Mandragola

After hearing about The Prince and The Godfather all class for the last couple of days, I finally read Mandragola. What a funny, bawdy play! And a much more enjoyable way to get Machiavelli, I think, than The Prince (which I've just never cared for--too much history, I think).

Machiavelli doesn't seem to have a super high view of women; then again, he doesn't seem to have a super high view of people in general, except insofar as they're clever and manipulative. The main character, Callimaco, convinces a friar to advocate an affair with him to a woman who is his confessee. The friar and the woman's mother convince her, a previously pretty pious woman, to sleep with Callimaco. All in an effort to get the woman and her husband to conceive. The play doesn't say anything about whether or not she conceives, but it seems at the end of the day she will, and it will be Callimaco's baby (which is to say, at first she is reticent to have an affair and her husband is pushing it as a means to get her pregnant, but by the end, she's embraced the affair and completed the cuckolding of her husband).

Next up: Must watch The Godfather.


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