The myth of the ‘good Italian’ as compared to the ‘bad German’, constructed by the Italian political and cultural elites following the armistice, became the pillar of a national memory of self-exculpation which has continued up to the present day. This enduring myth is partly due to the role played by mass culture, such as cinema, where a film like Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterranean, which won an Oscar in 1992, both embraced and relaunched it. But a significant role had been played by two other factors. Firstly, the Italian institutions ensured that the image of the ‘good Italian’ was never contested. This is demonstrated by the Italian diplomatic protest of 1989, when the BBC broadcast the documentary Fascist Legacy, on the Italian crimes in her colonies and in Europe. Secondly, the image of the ‘good Italian’ has been much championed abroad, where the stereotypical image of the ‘pasta-eating’ and ‘mandolin-strumming’ Italian has circulated widely, and continues to do so. One compelling example is the best-selling novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières, which was also made into a highly successful Hollywood film. Italian and international historians have, for years, revealed the criminal responsibilities of the Fascist regime. Nevertheless, this has not led to a profound rethink in Italian public opinion, which continues to use the image of the ‘bad German’ as an easy alibi to avoid coming to terms with the dark pages of the country’s national history.
The medical uses of opium, henbane, black poppy, mandrake, and belladonna for the inducement of sleep and the alleviation of pain were well-recognised in early modern England through a variety of writings. A credulous Elizabethan audience and stories travelling from the Continent helped in adding layers to stories of drugged victims who appeared dead for days, and the mystery of a pseudo-death followed by a quasi-resurrection had a tremendous appeal for contemporary audiences with a taste for the sensational and the macabre. Soporifics that ape the functions of poison by escorting the body into a mock-death state featured significantly in a wide range of early modern English drama. The supposedly envenomed potion that is deliberately administered to achieve a goal and the role such administrations play in early modern Machiavellian plays is the concern of this chapter. The Jew of Malta and Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany are the foregrounded texts, as these two plays focus on two contrasting aspects of these draughts: self-preservation (as in the case of Barabas) and as an aid to smooth the process of assassination (in the case of Alphonsus). By applying a post-humanist reading of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, this chapter attempts to study, first, how contemporary Machiavels exploited this liminal status of the body by redefining the bounds of both ‘bare life’ and ‘qualified life’, and second, to examine why the staging of these mock-deaths based on the use of subdititious poisons was so recurrent a motif in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.