Renaissance in Italy Volume V Part 7

[Footnote 140: It is certainly significant that the Spanish share with the English the chief honors both of the ballad and the drama. The Scandinavian nations, rich in ballads, have been, through Danish poets, successful in dramatic composition. The Niebelungen Lied and the Song of Roland would, in the case of Germany and France, have to be set against the English ballads of action. But these Epics are different in character from the minstrelsy which turned pa.s.sing events into poetry and bequeathed them in the form of spirit-stirring narratives to posterity. Long after the epical impulse had ceased and the British epic of Arthur had pa.s.sed into the sphere of literature, the ballad minstrels continued to work with dramatic energy upon the substance of contemporary incidents.]

The deficiency of the tragic instinct among the Italians seems to be further exhibited by their failure to produce novels of the higher type.[141] Though Boccaccio is the prince of story-tellers, his _Novelle_ are tales, more interesting for their grace of manner and beautifully described situations, than for a.n.a.lysis of character or strength of plot. Recent Italian _romanzi_ are histories rather than works of free fiction; and these novels were produced after the style of Sir Walter Scott had been acclimatized in every part of Europe.

Meanwhile no Balzac or George Sand, no Thackeray or George Eliot, no Cervantes or Fielding, has appeared in Italy. The nearest approach to a great Italian novel of life and character is the autobiography of Cellini.[142] As the Italians lived instead of playing their tragedies, so they lived instead of imagining their novels.

[Footnote 141: See above, p. 54, for the distinction between the Italian _Novella_ and the modern novel.]

[Footnote 142: In the same way Alfieri's biography is a tragic and Goldoni's a comic novel. The Memoirs of Casanova, which I incline to accept as genuine, might rather be cited as a string of brilliantly written _Novelle_.]

If a national drama could have been produced in Italy, it might have appeared at Florence during the reign of Lorenzo de' Medici. In no other place and at no other period was the Italian genius more alive and centralized. But a city is not a nation, and the Compagnia di San Giovanni was not the Globe Theater. The desires of the Florentines, so studiously gratified by their merchant prince, were bent on carnival shows and dances. In this modern Athens the fine arts failed to find their meeting-point and fulfillment on the stage, because the people lacked the spirit and the freedom necessary to the drama. Artists were satisfied with decorating masks and cars. Poets amused their patrons with romantic stories. Scholars were absorbed in the fervent pa.s.sion for antiquity. Michelangelo carved and Lionardo painted the wonders of the modern world. Thus the Florentine genius found channels that led far afield from tragedy. At a later period, when culture had become more universally Italian, it might have been imagined that the bright spirit of Ariosto, the pregnant wit of Machiavelli, the genial humor of Bibbiena would have given birth to plays of fancy like Fletcher's or to original comedies of manners like Jonson's and Ma.s.singer's. But such was the respect of these Italian playwrights for their cla.s.sic models, that the scenes of even the best Florentine comedies are crowded with spendthrifts, misers, courtesans, lovers and slaves, borrowed from the Latin authors. Plautus and Terence, Ariosto and Machiavelli, not nature, were their source of inspiration.[143]

Mistakes between two brothers, confusions of s.e.x, discoveries that poor girls are the lost daughters of princely parents, form the staple of their plots. The framework of comedy being thus antique, the playwright was reduced to narrow limits for that exhibition of "truth's image, the ensample of manners, the mirror of life," which Il Lasca rightly designated as the proper object of the comic art.

[Footnote 143: Cantu quotes the prologue of a MS. play which goes so far as to apologize for the scene not being laid at Athens (_Lett.

It._ p. 471):

Benche l'usanza sia Che ogni commedia Si soglia fare a Atene, Non so donde si viene Che questa non grecizza, Anzi fiorentinizza.]

The similarity of conditions between late Greek and modern Italian life facilitated this custom of leaning on antique models, and deceived the poets into thinking they might safely apply Graeco-Roman plots to the facts of fifteenth-century romance. With the Turk at Otranto, with the Cardinals of Este and Medici opposing his advance in Hungary, with the episodes of French invasion, with the confusions of the Sack of Rome, there was enough of social anarchy and public peril to justify dramatic intrigues based on kidnapping and anagnorisis. The playwrights, when they adapted comedies of Plautus and Terence, were fully alive to the advantage of these correspondences. Claudio in Ariosto's _Suppositi_ had his son stolen in the taking of Otranto.

Bartolo in the _Scolastica_ lost sight of his intended wife at the moment of Lodovico Sforza's expulsion from Milan. Callimaco in Machiavelli's _Mandragola_ remained in Paris to avoid the troubles consequent on Charles VIII.'s invasion. Lidio and Santilla in Bibbiena's _Calandra_, Blando's children in Aretino's _Talanta_, were taken by the Turks. Fabrizio in the _Ingannati_ was lost in the sack of Rome. Maestro Cornelio in Ambra's _Furto_ was captured by the German Lanzi. In the _Cofanaria_ of the same author there is a girl kidnapped in the Siege of Florence. Slavery itself was by no means obsolete in Italy upon the close of the middle ages; and the slave-merchant of Ariosto's _Ca.s.saria_, hardly distinguished from a common brothel-keeper, was not so anachronistic as to be impossible.

The parasites of Latin comedy found their counterpart in the clients of rich families and the poorer courtiers of princes. The indispensable Davus was represented by the body servants of wealthy householders. The _miles gloriosus_ reappeared in professional _bravi_ and captains of mercenaries. Thus the personages of the Latin stage could easily be furnished with Italian masks. Still there remained an awkwardness in fitting these new masks to the old lay-figures; and when we read the genuine Italian comedies of Aretino, especially the _Cortigiana_ and the _Marescalco_, we feel how much was lost to the nation by the close adherence of its greater playwrights, Ariosto and Machiavelli, to the conventions of the _Commedia erudita_.

The example of Ariosto and Machiavelli led even the best Florentine playwrights--Cecchi, Ambra, and Gelli--into a false path. The plays of these younger authors abound in reminiscences of the _Suppositi_ and _Clizia_, adapted with incomparable skill and humor to contemporary customs, but suffering from too close adherence to models, which had been in their turn copied from the antique. It was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that criticism hit the vein of common sense. Il Lasca, who deserves great credit for his perspicacity, carried on an unremitting warfare against the comedy of _anagnorisis_. In the prologue to his _Gelosia_ he says:[144] "All the comedies which have been exhibited in Florence since the Siege, end in discoveries of lost relatives. This has become so irksome to the audience that, when they hear in the argument how at the taking of this city or the sack of that, children have been lost or kidnapped, they know only too well what is coming, and would fain leave the room.... Authors of such comedies jumble up the new and the old, antique and modern together, making a hodge-podge and confusion, without rhyme or reason, head or tail. They lay their scenes in modern cities and depict the manners of to-day, but foist in obsolete customs and habits of remote antiquity. Then they excuse themselves by saying: Plautus did thus, and this was Menander's way and Terence's; never perceiving that in Florence, Pisa and Lucca people do not live as they used to do in Rome and Athens. For heaven's sake let these fellows take to translation, if they have no vein of invention, but leave off cobbling and spoiling the property of others and their own." The prologue to the _Spiritata_ contains a similar polemic against "quei ritrovamenti nei tempi nostri impossibili e sciocchi."[145] In the prologue to the _Strega_, after once more condemning "quelle recognizioni deboli e sgarbate," he proceeds to attack the authority of ancient critics on whom the pedantic school relied:[146] "Aristotle and Horace knew their own times. But ours are wholly different. We have other manners, another religion, another way of life; and therefore our comedies ought to be composed after a different fashion.

People do not live at Florence as they did in Rome and Athens. There are no slaves here; it is not customary to adopt children; our pimps do not put up girls for sale at auction; nor do the soldiers of the present century carry long-clothes babies off in the sack of cities, to educate them as their own daughters and give them dowries; nowadays they make as much booty as they can, and should girls or married women fall into their hands, they either look for a large ransom or rob them of their maidenhead and honor."

[Footnote 144: _Commedie di Antonfrancesco Grazzini_ (Firenze, Lemonnier, 1859), p. 5.]

[Footnote 145: _Op. cit._ p. 109.]

[Footnote 146: _Ibid._ p. 173.]

This polemic of Il Lasca, and, indeed, all that he says about the art and aim of comedy, is very sensible. But at his date there was no hope for a great comedy of manners. What between the tyranny of the Medici and the pressure of the Inquisition, Spanish suspicion and Papal anxiety for a reform of manners, the liberty essential to a new development of the dramatic art had been extinguished. And even if external conditions had been favorable, the spirit of the race was spent. All intellectual energy was now losing itself in the quagmire of academical discussions and literary disputations upon verbal niceties. Attention was turned backward to the study of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Authors aiming above all things at correctness, slavishly observant of rules and absurdly fearful of each other's ferules, had not the stuff in them to create. What has been said of comedy, is still more true of tragedy. The tragic dramas of this period are stiff and lifeless, designed to ill.u.s.trate critical principles rather than to stir and purify the pa.s.sions. They have no relation to the spirit of the people or the times; and the blood spilt at their conclusion fails to distinguish them from moral lucubrations in the blankest verse.[147]

[Footnote 147: I have put into an Appendix some further notes upon the opinions recorded by the playwrights concerning the progress of the dramatic art.]

The first regular Italian tragedy was the _Sofonisba_ of Gian Giorgio Trissino, finished in 1515, and six times printed before the date of its first representation at Vicenza in 1562.[148] Trissino was a man of immense erudition and laborious intellect, who devoted himself to questions of grammatical and literary accuracy, studying the critics of antiquity with indefatigable diligence and seeking to establish canons for the regulation of correct Italian composition. He was by no means deficient in originality of aim, and professed himself the pioneer of novelties in poetry.[149] Thus, besides innovating in the minor matter of orthography, he set himself to supply the deficiencies of Italian literature by producing an epic in the heroic style and a tragedy that should compete with those of Athens. He had made a profound study of the _Poetics_ and believed that Aristotle's a.n.a.lyses of the epic and the drama might be used as recipes for manufacturing similar masterpieces in a modern tongue.[150] The _Italia Liberata_ and the _Sofonisba_, meritorious but lifeless exercises which lacked nothing but the genius for poetry, were the results of these ambitious theories. Aristotle presided over both, while Homer served as the professed model for Trissino's heroic poem, and Sophocles was copied in his play. Of the _Italia Liberata_ this is not the place to speak.

The _Sofonisba_ is founded on a famous episode in the Punic Wars, when the wife of Syphax was married by Ma.s.sinissa contrary to the express will of Laelius and Scipio. She takes poison at her new husband's orders, and her death forms the catastrophe. There is some attempt to mark character in Lelio, Scipione, and Ma.s.sinissa; but these persons do not act and react on one another, nor is there real dramatic movement in the play. Sofonisba pa.s.ses through it automatically, giving her hand to Ma.s.sinissa without remorse for Syphax, drinking the poison like an obedient girl, and dying with decorous but ineffective pathos. Ma.s.sinissa plays the part of an idiot by sending her the poison which he thinks, apparently, she will not take. His surprise and grief, no less than his previous impulse of pa.s.sionate love, are stationary. In a word, Trissino selected a well-known story from Roman history, and forgot that, in order to dramatize it, he must present the circ.u.mstances, not as a narrated fable, but as a sequence of actions determined by powerful and convincing motives. The two essentials of dramatic art, action evolved before the eyes of the spectators, and what Goethe called the _motiviren_ of each incident, are conspicuous by their absence. The would-be tragic poet was too mindful of rules--his unities, his diction, his connection of scenes that should occupy the stage without interruption, his employment of the Chorus in harmony with antique precedent--to conceive intensely or to express vividly. In form the _Sofonisba_ is a fair imitation of Attic tragedy, and the good taste of its author secures a certain pale and frigid reflection of cla.s.sical simplicity. Blank verse is judiciously mingled with lyric meters, which are only introduced at moments of high-wrought feeling. The Chorus plays an un.o.btrusive part in the dialogue, and utters appropriate odes in the right places.

Consequently, the _Sofonisba_ was hailed as a triumph of skill by the learned audience to whom alone the author appealed. Its merits of ingenuity and scholarship were such as they could appreciate. Its lack of vitality and imaginative vigor did not strike men who were accustomed to judge of poetry by rule and precedent.

[Footnote 148: My references to Italian tragedies will be made to the _Teatro Italiano Antico_, 10 vols., Milano, 1809.]

[Footnote 149: This is shown by his device of a Golden Fleece, referring to the voyage of the Argonauts. To sail the ocean of antiquity as an explorer, and to bring back the spoils of their artistic method was his ambition.]

[Footnote 150: Compare what Giraldi says in the dedication of his _Orbecche_ to Duke Ercole II.: "Ancora che Aristotele ci dia il modo di comporle." In the same pa.s.sage he dwells on the difficulties of producing tragedies in the absence of dramatic instinct, with an ingenuousness that moves our pity: "Quando altri si da a scrivere in quella maniera de' Poemi, che sono stati per tanti secoli tralasciati, che appena di loro vi resta una lieve ombra." It never occurred to him that great poetry comes neither by observation nor by imitation of predecessors. The same dedication contains the monstrous critical a.s.sertion that the Latin poets, _i.e._ Seneca, improved upon Greek tragedy--_a.s.sai piu grave la fecero_.]

Numerous scholars entered the lists in compet.i.tion with Trissino.

Among these the first place must be given to Giovanni Rucellai, whose _Rosmunda_ was composed almost contemporaneously with the _Sofonisba_ and was acted before Leo X. in the Rucellai Gardens upon the occasion of a Papal visit to Florence. The chief merit of _Rosmunda_ is brevity. But it has the fatal fault of being a story told in scenes and dialogues, not an action moving and expanding through a series of connected incidents. Rosmunda's father, Comundo, has been slain in battle with the Lombards under Albuino. Like Antigone, the princess goes by night to bury his corpse; and when the tyrant threatens her, she replies in language borrowed from Sophocles. Albuino decapitates Comundo and makes a wine-cup of his skull, from which, after his marriage to Rosmunda, he forces her to drink. This determines the catastrophe. Almachilde appears upon the scene and slaughters Albuino in his tent. We are left to conjecture the murderer's future marriage with the heroine. That the old tale of the _Donna Lombarda_ is eminently fitted for tragic handling, admits of no doubt. But it is equally certain that Rucellai failed to dramatize it. Almachilde is not introduced until the fourth act, and he a.s.sa.s.sinates Albuino without any previous communication with Rosmunda. The horrible banquet scene and the incident of the murder are described by messengers, while the chief actors rarely come to speech together face to face.

The business of the play is narrated in dialogues with servants. This abuse of the Messenger and of subordinate characters, introduced for the sole purpose of describing and relating what ought to be enacted, is not peculiar to the _Rosmunda_. It weakens all the tragedies of the sixteenth century, reducing their scenes to vacant discussions, where one person tells another what the author has conceived but what he cannot bring before his audience. Afraid of straining his imaginative faculties by the display of characters in action, the poet studiously keeps the chief personages apart, supplying the hero and the heroine with a shadow or an echo, whose sympathetic utterances serve to elicit the plot without making any demand upon the dramatist's power of presentation. Unfortunately for the tragic poets, the precedent of Seneca seemed to justify this false method of dramatic composition.

And Seneca's tragedies, we know, were written, not for action, but for recitation.

These defects culminate in Speron Sperone's _Canace_. The tale is horrible. Eolo, G.o.d of the winds, has two children, Canace and Macareo, born at one birth by his wife Deiopea. Under the malign influence of Venus this unlucky couple love; and the fruit of their union is a baby, killed as soon as born. The brother and the sister commit suicide separately, after their father's anger has thrown the light of publicity upon their pa.s.sion. In order to justify the exhibition of incest in this repulsive form, there should at least have been such scenes of self-abandonment to impulse as Ford has found for Giovanni and Annabella; or the poet might have suggested the operation of agencies beyond human control by treading in the footsteps of Euripides; or, again, he might have risen from the sordid facts of sin into the region of ideal pa.s.sion by the presentation of commanding personality in his princ.i.p.al actors. Nothing of this kind redeems the dreary disgust of his plot. The first act consists of a dialogue between Eolo and his Grand Vizier; the second, of a dialogue between Canace and her nurse; the third, of dialogues between Deiopea and her servants; the fourth, of a Messenger's narrative; the fifth, of Macareo's dialogues with his valet and his father's henchman. This a.n.a.lysis of the situations shows how little of dramatic genius Sperone brought to bear upon the hideous theme he had selected. The _Canace_ is a succession of conversations referring to events which happen off the stage, and which involve no play of character in the chief personages. It is written throughout in lyrical measures with an affected diction, where rhetorical conceits produce the same effect as artificial flowers and ribbons stuck upon a skeleton.

Giraldi, the author of the _Hecatommithi_, fares little better in his _Orbecche_.[151] It is a play founded on one of the poet's own _Novelle_.[152] Orbecche, the innocent child of Sulmone and Selina, has led her father to detect his wife's adultery with his own eldest son. Selina, killed together with her paramour, exercises a baleful influence from the world of ghosts over this daughter who unwittingly betrayed her sin. Orbecche privately marries the low-born Oronte and has two sons by her husband. Sulmone, when he discovers this _mesalliance_, a.s.sa.s.sinates Oronte and his children in a secret place, and makes a present of his head and hands to his miserable daughter.

Upon this, Orbecche stabs her father and then ends her own life. To horrors of extravagant pa.s.sion and bloodshed we are accustomed in the works of our inferior playwrights. Nor would it perhaps be just to quarrel with Giraldi for having chosen a theme so morbid, if any excuse could have been pleaded on the score of stirring scenes or vivid incidents. Unluckily, the life of dramatic action and pa.s.sion is wanting to his ponderous tragedy. Instead of it, we are treated to disquisitions in the style of Seneca, and to descriptions that would be harrowing but for their invincible frigidity. No amount of crime and bloodshed will atone for the stationary mechanism of this lucubration.

[Footnote 151: This tragedy was acted at Ferrara in Giraldi's house before Ercole II., Duke of Ferrara, and a brilliant company of n.o.ble persons, in 1541. The music was composed by M. Alfonso dalla Viuola, the scenery by M. Girolamo Carpi.]

[Footnote 152: Giraldi, a prolific writer of plays, dramatized three other of his novels in the _Arrenopia_, the _Altile_ and the _Antivalomeni_. He also composed a _Didone_ and a _Cleopatra_.]

Lacking dramatic instinct, these Italian scholars might have redeemed their essential feebleness by acute a.n.a.lysis of character. Their tragedies might at least have contained versified studies of motives, metrical essays on the leading pa.s.sions. But we look in vain for such compensations. Stock tyrants, conventional lovers, rhetorical pedants, form their _dramatis personae_. The inherent vices of the _Novella_, expanded to excessive length and invested with the forms of antique art, neutralize the labors of the lamp and file that have been spent upon them.[153] If it were requisite to select one play in which a glimmer of dramatic light is visible, we could point to the _Marianna_ of Lodovico Dolce. Here the pa.s.sion of love in a tyrant, dotingly affectionate but egotistic, roused to suspicion by the slightest hint, and jealous beyond Oth.e.l.lo's lunacy, has been depicted with considerable skill. Herod is a fantastical Creon, who murders the fancied paramour of Marianna, and subsequently a.s.sa.s.sinates Marianna herself, his two sons by her, and her mother, in successive paroxysms of insane vindictiveness, waking up too late from his dream of self-injury into ign.o.ble remorse. Though his conviction that Marianna meant to poison him, and his persuasion of her adultery with Soemo are so ill prepared by reasonable motives as to be ridiculous, the operation of these beliefs upon his wild-beast nature leads to more real movement than is common in Italian tragedies. The inevitable Chorus is employed for the utterance of sententious commonplaces; and the part of the Messenger is abused for the detailed and disgusting description of executions that inspire no horror.

[Footnote 153: It may here be remarked that though the scholarly playwrights of the Renaissance paid great attention to Aristotle's _Poetics_, and made a conscientious study of some Greek plays, especially the _Antigone_, the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, the _Phoenissae_, and the _Iphigenia in Tauris_, they held the uncritical opinion, openly expressed by Giraldi, that Seneca had improved the form of the Greek drama. Their worst faults of construction, interminable monologues, dialogues between heroines and confidantes, dry choric dissertations, and rhetorical declamations are due to the preference for Seneca. The more we study Italian literature in the sixteenth century, the more we are compelled to acknowledge that humanism and all its consequences were a revival of Latin culture, only slightly tinctured with the simpler and purer influences of the Greeks. Latin poetry had the fatal attraction of facility. It was, moreover, itself composite and derivatory, like the literature of the new age. We may profitably ill.u.s.trate the att.i.tude of the Italian critics by Sidney's eulogy of _Gorboduc_: "full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality which it doth most delightfully teach and so obtain the very end of Poesy."]

The tragedies. .h.i.therto discussed, though conforming to the type of the cla.s.sical drama, were composed on original subjects. Yet the best plays of this pedantic school are those which closely follow some Attic model. Rucellai's _Oreste_, produced in imitation of the _Iphigenia in Tauris_, far surpa.s.ses the _Rosmunda_, not only as a poem of action, but also for the richness and the beauty of its style.

That Rucellai should spoil the plot of Euripides by his alterations, protracting the famous recognition-scene till we are forced to suppose that Orestes and Iphigenia kept up a game of mutual misunderstanding out of consideration for the poet, and spinning out the contest between Orestes and Pylades to absurdity, was to be expected. A scholar in his study can scarcely hope to improve upon the work of a poet whose very blemishes were the defects of a dramatic quality. He fancies that expansion of striking situations will fortify them, and that the addition of ingenious rhetoric will render a simple action more effective. The reverse of this is true; and the best line open to such a poet is to produce a faithful version of his original. This was done by Luigi Alamanni, whose translation of the _Antigone_, though open to objections on the score of scholarship, is a brilliant and beautiful piece of Italian versification. Lodovico Dolce in his _Giocasta_ attempted to remodel the _Phoenissae_ with very indifferent success; while Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara defaced the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ in his _Edippo_, by adding a final act and interweaving episodical matter borrowed from Seneca. A more repulsive tragi-comedy than this _pasticcio_ of Sophocles and Seneca, can scarcely be imagined. Yet Quadrio and Tiraboschi mention it with cautious compliment, and it received the honor of public recitation at Vicenza in 1565, when Palladio erected a theater for the purpose in the n.o.ble Palazzo della Ragione. We cannot contemplate these _rifacimenti_ of standard-making masterpieces without mixed feelings of scorn and pity. Sprouting fungus-like upon the venerable limbs of august poetry, they lived their season of mildewy fame, and may now be reckoned among the things which the world would only too willingly let die. The inept.i.tude of such performance reached a climax in Lodovico Martelli's _Tullia_, where the Roman legend of Lucius Tarquinius is violently altered to suit the plot of Sophocles' _Electra_. Romulus appears at the conclusion of the play as a _deus ex machina_, and the insufferable tedium of the speeches may be imagined from the fact that one of them runs to the length of 211 lines.

These tragedies were the literary manufacture of scholars, writing in no relation of reciprocity with the world of action or the audience of busy cities. Applying rules of Aristotle and Horace, travestying Sophocles and Euripides, copying the worst faults of Seneca, patching, boggling, rehandling, misconceiving, devising petty traps instead of plots, mistaking bloodshed and brutality for terror, attending to niceties of diction, composing commonplace sentences for superfluous Choruses, intent on everything but the main points of pa.s.sion, character, and action, they produced the dreariest _caput mortuum_ of unintelligent industry which it is the melancholy duty of historians to chronicle. Their personages are shadows evoked in the camera obscura of a pedant's brain from figures that have crossed the orbit of his solitary studies. No breath or juice of life animates these formal marionettes. Their movements of pa.s.sion are the spasms of machinery. No charm of poetry, no bursts of lyrical music, no resolutions of tragic solemnity into irony or sarcasm, afford relief from clumsy horrors and stale disquisitions, parceled out by weight and measure in the leaden acts. An intolerable wordiness oppresses the reader, who wades through speeches reckoned by the hundred lines, wondering how any audience could endure the torment of their recitation. Each play is a flat and arid wilderness, piled with barrows of extinct sentences in Seneca's manner and with pyramids of reflection heaped up from the commonplace books of a pedagogue.

The failure of Italian tragedy was inseparable from its artificial origin. It was the conscious product of cultivated persons, who aimed at nothing n.o.bler than the imitation of the ancients and the observance of inapplicable rules. The curse of intellectual barrenness weighed upon the starvelings of this system from the moment of their birth, and nothing better came of them than our own _Gorboduc_. That tragedy, built upon the false Italian method, is indeed a sign of what we English might have suffered, if Sidney and the court had gained their way with the Elizabethan Drama.

The humanistic influences of the fifteenth century were scarcely less unpropitious to national comedy at its outset than they had been to tragedy. Although the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ contained the germ of vernacular farce, though interludes in dialect amused the folk of more than one Italian province, among which special reference may be made to the Neapolitan _Fa.r.s.e_, yet the playwrights of the Renaissance preferred Plautus and Terence to the indigenous growth of their own age and country.[154] We may note this fact with regret, since it helped to deprive the Italians of a national theater. Still we must not forget that it was inevitable. Humanism embraced the several districts of Italy in a common culture, effacing the distinctions of dialect, and bringing the separate elements of the nation to a consciousness of intellectual unity. Divided as Venetians, as Florentines, as Neapolitans, as Lombards, and as Romans, the members of the Italian community recognized their ident.i.ty in the spiritual city they had reconquered from the past. What the English translation of the Bible effected for us, the recovery of Latin and the humanistic education of the middle cla.s.ses achieved for the Italians. For a Florentine scholar to have developed the comic elements existing in the _Feste_, for a Neapolitan to have refined the matter of the _Fa.r.s.e_, would have seemed the same in either case as self-restriction to the limits of a single province. But the whole nation possessed the Latin poets as a common heritage; and on the ground of Plautus, Florentines and Neapolitans could understand each other. It was therefore natural that the cultivated orders, brought into communion by the ancients, should look to these for models of an art they were intent on making national. Together with this imperious instinct, which impelled the Italians to create their literature in sympathy with the commanding spirit of the age, we must reckon the fashionable indifference toward vernacular and obscure forms of poetry. The princes and their courtiers strove alike to remodel modern customs in accordance with the cla.s.sics. Illiterate mechanics might amuse themselves with farces.[155] Men who had once tasted the refined and pungent salt of Attic wit, could stomach nothing simpler than scenes from antique comedy.

[Footnote 154: D'Ancona (_Origini del Teatro_, vol. ii. sec. x.x.xix.) may be consulted upon the attempts to secularize the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ which preceded the revival of cla.s.sical comedy.]

[Footnote 155: Leo X., with a Medici's true sympathy for plebeian literature added to his own coa.r.s.e sense of fun, patronized the farces of the Sienese Company called Rozzi. Had his influence lasted, had there been any one to continue the traditions of his Court at Rome, it is not impossible that a more natural comedy, as distinguished from the _Commedia erudita_, might have been produced by this fashionable patronage of popular dramatic art.]

We therefore find that, at the close of the fifteenth century, it was common to recite the plays of Plautus and Terence in their original language. Paolo Comparini at Florence in 1488 wrote a prologue to the _Menaechmi_, which his pupils represented, much to the disgust of the elder religious Companies, who felt that the ruin of their _Feste_ was involved in this revival of antiquity.[156] Pomponius Laetus at Rome, about the same time, encouraged the members of his Academy to rehea.r.s.e Terence and Plautus in the palaces of n.o.bles and prelates.[157] The company of youthful actors formed by him were employed by the Cardinal Raffaello Riario in the magnificent spectacles he provided for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the Papal Court. During the pontificate of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII., the mausoleum of Hadrian, not then transformed into a fortress, or else the squares of Rome were temporarily arranged as theaters for these exhibitions.[158] It was on this stage that Tommaso Inghirami, by his brilliant acting in the _Hippolytus_ of Seneca, gained the surname of Phaedra which clung to him through life. In the pontificate of Alexander we hear of similar shows, as when, upon the occasion of Lucrezia Borgia's espousal to the Duke of Ferrara in 1502, the _Menaechmi_ was represented at the Vatican.[159]

[Footnote 156: See D'Ancona, _Or. del Teatro_, vol. ii. p. 201.]

[Footnote 157: Sabellico, quoted by Tiraboschi, says of him: "primorum antist.i.tum atriis suo theatro usus, in quibus Plauti, Terentii, recentiorum etiam quaedam agerentur fabulae, quas ipse honestos adolescentes et docuit et agentibus praefuit."]

[Footnote 158: See the letter of Sulpizio da Veroli to Raffaello Riario, quoted by Tiraboschi; "eamdemque, postquam in Hadriani mole Divo Innocentio spectante est acta, rursus inter tuos penates, tamquam in media Circi cavea, toto consessu umbraculis tecto, admisso populo, et pluribus tui ordinis spectatoribus honorifice excepisti. Tu etiam primus picturatae scenae faciem, quum Pomponiam comoediam agerent, nostro saeculo ostendisti."]

[Footnote 159: See _Lucrezia Borgia_, by Gregorovius (Stuttgart, 1874), vol. i. p. 201.]

The Court which accomplished most for the resuscitation of Latin Comedy was that of the Estensi at Ferrara. Ercole I. had spent a delicate youth in humanistic studies, collecting ma.n.u.scripts and encouraging his courtiers to make Italian translations of ancient authors. He took special interest in theatrical compositions, and spared no pains in putting Latin comedies with all the pomp of modern art upon the stage. Thus the Ferrarese diaries mention a representation of the _Menaechmi_ in 1486, which cost above 1000 ducats. In 1487 the courtyard of the castle was fitted up as a theater for the exhibition of Nicol da Correggio's Pastoral of _Cefalo_.[160]

Again, upon the occasion of Annibale de' Bentivogli's betrothal to a princess of the Este family, the _Amphitryon_ was performed; and in 1491, when Anna Sforza gave her hand to Alfonso d'Este, the same comedy was repeated. In 1493 Lodovico Sforza, on a visit to Ferrara, witnessed a representation of the _Menaechmi_, which so delighted him that he begged Ercole to send his company to Milan. The Duke went thither in person, attended by his son Alfonso and by gentle actors of his Court, among whom Lodovico Ariosto played a part. Later on, in 1499, we again hear of Latin comedies at Ferrara. Bembo in a letter of that year mentions the _Trinummus_, _Poenulus_ and _Eunuchus_.[161]

[Footnote 160: Nicol was a descendant of the princely house of Correggio. He married Ca.s.sandra, daughter of Bartolommeo Colleoni. His _Cefalo_ was a mixed composition resembling the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ in structure. In the Prologue he says:

Requiret autem nullus hic Comoediae Leges ut observentur, aut Tragoediae; Agenda nempe est historia, non fabula.

See D'Ancona, _op. cit._ vol. 2, pp. 143-146, 155.]

[Footnote 161: _Ep. Fam._ i. 18, quoted by Tiraboschi.]

It is probable that Latin comedies were recited at Ferrara, as at Rome, in the original. At the same time we know that both Plautus and Terence were being translated into Italian for the amus.e.m.e.nt of an audience as yet but partially acquainted with ancient languages.

Tiraboschi mentions the _Anfitrione_ of Pandolfo Collenuccio, the _Ca.s.sina_ and _Mostellaria_ versified in _terza rima_ by Girolamo Berardo, and the _Menechmi_ of Duke Ercole, among the earliest of these versions. Guarini and Ariosto followed on their path with translations from the Latin made for special occasions. It was thus that Italian comedy began to disengage itself from Latin. After the presentation of the original plays, came translation; and after translation, imitation. The further transition from imitation to freedom was never perfectly effected. The comic drama, determined in its form by the circ.u.mstances of its origin remained emphatically a _commedia erudita_. Adapted to the conditions of modern life, it never lost dependence upon Latin models; and its most ingenious representations of manners were defaced by reminiscences which condemn them to a place among artistic hybrids. Ariosto, who did so much to stamp Italian comedy with the mark of his own genius, was educated, as we have already seen, in the traditions of Duke Ercole's Latin theater; and Ariosto gave the law to his most genial successor, Cecchi. The Pegasus of the Italian drama, if I may venture on a burlesque metaphor, was a mule begotten by the st.u.r.dy a.s.s of Latin on the fleet mare of the Italian spirit; and it had the sterility of the mule.