A man wishes to have a child after years of a sterile marriage. He will achieve it, with the help of a supposed doctor (in love with the lady), by giving his wife a mandrake potion, but which will poison the first person who approaches her. They seduce a stranger (who is the doctor himself in disguise) and take him to the woman's room. From there arises the comic plot, which crystallizes in a magnificent definition the game of carnal mockery, describing the daily reality of society, articulating figures and stage games. In this work Machiavelli uses comedy as a means to brutally reveal a world that, beneath its social veneer, is revealed to us to be corrupt to the root. It is governed by the reverse side of the Renaissance coin: it puts the human being in the foreground, but not in his beauty, in his similarity to God or to the mythological models of Olympic perfection, but in his social and intimate reality, in his misery, weakness, stupidity, greed and evil. In the plot of The Mandrake, the author allies representatives of all society from the rogue to the friar, passing through the bourgeois and the aristocrat, in the enterprise of corrupting virtue, which, yielding to the game, becomes its very opposite. The vigour and the human truth of the characters, stripped of all idealisation, are the counterweight to the revelation of a real world in which they cannot transform the good and the sublime, an irredeemably depraved world in which, through the play of passions and interests, the old scales of values ​​collapse and other sordid but active ones appear, and, for better or worse, renovating. It is a five-act comedy that is not born out of idle amusement on the part of the author but out of the passionate observer he possessed about human nature and the corruption of the world, which is as it is and does not change with sermons or prayers. This work is considered the most important comedy in the history of Italian literature.