ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the two extant comedies of Mandragola and Clizia, and the accurate translation of Terence’s Andria, in light of the prose writings, particularly The Prince and The Discourses. The author focuses his analysis on the use of the concepts of fortuna, necessità, and virtù, which reveal the philosophical centre around which the innovative, and to some extent, radical ideology of Machiavelli’s comedies take place. In the general sense, virtù is the ability of man to take control of the deceptive course of Fortune, an intellectual power acting along with the collaborative assistance of necessity, that in the comedies is assigned to women, demonstrating the author’s disruption of fixed gender hierarchies. Evidence of the central role attributed to Machiavelli’s experiments with learned comedy comes from many recent scholarly interpretations, reviewed in detail in the chapter’s conclusions, tracing the legacy of the comedies’ ideas into English Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare.
