A five-act play, first performed at the Théâtre Français on 24 February
1842, This tragedy is loosely based on a historical incident, the
assassination of Duc Alessandro de Medici of Florence in 1537 by his
cousin, Lorenzo, and probably inspired by a previous play based on the
same incident, "Lorenzaccio," by Alfred de Musset.
In Dumas' fiction, Duc Alessandro, the ruler of Florence, has made himself
obnoxious to the population by his practice of abducting and seducing or
raping the wives and daughters of the leading citizens. Lorenzino,
slightly built and possibly a physical coward, has made himself
indispensable to Alessandro by assisting in his debauchery. As the play
opens, two minions are standing guard outside the house of the Marquis
Cibo, while Alessandro and Lorenzino visit with the Marquise. The husband
returns unexpectedly, and we successively meet Lorenzino, who emerges to
toss Alessandro's armor down a well, the mortally wounded marquis, the
blood-stained Duc Alessandro, and the republican revolutionaries Philippe
Strozzi and Michel, who have clandestinely returned to Florence to
overthrow the Duc. Michel has a personal reason to hate the Duc, as
Alessandro raped his sister, who has just died.
Alessandro next takes an interest in the beautiful Luiza, daughter of the
supposedly exiled Strozzi, and we learn, fiancée of Lorenzino. Lorenzino
agrees to procure his fiancée for Alessandro, betrays her father to the Duc,
and promises Luiza that they can flee together and marry if she just does
exactly as she is told. Lorenzino conveys Luiza to his house, invites the
Duc, and then with the help of Michel, murders him. However, Luiza,
thinking herself betrayed by Lorenzino, swallows poison, and dies in
Lorenzino's arms.
The character of Lorenzino foreshadows in many respects that of Chicot the
Jester in
La Dame de Monsoreau.
Both are men who have abandoned their
honor in order to play the buffoon so that they might better achieve their
ultimate objective of revenge. Lorenzino is also a staunch republican, and
the root of his quarrel with Alessandro is with the tyrant rather than the
rapist.
In history, Duc Alessandro de Medici (1510-1537), the illegitimate son of
Lorenzo de Medici, was imposed on Florence in 1529 by Pope Clement VII
after the city had been reduced by siege. Lorenzino (1514-1548) was a
member of a junior branch of the de Medici, and was a writer and playwright
of considerable reputation. The murder took place at Lorenzino's house,
the promised woman (who was never present) was the young wife of the
elderly Leonardo Ginori. Michel and Luiza are Dumas' creations. After
the murder, Lorenzino who had his finger bitten off in the struggle,
immediately fled to Bologna to await the revolution, which did not occur.
Lorenzino subsequently wrote an "apologia" in which he claimed (dubiously)
to be motivated by republican sentiments. Lorenzino was himself murdered
in Venice in 1548.
When Dumas made Strozzi, Michel, and Lorenzino into Republican heroes (and
hence sympathetic to an audience that he would hope shared his republican
sympathies), he was, of course, projecting the values of the French
revolution (liberté, egalité, and fraternité) backward into a time before
they were invented. The republicans of the Italian renaissance upheld the
rights of a narrow urban commercial oligarchy within a particular city, and
would not have recognized the existence of any wider definition of
"liberté," and they would have thought "egalité" and "fraternité" absurd
if not pernicious.
