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 igno-
rance, knowledge is constantly being heralded as power.
75See De re aedificatoria 5.7, where Alberti observes that theaters should be found near
the monasteries of friars who are experts in the "bonae artes" and who can induce spectators
from sin through the arts of persuasion; cited in Ponte, 109n.
76This is certainly the case with Alberti's wives in Della famiglia, for whom the instruc-
tions 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).
77The 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 drammaturgia ... cioe a
un teatro fondato in primo luogo sui valori del testo, e percib su un rapporto intellettuale tra
l'autore e il suo pubblico" (121).
Such control has obvious affinities with the wily narrator of the pro-
logue, 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, sug-
gests that the shadowy figure named Machiavelli stands behind Ligurio and
the narrator alike, as he withholds from an audience "enforced" into collu-
sion the details of the Mandragola's questionable denouement. The
thwarting of the audience's desire to control its reaction to the play's un
ing 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 sensale (matchmaker) in a former life, and in
many ways, a sensale 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
Mandragolds 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
78The 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 ex-
tension, 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 com-
pletely 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.
into and knowledge of the private dom

sphere. Theater, and particularly comi
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 Machi-
avelli's theater can enact, but a bid, perhaps a hopeless one, for an ex-
chancellor'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 in 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 15 1Os
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 Man-
dragola. The narrator of the prologue of Clizia claims to have written the
play as a roman a clef for events that happened "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 fool-
79See Raimondi's classic essay, "Machiavelli, Giovio e Aristofane," 235-52.

80t is also for this performance that the canzoni between the acts were composed, can-
zoni 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).
81Prologue, 116: "lo autore, per fuggire carico, ha convertiti i nomi veri in nomi fitti."
ish, 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 Man-
dragola, 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 him-
self, 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 soci-
ety, 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, ac-
tors and spectators alike, to the insinuations of "persone malediche,"
Mandragola can be said to be an early modern and very Machiavellian ver-
sion of Rome's first theater.
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON
82Ibid., 117-18: "le parole che ... sono o sciocche o iniuriose o amorose."
83Ibid., 118: "le persone sciocche, malediche o innamorate."
84Ibid.: "Essendosi rimasto di dire male."
85Ibid.: "sanza arrossire." Raimondi also observes the differences between the two pro-
logues, 218ff.
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Theater and Its Social Uses: Machiavelli's Mandragola and the Spectacle of Infamy

Author(s): Jane Tylus

Cambridge University Press, Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with

Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 656-86 [ 656 ]

And it is Ovid's detailed account of the Sabine women's abduction at

forever. Following this absurd ritual

carnivalesque a mode as some critics have suggested. Other readers have

desires but to what the classical texts M

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

Ligurio also emerges as the principle dissem

HUMANISM AND THEATRICAL EROS

Theater history was in its infancy during the early Renaissance,

171979, Ars amatoria 1. 101-08.

Augustus's Rome, is far more sardonic, as it questions the degree to which

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

sermons, but to see and to be seen." He

primitive stage is reduced to a convenient starting point for the history of

271967, 8.6, 710.

toil for noble ends has projected himse

29Cited in an interesting context in Boyer, who comments: "Thus Alberti conceived of

threshold of the public space carries with it nothing challenging or poten-

that now spreads out before you: today

Nicia about Callimaco ("I hold him very dear,

that the arrangements for Ligurio's in

THEATER AS SOCIAL TRAP

At first glance, it would seem that Callimaco is eminently disposed to take

who comes to Callimaco's aid describes her

- priest, mother-in-law, lover, and husband - against a proud woman of

conduit for a lover's affections such as a serva

be addressed. The key word in Cope's passage

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

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

attests: Bibbiena declares at the end of

a lot of money."69 Once Ligurio concludes

Calfucci never appears in the play;

thereby placed in an uncomfortably feminized position with regard to the

THEATER AND ITS USES

To whom, however, can this theater be said to be useful? And to w

and harmonious theaters, characterized by their numerous aperture, are

into and knowledge of the private dom

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

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON

Alberti, Leon Battista. 1967. De Re Aedicfi- and Architectural Entertainments.

Petrarca, Francesco. 1862. La vita di Ro- Psychoanalysis andLiterature, eds. Vale-

Ridolfi, R. 1968. Studi sulle commedie di Park.

Machiavelli. Pisa. Wofford, Susanne L. 1992. "The Social

atro: Visioni dell'edificio e della scena in Boccaccio and Botticelli." In Cre-

tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento. Rome. ative Imitation: New Essays on

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