La mandragola

The current best-selling bilingual edition of Machiavelli’s plays, The Comedies of Machiavelli, edited by David Sices and James B. Atkinson, contains several errors, mistranslations, and historical inaccuracies. Though Sices claims fidelity to Machiavelli’s texts in his introduction, my experience with his work—as both a theatre director and a student of Italian Renaissance literature—has proven otherwise. In particular, Sices’s translation of La Mandragola (titled The Mandrake in his edition) plays upon a misguided image of Machiavelli the villain, a stereotype that has plagued Italian Renaissance studies for centuries. My translation of La Mandragola offers an alternative to Sices’s work. In this edition, I remain loyal to the 1513 performance text, preserving Machiavelli’s exact words whenever possible and footnoting discrepancies. I have also preserved Machiavelli’s use of formal and familiar language, a feat no other modern translation has attempted. In my opinion. Machiavelli’s use of tu and voi forms are critical to understanding his overall comment on contemporary religious, civil, and sexual power structures. Though there is still work to be done, I am confident my translation is both more entertaining and more accurate than the current bilingual edition. In sum, I hope this translation, intended for academic audiences, facilitates a more accurate conversation on Machiavelli’s contribution to Early Modern drama.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Alabama Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Crawford, Jacob Andrew

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Wittman, Emily Ondine

Contributors dc:contributor

• Burch, Steven D.
• Davies, Catherine Evans
• Goethals, Jessica

• Literature

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US, English

Dc Identifier Other

u0015_0000001_0002784
Crawford_alatus_0004M_13231

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ir.ua.edu:123456789/3422