Virtual Grub Street: A Review of Malachi Bogdanov's Production of Machiavelli's The Mandrake Root.

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.