"Transformation/Adaptation in Mandragola"

Mandragola

reading "Transformation/Adaptation in Mandragola" (Giulio Ferroni) from Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature

prologue to Mandragola can be divided into two parts: first four stanzas introduces characters and mise-en-scene; next four stanzas shows author's attitude towards play & public. Deliberate structural separation between the comic status of the play's corrupt & foolish characters and the author's personal heroism, which has been prevented from finding expression in a sphere worthy of it.

Letter to Vettori of January 31, 1515

Anybody who saw our letters, honored friend, and saw their diversity, would wonder greatly, because he would suppose now that we were grave men, wholly concerned with important matters, and that into our breast no thought could fall that did not have in itself honesty and greatness. But then, turning the page, he would judge that we, the very same persons, were lighthearted, inconstant, lascivious, concerned with empty things. And in this way of proceeding, if to some it may appear censurable, to me seems praiseworthy, because we are imitating Nature, who is variable, and he who imitates her cannot be blamed.

Comedy is Machiavelli's adaptation to nature, to fortuna.

Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature (MDL) PG 83: the discovery of the necessity for an accord or "adaptation" between the internal nature of the individual (which is expresses itself in particular "mode of action") and the external nature (Fortuna).

MDL: 84 the perpetual adaptation to Fortuna sustains all of Machiavelli's thought, for ex. how to use both the beast and the man, and in the image of the centaur Chiron, symbol of the coexistence of different natures. (Prince Chapter 18)

both the sublime "communing with the ancients" and the comic "thousand disputes and countless insults with offensive words". The Machiavellian sage has need of contraries, that he discovers the equal validity of the inferior and the superior. (beast and man) A disruption of the Christian ideal.

The play is also about the adaptation needed to obtain one's goals.