The Mandrake Book

Read in the Bondanella/Musa translation in The Portable Machiavelli.

Silly, and mostly not that funny - as is the case with quite a lot of the comedy I've read that's over 150 years old. Sometimes jokes can hold up as jokes even if their values are outdated, but that isn't too often the case in The Mandrake Root, and various absurd plot-holes are apparently recognised but then disregarded. It has its moments, though, and in general it was pacier and less boring than Virgins' Vows, one of a trio of Polish comedies from the 1830s I read a couple of days before this.

As I find with a lot of older texts, it was little details that were the most fascinating. e.g. Machiavelli's resentment at still not getting a job commensurate with his abilities - sometimes in lines about the writer of the play, at other times in the words of gullible buffoon Nicia, a nice touch of subtle self-mockery. Licentious behaviour at spas was already a thing, well before the 18th century, with which it's often most associated now. Although there were spas, holidays don't seem to have been an accepted part of life with standard routines: a rich lawyer complains of the hassle of having to uproot his household to travel to one. Some of Lucrezia's sentiments, especially at the end, may not feel plausible to the 21st century reader (if only we had commentaries on plays from 16th century women, to know if that was also the case for them) - but part of her backstory still rings true today. She had made a solemn vow to attend morning mass for 40 days in a row, but was sexually harassed or assaulted by a priest and stopped going half way through, despite the gravity of such a promise (she had to get a dispensation) and "Since that time she has been as nervous as a hare".

I was grateful to a Great Courses audio I finished a few weeks ago, The Western Literary Canon in Context: without it I wouldn't have recognised the significance of two important Classical references.
- Firstly in the editor's note: he has also managed to create a natural situation permitting him to observe the unities of time, place, and action without the slightest hint of any pedantic adherence to the so-called rules of dramatic structure that mar many of the other neoclassical dramatic works produced during this same period.
This evidently referred to rules established in Aristotle's Poetics and which remained culturally important for a very long time. (Though the lecturer didn't spell it out, they probably only loosened their grip over the course of the 20th century; it sounded as if Virginia Woolf still cared about it..)
- And another in the text: "a doctor of the law
who learned a lot by reading his Boethius"
Boethius was central to medieval thought and to the idea of Fortuna, a favourite motif of Machiavelli's - he's being mentioned ironically in this line.

The editor's note prompted me to read up a little on the comedies of Terence, one of Machiavelli's main inspirations for this play, and an essential of Latin education before the last hundred years. The late Peter Brown's introduction to the Oxford edition of Terence explained that most of Terence's plays have plots involving rape, and how rape and seduction were each viewed in the Roman world, more or less in reverse of how they would be thought of in the west in the 20th century, with seduction being worse in the Roman context. The plot of The Mandrake Root seems to sit almost midway between the Roman and contemporary attitudes: it is kind of a seduction, the circumstances would certainly be considered coercive today, but the objective is for the woman to be willingly involved with the protagonist, and the play celebrates it when she is. The last is the opposite of the Roman social norm as described by Brown, but also isn't the mainstream early modern Christian one either. And the whole play is another work in which Machiavelli can sound amoral and not very Christian.

You're probably not going to read this play unless you are a geek about early modern literature, or doing some kind of research or course, and I would say that's quite appropriate. I don't think it's a hidden gem that a wider audience might love, but it's pretty short, and can be interesting at times in a historical-source kind of way.

2-3 May 2020