Renaissance in Italy Volume IV Part 23

Returning to the _Rappresentazioni_, we are forced to admit that the defect of the Italian fancy is more apparent than its quality, in a species of dramatic art which, being childish, needed some magic spell to reconcile an adult taste to its puerility.[447] They were written at the most prosaic moment of the national development, by men who could not afford to subst.i.tute the true Italian poetry of irony and idyllic sensuousness for the ancient religious spirit. The bondage of the middle ages was upon them. They were forced to take the extravagance of the monastic imagination for fact. But they did not really believe; and so the fact was apprehended frigidly, prosaically. Instead of poetry we get rhetoric; instead of marvels, gross incredibilities are forced upon us in the lives of men and women fashioned like the folk who crowd the streets we know. Another step in the realistic direction would have transformed all these religious myths into _novelle_; and then a new beauty, the beauty of the Decameron and _Novellino_, would have been shed upon them. But it was precisely this step that Castellani and Belcari dared not take, since their purpose remained religious edification. Nay, their instinct led them in the opposite direction.

Unable to escape the influence of the _novella_, which was the truest literary form peculiar to Italy in that age, they converted it into a sacred legend and treated it with the same rhetorical and insincere pietism as the stories of the Saints. From S. Barbara to the third-cla.s.s _Rappresentazioni_ the transition is easy.

The interest of this group of stories, as ill.u.s.trating the psychological conditions of the Italian imagination, is great. Stripped of medieval mystery, reduced to the proportions of a _novella_, but not yet invested with its worldly charm, denuded of the pregnant symbolism or tragic intensity of their originals, these plays reveal the poverty of the fifteenth century, the incapacity of the Florentine genius at that moment to create poetry outside the sphere of figurative art, and in a region where irony and sensuality and natural pa.s.sion were alike excluded. They might be compared to dead bones awaiting the spirit-breath of mirth and sarcasm to rouse them into life. _Teofilo_ is the Italian Faustus.[448] A devil accuses him to the Bishop he is serving. Outcast and dishonored, he seeks Manovello, a Jewish sorcerer, who takes him to a cross-way and raises the fiend, Beelzebub. Teofilo abjures Christ, adores the devil, and signs a promise to be Satan's bondsman. In return, Beelzebub dispatches a goblin, Farfalletto, to the Bishop, who believes that an angel has come to bid him restore Teofilo to honor. Consequently Teofilo regains his post. But in the midst of his prosperity the renegade is wretched. Stung by conscience, he throws himself upon the mercy of our Lady. She pleads for him with Christ, summons the devil, and wrests from his grasp the parchment given by Teofilo. Poetic justice is satisfied by Manovello's descent to h.e.l.l.

Such is the prosaic form which the Faust legend a.s.sumed in Italy.

Instead of the l.u.s.t for power and knowledge which consumed the doctor of Wittenberg, making him exclaim:

Had I as many souls as there be stars, I'd give them all for Mephistophilis!

we have this commonplace story of a bishop's almoner, driven by a vulgar trial of his patience to abjure the faith. The intercession of Mary introduces a farcial element into the piece: the audience is amused by seeing the devil's contract s.n.a.t.c.hed from him after a jocular altercation with the Queen of Heaven. Our Mephistophilis is either fantastically grotesque, as in the old prose-legend, or tragically saturnine, as in Marlowe's tragedy. The fiend of this Florentine play is a sort of supernatural usurer, who lends at a short date upon exorbitant interest, and is nonsuited for fraud in the supreme court of appeal. To charge the Italian imagination in general with this dwarfing and defining of a legend that had in it such elements of grandeur, might be scarcely fair. The fault lies more perhaps with Florence of the fifteenth century; yet Florence was the brain of Italy, and if the people there could find no more of salt or savor in a myth like that of Theophilus, this fact gives food for deep reflection to the student of their culture.

In the _Re Superbo_ we have one of those stories which traveled from the far East in the middle ages over the whole of Europe, acquiring a somewhat different form in every country.[449] The proud king in the midst of his prosperity falls sick. He takes a short day's journey to a watering-place, and bathes. By night an angel a.s.sumes his shape, dons his royal robes, summons his folk, and fares homeward to his palace. The king, meanwhile, is treated by the innkeeper as an impudent rascal. He begs some rags to cover his nakedness, and arrives in due time at the city he had left the day before. There his servants think him mad; but he obtains an audience with the angel, who reads him a sermon on humility, and then restores him to his throne. In this tale there lay nothing beyond the scope of the Italian imagination. Consequently the treatment is adequate, and the situations copied from real life are really amusing. The play of _Barlaam e Josafat_ by Bernardo Pulci is more ambitious.[450] Josafat's father hears from his astrologers that the child will turn Christian. Accordingly he builds a tower, and places his son there, surrounded with all things pleasant to the senses and cheering to the heart of man. His servants receive strict orders that the boy should never leave his prison, lest haply, meeting with old age or poverty or sickness, he should think of Christ. On one occasion they neglect this rule. Josafat rides forth and sees a leper and a blind man, and learns that age and death and pain are in store for all. This stirs reflection, and prepares him to receive the message of one Barlaam, who comes disguised as a merchant to the tower. Barlaam offers him a jewel which restores sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and which turns a fool to wisdom. The jewel is the faith of Christ. Josafat is instantly converted and baptized; nor can the persuasions of wise men or the allurements of women overcome his fixed resolve. So firmly rooted is his new faith, so wonderful his eloquence, that he converts his father and the Court, and receives for his great wisdom the crown of his ancestors. Yet an earthly throne savors too much in his eyes of worldly pride. Therefore he renounces it, and lives thenceforth a holy hermit. This legend, it will be perceived, is a dim echo of the wonderful history of Siddartha, the founder of Buddhism.

Beautiful as are the outlines, too beautiful to be spoiled by any telling, Pulci has done his best to draw it from the dream-world of romance into the sphere of prose. At the same time, while depriving it of romance, he has not succeeded in dramatizing it. We do not feel the psychological necessity for the changes in any of the characters; the charm of each strange revolution is destroyed by the clumsy preparation of the motives. We are forced to feel that the playwright was working on the lines of a legend he did not understand and could not vitalize. The wonder is that he thought of choosing it and found it ready to his hand.

Few of the _Rappresentazioni_ are so interesting as _S. Uliva_.[451]

Uliva is no saint of the Catholic calendar but a daughter of world-old romance. Her legend may be read in the _Gesta Romanorum_, in Philip de Beaumanoir's _Roman de la Mannelline_, in Ser Giovanni's _Pecorone_, in Chaucer's _Man of Law's Tale_, in Grimm's _Handless Maiden_, and in Russian and Servian variations on the same theme. It is in truth the relic of some very ancient myth, used by the poets of all ages for the sake of its lesson of patience in affliction, its pathos of persecuted innocence. The form the tale a.s.sumed in Italy is this. Uliva, daughter of the Roman Emperor, Giuliano, is begged in marriage by her own father, who says she has more beautiful hands than any other princess. She cuts her hands off, and Giuliano sends her to Britain to be killed. But her murderers take pity on her, and leave her in a wood alone. There the King of Britain finds her and places her under the protection of his queen. After many misfortunes the Virgin Mary restores her hands, and she is married to the King of Castile. She bears him a son; but by this time she has roused the jealousy and hatred of the queen-mother, who takes the opportunity of the king's absence to poison his mind against her by letters, and shortly after drives her forth with her child. Uliva reaches Rome, and lives there twelve years unknown, till her husband, who has discovered and punished his mother's treason, and has sought his wronged wife sorrowing, at last rejoins her and recognizes in her son his heir. The play ends with a reconciliation scene between the Emperor, the King, and Uliva, the Pope p.r.o.nouncing benedictions on the whole party. It will be seen from this brief abstract of the legend that the _Rappresentazione_ is a chivalrous _novella_ dramatized. Several old pathetic stories have been woven into one, and the heroine has been dignified with the t.i.tle of saint because of the pity she inspires.

Uliva belongs to the sisterhood of Boccaccio's Griselda, Ariosto's Ginevra, and the Queen in our old ballad of Sir Aldingar. The medieval imagination, after creating types of stateliness like Guinivere, of malice like Morgana, of love like Iseult, turned aside and dwelt upon the tender delicacy of a woman, whose whole strength is her beauty, gentleness, and patience; who suffers all things in the spirit of charity; whom the angels love and whom our Lady cherishes; who wins all hearts of men by her goodliness; and who, like Una, pa.s.ses unscathed through peril and persecution until at last her joy is perfected by the fruition of her lawful love. It was precisely this element of romance that touched the Italian fancy; and the playwright of _S. Uliva_ has shown considerable skill in his treatment of it. Piteous details are acc.u.mulated with remorseless pertinacity upon the head of the unfortunate Uliva, in order to increase the pathos of her situation.

There is no mitigation of her hardships except in her own innocence, and in the loving compa.s.sion wrung by her beauty from her rude tormentors.

This want of relief, together with the brusque pa.s.sage from one incident to another, betrays a lack of dramatic art. But the poet, whoever he was, succeeded in sustaining the ideal of purity and beauty he conceived. He shows how all Uliva's sufferings as well as her good fortune were due to the pa.s.sions her beauty inspired, and how it was her purity that held her harmless to the end.

_Stella_ is the same story slightly altered, with a somewhat different cast of characters and an evil-hearted step-mother in the place of the malignant queen.[452] If we compare both fables with Grimm's version of the "Handless Maiden," the superiority of the Northern conception cannot fail to strike us. The Italian _novella_, though written for the people, exhibits the external pomp and grandeur of royalty. All its motives are drawn from the clash of human pa.s.sions. Yet these are hidden beneath a superinc.u.mbent ma.s.s of trivialities. The German tale has a background of spiritual mystery--good and evil powers striving for the possession of a blameless soul. When the husband, who has been deceived by feminine malice, takes his long journey without food as a penitent to find his injured wife, how far deeper is the pathos and the poetry of the situation than the Italian apparatus of couriers with letter-bags, chancellors, tournaments, and royal progresses undertaken with a vast parade, can compa.s.s! The Northern fancy, stimulated by the simple beauty of the situation, confines itself to the pa.s.sionate experience of the heart and soul. The Florentine playwright adheres to the material facts of life, and takes a childish pleasure in pa.s.sing the splendors of kings and princes in review. By this method he vulgarizes the legend he handles. Beneath his touch it ceases to be holy ground. The enchantment of the myth has evanesced.

_Rosana_ is simply the story of _Floire et Blanchefleur_, which Boccaccio had already worked into his _Filocopo_.[453] Austero, King of Rome, goes with his wife on pilgrimage to Holy Land. He falls into the hands of the King of Cesaria, and is slain with all his folk, except the queen. She is taken captive to Cesaria, where she gives birth to Rosana on the same day that Ulimeno is born to her master. When Ulimeno grows up, he loves the daughter of his father's slave. His parents seek to cure this pa.s.sion by sending him to France, and at the same time sell Rosana to some merchants, who convey her to the Sultan's harem. Ulimeno returns to Cesaria in deep distress, and vows that he will never rest till he has regained his love. After a proper number of adventures, he finds Rosana in the seraglio, where notwithstanding the Sultan's admiration of her beauty, she has preserved her virginity. They are married, and Ulimeno is converted, with his realm, to Christianity. The prettiest parts of this play are the scenes in the seraglio, where Rosana refuses comfort from the Sultan's women, and the contrivances devised by Ulimeno to get speech with her. Except that Rosana and her parents are Christian and that the saints protect her, there is nothing to justify the t.i.tle of _Sacra Rappresentazione_. It is a love-romance, like Shakspere's _Pericles_.

Another _novella_ of less poetic interest is dramatized in _Agnolo Ebreo_.[454] Agnolo, the Jew, has a Christian wife, who persuades him instead of putting out his money at usury to lend it to Christ by giving it away in alms. Having thus cast his bread upon the waters, he recovers it again after not many days by picking up money in the streets and finding a jewel in a fish's belly. He is baptized, because he sees clearly that the G.o.d of the Christians can make him rich. Only its tedious solemnity prevents this play from being a farce.

Three _Rappresentazioni_ are written upon incidents of pilgrimage to the shrine of S. James of Compostella--Il Santo Barone, as he is always called. The first of these is ent.i.tled _Rappresentazione di un Pellegrino_.[455] It tells the tale of a certain Guglielmo who vowed the journey to Compostella on his sick bed. Upon the road he meets with a fiend in the disguise of S. James, who persuades him to commit suicide.

No sooner is he dead, than the devil grasps his soul, as may be seen in Lorenzetti's fresco of the Campo Santo, and makes away with it toward h.e.l.l. S. James stops him, and a voluble altercation takes place between them, at the end of which the soul, who keeps crying _misericordia_ at intervals, is rescued and restored to its body. Then Guglielmo completes his vow, and returns joyfully to his wife. _I due Pellegrini_ is more complex.[456] Arrigo Coletta leaves his wife and son at Rome; Constantino Constante leaves his wife and three sons at Genoa; and both set forth to Compostella. On the way they meet and make friends; but the Genoese dies before they have got far upon their journey. His Roman friend carries the dead body to Compostella, where S. James restores it to life, and both return in safety to their homes. After sojourning some time in Rome, Arrigo falls sick of leprosy, and has to go forth and wander up and down the earth. Chance brings him to the house of the Genoese who had received such benefits from him upon their pilgrimage.

They consult doctors and wise men together, who a.s.sure them that no cure can be wrought unless the leper bathe from head to foot in the blood of virgins. This determines Constantino to sacrifice all that he holds dearest in the world. He kills his three sons, and prepares a bath of their blood, which restores his old benefactor to health. But the Saint of Compostella has still his eye upon his servants. A miracle brings the three boys back to life. They are found with golden apples in their hands, and the play ends with a general thanksgiving. The prosy bluntness with which the incidents of this strange story are treated as matter of fact, is scarcely less remarkable than the immorality which subst.i.tutes mere thaumaturgy for the finer instincts of humanity. The exaggerated generosity of Constantino might be paralleled from hundreds of _novelle_. This one virtue seems to have had extraordinary fascination for the Italians. _I tre Pellegrini_ is based upon a legend of medieval celebrity, versified by Southey in his "Pilgrimage to Compostella."[457] A father, a mother, and a son of great personal beauty set forth together for the shrine of S. Iago. On the road they put up at an inn, where Falconetta, the host's daughter, falls in love with the boy and tempts him. Thwarted in her will, she vows to ruin him; and for this purpose, puts a silver cup into his traveling bag. In the morning the pilgrims are overtaken by the police, who find the cup and hang the beautiful young man. The parents complete their vow, and on the way back discover their son upon the gallows alive and well. Falconetta is burned, and her parents are hanged--the old host remarking, not without humor, that, though he was innocent of this crime, he had murdered enough people in his day to have deserved his fate. The style of this play merits more praise than can be bestowed on the _Rappresentazioni_ in general. Falconetta is a real theatrical character, and the bustle of the inn on the arrival of the guests is executed with dramatic vigor.

In their _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ the Florentines advanced to the very verge of the true drama. After adapting the Miracle-plays of medieval orthodoxy to their stage, they versified the Legends of the Saints, and went so far as to dramatize novels of a purely secular character. The _Figliuol Prodigo_ and the farce appended to the _Pellegrino_ contain the germs of vernacular comedy. S. Maddalena is a complete character. S.

Uliva is delicately sketched and well sustained. The situation at the opening of the _Tre Pellegrini_ is worked out with real artistic skill.

Lastly, in the _Esaltazione della Croce_ a regular five-act tragedy was attempted.

From the oratories of the Compagnie and the parlors of the convents this peculiar form of art was extended to the Courts and public theaters.

Poliziano composed a _Rappresentazione_ on the cla.s.sical fable of Orpheus, and Niccol da Correggio another on the myth of Cephalus and Procris.[458] Other attempts to secularize the religious drama followed, until, in 1521, Francesco Mantovano put the contemporary history of the French General Lautrec upon the boards.

Still the fact remains that the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ did not lead to the production of a national Italian theater. If we turn to the history of our Elizabethan stage, we shall find that, after the age of the Miracles and Moralities had pa.s.sed, a new and independent work of art, emanating from the creative genius of Marlowe and Shakspere, put England in the possession of that great rarity, a Drama commensurate with the whole life of the nation at one of its most brilliant epochs. To this accomplishment of the dramatic art the Italians never attained. The causes of their failure will form the subject of a separate inquiry when we come to consider the new direction taken by the playwrights at the Courts of Ferrara and Rome.

As an apology for the s.p.a.ce here devoted to the a.n.a.lysis of plays childish in their subject-matter, prosaic in their treatment, and fruitless of results, it may be urged that in the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ better than elsewhere we can study the limitations of the popular Italian genius at the moment when the junction was effected between humanism and the spirit of the people.

FOOTNOTES:

[358] Muratori, _Rer. Ital. Script._ viii. 712.

[359] A curious letter describing the entrance of the _Battuti_ into Rome in 1399 may be read in Romagnoli's publication _Le Compagnie de'

Battuti in Roma_, Bologna, 1862. It refers to a period later by a century than the first outbreak of the enthusiasm.

[360] Some banners--_Gonfaloni_ or _Stendardi_--of the Perugian fraternities, preserved in the Pinacoteca of that town, are interesting for their ill.u.s.tration of these religious companies at a later date. The Gonfalone of S. Bernardino by Bonfigli represents the saint between heaven and earth pleading for his votaries. Their Oratory (Cappella di Giustizia) is seen behind, and in front are the men and women of the order. That of the _Societas Annuntiatae_ with date 1466, shows a like band of lay brethren and sisters. That of the Giustizia by Perugino has a similar group, kneeling and looking up to Madonna, who is adored by S. Francis and S. Bernardino in the heavens.

Behind is a landscape with a portion of Perugia near the Church of S.

Francis. The Stendardo of the Confraternita di S. Agostino by Pinturicchio exhibits three white-clothed members of the body, kneeling and gazing up to their patron. There is also a fine picture in the Perugian Pinacoteca by Giov. Boccati of Camerino (signed and dated 1447) representing Madonna enthroned in a kind of garden, surrounded by child-like angels with beautiful blonde hair, singing and reading from choir books in a double row of semi-circular choir-stalls. Below, S. Francis and S. Dominic are leading each two white _Disciplinati_ to the throne. These penitents carry their scourges, and holes cut in the backs of their monastic cloaks show the skin red with stripes. One on either side has his face uncovered: the other wears the hood down, with eye-holes pierced in it. This picture belonged to the Confraternity of S. Domenico.

[361] _Cantici di Jacopone da Todi_ (Roma, Salviano, 1558), p. 64. I quote from this edition as the most authentic, and reproduce its orthography.

[362] This Life is prefixed to Salviano's Roman edition of Jacopone's hymns, 1558.

[363] The biographer adds, "Ma fu si horribile e spiacevole a vedere che conturb tutta quella festa, lasciando ogniuno pieno di amaritudine."

[364] See above, p. 284. The seventeenth-century editor of Jacopone and his followers, Tresatti, has justly styled this repulsive but characteristic utterance, "invettiva terribile contro di se."

[365] _Op. cit._ p. 109.

[366] _Ibid._ p. 77.

[367] _Ibid._ p. 122. See Appendix.

[368] _Ibid._ p. 45.

[369] It is printed in Salviano's, and reproduced in Tresatti's edition. I have followed the reading offered by D'Ancona, _Origini del Teatro_, vol. i. p. 142. See Translation in Appendix.

[370] The word _Corrotto_, used by Mary, means lamentation for the dead. It corresponds to the Greek _Threnos_, Corsican _Vocero_, Gaelic _Coronach_.

[371] _Le Poesie spirituali del Beato Jacopone da Todi._ In Venetia, appresso Niccol Miserrimi, MDCXVII. The book is a thick 4to, consisting of 1,055 pages, closely printed. It contains a voluminous running commentary. The editor, Tresatti, a Minorite Friar, says he had extracted 211 _Cantici_ of Jacopone from MSS. belonging to his Order, whereas the Roman and Florentine editions, taken together, contained 102 in all. He divides them into seven sections: (1) Satires, (2) Moral Songs, (3) Odes, (4) Penitential Hymns, (5) The Theory of Divine Love, (6) Spiritual Love Poems, (7) Spiritual Secrets. This division corresponds to seven stages in the soul's progress toward perfection. The arrangement is excellent, though the sections in some places interpenetrate. For variety of subjects, the collection is a kind of lyrical encyclopaedia, touching all needs and states of the devout soul. It might supply material for meditation through a lifetime to a heart in harmony with its ascetic and erotically enthusiastic tone.

[372] _Op. cit._ p. 149.

[373] _Ibid._ p. 244.

[374] _Ibid._ p. 253.

[375] _Op. cit._ p. 266. See Translation in Appendix.

[376] _Op. cit._ p. 306.

[377] _Ibid._ p. 343.

[378] _Op. cit._ pp. 416, 420.

[379] _Ibid._ p. 433.

[380] _Op. cit._ p. 703.

[381] _Ibid._ p. 741.

[382] _Ibid._ p. 715.

[383] _Opere di Girolamo Benivieni_ (Venegia, G. de Gregori, 1524), p.

151.