Did Shakespeare Make Fun of Other Writers?

A friend recently asked me whether Shakespeare ever made fun of the work of other writers. The first thing I thought of was Falstaff taking on the style of Thomas Preston's Cambyses¹:

Falstaff.... I must speake in passion, and I will doe it in king Cambises vaine.

Prince. Well, here is my leg.

Falstaff. And here is my speech; stand aside Nobilitie.

Hostess. O Jesu, this is excellent sport i'faith.

Falst. Weepe not sweet Queene, for trickling teares are vain.

Host. O the father, how he holds his countenance?

Falst. For Gods sake Lords, convay my trustfull Queene,

For teares do stop the floudgates of her eyes.

Host. O Jesu, he doth it as like one of these harlotrie² plaiers as ever I see.

Falst. Peace good pint-pot, peace good tickle-braine.

Harrie, I doe not onelie marvaile where thou spendest

thy time, but also how thou art accompanied.³

Shakespeare next has Falstaff launch into John Lyly's Euphuistic style. Early on, Shakespeare was actually heavily influenced by Lyly's works but he chose not to allow serial “proverbs” to take over his plays.

For though the cammomill, the more it is troden on, the faster it growes, so youth the more it is wasted, the sooner it weares:

The point here is that the hoi poloi — “the pit,” in the jargon of the time — find such melodramatic bellowing to be the epitome of a good play and such proverbs to be the epitome of wisdom. Falstaff has enough education to manipulate his fellows and the Hostess has none at all.

The educated audience, in the boxes, consider such passages to be unintentionally comical. It is them for whom Shakespeare has written the scene.

While Cambyses is often and always the butt of Shakespeare parodies, others were often on the receiving end of both mockery and praise. Again, many lines from the plays of Lyly are too close to those of Shakespeare's early comedies Two Gentleman of Verona and Comedy of Errors to be coincidence. It is difficult, though, if not impossible, to determine which playwright took what from the other. That they were cross-pollinating is among the highest means of praise.

George Peele's The Battell of Alcazar was parodied in a line of the character Pistol, on much the same basis as Cambyses, in the same 2 Henry IV, But a look at Peele's play yields us the lines:

Moore. Villaine, a horse.

Boy. Oh my Lord, if you returne you die.

Moore. Villaine I saie, give me a horse to flie,

To swimme the river villaine, and to flie.⁴

Which are almost certainly the inspiration for the lines from The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, the first try at the theme, which also shows signs of Peele as co-writer:

King. A horse, a horse, a fresh horse.

Page. A flie my Lord, and save your life.

King. Flie Villaine, looke I as tho I would flie, no first shall this dull and scencelesse ball of earth receive my bodie cold and void of sence,...

Which is halfway to Shakespeare's solo effort, The Tragedy of Richard the Third:

Richard III. A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

Catesby. Withdraw, my lord; I'll help you to a horse.

Richard III. Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die:⁵

He has even substituted “slave” for Peele's favorite expletive “villaine” just as he did throughout, when he removed nearly every one of the many instances of the word, in the process of rewriting Peele's King John⁶ into the play we now attribute entirely Shakespeare.

Peele's play The Arraignment of Paris (1584) was a favorite of Edward de Vere and John Lyly who managed the Blackfriars theater during an historically important run from 1581 to 1584. It was acted, as most plays at Blackfriars, by the combined company of the Children of St. Paul's and the Children of the Royal Chappel.

The scholarly consensus has long been that his original King John shows signs that Shakespeare edited a modest portion of the play — like a theater manager might. Alcazar and King John may have been written for the Blackfriars just as it closed. After the theater was closed, Lyly became the dramaturge for the Children of St. Paul's and the plays may have first appeared there. Alcazar was purchased as a remainder by Philip Henslowe, perhaps because it was a play without a playhouse, and became the favorite play for many years, by any playwright except Christopher Marlowe, in the repertoire of the Admiral's Men company.

There are numerous ways, then, that Shakespeare honored Peele's work. Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe's Dido and Tamburlaine: Shakespeare parodied their melodramatic style at its most exaggerated. Yet the player's speech in Hamlet may have been meant to honor Marlowe's Dido by competing with it, and he declared the death of Marlowe a great loss in the line “a great reckoning in a little room”.⁷

1Preston, Thomas. A Lamentable Tragedie of Cambises, King of Percia (1569)

2Malapropism for “harlequin”.

31 Henry IV, II.iv.

4Peele, George. The Batell of Alcazar (1594). Scholarly consensus is that this play was written circa 1589. It was extremely popular on stage and publication held off until 1594.

5The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (1597), V.iv. The play was written years earlier but was so popular on the stage that publication was held off.

6Peele, George. The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591). Shakespeare, William. The Life and Death of King John (first published in 1623 in the First Folio)

7As You Like It, III.iii.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

Shakespeare's Washing Machine

In the olden days, I could be depended upon to launch into a set-speech when someone complained about the harshness of their lives. Even the modern lower-middle class, I would explain, live better lives than the nobility of medieval and early modern times.

Our houses and apartments are much warmer than medieval castles, at any distance from the fireplaces, during the winter. Few buildings had potable water piped in, and, in almost all that did, the pipes were made of lead. There were no flush toilets until that late 18^th century.

Various methods were used to dispose of bodily waste: chamber pots were the indoor option of the householder and tenant. Castle walls were pocked with corbels, open at the bottom, that sent the waste of servants and soldiers either to a ditch that emptied into the nearest water source or simply onto the ground.¹ The nobility deposited in their private stool, built like a over-sized velvet-lined child's training potty, which had a dedicated servant who took the result (“the stool”) away to throw down an available corbel. The same was often the source of the castle's potable water. In London, and other large cities, professional water carriers lugged large jars-full from locations of cleaner water, or from aqueducts, to houses wealthy enough to afford to buy it.

Some castle “jakes” sat above indoor pits that smelled as might be expected. Inside the castle bailey were open-bottomed Port-a-Johns that were used until they filled up and then were covered over with dirt and a new hole dug nearby. Courtiers urinated in the fireplaces in waiting rooms. Litter was thrown everywhere within the walls and collected by garbage wagons every few months. Castle grounds periodically wreaked of garbage and offal. Tenement blocks in populated towns and cities could smell every bit as bad.²

It was one of the many signs of status to be given rooms away from the bailey and the kitchens which tended regularly to catch fire. Lesser beings were not so lucky.

It took until the 19^th century for London and Paris to grow desperate enough to stop the terrifying cycle of dysentery, typhoid, and cholera epidemics, which killed many tens of thousands, for the cities to build modern under-ground sewer systems. At about the same time, surgeons began in the habit of washing their hands before doing surgery. These two advancements have since saved more lives than all the subsequent medical advances until our day.

This subject could (and does) fill enormous libraries. This small sample will have to be sufficient for our present purposes.

One of the most ironic results of this is Shakespeare's washing machine. A considerable majority of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights were born into an England in which the word “Master” was rapidly transforming into “Mister”. Master had been the proper word for centuries with which to address superior officers of guilds, of noble households and other males awarded coats-of-arms for special services to the crown. But England was rapidly becoming a trading empire. Skilled workers of every type were needed in plenty. The respect for their station was growing rapidly. Toward the end of the 16^th century, any respectable head of household, tradesman, merchant, etc., was addressed as “Master”. The title was becoming our modern Mister.

The playwrights of the time were mostly drawn from this new class. And you can see it in their plays. Ben Jonson was a bricklayer's son. This did not prevent him from getting an excellent education in the premiere public school of his day but college proved beyond his family's means.

In Jonson's plays there are house-wives polishing pewter to a fine luster, doing laundry and much more. At the center of his plays, he is portraying the life of the new class to which he belongs. He shows his education, also, by references to, and plays about, classical history.

Another bricklayer's son who had access to a quality education and wrote exceptional plays and prose is Thomas Middleton. Middleton's works are chock full with laundresses, starchwomen, worsted stockings (what we call socks), and six-penny ordinaries (which we might call greasy spoons). His wives wash dishes. Shop keepers are everywhere at their shop doors heard to cry “What d'ye lack?” at passersby and sending their sons to be educated, as he had been, at Cambridge and the Inns of Court.

And what is seen especially in Middleton is servants and tenants shaking their heads at the foolishness of their “betters”. The tables are turned. Sons of gentlemen are all but uniformly ridiculously dressed and unmitigated dolts. Once sons of mercers turn courtiers (and they do in profusion) all hope of a useful life is lost. They will forever be a financial burden.

The likes of Jonson's and Middleton's works will be the model for Bertie and Jeeves stories for hundreds of years to come. At the behest of the likes of Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil, the nobility is being retired to their lands, where their ego and refusal to apply themselves to a practical education will be allowed a steadily shrinking domain. The new government is made up of myopic mercers' and drapers' sons graduating from the Inns of Court.

As amusing as these works may be the details of world they depict are foreign to us. The irony of this is that we feel a much closer relationship to the works of Shakespeare. With the exception of a single play, called The Merry Wives of Windsor, he makes no mention whatsoever of laundry. In none does he mention starchwomen or a character doing his or her best to preserve a farthing candle.

He resembles us. Unlike Middleton, he never mentions suet under the assumption that we will understand how candles were made. When his characters read at night it is by light that he feels no need to explain. Unlike Middleton, the author or his protagonist never complain

How many such black and ghastly seasons have I passed over, accompanied only with a demure watching-candle, that blinked upon Aristotle's works, and gave even sufficient glimmering to read by, but none to spare!³

Surely, Shakespeare feels no need, any more than the modern author to specify that a character is able to read his books because he or she has turned on the electric light. When they attend a masque, in a great hall, no one lights the scores of expensive candles. As in our world, the chandelier is simply there making light. Presumably someone turned on the switch.

His characters travel by horse like we travel by car. The horse stands waiting equipped with saddles, reins and bits, like all our cars stand at every moment awaiting our commands with power windows, cruise control and zero-to-sixty in impressive numbers of seconds that we do not need to mention. The details are unspoken, assumed. His silence on the matter, like the modern author's, makes clear that, upon their return home, they park their horse in the garage, just like we don't think to mention, hop off, and go straight into their abodes, filled with amenities unnecessary to mention, to see if there is any leftover pizza in the refrigerator.

What we likely do not notice is that Windsor is the town that serves the Queen's primary palace. It is a place that the noble and the wealthy and hangers-on walk into as they pass out of the back gate of the palace.⁴ The laundresses can be seen washing the laundry in Datchet Mead not far from the gate. At the distance, their own servants can hardly be made out from those of Mistress (Mrs.) Ford or Mistress Page. Their clothing simply appears at their privy chambers clean and fresh, at appropriate times, and together with servants too common to mention to help put it on them.

The overflow of the palace servants and guests take rooms at the inns and houses, drink at the taverns. Those who reside inside go out to get a change of air. Perhaps, a pottle of ale. The residents of the town grow wealthy with the business of the wealthy. Their wives have servants that can be seen carrying the buck-baskets filled with dirty laundry as one goes in and out of the gate.

Yet, only minor characters, meant to provide comic relief, or servants, seem ever to sport soiled or tattered clothing, or have to wait wrapped in a sheet until their only shirt comes back from the laundry, etc., in the plays of Shakespeare. In fact, there are no laundresses in his world. There is no laundry. The characters of the classes from which Shakespeare draws his plots don't even seem to express particular concern about such matters except in one instance. The theme of “exile” has long been noticed to be persistent in the works of Shakespeare and there he and his characters wear motley, in comedies, in tragedies rags.

Add to all of this, the fact that nearly all modern readers read the poetry and plays of William Shakespeare (if they read them at all) in modernized versions. The spelling is standardized, at times the grammar, and words or phrases are even sometimes replaced by modern equivalents. Still more, plays like Coriolanus or Titus Andronicus are almost never revived in print, on stage or on film. Some scholars are adamant that they could not possibly have been written by Shakespeare — at worst the offensive portions, they assert, were co-written by others and only less objectionable parts by the Bard.

It is no surprise, then, that Shakespeare is perceived to be like us; the world he depicts familiar. Neither is it a surprise that it is the more democratic direction of the late Elizabethan period that seems foreign — even off-putting. The details around washing cloths or dishes rarely enter into our literature because the washing machine, the dishwasher and drier are assumed thus a part of every story without being mentioned. Clean clothing comes from back stage... in both the 21^st century and in the plays of Shakespeare. We read Shakespeare as if he had a washing machine.

1See my “A Brief History of the Castle Jakes.” Virtual Grub Street, July 7, 2019. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2019/07/a-brief-history-of-castle-jakes.html

2See my “Livin’ Real at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth.” Medieval and Tudor Topics, June 4, 2022. https://vgs-pbr-reviews.blogspot.com/2022/06/livin-real-at-windsor-castle-with-queen.html

3Father Hubburd's Tales. The Works of Thomas Middleton, V.598 (1840). [Dyce ed.]

4See my “Mr. Billington's Bluster: the Uncommon-ness of The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Virtual Grub Street, May 27, 2024. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2024/05/mr-billingtons-bluster-uncommon-ness-of_27.html

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

No, Shakespeare Was Not a Member of the Mermaid Club.

Having read yet again that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson famously traded witticisms at the Mermaid Tavern, on Bread Street, I am no longer able to put off addressing the myth as being too minor to give precious time. It so happens that Thomas Coriate [Coryate] sent a letter, in late 1615,

TO THE HIGH

Seneschall of the right

W'orshipfull Fraternitie of Sireniacal

Gentlemen, that meet the first Fridaie of every Moneth,

at the signe of the Mere-

Maide in Bread- streete in London,

from Asmere [Ajmer], India, the which was later printed in his THOMAS CORIATE Traueller for the English Wits: Greeting (1616).¹ The intrepid Coriate, unfortunately died in 1617.

The cover design of his book features him riding an elephant. The publisher of travels tales, Samuel Purchas, collected his letters to the various members of the Fraternitie and published them in his enormously popular Purchas' Pilgrims series.

In one letter to Laurence Whitaker, the aforesaid Seneschall of the Sireniacals, he writes

I have rid upon an Elephant since I came to this Court, determining one day (by Gods leave ) to have my Picture expressed in my next Booke , sitting upon an Elephant. The King keepeth a thousund Women for his owne body, whereof the chiefest (which is his Queene ) tis called Normal.²

Presumably, the thousand women was beyond any engraver's skill. As we can see, the elephant made the... ahem... cut.

The Sireniacal Gentlemen refers to the supper club that met at the Mermaid Tavern, on Bread Street, in London. Coryate made a point of addressing each of the members of the club individually by name.

There is no other such roster extant.

Some 50 years later, Thomas Fuller reported an oral history asserting that Shakespeare was a member and the club was delighted to witness epic wit-combats, on club nights, between he and Johnson.³

Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Johnson, which two I behold like

a Spanish great Gallion, and an English man of War; Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning solid, but Slow in his performances. Shake- spear with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in failing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention.

Fuller was cousin to the tireless self-promoter, William Davenant, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Shakespeare and was a source of other Shakespeare myths. It is more than a little likely that he got his information from Davenant or their still more imaginative friend John Aubrey. Regardless, there is not a stitch of evidence to support his story.

Still, the picture is an attractive one. So attractive that it has since been entered the scholarly record as fact. Such has been common practice in filling the entirely un-literary documented biography of the man from Stratford.

That said, it must be admitted that there is evidence of a possible connection between Shakspere of Stratford and the Mermaid Tavern. The owner of the property upon which the Mermaid stood, one William Johnson, is listed as a partner in Shakspere's purchase of the Blackfriars Gate House on March 10, 1613 [O.S.].

Furthermore, the author Hugh Holland, a member of the Fraternitie of Sireniacal Gentlemen, according to Coryat, provided a dedicatory poem to the Shakespeare First Folio. It gives no sign of the author having been a personal friend. Both congratulatory poems for the folio, other than Holland's, were provided by equally minor writers previously published by Edward Blount partner in the Folio project — not at all members of the Mermaid club.

For his part, Holland had had multiple close connections to Ben Jonson, editor-in-chief of the Folio. The two had been students together in the famous Westminster school of William Camden. Jonson had contributed a long allegorical ode to Holland's book-length poem Pancharis. Holland donated a congratulatory poem to Jonson's play Sejanus.

Jonson wrote poems to, or featuring, members of the Fraternitie: Hugh Holland; John Donne; Robert Cotton; Christopher Brooke; John Selden; John Hoskyns; Inigo Jones; and a prose dedication to Richard Martin. He wrote more than one poem to Francis Beaumont who does not appear on Coryat's list and who Coryat may not have met due to his extended absences for travel.

But Jonson never wrote the name Shakespeare in public print until the First Folio. He owed a great deal to his patron, William Herbert, Lord Chamberlain to the King, to whom the Folio was dedicated, together with his brother, son-in-law to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Surely, his poem "To the memory of my beloved, the AUTHOR MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: And what he hath left us." paid the Lord Chamberlain back in particularly gratifying fashion.

After that poem, there is no record that Jonson ever mentioned Shakespeare by name again. To the best of our knowledge, he never mentioned Shakespeare again in private or public.

The name Shakespeare never appeared, before or after the Folio, on any commendatory poem overtly congratulating any living writer of his day. Poems of that genre did appear in association with the initials E.O. and the monikers Si fortunatus infoelix and Ignoto.

Beaumont wrote verse letters to Ben one of which makes reference to the Mermaid. Another does not, but does mention Shakespeare in a most intriguing way. I look forward to writing about those letters in the days ahead.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

1Coriat, Thomas. THOMAS CORIATE Traueller for the English Wits: Greeting (1616). 37ff.

2Purchas, Samuel. Purchas, his Pilgrimes (1625). I.594. Date only 1615.

3Fuller, Thomas. The History of the Worthies of England (1662). “The Worthies of England,” 126.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

A Review of Malachi Bogdanov's Production of Machiavelli's The Mandrake Root.

[New post] Few people have watched a 16^th century play by anyone other than William Shakespeare and maybe Christopher Marlowe. Late 15^th century Ferrara, Italy, introduced the Renaissance that gave the West the early modern theater. Particularly Ludovico Ariosto whose loose translations from the Latin playwright Plautus were the model for Shakespeare's early comedies — especially the Comedy of Errors.

The mid and late century passed the baton to the English. Thus Shakespeare's plays are filled with the influences of the Italian playwrights as well as those English playwrights who shared his era.

Of course, Italy was leading the rest of Europe in much more than the progress of popular theater. Nicholo Machiavelli was in the middle of it. By no means foremost a playwright, he was secretary to the governing Signoria, worked on engineering projects with Leonardo da Vinci, and, upon a change of government, was imprisoned and tortured.

Upon his release from prison, Machiavelli laid low. He had a modest house in Sant'Andrea, just outside of Florence. No longer tasked with reams of paperwork and travels to foreign courts, his life began to revolve around his writing room. During the years ahead he would write his most famous work, The Prince, and other minor masterpieces of western literature such as The History of Florence, The Art of War and La Mandragola (the Mandrake Root).

Like Edward de Vere, his fall from power would leave him with a great deal of time on his hands. Like Vere, he chose to fill the hours with his favorite pastime: writing.

But unlike Shakespeare, Machiavelli wrote only a handful of plays and still fewer poems. While one of those plays greatly influenced the Elizabethan playwrights, future eras had other interests. While England was in the process of becoming the world's greatest maritime empire, Italy was in the midst of decline. England's successor, the United States, was flush with vast wealth to invest in a spectacular movie industry that would bring Shakespeare to new generations of viewers. Italy had little wealth to spend in such a way.

Italian cinema did manage to produce a 1966 version of La Mandragola, in Italian, however, which would seem to be the best in any language to date taking into account that it greatly expands the play to tease the male viewers again and again with statuesque not quite nude young women. Not a classic but certainly a high-end bit of work that disclaimer aside. The characters are much more animated than other productions, the pace much faster and the dialogue crisper.

The only English language movie version (as opposed to filmed stage-play) happens to be Malachi Bogdanov's first full-length movie, released in 2008. While a low-budget affair it is entertaining enough and the only chance the English-language viewer is likely to have to get a feeling of what the 16^th century Italian theater was like.

Callimaco (Jason Nicoli) has returned from living in Paris, France, for ten years, in order to get away from the Italian Wars, which plagued central and northern Italy from roughly 1494 until decades after La Mandragola was first staged in 1518. Having heard, during a tavern conversation, in the French city, that the most beautiful woman in the world lives in Sassari, Sardinia, he is irresistibly drawn to see her.

Sassari is presumably chosen instead of Machiavelli's original, Florence, in order to identify the location in which the film is actually shot, and to explain why it is a village rather than a city. It is suitably quaint, and, more importantly, feasible on a low budget.

The young woman's name is Lucrezia (Chara Jackson). Her husband, Nicia (Geoffrey Bateman), a middle-aged lawyer, is impossibly gullible, to the point that he is constantly described by all as being “stupid”. He is also desperate to have a son after six childless years.

Callimaco's servant Siro (Craig Painting) provides a goofy confidant for his private thoughts. His friend Ligurio, who has given up working for a living, in favor of mooching, provides more of the same, and, additionally, volunteers to arrange for him to be intimate with Lucrezia.

The first of Ligurio's plans is abandoned. The second is for Callimaco to pretend to be a doctor specializing in infertility cures. Ligurio praises him to Nicia. The two concoct a guaranteed fertility potion from the Mandrake root (La Mandragora). Nicia is eager to give it to his wife. So eager that, even when he is informed that a powerful poison inherent in the potion will certainly kill the first man to have sex with her, after she has taken it, he agrees to find someone else to lay with her before he does.

Lucrezia, it turns out, is genuinely pious, and resists the idea of adultery. The ruse requires both the village priest (Jonathan Owen) and Lucrezia's mother (Den Woods) to be recruited to the cause. Their task will be to convince her that this particular adultery is a godly act. Callimaco and Ligurio must figure out a way to make Callimaco her first post-potion lover without detection by Nicia.

It can be quite shocking, at first, to learn how freely Italian plays of the time portray priests as venal hypocrites. Father Timoteo appreciates that value of ducats and would be quite happy to do almost anything in order to receive them. It is implied that he indulges in all of life's pleasures as occasion permits.

This and similar plays were regularly presented before the Pope himself, and members of the Consistory, at a time when Rome was under fire for its corruption. Martin Luther had posted his 95 Theses only the year before Machiavelli is believed to have written La Mandragola. Entire swathes of the faithful would soon be abandoning the communion for Protestantism.

But then, the gravity of the situation could not yet have been understood. Both Pope and council were highly cosmopolitan. They were still able to laugh at themselves, still able to enjoy fine meals and nights out at the theater. Even in his tenuous political situation, Machiavelli did not fear to write as he did and to bring it on the very public stage.

Students of the theater of the period will perhaps be disappointed that the canzone (songs) after each act of the original play are left off in this production. A general audience is likely rather to be pleased to forego this touch outdated now by some 500 years.

A YouTube portal to Bogdanov's production can be found at the end of this review.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
• Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

•