Writing and The Paradox of The Self - Machiavelli's Literary Vocation

Writing and the Paradox of the Self:
John Bernard
Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 59-89 (Article) Published by Renaissance Society of America DOI: 10.1353/ren.2008.0129
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Writing and the Paradox of the Self: Machiavellis Literary Vocation*

by J O H N B E R N A R D
The respective roles of virt and fortuna, never resolved in his political writings, are critical to understanding Machiavellis literary evolution. As his letters suggest, in the years between the fall of the Soderini republic and his reentry into public life with Mandragola, Machiavelli came to understand the power of language to impose order on the anarchy of events. The fragmentary LAsino records his discovery that writing can achieve an agency denied to princes. Mandragolas dialectic between the author and his protagonist demonstrates that the inventive plasticity of the writer is grounded in the inherent stability of the creative self.
1. T H E P R O B L E M A T I C S E L F
ne need no longer apologize for thinking of Niccol Machiavelli (14691527) as preeminently a writer. Though the ghost of the coolly analytical theorist still occasionally haunts the critical scene, for more than thirty years the consensus has viewed him primarily as an inventive genius, a man of passionate imagination.1 This view has sometimes led to a split between Machiavelli the father of political science and Machiavelli the artist, or even between politics and ethics.2 But this dichotomy easily resolves itself into a more coherent image of Machiavelli as the inventor of a prose of the world, expressing a consistent view of human affairs in a variety of styles across his chosen genres. In a more narrowly writerly vein, Ricardo Bacchelli argues that even in his theoretical writings Machiavelli conceives of freedom as the inherent exercise of artistic power. For example, in the analytic structures of The Prince or The Art of War historical facts per se entail no order, no scientific rules. Instead, these are provided by passionate conceptualization, the artists capacity to create fictions that have the ring of truth (or at least the force of desire). In this perspective, whether he is deploying the shrewd antitheses of The Prince, unwinding the self-ironic narrative of LAsino, or shaping the biting dialogue of Mandragola, Machiavelli comes across as a man of fertile imagination who
*
This essay is an expansion of a paper delivered at the 2003 RSA conference in Toronto. The author wishes to thank his fellow panelists, Donald Beecher, Olga Zorzi Pugliese, and Raymond Waddington, as well as members of the audience, for helpful suggestions and corrections to his arguments. 1 Caretti, 50; for an overview of critical views down to 1969 of Machiavelli as a writer, see Clark. 2 Zanini, 3536.
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wields the resources of language to forge, in one of his key words, an ordine, a way of understanding the world in short, a narrative.3 In the more blatantly political works this plastic imagination may also help him, as Gramsci believed, to bring to light the latent ideology, or hegemony, of Machiavellis Florentine or Italian citizenry.4 Central to Machiavellis posture as a writer is the question of Fortune as the field of human freedom or, as he typically views it, the respective roles of virt and fortuna. To what extent, Machiavelli repeatedly asks, are mens natures fixed, to what extent can they be refashioned for success? Underlying this question is another, farther-reaching one: What is the nature of the human individual? Is the self a given, a hand one is dealt and must play, or can one reshuffle the deck and deal oneself a better one? In our present cultural discourse we are accustomed to thinking of this question as one of Renaissance self-fashioning. But from the outset this conceit has been fraught with ironies and ambiguities. In his epochal study, Stephen Greenblatt queries the actual, as opposed to hypothetical, autonomy in the process of creating a self for presentation to others.5 As I will argue, Machiavellis struggle with the problem already foreshadows the ambivalences and contradictions displayed by later writers such as Marlowe (156493) and Shakespeare (1564 1616).6 On this subject Machiavelli has, I think, often been misunderstood. Even in The Prince, while his ultimate ideal is, in Victoria Kahns words, to be as flexible and capable of change as Fortune herself, the text fails to produce such a figure because, as Machiavelli himself notes in chapter 25, men are innately incapable of adjusting their natural inclinations to radical changes in their circumstances.7 The conviction that while adaptability to circumstances is maximally effective there are no exemplars of such a virtue is already articulated in the famous Ghiribizzi of 1506.8 Here, after conceding that the man of total self-possession could control the stars and
See Whitfield on Machiavellis use of this crucial term. Gramscis appropriation of Machiavelli informs Struever in her recent study of Renaissance ethical thought: see especially 21024. See Fontana for a sustained exploration of Gramscis debt to Machiavelli. 5 Greenblatt, 89. 6 It is notable that Taylor, the classic modern study of the subject, makes no mention of Machiavelli and, indeed, gives short shrift to the Renaissance. 7 Kahn, 70; Machiavelli, 1982, 188: N si truova uomo s prudente, che si sappi accomodare a questo [modo di procedere] . . . perch non si pu deviare da quello a che la natura lo inclina. On the aporia of chapter 25 of The Prince, see Najemy, 20507. 8 This letter, written by Machiavelli to Giovan Battista Soderini, Pieros nephew, while the writer was with the pope in Perugia, has traditionally been known as the Ghiribizzi (whims, fantasies, caprices). As Atkinson and Sices note (Machiavelli 1996a, 117), it has
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the Fates, Machiavelli concludes that such wise men do not exist. 9 In addition, as Michael McCanles has argued, the very notion of political power as self-presentation in a public arena implies that the political agents will is checked by, and therefore depends on, the will of others. Far from emerging as an integral subject, by his reliance on public opinion for validation Machiavellis prince becomes the predicate of others, thus proving that political power rests ultimately in the minds of men who believe in it.10 Timothy Lukes has attempted to reduce these tensions between Machiavellis basic anthropology and his nascent political theory to a radical discontinuity in his writings between a purely theoretical fatalism and a more practical need to avoid . . . defeatism.11 As chance or circumstance, Fortune can be defeated via adaptability and audacity; as human finiteness, she cannot.12 In a similarly tendentious approach Richard Greenwood argues that whereas Machiavellis humanistic rationalism leads him in the Ghiribizzi to stress the inherent weaknesses of human nature, especially mens lack of foresight and their inability to control their own nature, in The Prince he no longer thinks the achievement of foresight an insurmountable problem.13 In this reading, the implicit selfcontradiction is ultimately subsumed in the call for a strong leader to redeem Italy from its foreign oppressors.14 In the Discorsi Machiavellis inconsistencies with respect to individual freedom, if less important, are even more blatant. In the first chapter of book 1, where the subject is Romes acquisition of an empire, he refutes
long been considered an essential document for understanding . . . the germination of ideas that blossomed forth in The Prince seven years later. 9 Machiavelli, 1984b (hereafter cited as Lettere), 244 (121): [i]l savio comandassi alle stelle et a fati . . . di questi savi non si truova. In citations of the Lettere, the numbers indicate, respectively, page and letter (in parentheses); translations are mine. On redating the Ghiribizzi from 1512 to 1506, see Ridolfi and Ghiglieri. Accepting their argument, Gaeta (Lettere, 239) reverses the position he held in Machiavelli, 1981a, 228, reassigning its destinario from Piero to Giovan Battista Soderini, and its place of origin from Ragusa to Perugia. 10 McCanles, 106: The prince never is this or that, he uses this or that quality, or rather he has this or that quality predicated of him by others: a discourse that is full of predicates but lacks a subject, a substantive person. . . . The prince exists only to the extent that he is the grammatical subject of sentences that are uttered and written about him. 11 Lukes, 35. 12 Ibid., 47. 13 Greenwood, 199200. 14 Pocock, 181, sees this solution as a cynical reduction of Florence to inert matter on which legislators may impose form and permanence.
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those who attribute it to Fortune, emphasizing Roman prudence and concluding that the fortune which Rome had in this respect, all rulers would have who proceeded like the Romans and would have the same virt as they.15 Hence, the next chapter will show how much more virtue did than fortune to help the Romans to acquire their empire by demonstrating the kind of people the Romans had to overcome.16 In 2.29, however, Machiavellis thesis is that men may second fortune but cannot oppose it.17 Here the rehearsal of the historical facts regarding Romes early encounter with the Gauls suggests a providential pattern driven by an overarching design by heaven that encompasses even the virt of individuals. Having made the Fabii arouse the Gauls ire by violating the ius gentium (law of nations) and then ordained an atypical Roman passivity in the face of their attack, Fortune showed that she had decided . . . to scourge Rome, in the process singling out men of virtue and providing them the occasion to display it.18 On balance, though, here as in The Prince Machiavelli privileges virt, for the following chapter concludes by asserting that where men have little virtue, fortune makes a great show of her power. Hence, states go on changing till a lover of antiquity arises to rule her, so that from one day to the next she does not have a chance to show what she can do.19 Individual virt can trump fortuna, at least within the parameters of a larger, quasi-providential plan. In light of such evidence, it seems fair to conclude that in his political writings Machiavelli is at the very least ambivalent, if not incoherent, on the role of freedom in human affairs. In his nonpolitical writings, however, he goes a long way toward resolving this internal contradiction. Here, if he does not achieve a lucid theoretical solution of the problem for it is the nature of fictions to seek dramatic, not analytic, consistency he does appear to arrive at an existential one. It seems likely that Machiavellis
Machiavelli, 1984a (hereafter cited as Discorsi), 295 (book 2, chapter 1, no. 28): In modo che io credo che la fortuna che ebbero in questa parte i Romani, larebbono tutti quegli principi che procedessono come i Romani, e fossero della medesima virt che loro. 16 Ibid. (2.1.33): quanto possa pi la virt che la fortuna loro ad acquistare quello imperio. 17 Ibid., 374 (2.29.24): Affermo . . . che gli uomini possono secondare la fortuna e non opporsegli. 18 Ibid. (2.29.19): la fortuna per fare maggiore Roma e condurla a quella grandezza venne, giudic fussi necessario batterla. 19 Ibid., 37778 (2.30.32): e perch la varia, variano le republiche e gli stati spesso, e varieranno sempre infino che no surga qualcuno che sia della antichit tanto amatore che la regoli in modo che la non abbia cagione di mostrare, a ogni girare di sole, quanto ella puote.
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thinking on this question reflects his own personal circumstances. The progress he made toward resolving the dilemma of individual freedom during his enforced withdrawal from public life under the Medici restoration suggests that a personal imperative may be driving his intellectual shift. In any case the key texts the unfinished LAsino and his comic masterpiece, Mandragola as illuminated by his correspondence during the same years, reveal the outline of Machiavellis philosophical evolution as he comes to terms with his vocation as a writer. These texts repeatedly (and, I will argue, revealingly) focus on the mystery of the self, especially to others. At the heart of the conflict lies Machiavellis radical selfconsciousness about the act of writing. Writers depend on imagination, which thrives on the capacity to occupy other selves and enact their lives, thoughts, and being. The informing paradox that emerges from this sustained display of writerly self-consciousness is that the inventive plasticity of the writer is grounded in the inherent stability of the creative self. 2. W R I T I N G A S M E T A M O R P H O S I S However persistent the issue of individual autonomy is in Machiavellis political writings, it becomes more sharply focused in his literary work. This is particularly true in the critical years between his exclusion from public life in Florence following the fall of the Soderini republic in 1512 and his reentry into that life in a different mode six years later with the composition, and subsequent production, of Mandragola.20 Indeed, in the very period when Machiavelli was writing The Prince, we see him wrestling in his private correspondence with the value and even the possibility of a fungible self, frequently going out of his way to proclaim his own ingrained inflexibility. At the end of his best-known letter to Francesco Vettori (1474 1539) he proudly asserts his personal integrity: Whoever has been faithful and good for forty-three years, as I have, must not be able to change his nature.21 This implicit stain or dye of human personality, as
20 Ridolfi, 1963, 165, identifies a distinct literary phase of Machiavellis life between 151319, sandwiched between his twenty-nine years of continual reading and fourteen-and-a-half of active political engagement, on the one hand, and the seven of his last eight years devoted to writing the Histories, on the other (199). In a note on Mandragolas date of composition, Rodolfi infers (30103) from an allusion to a feared Turkish invasion of Italy that the play must have been written after the beginning of 1518. For more on the date(s) of the comedy, see below, n. 79. 21 Lettere, 428 (224): chi stato fedele et buono 43 anni, che io ho, non debbe poter mutare natura. For a somewhat reductive reading of this ending that stresses the need for a fluid human nature, see Saxonhouse, 7576.
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Montaigne (153392) will call it, is the essence of Machiavellis underlying sense of selfhood.22 In a clear allusion to his torture in the Medici prison, another letter to Vettori extols the pleasure of knowing that I have borne my afflictions so freely that I pride myself on it and hold myself to be more than I had thought, a boast that ironically provokes a mild warning from his friend to be more flexible in the face of misfortune.23 Typically, this stability of the self is perceived as part of a larger order of things. The capitolo Di fortuna, which is roughly contemporaneous with The Prince, begins by evoking the transitory role of virt in a world governed by the capricious anarchy of the voluble creature, Fortuna, goddess of instability and constant change.24 Twice the poem puts forth the desirability of conforming to fortunes changes, a posture that Jerome Mazzeo has called the ethical irrationality at the heart of Machiavellis anthropology.25 On both occasions Machiavelli immediately goes on to question the happiness such a posture may bring.26 At its philosophical climax the poem details a hidden virt implanted in each of us that makes it impossible to alter our ingrained natures to conform to Fortunas changes: And since you cant change your nature / nor leave the place Heaven assigns you, / in mid-journey she will abandon you.27 The Dantean echo in the last line implies Machiavellis adoption of his models disengaged Fortune as Heavens beneficent agent, an idea he will flirt with again in LAsino.28 Machiavellis ordine seems to be an untranscendable internal principle implicitly opposed to the disorder of events sponsored by Fortuna. That a fundamentally stable self may also be the locus of inventive freedom emerges as a major theme in Machiavellis literary output in the years following The Prince and the Discourses. Significantly, in these works
Montaigne, 2:813: Ce nest pas macheure; cest plutost une teincture universelle qui me tache. 23 Lettere, 363 (206): io stesso me ne voglio bene, e parmi essere da pi che non credetti; see also ibid., 365 (207). The key phrase in the two letters, which will recur in Machiavellis later literary works, is volgere il viso alla fortuna, which Machiavelli insists he has done in spades; whereas Vettori, while admitting that he has urged his friend to do so, concedes he himself has not been able to follow his own counsel. 24 Machiavelli, 1996b, 330 (line 10): volubil creatura. 25 Mazzeo, 59. 26 Machiavelli, 1996b, 333 (Di fortuna, l. 106): non per che fidar si possa in lei; ibid., 336 (ll. 16667): pur nondimanco al disiato porto / lun [Caesar] non pervenne e laltro [Alexander] . . . fu . . . morto. 27 Ibid., 334 (l. 119): occulta virt; 33435 (ll. 11214): e, non potendo tu cangiar persona / n lasciar lordin di che l Ciel ti dota, / nel mezzo del cammin la tabbandona. 28 For Machiavellis debt to Dante, see Fido, 1974, 3.
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he becomes more reflexive about his vocation. Moreover, it is specifically when the victim of Fortuna and the Medici considers himself as a writer that the informing paradox begins to emerge. Plasticity is of the essence of the literary vocation. In the theoretical writings, as I have noted, coldblooded analysis often reveals the failure of aspirants to power to achieve perfect adaptability. But in the more conventionally literary works imagination (fantasia) can generate a very different order of things, a quality that Ezio Raimondi finds symbolized by his favorite image of the centaur.29 Most important, imagination transcends the limits of identity or nature by inventing or inhabiting diverse possible selves. We may observe the possibility of multiple self-inventions in the exuberant literary playfulness Machiavelli shares in his letters with Vettori and Francesco Guicciardini (14831540). Despite the serious content politics, history, the fate of Italy the conjectures exchanged by Machiavelli and his friends operate in a fertile, if always somewhat suspect, dreamworld of suprarationality. Here words like fantasie, ghiribizzi, favole, and even cantafavola denote the various scenarios and prognostications bandied about when writing about the actions of the powerful.30 In its essence this art is something akin to Keatss negative capability: the gift of entering anothers subjective universe. Machiavelli takes obvious delight in adopting the persona of Pope Leo X (14751521), not to mention his famous self-transmutation into the ancients in his best-known letter to Vettori.31 At his most playful, the political fantast morphs into the deliberate creator of fictions. During a lull in their exchange of serious political commentary, Machiavelli reimagines an amorous scene described by Vettori between himself and one Costanza, entering so far into his friends adventure that he anticipates the visualizing mode later exploited by Pietro Aretino
For Raimondi, 156, the centaur incarnates a quality of impetuous youth and charismatic energy in Machiavelli that enables him to fuse deep thought and fantasia. It is this essential vitality, he believes, that makes Machiavelli himself an actor in a comic theater that separates wisdom from moderation (285). This fantastic ambivalence of the centaur shadows forth the solitude of the writer and the destiny of the intellectual and scientist (286). 30 In Lettere, 239 (208), he describes this discourse as castellucci, glossed by Gaeta here as progetti, and later (Machiavelli, 1984b, 367) as congetture, ragionamenti but translated by Atkinson and Sices (Machiavelli, 1996a, 225) as castles in the air. 31 Lettere, 384 (213): mi sono messo nella persona della papa, et ho esaminato tritamente quello di che io potrei temere adesso, e che rimedii ci farei. . . . ; ibid., 426 (224): rivestito condecentemente entro nelle antique corti degli antiqui uomini . . . e domendarli della ragione delle loro azioni. . . .
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(14921556) I seem to see giving way to the repeated I see32 as well as the adopted Venetians favorite trope of verbal portraiture: If I knew how to paint, I would send him to you painted.33 Several years later, in May 1521, he launches with Guicciardini into the hilarious burla of deceiving the friars he is staying with in Carpi by having his friend repeatedly send dispatches implying that he is an exalted personage.34 But perhaps his most elaborately self-conscious act of epistolary creativity involves his reinvention of his friends Filippo da Casavecchia and Giuliano Brancacci.35 In the course of discussing his affair with Costanza, Vettori lets drop that the two friends have fallen out because Filippo has embroiled himself with a goldsmiths boy. Two weeks later Machiavelli responds with a brilliant novella containing a ridiculous metamorphosis . . . concealed beneath a parable.36 Adopting the fowler trope frequently found in both Roman and Italian comedy, Machiavelli relates how Brancacci ministers to the hind feathers of a tender thrush, tries to foist off the assault on Casa, and is ultimately exposed by the latter, to Brancaccis own disgrace. In Florence in this carnival season, the letter concludes, you hear nothing but Are you Brancaccio or Casa? adding, in Ovids Latin, And this story was notorious all over heaven.37 By announcing his novella as a metamorphosis and concluding it with the
Ibid., 442 (229): E mi pare vedere il Brancaccio raccolto . . . Io lo veggo gestire . . . veggolo, parlando seco . . . Veggo voi, signor oratore, essere alle mani . . . veggovi rispondere generalmente loro . . . Veggo, alla giunta vostra, Filippo, il Brancaccio, il garzone, la fanciulla rizzarsi. See also Aretino, 66271 (letter 321: to Vasari); ibid., 40405 (194: to Michelangelo). 33 Ibid, 443 (229): se io sapessi dipignere, vel manderei dipinto. On Paolo Giovios use of this rhetoric, see Zimmerman, 20607, who also notes (169) that Giovio visited Aretino at least once in Venice. For Giovios relations with Machiavelli in the early 1520s at the Orti Oricellari and his praise of Mandragola, see Travi. 34 At one point (Lettere 522 [270]), Machiavelli pauses in his report of its success lest he overwork my imagination (Io vi scriverrei ancora qualche altra cosa, se io volessi affaticare la fantasia). 35 This feat needs to be contextualized with Machiavellis famous allusion a few months later to the laudable variety of the friends epistolary discourse, veering as it does from the great matters (cose grandi) appropriate to serious men (huomini gravi) to the vain matters (cose vane) of erotica (Lettere, 374 [163]). On cose vane, see Ferroni 1972a; on the letter as a whole, see Najemy, 31934. 36 Lettere 447 (231): io desideravo intendere meglio il vero di una novella che io vi scriverr qui dappi . . . Egli accaduto una cosa gentile, o vero, a chiamarla per il suo diritto nome, una metamorfosi ridicola. . . . E perch io non voglio che persona si possa dolere di me, ve la narrer sotto parabole ascose. 37 Ibid., 450 (231): Se tu il Brancaccio, o se il Casa?; et fuit in toto notissima fabula coelo. Machiavelli quotes Ovids Metamorphoses, book 4, line 189.
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quotation from the Metamorphoses, Machiavelli vaunts the multiple transformation he has effected. First, in retelling the event he has reversed the sexual orientation of his two friends.38 More significantly, his translation of Brancacci and Casavecchia from Rome to Florence implies that for him the latter may have become a unique scene of writing. While it is true that Machiavellis exclusion from public life makes Florence the place where amid my lice . . . I am rotting away, it is also and famously the site of that communion with the ancients that nurtures his political-historical imagination and will shortly inspire his poetic one.39 For Machiavelli, Rome is an emblem of the active life, a life he putatively seeks to reclaim by writing The Prince. To go to Rome is to return to action, and he repeatedly resists Vettoris exhortations to do so without some assurance of real agency. When he finally relents a dozen years later, it is only at the invitation of the Medici themselves and with the (as it turns out) illusory expectation that they will heed his advice. Conversely, the metamorfosi letter implicitly identifies Florence as the locus of that acceptance and redemption of the private life in the practice of theory ascribed to him by Nancy Struever.40 His imaginative resistance to the lure of Medicean Rome enhances the letters status as a token of the transformative activity of Machiavellian writing, with metamorphosis as its quintessential literary mode. This escape from the dilemma of the self most emphatically manifests itself in the fragmentary LAsino, written at this time. Machiavellis most Dantean production reflects his discovery that writing can help fashion an autonomous self and thus achieve an agency denied the princes of this world. Here the persona of a braying beast whose scherzi asinini will expose the follies of his times is joined with a bold acceptance of fate as
As Guido Ruggiero has pointed out to me in a personal communication. Lettere 46162 (236): Starromi dunque cos tra miei pidocchi. Throughout the letters of this period, Vettori tries repeatedly to lure Machiavelli to Rome and Machiavelli resists without a firm expectation of employment. This contrasts with the period immediately following his release from prison, when he seemed to believe Vettori could use his influence with Giuliano de Medici to find Machiavelli employment in now-Medici Rome; see Ridolfi, 1963, 13843. The significance of the two cities may be seen in Vettoris already-cited account of his life in Rome, parodied by Machiavelli. As Najemy, 223, has argued, in proposing that his friend visit him in Rome, Vettori associates it with his own resignation to the life of otiose study, a motif Machiavelli will recast in his letter as a sign of action. In his parodic version of Vettoris privileged life in Rome Machiavelli overcomes the external deprivations of his exile by means of his constructive reading of the ancients. 40 Struever, 166, argues that Machiavellis project is to establish a sense of useful knowledge [that] contributes to rich and compelling hypothetical textures, to the conduct or practice of theory. The kind of moral discipline proffered is a kind of mental discipline, a discipline which is internal, self-referring: Machiavelli, in sum, counsels us to theorize.
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a salutary medicina, an affirmation that is flanked by discourses on Machiavellis own (and his countrys collective) misfortunes. This epiphany anticipates both his turn to the theater and the peculiarly agonistic structure of his greatest comedy. Reconstituted as the mandragola, LAsinos medicina foreshadows the power of fiction to conquer, and hence transcend, personal misfortune. In his more conventional comedies the protagonists tend to bear out the authors existential privileging of men (and women) of character, whose virt implies a stable self. But in Mandragola it is the manipulative mimic-trickster Ligurio who embodies the authors strong sense of his own vocation as the preeminent mode of resolving the paradox of the self at the heart of his classic political texts. 3. A S I N I N E S E L F - F A S H I O N I N G Nowhere is writing more clearly an act of self-transformation than in the fragmentary LAsino. The composition of this text which has recently been called Machiavellis most complex, ambivalent, and moving work remains shrouded in mystery.41 Most of what we know, or may conjecture, about its place in Machiavellis oeuvre derives from his famous letter of December 1517 to Ludovico Alamanni (14951556) in praise of the first edition of Ariostos Orlando furioso. Here he registers his disappointment at not being included among the gallery of poets waiting to greet the voyager at the end of his poetic journey literally, he has been left behind like a prick and promises not to do the same to Ariosto (1474 1533) in his LAsino.42 As it turns out, there is no mention of the Ferrarese in the poem (perhaps because it is unfinished), and it has even been conjectured that it was the achievement of the Furioso itself that
Harvey, 121. Richardson, 137, characterizes LAsino though both ambitious and original as artistically the least successful of [Machiavellis] poems as well as, at 1,000-plus lines, his longest. 42 Lettere 383 (170): Io ho letto a questi d Orlando furioso dello Ariosto, et veramente il poema bello tutto, et in di molto luoghi mirabile. Se si truova cost, raccomandatemi a lui, et digli che io mi dolgo solo che, havendo ricordato tanti poeti, che mhabbi lasciato indietro come un cazzo, et chegli ha fatto a me quello in sul suo Orlando, che io non faro a lui in sul mio Asino. Radcliff-Umstead, 100, implies that the concept of Fortuna in Ariostos Lena may have been influenced by chapter 25 of Machiavellis Principe. Coincidentally or not, Ariostos first play, Cassaria, is an imitation of Terences Andria, translated by Machiavelli. On the possibility that Machiavelli and Ariosto may have met, see Ridolfi, 1963, 168, 300, n. 11.
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discouraged Machiavelli from continuing beyond the completed eight capitoli, turning him instead to comedy as his principal genre.43 Be that as it may, the poem as we have it is a fascinating document and, in its first half at least, a brilliant entre into Machiavellis evolving poetic imagination. A freewheeling pastiche in terzine of Dantean, Apuleian, Homeric, Ovidian, and Plutarchan elements just to mention the most obvious strands it offers an unusual insight into Machiavellis emerging view of the writer as a self-creating entity and of writing itself as both a stabilizing and liberating activity. For our purposes, the poem is especially helpful in showing how this activity converts the inevitable historical defeat of individuals and states into a creative personal triumph. Machiavellis vision culminates in the bitter medicina administered to the poems protagonist at the midpoint of the completed text, a potent symbol of the constructivist power of a fiction to constitute the stable selfhood of the writer. Like the epistolary novella discussed earlier, LAsino hinges on a series of generic metamorphoses. After proleptically defining his asinine persona in the first chapter (to which I will return shortly), in the second the narrator employs the conventional vocabulary of medieval dream-vision narrative When the nice season returns, and so on only to shift abruptly to the Dantean fall into a dark wood.44 His expected rescuer, however, turns out to be not a Virgilian precursor poet but a Donna who blends features of Dantes Beatrice with menacing aspects of her own mistress Circe before settling into a version of Apuleiuss feisty, accommodating maidservant. In capitolo 3 the Lady confirms the narrators suspicion that he is the victim of a cruel and unmerited Fortune, who will in time inevitably turn in his direction but whose blows he must bear for now if he is to earn her favors. Following the long section in which the Ladys moral exhortation is capped by their lovemaking, and a chapter in which the narrator muses on the variation of worldly things, the poem mutates into a long pageant of men-turned-beasts, culminating in the speakers interview with an unrepentant Plutarchan pig.45 What generic twists might have
Dionisotti 1993, 38. Inglese, 23031, has noted that Machiavelli could have had Ariosto in mind as the referent of one of the satirical beasts in chapter 7. 44 Machiavelli, 1996b, 365 (2.1): Quando ritorna la stagione aprica [lit.: open (to the sun)] / allor che primavera il verno caccia, / a ghiacci, al freddo, a le nevi nimica, / dimostra il cielo assai benigna faccia. . . . All subsequent citations of LAsino are from this edition. Page numbers are followed by chapter and line numbers (in parentheses). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 45 Ibid., 380 (5.36): del variar de le mondane cose.
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occurred next well never know. But it does feel as though at this juncture Machiavelli, like his porcine persona, got stuck in the mud. Before this happens, though, the poem richly exhibits the authors existential struggle. Its account of the protagonists liberation addresses the more philosophical side of Machiavellis own quest, his longstanding interrogation of Fortuna. Doomed to his ruin by his vain hopes and vain opinions as he explains to his mentor or would have explained if he could have found his voice he finds in her ministrations both spiritual liberation and sexual solace.46 The former occupies the heart of LAsino as we have it and centers on two transformative moments. The first concerns fate. Once in the Ladys camera the Narrator asks about his future. The resulting Dantean parody begins by defining a harsh, irreversible fate or fortune and goes on to ascribe his innocent sufferings to the malignant instability of things.47 Just as the flux of war, peace, and civil dissension arises because nothing on earth remains in the same state, these same humors will continue to pursue the Narrator till they have played themselves out and his days have turned felicitous.48 Viewed in this light, fate metamorphoses into providence, as the typically Machiavellian view of a hostile Fortuna takes on the Dantean color of a benign force that imposes this harsh star on him while promising untold rewards.49 One of these is in fact told: the vainglory of reporting all that he is about to experience if he undertakes to bear the burden of his fate.50 At the outset of their relationship, the Lady had warned the traveler to shun at all costs the transforming eye of Circe. But under the revolutionary dispensation of a Fortune-turned-Providence, he is now invited to undergo voluntarily his own physical metamorphosis as a condition of accepting his fate. Presumably, as the prologue implies, this would have happened in the completed poem. It is worth noting that in this pivotal passage the metamorphosis of Fortuna into providenza is given a specifically literary inflection. If the Narrator is willing to take upon himself the unmerited whips and scorns of Fortune, he will be rewarded with the sanction to castigate those who
Ibid., 368 (2.8687): Arei voluto dir: Mio senno poco, / vano sperare e vana openione / mhan fatto ruinare in questo loco. 47 Ibid., 373 (3.80, 86): sorte, fortuna. 48 Ibid., (3.9293): nulla in terra / vien ne lo stato suo perseverando; ibid., (3.103): umori. 49 Ibid., 374 (3.118): providenza; ibid. (3.12426): N pu mutarsi questa dura stella; / e per averti in questo luogo messo, / si diferisce il mal, non si cancella. 50 Ibid. (11214): Forse chanchor prenderai vanagloria / a queste genti raccontando e quelle / de le fatiche tue la lunga istoria.
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have been the agents of fate, including his own misfortunes, in the form of what the prologue refers to as the asinine jokes his poem will produce.51 Implicitly, the heroism celebrated here, even if ironically qualified as vainglory, is that of the intrepid satirist exposing the vices of his age. This challenge to embrace a willed, virtuoso freedom is the key to the ensuing action of the poem. Though confused, the narrator takes the Ladys exhortation to heart. Refusing to blame heaven or other men for his misfortunes, he agrees to make his Dantean descent through the infernal gates under her conditions, challenging Fortune to do her worst because I know well she never cared about me.52 The Lady in turn foresees a voyage worthy of being sung . . . by historian or poet : precisely, of course, Machiavelli himself, who in an October 1525 letter to Guicciardini will sign himself historian, comedian, tragedian.53 At the end of the chapter, the Narrator blesses her and prays that she find pleasing the things he has done and written.54 Prior to that consummation, the wine that the Lady proffers in the erotic consolazione that prefaces the journey stands as a metonym of Machiavellis new, almost Stoical version of fate. Let us enjoy ourselves, she proclaims, anticipating the return of good fortune and the fall of those now in power: [A]nd when evil comes, as it must, / gulp it down like medicine; / for he is crazy who [merely] tastes or savors it.55 The consoling wine of misfortune bravely quaffed like medicine is a token of Machiavellis bravado in defying a hostile fate; his vigorous embrace of his miseries is reinforced by the rendering of the ensuing sexual encounter in a mood of
Ibid., 365 (1.111): gli scherzi asinini. Ibid., 37475 (4.112): Poi che la donna di parlare stette, / levami in pi, rimanendo confuso / per le parole chella aveva dette. / Pur dissi: Il ciel n altri i non accuso, / n mi vo lamentar di s ria sorte, / perch nel mal pi che nel ben sono uso. / Ma sio dovessi per linfernal porte / gire al ben che detto hai, mi piacerebbe, / non che per quelle vie che tu mhai porte. / Fortuna dunque tutto quell che debbe / e che le par, de la mia vita faccia; / chio so ben che di me mai non le ncrebbe . 53 Ibid., 375 (4.1618): Alma discreta[,] / questo viaggio tuo, questo tuo stento, / cantato fia da istorico o poeta; Lettere, 568 (300): istorico, comico e tragico. 54 LAsino, 37879 (4.13335): Sia benedetta lora, quando io missi / il pi nella foresta, e se mai cose / che ti fossero a cor, feci n scrissi. Emphasis mine. 55 Ibid., 376 (4.3742): Godiamo adunque; e come fanno i saggi, / pensa che ben possa venire ancora; / e chi dritto, al fin convien che caggi. / E quando viene il mal, che viene ognora, / mandalo gi come una medicina; / ch pazzo chi la gusta o lassapora. The phrase Godiamo adunque clearly echoes the well-known Latin hymn, Gaudeamus igitur.
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(for him) rare erotic harmony.56 Moreover, the elected trope is closely associated in the passage with Machiavellis vocation as a writer, who will reward and please his benefactress-muse with his record of their encounter. Tellingly, the sequence suggests that writing itself may be a way to overcome Fortune. Already in Di fortuna Machiavelli had challenged the goddess to turn her eyes upon him and read the truth about herself that he dares to sing.57 And even earlier, in his prison sonnets to Giuliano de Medici, he insists on his unique identity as one of the poets.58 If the present sequence fails to achieve a systematic solution to the dilemma of the self in its quest for existential freedom, it does suggest that a writerly turning of ones face to Fortune may constitute an asinine fashioning of both the self and its adversary through the exercise of the literary imagination. And the fact or demonstration of this exercise in LAsino implies the paradox that such a stable identity may indeed must underwrite the chameleon-like self-fashioning that is the essence of writing. Machiavelli underscores the broader significance of his personal conversion by explicitly linking it to his interrogation of historical change. In the fifth chapter the pilgrims meditation on his favorite theme of the variation of worldly things shows that events on the macrocosmic level project those in the human world. All states, he muses, fall because the powerful fail to be satisfied by their power.59 Conversely, a state will thrive more or less in ratio to its good laws and order.60 This formulation introduces a typical panorama of Fortunes ceaseless motion: virt brings about tranquility, which leads to leisure, which causes ruin; the ensuing disorders in turn foster virtue, and so forth.61 In short, it is, and always was, and always will be / that evil follows good, and good evil, and the one
Harvey, 129: The poignanacy of LAsino is that it provides a tantalizing glimpse of a kinder world than the one that Machiavelli inhabits, a world of mutuality and friendship between men and women, where men can gain virt through friendship rather than solitary conquest and through equality of relations rather than seduction and violent assault. 57 Machiavelli, 1996b, 33031 (Di fortuna, ll. 1924): E lei, diva crudel, rivolga intanto / ver di me li occhi sua feroci e legga / quell chor di lei e del suo regno canto. / E, bench in alto sopra tutti segga / comandi e regni impetuosamente, / chi del suo stato ardisce cantar vegga. 58 Ibid., 425 (A Giuliano di Lorenzo de Medici, l. 17): io non sono il Dazzo, ma sono io; ibid., 423 (ll. 34): le alter miserie mie non vo contalle, / poich cos si trattano e poeti! 59 LAsino, 380 (5.3839): i potenti / di lor potenza non son mai satolli. 60 Ibid., 381 (5.7678): Vero che suol durar o pi o meno / una potenza, secondo che pi / o men sue leggi buone e ordin fieno. 61 Ibid., 382 (5.9499): tranquillit, ocio, disordini, and virtute.
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is always the cause of the other.62 Clearly, the historico-political situation replicates the pilgrims personal one, already rehearsed by the Lady. In both cases, stability and chaos are subsumed into an overarching order of things, ordained by him (or her) who governs us.63 But coming after the pilgrims liberation, the macrocosmic revelation underscores a crucial difference. Both individuals and states are trapped in the eternal cycle of rise and fall, good and bad fortune. But whereas states cannot escape the cycle because men of ambition, greed, and power will always supply the virt that fuels it, privileged individuals can learn to transcend it by capitalizing on the opportunity provided by their personal misfortune to understand its universal laws. In a sequence that seems to encapsulate Machiavellis understanding of his own experience during the preceding five years, the pilgrim, freed by the Lady from his bondage to desire and from his resentment at its frustration, is now ready to descend. At this point in the narrative, Machiavelli plunges into his bizarre fusion of the tenth book of the Odyssey with Plutarchs Gryllus. In a room presided over by the notorious court buffoon Baraballo (Abate di Gaeta), the pilgrim sees various beasts that symbolize diverse passions and, presumably, represent members of the papal court. These perfunctory descriptions serve as a prelude to his final encounter with a fat pig who justifies his refusal to resume his humanity by delivering a conventional defense of the superior life of beasts. Though manifesting all the human virtues, he explains, animals do so without desire for praise or renown; on the other hand, humans, out of ambition and avarice, pervert their virtues and immodestly give all in the service of their senses. Therefore the pig will remain contented among the other noble beasts. Here the poem ends, the pigs oration having echoed much of the pilgrims own thinking on the desire for fame and material goods that drives men and sustains the inexorable turning of Fortunes wheel.64 Did Machiavelli at this juncture drop the project in the face of an
Ibid. (5.10305): , e sempre fu, e sempre fia / che l mal succeda al bene, il bene al male, / e lun sempre cagion de laltro sia. 63 Ibid., 382 (5.10002): Questordine cos permette e vuole / chi ci governa, acci che nulla stia / o possa star mai fermo sotto l sole. 64 Examining the changes Machiavelli works on his Plutarchan model which gives animals some moral equity with humans without ever questioning mans superiority Fazion, 121, argues that Machiavellis aim is to refute the idealizing vision of the official [Humanist] culture of figures such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola exemplified thirty years later in Gellis Circe. For both, man alone lacks measure (123); but here, as in Discorsi 1.1, 1.3, 2.33, Machiavelli radically redefines virt as unattainable because of his incapacity to achieve happiness by apportioning his desires to the order of things (124).
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irrefutable reductio of his own meditations on human history? Or, on the other hand, was it his reading of the Orlando furioso at this time that persuaded him to turn to another genre? Id like to propose an alternative explanation of Machiavellis abandoning LAsino. Regardless of the order of composition, the opening chapter which I believe he wrote last already seems to foreshadow the authors turn to comedy. Referring in the poems opening lines to his travails in the form of an Ass, echoed later in his seeking the world beneath a new skin and thus implying the metamorphosis that presumably would have occurred had the poem been finished, the speaker builds a case for a poetics of speaking evil.65 Preferring the asss braying to the standard emblems of humanist poetry the waters of Helicon, Apollos lyre he embraces the formers conventional ingratitude as a proper response to his own treatment by others and by the heavens, which have poured new scorn on him.66 Already his rhetoric implies the disdain for Fortuna that he will develop under the Ladys tutelage, explicitly linking it to the renewal of his old habit of asinine speech. The blows of fortune no longer bother him because he has acquired the nature of [the ass] of whom I sing.67 The compulsion to respond in kind by exposing the defects of others is underscored by the novella that follows, in which a young Florentine feels compelled to run whenever he sees an alluring roadway. Despite his alleged cure, the sight of the Florentine Largo sparks his imagination which, whirling in his head, would break even the restraint of Christ and he returns to his obsession.68 At the end of the novella this obsession is sealed with the stamp of indelible selfhood: Because our mind, always inclined / toward its natural bent, does not grant us / any defense against its habit or nature.69 This commonplace of Machiavellian anthropology, often associated in his political writing with the compensating need for either a strong leader or a strong communal bond of legge (law) or buon ordine (good order), is here closely bound to his emergent view of his own creative
LAsino, 361 (1.12): I vari casi, la pena e la doglia / che sotto forma dun Asin soffersi, / canter io, pur che fortuna voglia; ibid., 374 (3.117): cercando il mondo sotto nuova pelle; ibid., 364 (1.101): dir male. 66 Ibid., 362 (1.25): nuovi sdegni. 67 Ibid., 36162 (1.1618): Morsi o mazzate io non istimo tanto / quanto io soelva, sendo divenuto / de la natura di colui chio canto. 68 Ibid., 364 (1.8084): di correr gli torn la fantasia, / che mulinando mai non si riposa; / e giunto in su la testa de la via, / lasci ire il mantello in terra e disse: / Qui non mi terr Cristo ; e corse via. 69 Ibid. (8890): Perch la mente nostra, sempre intesa / dietro al suo natural, non ci consente / contrabito o natura sua difesa.
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fantasy. And that view is patently anarchic: in the poet-satirists persona, Machiavelli casts himself as similarly tainted with an asinine compulsion to run, compelled by the time, abundant in matter.70 Just as the giovanetto throws off his hard-won cure and returns to his obsession, so the speaker has come to recognize his own fantastic vocation as an ingrained habit because human character always reverts to its natural bent. Like the Florentine youth, the speaker has tried an altro modo, but the times are such that he must resume his habit of speaking evil.71 The force of this commitment is marked by the capitolos final aggressive gesture to the reader: And let whoever doesnt like it beshit himself !72 In the passage leading up to this gesture, the reader is warned to keep his distance lest he feel the full force of the poets scherzi asinini. In the guise of a comically rendered compulsive paranoia, Machiavelli has invented a volatile, yet paradoxically solid, persona through which he can confront and chastise an inherently unstable world. 4. S T A G I N G V IR T LAsino, I have been arguing, may be viewed both formally and substantively as a transitional moment in Machiavellis evolution as a writer. The texts oscillation between personal self-interrogation and theoretical discourse hints at its authors struggle to find an appropriate objective correlative for his convictions about the human condition. This struggle can be intuited in the poems generic instability, as he invests his intentions now in allegory, now in parable, now in quasi-philosophical discourse. The theater furnished what must have been an inviting avenue of escape from this generic uncertainty, one more suited both to the writers basic passion for the conduct of human affairs on the stage of public life, and to an ear attuned to the inflections of everyday speech. Hence in his comedies Machiavelli could explore the perennial issues that engage him,
Ibid. (10002): onde, salquanto or di veleno spargo, / benchio mi sia divezzo di dir male, / mi sforza il tempo di materia largo. L. F. Benedetto is probably right, as cited in ibid., 364n, that Machiavellis largo alludes to the via Larga, where the youth goes berserk in the preceding novella. In the parallel between the youthful runners obsession and that of the narrator the times amplitude sends the latter off on his scherzi asinini. 71 Raimondi, 245, sees dire male as the keynote of the Attic or Aristophanic Machiavelli of Mandragola, who can hide his poisons and his bitternesses (250) in antique diversion. 72 LAsino, 365 (121): e chi lo vuol aver per mal, si scinga. A more polite translation might be, So much the worse for him! which is how Blasucci (in ibid., 127, n. 1) translates Nicias almost verbatim use of the same obscene expression in Mandragola 2.1. There the editor glosses, si cali le brache (e si vuoti il ventre).
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exploiting to the full his sense of the absurdities of human intercourse. Of course, any comic playwright must exercise negative capability if he is to bring his characters to life. But Machiavellis comic mirror is held up to a nature in which his personages wrestle with the same issues of identity and flexibility as do Machiavelli himself and the denizens of his historicopolitical world. As Lanfranco Caretti has argued, while the epitome of Machiavellis style is achieved in his purely literary prose, and especially in Mandragola, the same intellectual fervor [and] . . . furor surface from beneath the appearance of logical coldness in the political and historical works. Hence, whether in dialogic or novelistic discourse, the comic is the true Machiavellian muse.73 This being the case, it is surprising that, instead of indulging the inconsistencies and contradictions of peoples behavior, on balance Machiavellis plays celebrate the intractable stubbornness of human nature. This is true across the span of his extant comedies. Indeed, one might conjecture that on the threshold of his literary inauguration Machiavellis decision to translate Terences Andria had something to do with the stability of his heros mentor, Crito, a man who has held on to [his] old character.74 His last comedy, Clizia, similarly foregrounds the persevering Sofronias restoration of the wayward Nicomacos order of life.75 Paradoxically, the one play that seems to contradict this claim and the
Caretti, 56. Machiavelli, 1996b, 97 (Andria, 4.5, Miside to Crito): Tu . . . ritieni il tuo costume antico. The key word costume echoes the tricky slave Davos earlier warning to Panfilo that nobody will ever give a wife to someone with your character (75 [2.3]: nessuno dar mai moglie a cotesti costumi). But the character invoked in this instance is really one fashioned by Davo himself, who counsels the young hero to mask his noble nature in the service of his own ill-advised plot. The true Panfilo is the conventionally faithful lover, who has sworn, and intends, to be true to his love and to acknowledge and raise their child. 75 Ibid., 195 (Clizia, 2.4): ordine della . . . vita. On Clizia as a conventionally moral comedy, see Andrews, 57. Martinez, 1993, 121, views the play as centering on the question of harmonizing human desire with Fortune and Necessity, more specifically with the issue of the stability of the self. The self-referentiality of the protagonists name Nic(c)o(l) Mac[o](hiavelli) is self-evident and has often been noted; Cope, 98, and others have linked it to Machiavellis own infatuation with Barbara Raffacani Salutati. The connection is underscored when Sofronia muses on Nicomacos recent mutazione (Machiavelli, 1996b, 194 [2.4]), describing the former orderliness of his life in language that seems to echo Machiavellis own in his December 1513 letter to Vettori, except that it lacks the culminating bookish communion with the noble ancients. Regarding the eponymous heroine, Martinez, 1993, 127, n. 19, associates her name with the inclinations of nature that make it difficult for even the man of virt to meet the changing circumstances of fortune.
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greatest of Machiavellis comedies provides its most emphatic corroboration. In the brilliantly original Mandragola Machiavelli utterly transforms the classic comic paradigm. Seen through the lens of Andria, virtually all of the characters are infinitely plastic. Thus the virtuous (if absent) heroine Glicerio becomes Lucrezia, a naive victim turned paragon of prudent selfgratification; and the romantic hero Panfilo is transformed into Callimaco, the determined seducer-become-surrogate-husband. Moulding this pliable material seemingly to his will is that paragon of ferociously clever amorality, Ligurio, a highly developed scion of the stock trickster of Roman comedy. How the author perceives these characters relations is one of the chief cruxes of the play. We get a clue in the prologues sardonic apology for his slight material.76 In language reminiscent of a well-known letter to Vettori in which huomini gravi stoop to cose vane (l. 247), the prologue links Machiavellis descent to comedy with his own enforced incapacity to demonstrate a different virtue in other undertakings and then proceeds to extrapolate from his personal situation to the general falling-off of his age from ancient virtue.77 Like the prologue (capitolo 1) of LAsino, the passage ends with a sharp warning to carping critics to beware the playwrights power to hurt. He knows how to speak evil too and is no respecter of persons when attacked.78 Machiavellis intentions are further clarified by the canzone added for the aborted 1526 Faenza production of the play. The pastoral pursuit that it projects of simple pleasures in the country serves as an appropriately deceptive guise for the urban setting of the sardonic comedy to follow. The chorus even echoes the pig in LAsino: pastoral otium is put forth as one extreme, Epicurean alternative to the vanity of self-aggrandizing aspiration. Here the genteel tone of aristocratic pastoral comedy clearly acts as a foil for the more equivocal innuendo of the (earlier-written) prologue and should alert us to the complex, if evasive, stance of its author. If in LAsino Machiavelli could not surmount the logic of the pigs argument against the vanities of heroic virt and complete his intended portrait of a personal conversion to other, more writerly endeavors, in Mandragola he will at
Machiavelli, 1996b, 115: leggieri. Ibid.: ch gli stato interciso [ed.: precluso, impedito] / monstrar con altre imprese altra virte, / non sendo premio alle fatiche sue. . . . Di qui depende, senza dubio alcuno, / che per tutto traligna / da lantica virt el secol presente. On cose vane and huomini gravi, see n. 35 above. 78 Ibid.: io lo ammunisco e dico a questo tale / che sa dir male anchegli.
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least represent other virtues by wielding his destructive pen at the expense of his fallen century. The literary posture of LAsinos prologue leads ineluctably to Mandragola. Indeed, if I am correct in assuming that the first chapter was in fact written last, it may well have led to it directly; for in all probability Mandragola was completed by September of 1518 and may have been begun as early as May of that year.79 In any case, absent a literal metamorphosis LAsinos speakers essential asininity lies in the defiantly hostile truth-telling he threatens there. This stance is repeated, as Giorgio Inglese has noted, in the Mandragola prologue, where dire male is identified as the authors first art.80 This posture may help us to understand how the comedy encodes Machiavellis new writerly understanding of the individuals triumph over Fortuna. The sequence of these pivotal texts is not without its hermeneutic perils. In this connection one must confront the strong, if ultimately unpersuasive, reading of the sequence by Giulio Ferroni, specifically with respect to the question of adaptability. Exploring the links between LAsino and Mandragola, Ferroni sees the poem reaching a dead end because the pigs rejection of humanity challenges Machiavellis former image of man as perpetually aspiring to an affirmation of the self and of his own dominion of the world. If our author privileges adapting oneself to nature or Fortune, then the pig is the perfect incarnation of the Machiavellian savio (wise man).81 In effect, Ferronis Asino replays the existential aporia of the major political texts discussed earlier. Fully embracing the bestial, Machiavelli is trapped in his own logic.82 Faced with this hermeneutical
Though the first documented performance is that referred to by Battista della Palla in a letter to Machiavelli from Rome, 30 April 1520 (Lettere, 507 [260]), Ridolfi, 1963, 173, asserts that the play was performed at the Florentine wedding festivities of Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, (the original dedicatee of The Prince) and his French bride in September 1518. Following Ridolfi, Parronchi, 62, n. 1, argues that Machiavelli started writing the play shortly after the couples wedding in France on 2 May of that year. On the date of the first edition there is less unanimity. Flaumenhaft (in Machiavelli, 1981b, 6) asserts it was 1518 but gives no evidence supporting this date. Colimore, 5556, records that no place or date exists for any edition of the play before 1531. Contra Ridolfi, 1954, 9293, Bertelli, 321, argues that the discovery of a 1519 manuscript of the play, ms. Laurenziano-Rediano 129, proves that it could not have been published in 1518, as no one would copy a printed book, and further infers that it was therefore not written and printed to celebrate Lorenzos marriage (my emphasis). Ibid., 32526, concludes from internal evidence that at least part of the comedy must have been composed as early as 1504. 80 Machiavelli, 1996b, 115: questa fu la sua primarte; Inglese, 231. 81 Ferroni, 1975, 34344. 82 Noting that Ferroni wants to see the Pig in LAsino 8, as supporting, like Lucrezia,
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impasse which, one should note, replicates that attributed to Machiavelli Ferroni blinks, reaffirms the necessity of adaptation, and shifts his attention to Mandragola, where, not surprisingly, he finds Lucrezia to be the perfect incarnation of the alleged ideal of riscontro / mutazione (mimetic compliance).83 But what if we take seriously Machiavellis repeated insistence that in the real world no one is wise enough to adapt to every circumstance? How can we reconcile such a view with the putative heroines or, in other readings, heros epiphany in the play? The answer, I believe, lies in the authors implied attitude toward his own emerging vocation as a writer. The argument for plasticity of character must be transposed to the imaginative dimension. To see why this is so requires revisiting the conventional view of the plays personages as stock figures in a presumed Machiavellian power struggle. To begin with Lucrezia: rather than a paragon of princely adaptability, Machiavelli goes out of his way to present her as the male protagonists ultimate victim. Though she does not share the total invisibility of her precursor Glicerio in Andria , Lucrezia is nearly as impenetrable. She does not appear in the play till the end of the third act. Up to that point we have heard from her husband Nicia about her earlier unsettling experience with lustful friars, which had also been triggered by Nicias desire for a pregnancy, as well as her extreme piety (3.2). But her first speech in the play, addressed to her mother, reveals her sense of honor and her revulsion from sacrificing an innocent stranger in the process of losing it (3.10), while her passive role in the combined assault by Timoteo and Sostrata in the next scene shows her departing from a familiar moral world taken on faith into an unknown one Where are you leading me, father? identified in her own mind with death.84 The crisis of Lucrezias development is nearly buried in her offstage bedroom conversion. And it is in keeping with Machiavellis sense of the mystery of human motivation that her change of heart is mediated to us by her lover. The few hints we get of the nature of her metamorphosis are thus
an hypothesis of the savio capable of mutare coi tempi, Inglese argues that he turns the poem upside down: While the myth of superiority of animals does represent an antihumanist ideal, the context the mud the Pig wallows in reveals his function of discouraging any nostalgia for a regenerative reconciliation with nature (23536). 83 Ferroni, 1972b, 8187. 84 Machiavelli, 1996b, 145 (3.11): A che me conducete voi, padre?, which echoes her immediately preceding Che cosa mi persuadete voi? Pressed by her mother and the friar, she proclaims herself contenta: ma non credo mai essere viva domattina.
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ambiguous enough to allow full play to interpretation, as subsequent criticism has shown. Lucrezias last words before her fall are a simple prayer to God and the Virgin to preserve her from harm; her next are those reported by Callimaco after their tryst, in which she inserts a newly discovered self into a world that she enters under his protection. Here, after a few sighs, she acknowledges that the combined forces of her lovers shrewdness, Nicias stupidity, Sostratas simplicity, and Timoteos wickedness have led me to do what I never would have done by myself. Then, in a sardonic parody of the Narrators metamorphosis in LAsino, she infers from this improbable event the workings of a heavenly inclination that she lacks the power to resist.85 Is the irony Lucrezias or Machiavellis? As Jackson I. Cope has warned us, one should tread lightly in projecting an after-curtain life on to this innovatively open-ended comedy.86 Much has been made of Lucrezias rebirth as a Machiavellian New Woman whose worldliness stems from a sexual initiation that liberates her own suppressed desires.87 But Lucrezia confesses to no such transfiguring pleasure, either to Callimaco as he reports it or to the audience in the following scene. Callimacos passing allusion to the tenor of her surrender implies a resignation to a moral universe controlled by others. When Lucrezia reappears in person in act 5, scenes 5 and 6, we find a few swift traces of an assertive young wife who will probably exact a more painful price than mere cuckolding from her dottering husband for the production of his heirs. But on balance it seems likely that the new Lucrezia is intended to appear no more a self-creation
85 Ibid., 163 (5.4): doppo qualche sospiro disse: Poi che lastuzia tua, la sciocchezza del mio marito, la semplicit di mia madre e la tristizia del mio confessoro mi hanno condotto a fare quello che mai per me medesima arei fatto, io voglio iudicare che e venga da una celeste disposizione che abbi voluto cos, e non sono sufficiente a recusare quello che l cielo vuole che io accetti. 86 Cope, 11. 87 Echoing Ferroni, Barber, 45758, observes that Lucrezia, having live[d] in harmony with her environment (though without control), counters [Fortune] with a true mutazione and regains control. Similarly, Martinez, 1983, 40, argues that by submitting to Callimacos masculine power, Lucrezia ironically exchanges sexual natures with him; hence the ambiguous female power of Fortuna-Natura triumphs over traditional male virtue. Not all recent critics share this view of Lucrezia. For example, Behuniak-Long, 265, sees her as herself a figure of Fortuna, a fickle woman of questionable character who raises men in order to enjoy their fall (in short, a whore [272]); Tonelli, 42, reads Callimacos return from Paris as a move from a politically detached to engaged life in Florence, where he executes an allegorical rape of Fortune-woman. In a more explicitly political reading, Lord, 15556, views Lucrezia as representing the Florentine popolo, which, though fit to govern a kingdom, is incapable of governing itself because it is shackled by religion.
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born of disillusionment than is her precursor. She has simply adopted a different, and perhaps more gratifying, set of moral values from other characters, who command little of our respect. Her eye-opening discovery that the mandragola was a hoax neither adds to nor detracts from her sense that the moral stage on which she moves is constructed by others. For this reason, perhaps, more than as a result of her initiation into sexual pleasure, she tells Callimaco he will henceforth be her lord, master, guide.88 For all that, it is equally difficult to see Callimaco as embodying the authors ideal of personal power, as is often claimed. Such a view might have worked in the ambiance of The Prince; and Callimaco has been viewed as a Machiavellian prince under the tutelage of his adviser Ligurio. But the young seducer is something of a chameleon, who at times reveals a surprising lack of purpose and, at best, proves himself adept at taking Ligurios instruction, as when he adroitly picks up and runs with the latters cue about the mandrake root (2.6).89 But driven as they are by a derived or mimetic desire for Lucrezia, his metamorphoses first into a doctor, then into the supposed garzonaccio (young stud) are always passive and imposed, as the crucial invention of the mandragola in 2.2 shows.90 On the deepest level, he may reflect Machiavellis abiding sense that eros always drives men outside their true selves and hence represents a threat to stable identity. In his defining soliloquy in 4.1 he acknowledges himself to be poised between Nicias stupidity and Lucrezias virtue and foresees his own disappointment in the pleasure he desires. Echoing the words shared by Vettori and Machiavelli after the latters prison ordeal, he urges himself to face up to destiny.91 But unlike Machiavelli (and like Vettori himself), he is incapable of bearing his fate like a man, embracing instead a womanish passivity before the forces that assault him, as Lucrezia herself has already done with her mother and Fra Timoteo. The trickster Ligurio, on the other hand, comes closer to representing
Machiavelli, 1996b, 163 (5.4): signore, padrone, guida. Though there is always the possibility that he has been coached offstage. On Ligurios annihilation of Callimacos personality, see Ferroni as cited in Barber, 453. Sparacio, 79, sees Callimaco as virtually a pawn (pedina) of Ligurio. For a more Machiavellian Callimaco, see di Maria, 22, who insists on the protagonists control of both Ligurio and the plot, thus qualifying as a Machiavellian prince reclaiming his lost state (of happiness). 90 In the tradition of Livys ur-Lucretia narrative, Callimacos desire is generated by the praise of her he hears in Paris from Nicias kinsman, Cammillo Calfucci (Machiavelli, 1996b, 118 [1.1]). On mimetic or triangular desire, see Girard, 4152. 91 Ibid., 148 (4.1): Volgi el viso alla sorte, fuggi el male, o non lo potendo fuggire, sopportalo come uomo (see n. 23 above). See also Lettere, 363 (206) and 365 (207): Volgere il viso alla fortuna.
89 88
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the more active, if refined, Machiavellian agent of these transitional years. Though we should take care not to reduce him to a stand-in for the author, we might nevertheless taking our cue from the echoes of LAsino in the prologue of Mandragola reconsider Ferronis dismissal of Ligurio as a merely mechanical animator of events. It is true that, in a sense, Machiavellis parasite operates at a tangent to the action of the play, thus functioning as an agent of defamiliarization (straniamento) vis--vis the audience.92 As such, he oscillates between two competing paradigms: Wayne Rebhorns ubiquitous fox, the con man par excellence, and a more subtle constructor of others realities.93 Although the difference between these types may seem nugatory, it turns on a series of crucial distinctions. Is Ligurio primarily a manipulator or an inventor? Are his interlocutors the materia on which he imposes forma his victims or his (even if unwitting) collaborators? Finally, and most important, is the entire interaction to be viewed as the hostile encounter of adversaries evoked in the two prologues, or as an ultimately positive social engagement? The answers to these questions rest on our understanding of Ligurios motives. The quickness of his ingegno is indisputable. Besides the mandragola itself, he gratuitously invents a deaf Nicia, coerces Timoteos collaboration in a fictive abortion to earn Nicias alms, and torments the latter by repeatedly ratcheting up the price (3.4). He then uses the abortion in a bait-and-switch maneuver, first to test Timoteos pliability, then to steer him to the real task of persuading Lucrezia through her credulous mother to go through with the mandragola scheme (3.6, 8), leaving him feeling totally (if profitably) swindled.94 Finally, he improvises a solution to the problem Callimaco has created when he says that hell help the others nab the sacrificial victim, himself: Ligurio will get Timoteo to disguise himself as Callimaco (4.2). As a plot device, the mandragola itself betokens this dimension of his character. When Callimaco, having won Nicias total trust with his command of Latin, is forced in 2.2 to pick up Ligurios improvisations with respect to the mandragola, we begin to associate the innocuous root with the power to control others perceptions of their world. By metonymy, then, the mandragola already embodies the human capacity to construct reality. More elusive is the ethical valence of this posture. As Ferroni and others have argued, Ligurio appears to stand totally outside the events he
92 93
Ferroni, 1972b, 68. Rebhorn, 5660. 94 Machiavelli, 1996b, 142 (3.9): giuntato.
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is orchestrating. At one point, observing Callimaco nearly swoon in gratitude to Timoteo and Sostrata in anticipation of sexual pleasure, he apostrophizes, What kind of guy is this? an apposite variation on Davos What kind of tale is this? in the translated Andria.95 Undoubtedly, a large part of his energy derives from the action itself. Like Machiavelli among the friars of Carpi, Ligurio takes evident pleasure in the sheer execution of the plot. He even manages to slip Nicia some foultasting camphor, in gratuitous payment for the latters gullibility (4.9). Yet beyond the pure joy of imposing his will on the world, his complex character encompasses the artists insidious ability to enter into others psyches. When Callimaco admits his distrust of the parasite, Ligurio counters that he can be trusted because your blood flows with mine so that I want to satisfy your desire almost as much as you do.96 The implication is that Ligurio has the capacity to easily imagine himself in anothers skin. On the eve of Callimacos triumph, Ligurio reminds him that once he gains Lucrezias bed hell still have to earn her complicity (4.2). When he learns that his protg has heeded this advice and effected a permanent change in the plays social configuration, he says nothing more about a material reward. On one level, then, Ligurio seems to incarnate the Machiavellian ideal of an intense but disinterested amorality. On this reading, he incarnates the authors aggressive dedication to deceiving his audience, as Rebhorn argues. But there are implicit disclaimers of this ideal in the text. In arguing for a Pirandellesque humanizing contrarian sentiment at work in the play, Franco Masciandaro has pointed out that it is Ligurio who in the finale thinks to ask if anyone will remember Siro.97 Has the trickster a soft spot in his heart for the lowly servant, or does his image of an emerging ordine perhaps prohibit exclusions? If there is a positive ideal informing the parasite, it is one that centers in the power of fantasia to transcend the limitations of our fixed natures, even to the extent of imagining a more functional community. Precisely because he seems to operate imaginatively outside the arena of human actions and desires, Ligurio signifies the ultimate in human potentiality. Only by adopting such a mask as Ligurios and imaginatively penetrating the various guises of humanity, including the bestial, can one express it fully.
95 Ibid., 149 (4.2): Che gente questa; ibid., 94 (4.4): Che favola questa? On favola here (and fabula in Terence) as stuff or nonsense, see Machiavelli, 1985, 78. 96 Machiavelli, 1996b, 124 (1.3): Non dubitare della fede mia, ch quando e non ci fussi lutile che io sento e che io spero, ci che l tuo sangue si aff col mio, e desidero che tu adempia questo tuo desiderio presso a quanto tu. 97 Masciandaro, 194.
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The ambiguous resonance of Ligurios function is captured in his name, which evokes the equivocal stance of his author. As Donald A. Beecher has written, though the animateur . . . has tainted the moral atmosphere of the entire play with his aberrant nature, as a figure of the satirist he emerges as an ironic public benefactor whose genius is for the construction of the comedy of the inverted world, a sardonic-satirical version of Northrop Fryes new society.98 Ligurio implicitly gloats over (ligurire) the plays other personages, fulfilling the dire male threat of the two prologues. But he also binds (ligare) them into a new social order that reflects their true moral values.99 It is hard to resist reading Machiavellis own virtues into Ligurio. Acknowledging the absence of ancient virt in his fellow citizens, yet denied by his evil fortune any possibility of active virtue, Machiavelli adopts the alternative literary mode by reverting to his first art of braying at his compatriots. Through the persona of Ligurio he exposes the whole instability and hollowness of their social and psychic ordini. Far from empowering Lucrezia to seize the occasion and overthrow Fortune, Ligurio subjects all of the plays characters, in Jane Tyluss words, to the vulnerable posture of the early modern woman.100 Through his superior intelligence and grasp of human motive, he conquers and reshapes his world. If this reading of the play has any merit, the ultimate key to its understanding may lie in the elusive mandragola itself. More than merely a word without substance by whose virtue people can be manipulated rhetorically to believe in anothers reality, as Rebhorn defines it, the mandragola is, as we have seen, emblematic of the mysterious self, mirroring each characters beliefs, desires, and prejudices.101 Upon those who control it, however, it bestows the gift of self-knowledge, sharing the power of the Asino Ladys draught of evil. It is an elixir for the knowing that underscores the unique virtues of the literary imagination. Inoculated by reality, its true master is immune to its destructive power. By this final metamorphosis of the metaphoric medicina to the symbolic mandragola, Machiavelli the writer completes the transcendence of his personal misfortune through fantasia, producing at last an exemplar of the Machiavellian wise man. In addition he offers his newfound wisdom as an ambiguous gift to his compatriots if he can only castigate them into partaking of his vision.
Beecher, 179, 184. The significance of Ligurios name is a commonplace of criticism of the play. See, for example, Flaumenhafts note in Machiavelli, 1981b, 57. 100 Tylus, 676. 101 Rebhorn, 67.
99 98
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5. THE MACHIAVELLIAN EXCHANGE Is comedy, then, Machiavellis true genre, as Caretti believes, or is Riccardo Bacchelli more correct in claiming that Machiavelli truly is, as he says, istorico, comico e tragico?102 On balance, I think the former. While the historian observes that the individual always loses, in his literary incarnation Machiavelli believes that men create their reality by framing their own stories. Thus the writers essential freedom to invent epitomizes each individuals struggle to attain his desires or, when he fails, to construct an acceptable narrative.103 This applies to himself as well, as his letter of December 1509 to Guicciardini narrating his humiliating encounter with an old Veronese whore, or those of 1521 detailing the Carpi prank, suggest.104 Even the eponymous Nicomacos humiliation in Clizia, reminiscent of Machiavellis own in these and other episodes, may be read as a literary recreation of his autores imaginative self-redemption. Without pushing Machiavellis text into the shadowy domain of allegory, when Damone advises the old lecher to put himself and his honor in Sofronias hands (5.2) as, returning to himself, he soon does we may be forgiven for discerning a reflexive nod toward the act of writing as the construction of wisdom. In the pages above I have tried to argue that the resolution of Machiavellis internal conflicts occurs in the crucial period of his life between his release from prison and his theatrical debut in Florence. Commenting on this gestation, Raimondi implies that the writer internalizes his long duet with Vettori in their correspondence, transforming it into a private competition between the political writer and the exuberant fictional narrator of his literary works. One of these voices, he adds, may conceal an extravagant and provocative will to paradox.105 On the stylistic level, this conjecture captures well our sense of the dynamic of this stage in Machiavellis literary development. The sardonic glint in the portraits of
See p. 76, above. Most of Sullivans contributors, as well as Caretti, opt for comico; for the exceptional, tragic Machiavelli, see Martinez, 2000. 103 Najemy, 33637. 104 For the whore, see Lettere, 32123 (178). Contrary to the usual positive view of this letter as a self-deprecating joke, Schiesari, 17879, sees the anecdote as stag[ing] the fear of a feminine symbolic order, one where the distinctions between political economy and sexual economy, subject of exchange and object of exchange, masculinity and femininity, are blurred and revealing Machiavellis inherent suspicion of women as well as his inability to theorize economic functions. 105 Raimondi, 196: Lo scrittore politico tace o si confonde con il narratore giocoso del lungo duetto col Vettori in una sorta di gara a due voci, che forse nasconde anche, per una delle due parti, una volont di paradosso o di esasperata stravaganza, quasi di sfida.
102
86
our author and the exuberant fantasy of both his letters and the pranks they frequently relate suggest the plasticity of the synthetic imagination always lurking near the surface of Machiavellis political analyses. What the texts queried in this essay add to this intuition is the writers growing conviction that the imaginative (re)construction of reality may furnish the key to resolving the agon between freedom and necessity, virt and fortuna, that bedevil the political theorist on the level of abstract analysis. The social fabrications represented in his great comedy, and his own analogous act of creating them glanced at in its prologue, come closest to articulating the virt demanded by the new Medicean epoch into which history plunged him in 1512. Whether or not this view of writing as a self-redeeming stabilization of external chaos is, as Struever has proposed, part of a broader early modern relocation of inquiry in a personal and interpersonal realm of theory as practice is a conjecture worthy of further debate.106 Such an argument might begin by acknowledging that, contrary to the consistent philosophical position on the Self and the Other so often sought by his critics, Machiavelli enacts human freedom in discrete moments of imaginative writing. Viewed in this perspective, his entire literary production is what Struever calls a conversation or exchange with his reader inviting the exercise of imaginative freedom by which one fashions a self.107 This emphasis seems more apt, and in the final analysis more convincing, than Rebhorns brief for a more antagonistic and confrontational version of self-fashioning.108 Moreover, on the historical plane invoked by Struever (following Gramsci), this self, ever open to expanding human possibility, is both a private answer to the question of virt versus fortuna and the public foundation for a hegemonic culture a republic of free citizens.109 UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON, THE HONORS COLLEGE, EMERITUS
Struever, 16. Ibid., 17581. 108 The crux of Rebhorns overall argument is the radical, unstabilizing view of both self and society (25) that he implicitly attributes not only to Machiavellis con men but to Machiavelli himself. The issue, for me, is whether Machiavelli does in fact endorse such a view or merely acknowledges it as inherent in the type. By connecting the con man with Renaissance self-fashioning (26) Rebhorn usefully raises the crucial issue of the malleability of the self in Machiavelli. The deep personal investment in the ideology of selffashioning (28) that he attributes to the writer seems to me instead to be a literary motif: a possibility of human life that Machiavelli can embrace as a writer even as he denies his own capacity and (implicitly) the desirability of such total moral freedom. 109 Struever, 214.
107 106
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