Though better known today as a political theorist than as a dramatist, Machiavelli secured his fame as a giant in the history of Italian comedy more than fifty years before Shakespeare's comedies delighted English-speaking audiences. This bilingual edition includes all three examples of Machiavelli's comedic art: sparkling translations of his farcical masterpiece, The Mandrake ; of his version of Terence's The Woman From Andros ; and of his Plautus-inspired Clizia --works whose genre afforded Machiavelli a unique vehicle not only for entertaining audiences but for examining virtue amid the twists and turns of fortune .

A superb achievement, one that successfully brings together in accessible form the work of two major writers of Renaissance France. This is now the default version of Montaigne in English. --Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley

This annotated translation of Etienne de La Boetie's political masterpiece offers an ideal opportunity to become acquainted with the thought of a brilliant though short-lived 16th-century French thinker known for 'his mortal and sworn hatred for all vice, ' as his friend Michel de Montaigne put it, 'but particularly for that sordid traffic concocted under the honorable title of justice'."