John Addington Symonds

First attempts at Secular Drama—The Orfeo and Timone—General Character of Italian Plays—Court Pageants and Comedies borrowed from the Latin—Conditions under which a National Drama is formed—Their absence in Italy—Lack of Tragic Genius—Eminently Tragic Material in Italian History—The Use made of this by English Playwrights—The Ballad and the Drama—The Humanistic Bias in Italy—Parallels between Greek and Italian Life—Il Lasca's Critique of the Latinizing Playwrights—The Sofonisba of Trissino—Rucellai's Rosmunda—Sperone's Canace—Giraldi's Orbecche—Dolce's Marianna—Transcripts from the Greek Tragedians and Seneca—General Character of Italian Tragedies—Sources of their Failure—Influence of Plautus and Terence over Comedy—Latin Comedies acted at Florence, Rome, Ferrara—Translations of Latin Comedies—Manner of Representation at Court—Want of Permanent Theaters—Bibbiena's Calandra—Leo X. and Comedy at Rome—Ariosto's Treatment of his Latin Models—The Cassaria, Suppositi, Lena, Negromante, Scolastica—Qualities of Ariosto's Comedies—Machiavelli's Plays—The Commedia in Prosa—Fra Alberigo and Margherita—The Clizia—Its Humor—The Mandragola—Its sinister Philosophy—Conditions under which it was Composed—Aretino disengages Comedy from Latin Rules—His Point of View—The Cortegiana, Marescalco, Talanta—Italy had innumerable Comedies, but no great Comic Art—General Character of the Commedia Erudita—Its fixed Personages—Gelli, Firenzuola, Cecchi, Ambra, Il Lasca—The Farsa—Conclusion on the Moral Aspects of Italian Comedy.

Contemporaneously with the Roman Epic, the Drama began to be a work of studied art in Italy. Boiardo by his Timone and Poliziano by his Orfeo gave the earliest specimens at Ferrara and Mantua of secular plays written in the vulgar tongue. The Timone must have been composed before 1494, the date of Boiardo's death; and we have already seen that the Orfeo was in all probability represented in 1472. It is significant that the two poets who were mainly instrumental in effecting a revival of Italian poetry, should have tried their hands at two species of composition for the stage. In the Orfeo we find a direct outgrowth from the Sacre Rappresentazioni. The form of the Florentine religious show is adapted with very little alteration to a pagan story. In substance the Orfeo is a pastoral melodrama with a tragic climax. Boiardo in the Timone followed a different direction. The subject is borrowed from Lucian, who speaks the prologue, as Gower prologizes in the Pericles of Shakspere. The comedy aims at regularity of structure, and is written in terza rima. Yet the chief character leaves the stage before the end of the fifth act, and the conclusion is narrated by an allegorical personage, Lo Ausilio.[134]

These plays, though generally considered to have been the first attempts at secular Italian dramatic poetry, were by no means the earliest in date, if we admit the Latin plays of scholars.[135] Besides some tragedies, which will afterwards be mentioned, it is enough here to cite the Philogenia of Ugolino Pisani (Parma, 1430), the Philodoxius of Alberti, the Polissena of Leonardo Bruni, and the Progne of Gregorio Corrado. It is therefore a fact that, in addition to religious dramas in the mother tongue, the Italians from an early period turned their attention to dramatic composition. Still the drama never flourished at any time in Italy as a form of poetry indigenous and national. It did not succeed in freeing itself from classical imitation on the one hand, or on the other from the hampering adjuncts of Court-pageants and costly entertainments. Why the Italians failed to develop a national theater, is a question easier to ask than to answer. The attempt to solve this problem will, however, serve to throw some light upon their intellectual conditions at the height of the Renaissance.

Plays in Italy at this period were either religious Feste of the kind peculiar to Florence, or Masks at Court, or Comedies and Tragedies imitated by men of learning from classical models, or, lastly, Pastorals combining the scenic attractions of the Mask with the action of a regular drama. None of these five species can be called in a true sense popular; nor were they addressed by their authors to the masses of the people. Performed in private by pious confraternities or erudite academies, or exhibited on state occasions in the halls of princely palaces, they were not an expression of the national genius but a highly-cultivated form of aristocratic luxury. When Heywood in his prologue to the Challenge for Beauty wrote:

when Marlowe in the first scene of Edward II. made Gaveston, thinking how he may divert the pleasure-loving king, exclaim:

both of these poets uttered a true criticism of the Italian theater. Marlowe accurately describes the scenic exhibitions in vogue at the Courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and Rome, where the stage was reckoned among the many instruments of wanton amusement. Heywood, by his scornful phrase jigs, indicates their mixed nature between comedies and ballets, with interludes of pageantry and accompaniment of music. The words italicized show that the English playwrights were conscious of having developed a nobler type of the drama than had been produced in Italy. In order to complete the outline sketched by Heywood and Marlowe, we must bear in mind that comedies adapted from the Latin, like the Suppositi of Ariosto, or constructed upon Latin principles, like Machiavelli's Mandragola or the Calandra of Bibbiena, were highly relished by a society educated in humanistic traditions. Such efforts of the scholarly muse approved themselves even in England to the taste of critics like Sir Philip Sidney, who shows in his Defense of Poesy that he had failed to discern the future greatness of the national drama. But they had the fatal defect of being imitations and exotics. The stage, however learnedly adorned by men of scholarship and fancy, remained within the narrow sphere of courtly pastime. What was a mere hors d'oeuvre in the Elizabethan age of England, formed the whole dramatic art of the Italians.

If tragedy and comedy sprang by a natural process of evolution from the medieval Mystery, then the Florentines should have had a drama. We have seen how rich in the elements of both species were the Sacre Rappresentazioni; and how men of culture like Lorenzo de' Medici, and Bernardo Pulci deigned to compose them. But the Sacre Rappresentazioni died a natural death, and left no heritage. They had no vital relation to the people, either as a source of amusement or as embodying the real thoughts and passions of the race. Designed for the edification of youth, their piety was too often hypocritical, and their extravagant monastic morality stood in glaring opposition to the ethics of society. We must go far deeper in our analysis, if we wish to comprehend this failure of the Italians to produce a drama.

Three conditions, enjoyed by Greece and England, but denied to Italy, seem necessary for the poetry of a nation to reach this final stage of artistic development. The first is a free and sympathetic public, not made up of courtiers and scholars, but of men of all classes—a public representative of the whole nation, with whom the playwright shall feel himself in close rapport. The second is, a center of social life: an Athens, Paris or London: where the heart of the nation beats and where its brain is ever active. The third is a perturbation of the race in some great effort, like the Persian war or the struggle of the Reformation, which unites the people in a common consciousness of heroism. Taken in combination, these three conditions explain the appearance of a drama fitted to express the very life and soul of a puissant nation, with the temper of the times impressed upon it, but with a truth and breadth that renders it the heritage of every race and age. A national drama is the image created for itself in art by a people which has arrived at knowledge of its power, at the enjoyment of its faculties, after a period of successful action. Concentrated in a capital, gifted with a common instrument of self-expression, it projects itself in tragedies and comedies that bear the name of individual poets, but are in reality the spirit of the race made vocal.[136]

These conditions have only twice in the world's history existed—once in the Athens of Pericles, once in the London of Elizabeth. The measure of greatness to which the dramas of Paris and Madrid, though still not comparable with the Attic and the English, can lay claim, is due to the participation by the French and Spanish peoples in these privileges. But in Italy there was no public, no metropolis, no agitation of the people in successful combat with antagonistic force. The educated classes were, indeed, conscious of intellectual unity; but they had no meeting-point in any city, where they might have developed the theater upon the only principles then possible, the principles of erudition. And, what was worse, there existed no enthusiasms, moral, religious or political, from which a drama could arise. A society without depth of thought or seriousness of passion, highly cultured, but devoid of energy and aspiration, had not the seed of tragedy within its loins. In those polite Italian Courts and pleasure-seeking coteries, the idyl, the Novella, and the vision of a golden age might entertain men weary with public calamities, indulgent to the vice and crime around them. From this soil the forest-trees of a great drama could not spring. But it yielded an abundant crop of comedies, an undergrowth of rankly sprouting vegetation. It was, moreover, well adapted to the one original production of the Italian stage. Pastoral comedy, attaining perfection in Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor Fido, and bearing the germs of the Opera in its voluptuous scenes, formed the climax of dramatic art in Italy.

Independently of these external drawbacks, we find in the nature of the Italian genius a reason why the drama never reached perfection. Tragedy, which is the soul of great dramatic poetry, was almost uniformly wanting after Dante. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, are pathetic, graceful, polished, elevated, touching, witty, humorous, reflective, radiant, inventive, fanciful—everything but stern, impassioned, tragic in the true heroic sense. Even the Florentines, who dallied sometimes with the thoughts of Death and Judgment in bizarre pageants like the show of Hell recorded by Villani, or the Mask of Penitence designed by Piero di Cosimo, or the burlesque festivals recorded in the life of Rustici by Giorgio Vasari—even the Florentines shrank in literature from what is terrible and charged with anguish of the soul. The horrors of the Novelle are used by them to stimulate a jaded appetite, to point the pleasures of the sense by contrast with the shambles and the charnel-house. We are never invited to the spectacle of human energies ravaged by passion, at war with destiny, yet superior to fate and fortune and internal tempest in the strength of will and dignity of heroism. It is not possible to imagine those liete brigate of young men and maidens responding to the fierce appeal of Marston's prologue:

Sterner, and it may be gloomier conditions of external life than those which the Italians enjoyed, were needed as a preparation of the public for such spectacles. It was not on these aspects of human existence that a race, accustomed to that genial climate and refined by the contemplation of all-golden art, loved to dwell in hours of recreation. The Novella, with its mixture of comedy and pathos, license and satire, gave the tone, as we have seen, to literature. The same quality of the Italian temperament may be illustrated from the painting of the sixteenth century, which rarely rises to the height of tragedy. If we except Michelangelo and Tintoretto, we find no masters of sublime and fervid genius, able to conceive with intensity and to express with force the thrilling moods of human passion. Raphael marks the height pf national achievement, and even the more serious work of Raphael found no adequate interpreters among his pupils.

The absence of the tragic element in Italian art and literature is all the more remarkable because the essence of Italian history, whether political or domestic, was eminently dramatic. When we consider what the nation suffered during the civil wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, under the tyranny of monsters like Ezzelino, from plagues that swept away the population of great cities, and beneath the scourge of sinister religious revivals, it may well cause wonder that the Italian spirit should not have assumed a stern and tragic tone instead of that serenity and cheerfulness which from the first distinguished it. The Italians lived their tragedies in the dynasties of the Visconti and the Sforzas, in the contests of the Baglioni and Manfredi, in the persons of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta and Cesare Borgia, in the murders, poisonings, rapes and treasons that form the staple of the annals of their noble houses. But it was the English and not the Italian poets who seized upon this tragic matter and placed it with the light of poetry upon the stage.[137] Our Elizabethan playwrights dramatized the legends of Othello and Juliet, the loves of Bianca Capello and Vittoria Accoramboni, the tragedies of the Duchess of Amalfi and the Duke of Milan. There is something even appalling in the tenacity with which poets of the stamp of Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Massinger and Tourneur clung to the episodes of blood and treachery furnished by Italian stories. Their darkest delineations of villainy, their subtlest analyses of evil motives, their most audacious pictures of vice, are all contained within the charmed circle of Italian history. A play could scarcely succeed in London unless the characters were furnished with Italian names.[138] Italy fascinated the Northern fancy, and the imagination of our dramatists found itself at home among her scenes of mingled splendor and atrocity. Nowhere, therefore, can a truer study of Italian Court-intrigue be found than in the plays of Webster. His portraits, it may be allowed, are painted without relief or due gradation of tone. Flamineo and Bosola seem made to justify the proverb—Inglese Italianato È un diavolo incarnato. Yet after reading the secret history of the Borgias, or estimating the burden on Ferdinand's conscience when he quaked before the French advance on Naples, who can say that Webster has exaggerated the bare truth? He has but intensified it by the incubation of his intellect. Varchi's account of Lorenzino de' Medici, affecting profligacy and effeminacy in order to deceive Duke Alessandro, and forming to his purpose the ruffian Scoronconcolo from the dregs of the prisons, furnishes a complete justification for even Tourneur's plots. The snare this traitor laid for Alessandro, when he offered to bring his own aunt to the duke's lust, bears a close resemblance to Vendice's scheme in the Revenger's Tragedy; while the inconsequence of his action after the crime, tallies with the moral collapse of Duke Ferdinand before his strangled sister's corpse in the last act of the Duchess of Malfi.

The reality of these acted tragedies may have been a bar to their mimic presentation on the stage in Italy. When the Borgias were poisoning their victims in Rome; when Lodovico Sforza was compassing his nephew's death at Pavia; when the Venetians were decapitating Carmagnuola; when Sixtus was plotting the murder of the Medici in church, and Grifonetto Baglioni was executing il gran tradimento; could an Italian audience, in the Court or on the Piazza, have taken a keen pleasure in witnessing the scenic presentment of barbarities so close at hand? The sense of contrast between the world of fact and the work of art, which forms an essential element of Æsthetic pleasure, would have been wanting. The poets turned from these crimes to comedy and romance, though the politicians analyzed their motives with impartial curiosity. At the same time, we may question whether the Despots would have welcomed tragic shows which dramatized their deeds of violence; whether they would have suffered the patriotism of Brutus, the vengeance of Virginius, the plots of Catiline, or the downfall of Sejanus to be displayed with spirit-stirring pomp in theaters of Milan and Ferrara, when conspiracies like that of Olgaiti were frequent. It was the freedom of the English public and the self-restraint of the English character, in combination with the profound appetite for tragic emotion inherent in our Northern blood, which rendered the Shaksperian drama possible and acceptable.

In connection with this inaptitude of the Italians for tragedy, it is worth noticing that their popular poetry exhibits but rare examples of the ballad. It abounds in love ditties and lyrics of the inner life. But references to history and the tragedies of noble families are comparatively scarce.[139] In Great Britain, on the contrary, while our popular poetry can show but few songs of sentiment, the Border and Robin Hood ballads record events in national history or episodes from actual domestic dramas, blent with the memories of old mythology. These poems prove in the unknown minstrels who produced them, a genuine appreciation of dramatic incident; and their manner is marked by vigorous objectivity. The minstrel loses himself in his subject and aims at creating in his audience a vivid sense of the action he has undertaken to set forth. The race which could produce such ballads, already contained the germs of Marlowe's tragedy. It would be interesting to pursue this subject further, and by examining the ballad-literature of the several European nations to trace how far the capacities which in a rude state of society were directed to this type of minstrelsy, found at a later period their true sphere of art in the drama.[140]

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 analysis 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.

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 passion 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 Massinger's. But such was the respect of these Italian playwrights for their classic 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 sex, 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.

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 GrÆco-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 Cassaria, 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."

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 illustrate critical principles rather than to stir and purify the passions. 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]

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 analyses 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 Massinissa contrary to the express will of LÆlius 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 Massinissa; but these persons do not act and react on one another, nor is there real dramatic movement in the play. Sofonisba passes through it automatically, giving her hand to Massinissa without remorse for Syphax, drinking the poison like an obedient girl, and dying with decorous but ineffective pathos. Massinissa 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 passionate 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 circumstances, 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 classical simplicity. Blank verse is judiciously mingled with lyric meters, which are only introduced at moments of high-wrought feeling. The Chorus plays an unobtrusive 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.

Numerous scholars entered the lists in competition 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 assassinates 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, god 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 passion. 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 passion by the presentation of commanding personality in his principal 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 analysis 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 mÉsalliance, assassinates 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 passion 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 passion 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.

Lacking dramatic instinct, these Italian scholars might have redeemed their essential feebleness by acute analysis of character. Their tragedies might at least have contained versified studies of motives, metrical essays on the leading passions. But we look in vain for such compensations. Stock tyrants, conventional lovers, rhetorical pedants, form their dramatis personÆ. 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 passion of love in a tyrant, dotingly affectionate but egotistic, roused to suspicion by the slightest hint, and jealous beyond Othello's lunacy, has been depicted with considerable skill. Herod is a fantastical Creon, who murders the fancied paramour of Marianna, and subsequently assassinates 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 ignoble 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.

The tragedies hitherto discussed, though conforming to the type of the classical 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 surpasses 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 PhoenissÆ with very indifferent success; while Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara defaced the Œdipus 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 noble 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 ineptitude 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 passion, 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 passion 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 nobler 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 Farse, 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 identity 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 classes 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 Farse, 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 classics. 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.

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 MenÆchmi, 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 LÆtus at Rome, about the same time, encouraged the members of his Academy to rehearse Terence and Plautus in the palaces of nobles 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 amusement 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 PhÆdra 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 MenÆchmi was represented at the Vatican.[159]

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 manuscripts 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 MenÆchmi in 1486, which cost above 1000 ducats. In 1487 the courtyard of the castle was fitted up as a theater for the exhibition of NicolÒ 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 MenÆchmi, 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]

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 amusement of an audience as yet but partially acquainted with ancient languages. Tiraboschi mentions the Anfitrione of Pandolfo Collenuccio, the Cassina 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 circumstances 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 sturdy ass of Latin on the fleet mare of the Italian spirit; and it had the sterility of the mule.

The year 1502, when Lucrezia Borgia came as Alfonso d'Este's bride to Ferrara, marks the climax of these Latin spectacles.[162] Ercole had arranged a theater in the Palace of the PodestÀ (now called the Palazzo della Ragione), which was connected with the castle by a private gallery. His troupe, recruited from Ferrara, Rome, Siena, and Mantua, numbered one hundred and ten actors of both sexes. Accomplished singers, dancers, and scene-painters were summoned to add richness to the spectacle. We hear of musical interludes performed by six violins; while every comedy was diversified by morris-dances of Saracens, satyrs, gladiators, wild men, hunters, and allegorical personages.[163] The entertainment lasted over five nights, a comedy of Plautus forming the principal piece on each occasion. On the first evening the Epidicus was given; on the second, the Bacchides; on the third, the Miles Gloriosus; on the fourth, the Asinaria; on the fifth, the Casina. From the reports of Cagnolo, Zambotto, and Isabella Gonzaga, we are led to believe that the unlettered audience judged the recitations of the Plautine comedies somewhat tedious. They were in the same position as unmusical people of the present day, condemned to listen to Bach's Passion Music, and afraid of expressing their dissatisfaction. Yet these more frivolous spectators found ample gratification in the ingenious ballets, accompanied with music, which relieved each act. The occasion was memorable. In those five evenings the Court of Ferrara presented to the fashionable world of Italy a carefully-studied picture of Latin comedy framed in a setting of luxuriant modern arabesques. The simplicity of Plautus, executed with the fidelity born of reverence for antique art, was thrown into relief by extravagances borrowed from medieval chivalry, tinctured with Oriental associations, enhanced by music and colored with the glowing hues of Ferrarese imagination. The city of Boiardo, of Dossi, of Bello, of Ariosto, strained her resources to devise fantastic foils for the antique. It was as though Cellini had been called to mount an onyx of Augustus in labyrinths of gold-work and enamel for the stomacher of a Grand-Duchess.

We may without exaggeration affirm that the practice of the Ferrarese stage, culminating in the marriage shows of 1502, determined the future of Italian comedy. The fashion of the Court of Ercole was followed by all patrons of dramatic art. When a play was written, the author planned it in connection with subordinate exhibitions of dancing and music.[164] He wrote a poem in five acts upon the model of Plautus or Terence, understanding that his scenes of classical simplicity would be embedded in the grotesques of cinque cento allegory. The whole performance lasted some six hours; but the comedy itself was but a portion of the entertainment. For the majority of the audience the dances and the pageants formed the chief attraction.[165] It is therefore no marvel if the drama, considered as a branch of high poetic art, was suffocated by the growth of its mere accessories. Nor was this inconsistent with the ruling tendencies of the Renaissance. We have no reason to suppose that even Ariosto or Machiavelli grudged the participation of painters like Peruzzi, musicians like Dalla Viuola, architects like San Gallo, and dancers of ephemeral distinction, in the triumph of their plays.

The habit of regarding scenic exhibitions as the adjunct to extravagant Court luxury, prevented the development of a theater in which the genius of poets might have shone with undimmed intellectual luster. The want of permanent buildings, devoted to acting, in any great Italian town, may again be reckoned among the causes which checked the expansion of the drama. When a play had to be acted, a stage was erected at a great expense for the occasion.[166] It is true that Alfonso I. built a theater after Ariosto's designs at Ferrara in 1528; but it was burnt down in 1532. According to Gregorovius, Leo X. fitted one up at Rome upon the Capitol in 1513,[167] capable of holding the two thousand spectators who witnessed a performance of the Suppositi. This does not, however, seem to have been used continuously; nor was it until the second half of the sixteenth century that theaters began to form a part of the palatial residences of princes. One precious relic of those more permanent stages remains to show the style they then assumed. This is the Teatro Farnese at Parma, erected in 1618 by Ranuzio I. after the design of Galeotti Aleotti of Ferrara. It could accommodate seven thousand spectators; and, though now in ruins, it is still a stately and harmonious monument of architectural magnificence.[168] What, however, was always wanting in Italy was a theater open to all classes and at all seasons of the year, where the people might have been the patrons of their playwrights.[169]

The transition from Latin to Italian comedy was effected almost simultaneously by three poets, Bernardo Dovizio, Lodovico Ariosto, and NiccolÒ Machiavelli. Dovizio was born at Bibbiena in 1470. He attached himself to the Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, and received the scarlet from his master in 1513. We need not concern ourselves with his ecclesiastical career. It is enough to say that the Calandra, which raised him to a foremost place among the literary men of Italy, was composed before his elevation to the dignity of Cardinal, and was first performed at Urbino some time between the dates 1504 and 1513, possibly in 1508. The reader will already have observed that the most popular Latin play, both at Ferrara and Rome, was the MenÆchmi of Plautus. In Dovizio's Calandra the influence of this comedy is so noticeable that we may best describe it as an accommodation of the Latin form to Italian circumstance. The intrigue depends upon the close resemblance of a brother and sister, Lidio and Santilla, whose appearance by turns in male and female costume gives rise to a variety of farcical incidents. The name is derived from Calandro, a simpleton of Calandrino's type; and the interest of the plot is that of a Novella. The characters are very slightly sketched; but the movement is continuous, and the dialogue is always lively. The Calandra achieved immediate success by reproducing both the humor of Boccaccio and the invention of Plautus in the wittiest vernacular.[170] A famous letter of Baldassare Castiglione, describing its representation at Urbino, enlarges upon the splendor of the scenery and dresses, the masks of Jason, Venus, Love, Neptune, and Juno, accompanied by morris-dances and concerts of stringed instruments, which were introduced as interludes.[171] From Urbino the comedy passed through all the Courts of Italy, finding the highest favor at Rome, where Leo more than once decreed its representation. One of these occasions was memorable. Wishing to entertain the Marchioness Isabella of Mantua (1514), he put the Calandra with great pomp upon his private stage in the Vatican. Baldassare Peruzzi designed and painted the decorations, giving a new impulse to this species of art by the beauty of his inventions.[172]

Leo had an insatiable appetite for scenic shows. Comedies of the new Latinizing style were his favorite recreation. But he also invited the Sienese Company of the Rozzi, who only played farces, every year to Rome; nor was he averse to even less artistic buffoonery, as may be gathered from many of the stories told about him.[173] In 1513 Leo opened a theater upon the Capitol, and here in 1519, surrounded with two thousand spectators, he witnessed an exhibition of Ariosto's Suppositi. We have a description of the scene from the pen of an eye-witness, who relates how the Pope sat at the entrance to the gallery leading into the theater, and admitted with his benediction those whom he thought worthy of partaking in the night's amusements.[174] When the house was full, he took his throne in the orchestra, and sat, with eye-glass in hand, to watch the play. Raphael had painted the scenery, which is said to have been, and doubtless was, extremely beautiful. Leo's behavior scandalized the foreign embassadors, who thought it indecorous that a Pope should not only listen to the equivocal jests of the Prologue but also laugh immoderately at them.[175] As usual, the inter-acts consisted of vocal and instrumental concerts, with ballets on classical and allegorical subjects.

Enough has now been said concerning the mode of presenting comedies in vogue throughout Italy. The mention of Leo's entertainment in 1519 introduces the subject of Ariosto's plays. The Suppositi, originally written in prose and afterwards versified by its author, first appeared in 1509 at Ferrara. In the preceding year Ariosto exhibited the Cassaria, which, like the Suppositi, was planned in prose and subsequently versified in sdrucciolo iambics.[176]

In Ariosto's comedies the form of Roman art becomes a lay-figure, dressed according to various modes of the Italian Renaissance. The wire-work, so to speak, of Plautus or of Terence can be everywhere detected; but this skeleton has been incarnated with modern flesh and blood, habited in Ferrarese costume, and taught the paces of contemporary fashion. Blent with the traditions of Plautine comedy, we find in each of the four plays an Italian Novella. The motive is invariably trivial. In the Cassaria two young men are in love with two girls kept by a slave-merchant. The intrigue turns upon the arts of their valets, who cheat the pander and procure the girls for nothing for their masters. In the Suppositi a young man of good family has assumed the part of servant, in order to seduce the daughter of his master. The devices by which he contrives to secure her hand in marriage, furnish the action of the play. The Lena has even a simpler plan. A young man needs a few quiet hours for corrupting his neighbor's daughter. Lena, the chief actress, will not serve as a go-between without a sum of ready money paid down by the hero. The movement of the piece depends on the expedients whereby this money is raised, and the farcical obstacles which interrupt the lovers at the point of their felicity. In the Negromante a young man has been secretly married to one woman, and openly to another. Cinthio loves his real wife, Lavinia, and feigns impotence in order to explain his want of affection for Emilia, who is the recognized mistress of his home. An astrologer, Iacchelino, holds the threads of the intrigue in his hands. Possessed of Cinthio's secret, paid by the parents of Emilia to restore Cinthio's virility, paid again by a lover of Emilia to advance his own suit, and seeking in the midst of these rival interests to make money out of the follies and ambitions of his clients, Iacchelino has the whole domestic company at his discretion. The comic point lies in the various passions which betray each dupe to the astrologer—Cinthio's wish to escape from Emilia, Camillo's eagerness to win her, the old folks' anxiety to cure Cinthio. Temolo, a servant, who is hoodwinked by no personal desire, sees that Iacchelino is an impostor; and the inordinate avarice of the astrologer undoes him. Thus the Negromante presents a really fine comic web of humors at cross purposes and appetites that overreach themselves.

There is considerable similarity in Ariosto's plots. In all of them, except the Negromante, we have a sub-plot which brings a tricksy valet into play. A sum of money is imperatively needed to effect the main scheme of the hero; and this has to be provided by the servant's ingenuity. Such direct satire as the poet thought fit to introduce, is common to them all. It concerns the costs, delays and frauds of legal procedure, favoritism at Court, the Ferrarese game-laws, and the tyranny of custom-house officials. But satire of an indirect, indulgent species—the Horatian satire of Ariosto's own epistles—adds a pleasant pungency to his pictures of contemporary manners no less than to his occasional discourses. The prologue to the Cassaria, on its reappearance as a versified play, might be quoted for the perfection of genial sarcasm, playing about the foibles of society without inflicting a serious wound. All the prologues, however, are not innocent. Those prefixed to the Lena and the Suppositi contain allusions so indecent, and veil obscenities under metaphors so flimsy, as to justify a belief in Ariosto's vulgarity of soul. Here the satirist borders too much on the sympathizer with a vice he professes to condemn.

It remains to speak of the Scolastica, a comedy left incomplete at Ariosto's death, and finished by his brother Gabrielle, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of his ripest genius impressed upon the style no less than on the structure of the plot.[177] The scene is laid at Ferrara, where we find ourselves among the scholars of its famous university, and are made acquainted in the liveliest manner with their habits. The heroes are two young students, Claudio and Eurialo, firm friends, who have passed some years at Pavia reading with Messer Lazzaro, a doctor of laws. The disturbance of the country having driven both professors and pupils from Pavia,[178] a variety of accidents brings all the actors of the comedy to Ferrara, where Eurialo is living with his father, Bartolo. Of course the two lads are in love—Claudio with the daughter of his former tutors, and Eurialo with a fatherless girl in the service of a noble lady at Pavia. The intrigue is rather farcical than comic. It turns upon the difficulties encountered by Claudio and Eurialo in concealing their sweethearts from their respective fathers, the absurd mistakes they make in the hurry of the moment, and the misunderstandings which ensue between themselves and the old people. Ariosto has so cleverly complicated the threads of his plot and has developed them with such lucidity of method that any analysis would fall short of the original in brevity and clearness. The dÉnouement is effected by the device of a recognition at the last moment. Eurialo's innamorata is found to be the lost ward of his father, Bartolo; and Claudio is happily married to his love, Flaminia. The merit of the play lies, however, less in the argument than the characters, which are ably conceived and sustained with more than even Ariosto's usual skill. The timid and perplexed Eurialo, trembling before his terrible father, seeking advice from every counselor, despairing, resigning himself to fate, is admirably contrasted with the more passionate and impulsive Claudio, who takes rash steps with inconsiderate boldness, relies on his own address to extricate himself, and vibrates between the ecstasies of love and the suspicions of an angry jealousy.[179] Bartolo, burdened in his conscience by an ancient act of broken faith, and punished in the disobedience of his son, forms an excellent pendent to the honest but pedantic Messer Lazzaro, who cannot bear to see his daughter suffer from an unrequited passion.[180] Each of the servants, too, has a well-marked physiognomy—the witty Accursio, picking up what learning he can from his master's books, and turning all he says to epigrams; the easy-going, Bacchanalian duenna; blunt Pistone; garrulous Stanna. But the most original of all the dramatis personÆ is Bonifazio, that excellent keeper of lodgings for Ferrarese students, who identifies himself with their interests, sympathizes in their love-affairs, takes side with them against their fathers, and puts his conscience in his pocket when required to pull them out of scrapes.[181] Each of these characters has been copied from the life. The taint of Latin comedy has been purged out of them.[182] They move, speak, act like living beings, true to themselves in every circumstance, and justifying the minutest details of the argument by the operation of their several qualities of head and heart. Viewed as a work of pure dramatic art, the Scolastica is not only the most genial and sympathetic of Ariosto's comedies, but also the least fettered by his Latinizing prepossessions, and the strongest in psychological analysis. Like the Lena, it has the rare merit of making us at home in the Ferrara which he knew so well; but it does not, like that play, disgust us by the spectacle of abject profligacy.[183] There is a sunny, jovial freshness in this latest product of Ariosto's genius, which invigorates while it amuses and instructs.

The Scolastica is not without an element of satire. I have said that Bartolo had a sin upon his conscience. In early manhood he promised to adopt a friend's daughter, and to marry her in due course to his own Eurialo. But he neglected this duty, lost sight of the girl, and appropriated her heritage. He has reason to think that she may still be found in Naples; and the parish priest to whom he confided his secret in confession, will not absolve him, unless he take the journey and do all he can to rectify the error of his past. Bartolo is disinclined to this long pilgrimage, with the probable loss of a fortune at the end of it. In his difficulty he has recourse to a Frate Predicatore, who professes to hold ample powers for dispensing with troublesome vows and pious obligations:[184]

The irony of this speech depends upon its plain and business-like statement of a simoniacal bargain, which will prove of mutual benefit to the parties concerned. Bartolo confides his case of conscience to the Friar, previously telling him that he has confessed it to the parson:

At the close of the communication, which is admirable for its lucid exposition of a domestic romance adapted to the circumstances of the sixteenth century, the Friar asks his penitent once more whether he would not willingly escape this pilgrimage. Who could doubt it? answers Bartolo. Well then:

Here again the sarcasm consists in the hypocritical adaptation of the old axiom that everything in this world can be got for money. On both sides the transaction is commercial. Bartolo, like a good man of business, wishes to examine the Frate's title-deeds before he engages in the purchase of his spiritual privileges. In other words he must be permitted to examine the Bull of Indulgence:[185]

We may further notice how the parish priest is here meant to play the part of solicitor in the bargain. He does not deal in these spiritual commodities; but he can give advice upon the point of validity. The episode of Bartolo and the Dominican reminds us that we are on the eve of the Reformation. While Rome and Ferrara laughed at the hypocrisies, credulities, and religious frauds implied in such transactions, Northern Europe broke into flame, and Luther opened the great schism.[186]

The artistic merit of Ariosto's comedies consists in the perfection of their structure. However involved the intrigues may be, we experience no difficulty in following them; so masterly is their development.[187] It may be objected that he too frequently resorts to the device of anagnorisis, in order to solve a problem which cannot find its issue in the action. This mechanical solution is so obviously employed to make things easy for the author that no interest attaches to the climax of his fables. Yet the characters are drawn with that ripe insight into human nature which distinguished Ariosto. Machiavelli observed that, being a native of Ferrara, cautious in the handling of Tuscan idioms, and unwilling to use the dialect of his own city, Ariosto missed the salt of comedy.[188] There is truth in this criticism. Matched with the best Florentine dialogues, his language wants the raciness of the vernacular. The sdrucciolo verse, which he preferred, fatigues the ear and adds to the impression of formality. He frequently interrupts the action with tirades, talking, as it were, in his own person to the audience, instead of making his characters speak.[189] Yet foreigners, who study his comedies side by side with Plautus, at almost the same distance of unfamiliarity, will recognize the brilliance of his transcripts from contemporary life. These studies of Italian manners are eminent for good taste, passing at no point into extravagance, and only marred by a certain banality of moral instinct. The Lena has the highest value as a picture of Ferrarese society. We have good reason to believe that it was founded on an actual incident. It deserves to rank with Machiavelli's Mandragola and Aretino's Cortigiana for the light it throws on sixteenth-century customs. And the light is far more natural, less lurid, less partial, than that which either Machiavelli or Aretino shed upon the vices of their century.

Of Machiavelli we have two genuine comedies in prose, the Mandragola and the Clizia, and two of doubtful authenticity, called respectively Commedia in Prosa and Commedia in Versi, besides a translation of the Andria.[190] Judging by internal evidence alone, a cautious critic would reject the Commedia in Versi from the canon of Machiavelli's works; and if the existence of a copy in his autograph has to be taken as conclusive evidence of its genuineness, we can only accept it as a crude and juvenile production. It is written in various measures, a graceless octave stanza rhyming only in the last couplet being used instead of blank verse, while many of the monologues are lyrical. The language is crabbed, uncertain, archaistic—in no point displaying the incisive brevity of Machiavelli's style. The scene is laid in ancient Rome, and the intrigue turns upon a confusion between two names, Catillo and Cammillo. The conventional parasite of antiquity and the inevitable slaves play prominent parts; while the plot is solved by a preposterous exchange of wives between the two chief characters. Thus the fabric of the comedy throughout is unnatural and false to the conditions of real life. Were it not for some piquant studies of Italian manners, scattered here and there in the descriptive passages, this Commedia in Versi would scarcely deserve passing notice.[191]

The Commedia in Prosa, for which we might find a title in the name of the chief personage, Fra Alberigo, displays the spirit and the style of the Mandragola. Critics who do not accept it for Machiavelli's own, must assume it to have been the work of a clever and obsequious imitator. It is a short piece in three acts written to expose the corruption of a Florentine household. Caterina, the heroine, is a young wife married to an old husband, Amerigo. Their maid-servant, Margherita, holds the threads of the intrigue in her hands. She has been solicited on the one side by Amerigo to help him in his amours with a neighbor's wife, and on the other by the friar, Alberigo, to win Caterina to his suit. The devices whereby Margherita brings her mistress and the monk together, cheats Amerigo of his expected enjoyment, and so contrives that the despicable but injured husband should establish Fra Alberigo in the position of a favored house-friend, constitute the argument. Short as the play is, it combines the chief points of the Clizia and the Mandragola in a single action, and may be regarded as the first sketch of two situations afterwards developed with more fullness by the author.[192] The language is coarse, and the picture of manners, executed with remorseless realism, would be revolting but for its strong workmanship.[193] The playwright expended his force on the servant-maid and the friar, those two instruments of domestic immorality. Fra Alberigo is a vulgar libertine, provided with pious phrases to cloak his vicious purpose, but casting off the mask when he has gained his object, well knowing from past experience that the appetites of the woman he seduces will secure his footing in her husband's home.[194] Margherita revels in the corruption she has aided. She delights in sin for its own sake, extracts handfuls of coppers from the friar, and counts on profiting by the secret of her mistress. Her speech and action display the animal appetites and gross phraseology of the proletariate, degraded by city vices and hardened to the spectacle of clerical hypocrisy.[195] One of her exclamations: "I frati, ah! son piÙ viziati che 'l fistolo!" taken in conjunction with her argument to Caterina: "I frati, eh? Non si trova generazione piÙ abile ai servigi delle donne!" points the satire intended by the playwright. Yet neither Caterina nor Amerigo yields a point of baseness to these servile agents. Plebeian coarseness is stamped alike upon their language and their desires. They have no delicacy of feeling, no redeeming passion, no self-respect. They speak of things unmentionable with a crudity that makes one shudder, and abuse each other in sarcasms borrowed from the rhetoric of the streets.[196] To a refined taste the calculations of Caterina are no less obnoxious and are far less funny than the rogueries of the friar.

This comedy of Fra Alberigo is a literal transcript from a cynical Novella, dramatized and put upon the stage to amuse an audience familiar with such arguments by their perusal of Sacchetti and Boccaccio. Its freedom from Latinizing conventionality renders it a striking example of the influence exercised by the Novellieri over the theater. The same may be said about both the Clizia and the Mandragola, though the former owes a portion of its structure to the Casina of Plautus.[197] The Clizia is a finished picture of Florentine home-life. Nicomaco and Sofronia are an elderly couple, who have educated a beautiful girl, Clizia, from childhood in their house. At the moment when the play opens, both Nicomaco and his son, Cleandro, are in love with Clizia. Nicomaco as determined to marry her to one of his servants, Pirro, having previously ascertained that the dissolute groom will not object to sharing his wife with his master. Sofronia's family pride opposes the marriage of her son and heir with Clizia; but she is aware of her husband's schemes, and seeks to frustrate them by giving the girl to an honest bailiff, Eustachio. In the contest that ensues, Nicomaco gains the victory. It is settled that Clizia is to be wedded to Pirro, and on the night of the marriage Nicomaco makes his way into the bridal chamber. But here Sofronia proves more than a match for her lord and master. Helped by Cleandro, she substitutes for Clizia a young man-servant disguised as a woman, who gives Nicomaco a warm reception, beats him within an inch of his life, and exposes him to the ridicule of the household.[198] Sofronia triumphs over her ashamed and miserable husband, who now consents to Clizia's marriage with Eustachio. But at this juncture the long-lost father of the heroine appears like a deus ex machina. He turns out to be a rich Neapolitan gentleman. There remains no obstacle to Cleandro's happiness, and the curtain falls upon a marriage in prospect between the hero and the heroine. The weakness of the play, considered as a work of art, is the mechanical solution of the plot. Its strength and beauty are the masterly delineation of a family interior. The dramatis personÆ are vigorously sketched and act throughout consistently. Nothing can be finer than the portrait of a sober Florentine merchant, regular in his pursuits, punctual in the performance of his duties, exact in household discipline and watchful over his son's education, whose dignified severity of conduct has yielded to the lunacies of an immoderate passion.[199] For the time being Nicomaco forgets his old associates, abandons his business, and consorts with youthful libertines in taverns. His appetite so blinds him that he devises the odious scheme I have described, in order to gratify a senile whim.[200] The lifelong fabric of honesty and honor breaks down in him; and it is only when lessoned by the punishment inflicted on him by his wife and son, that he returns to his old self and sees the vileness of the situation his folly has created. Sofronia is a notable housewife, rude but respectable. The good understanding between her and her handsome son, Cleandro, whom she loves affectionately, but whom she will not indulge in his caprice for Clizia, is one of the best traits furnished by Italian comedy. Cleandro himself has less than usual of the selfishness and sensuality which degrade the Florentine primo amoroso. There is even something of enthusiasm in his passion for Clizia—a germ of sentiment which would have blossomed into romance under the more genial treatment of our drama.[201] Morally speaking, what is odious in this comedy is the willingness of every one to sacrifice Clizia. Even Cleandro says of her: "Io per me la torrei per moglie, per amica, e in tutti quei modi, che io la potessi avere." Nicomaco, when he has failed in his plot to secure the girl, thinks only of his own shame, and takes no account of the risk to which he has exposed her. Sofronia is merely anxious to get her decently established beyond her husband's reach.

Only long extracts could do justice to the sarcasm and irony with which the dialogue is seasoned. Still a few points may be selected.[202] Sofronia is rating Nicomaco for his unseasonable dissipation. He answers: "Ah, moglie mia, non mi dire tanti mali a un tratto! Serba qualche cosa a domane." Eustachio, in view of taking Clizia for his wife, reflects: "In questa terra chi ha bella moglie non puÒ essere povero, e del fuoco e della moglie si puÒ essere liberale con ognuno, perchÈ quanto piÙ ne dai, piÙ te ne rimane." When Pirro demurs to Nicomaco's proposals, on the score that he will make enemies of Sofronia and Cleandro, his master answers: "Che importa a te? Sta' ben con Cristo e fÀtti beffe de' santi." A little lower down Nicomaco trusts the decision of Clizia's husband to lot:

Nor can criticism express the comic humor of the scenes, especially of those in which Nicomaco describes the hours of agony he spent in Siro's bed, and afterwards capitulates at discretion to Sofronia.[203] In spite of what is disagreeable in the argument and obscene in the catastrophe, the Clizia leaves a wholesomer impression on the mind than is common with Florentine comedies. It has something of Ariosto's bonhomie, elsewhere unknown in Machiavelli.

Meanwhile the Mandragola is claiming our attention. In that comedy, Machiavelli put forth all his strength. Sinister and repulsive as it may be to modern tastes, its power is indubitable. More than any plays of which mention has hitherto been made, more even than Ariosto's Lena and Negromante, it detaches itself from Latin precedents and offers an unsophisticated view of Florentine life from its author's terrible point of contemplation.

In order to appreciate the Mandragola, it is necessary to know the plot. After spending his early manhood in Paris, Callimaco returns to Florence, bent on making the beautiful Lucrezia his mistress. He has only heard of her divine charms; but the bare report inflames his imagination, disturbs his sleep, and so distracts him that he feels forced "to attempt some bold stroke, be it grave, dangerous, ruinous, dishonorable; death itself would be better than the life I lead." Lucrezia is the faithful and obedient wife of Nicia, a doctor of laws, whose one wish in life is to get a son. The extreme gullibility of Nicia and his desire for an heir are the motives upon which Callimaco relies to work his schemes. He finds a parasite, Ligurio, ready to assist him. Ligurio is a friend of Nicia's family, well acquainted with the persons, and so utterly depraved that he would sell his soul for a good dinner. He advises Callimaco to play the part of a physician who has studied the last secrets of his art in Paris, introduces him in this capacity to Nicia, and suggests that by his help the desired result may be obtained without the disagreeable necessity of leaving Florence for the baths of San Filippo. In their first interview Callimaco explains that a potion of mandragora administered to Lucrezia will remove her sterility, but that it has fatal consequences to the husband. He must perish unless he first substitutes another man, whose death will extinguish the poison and leave Lucrezia free to be the mother of a future family. Nicia revolts against this odious project, which makes him the destroyer of his own honor and a murderer. But Callimaco assures him that royal persons and great nobles of France have adopted this method with success. The argument has its due weight: "I am satisfied," says Nicia, "since you tell me that a king and princes have done the like." But the difficulty remains of persuading Lucrezia. Ligurio answers: that is simple enough; let us work upon her through her confessor and her mother. "You, I, our money, our badness, and the badness of those priests will settle the confessor; and I know that, when the matter is explained, we shall have her mother on our side." Thus we are introduced to Fra Timoteo, the chief agent of corruption. The monk, in a first interview, does not conceal his readiness to procure abortion and cover infanticide. For a consideration, he agrees to convince Lucrezia that the plot is for her good. He first demonstrates the utility of Callimaco's method to the mother Sostrata, and then by her help persuades Lucrezia that adultery and murder are not only venial, but commendable with so fair an end in view. His sophistries anticipate the darkest casuistry of Escobar. Lucrezia, with a woman's good sense, fastens on the brutal and unnatural loathsomeness of the proposed plan: "Ma di tutte le cose che si sono tentate, questa mi pare la piÙ strana; avere a sottomettere il corpo mio a questo vituperio, et essere cagione che un uomo muoia per vituperarmi: chÈ io non crederei, se io fussi sola rimasa nel mondo, e da me avesse a risurgere l'umana natura, che mi fusse simile partito concesso." Timoteo replies: "Qui È un bene certo, che voi ingraviderete, acquisterete un'anima a messer Domenedio. Il male incerto È, che colui che giacerÀ dopo la pozione con voi, si muoia; ma e' si truova anche di quelli che non muoiono. Ma perchÈ la cosa È dubbia, perÒ È bene che messer Nicia non incorra in quel pericolo. Quanto all'atto che sia peccato, questo È una favola: perchÈ la volontÀ È quella che pecca, non il corpo; e la cagione del peccato È dispiacere al marito: e voi gli compiacete; pigliarne piacere: e voi ne avete dispiacere," etc. Sostrata, accustomed to follow her confessor's orders, and not burdened with a conscience, clinches this reasoning: "Di che hai tu paura, moccicona? E c'È cinquanta dame in questa terra che ne alzarebbero le mani al cielo." Lucrezia gives way unwillingly: "Io son contenta; ma non credo mai esser viva domattina." Timoteo comforts her with a final touch of monkish irony: "Non dubitare, figliuola mia, io pregherÒ Dio per te; io dirÒ l'orazione dell'Angiolo Raffaelo che t'accompagni. Andate in buon'ora, e preparatevi a questo misterio, che si fa sera." What follows is the mere working of the plot, whereby Ligurio and Timoteo contrive to introduce Callimaco as the necessary victim into Lucrezia's bed-chamber. The silly Nicia plays the part of pander to his own shame; and when Lucrezia discovers the scheme by which her lover has attained his ends, she exclaims: "Poi chÈ l'astuzia tua e la sciochezza del mio marito, la semplicitÀ di mia madre e la tristizia del mio confessore, m'hanno condotta a far quello che mai per me medesima avrei fatto, io voglio giudicare che e' venga da una celeste disposizione, che abbia voluto cosÌ. PerÒ io ti prendo per signore, padrone e guida." It must be remarked that Lucrezia omits from her reckoning the weakness which led her to consent.

My excuse for analyzing a comedy so indecent as the Mandragola, is the importance it has, not only as a product of Machiavelli's genius, but also as an illustration of contemporary modes of thought and feeling. In all points this play is worthy of the author of the Principe. The Mandragola is a microcosm of society as Machiavelli conceived it, and as it needs must be to justify his own philosophy. It is a study of stupidity and baseness acted on by roguery. Credulity and appetite supply the fulcrum needed by unscrupulous intelligence. The lover, aided by the husband's folly, the parasite's profligacy, the mother's familiarity with sin, the confessor's avarice, the wife's want of self-respect, achieves the triumph of making Nicia lead him naked to Lucrezia's chamber. Moving in the region of his fancy, the poet adds Quod erat demonstrandum to his theorem of vileness and gross folly used for selfish ends by craft. But we who read it, rise from the perusal with the certainty that it was only the corruption of the age which rendered such a libel upon human nature plausible—only the author's perverse and shallow view of life which sustained him in this reading of a problem he had failed to understand. Viewed as a critique upon life, the Mandragola is feeble, because the premises are false; and these same false premises regarding the main forces of society, render the logic of the Principe inconsequent. Men are not such fools as Nicia or such catspaws as Ligurio and Timoteo. Women are not such compliant instruments as Sostrata and Lucrezia. Human nature is not that tissue of disgusting meannesses and vices, by which Callimaco succeeds. Here lay Machiavelli's fallacy. He dreamed of action as the triumph of astuteness over folly. Virtue with him meant the management of immorality by bold intelligence. But while, on the one hand, he exaggerated the stupidity of dupes, on the other he underestimated the resistance which strongly-rooted moral instincts offer to audacious villainy. He left goodness out of his account. Therefore, though his reasoning, whether we examine the Mandragola or the Principe, seems irrefragable on the premises from which he starts, it is an unconvincing chain of sophisms. The world is not wholly bad; but in order to justify Machiavelli's conclusions, we have to assume that its essential forces are corrupt.

If we turn from the Mandragola to the society of which it is a study, and which complacently accepted it as an agreeable work of art, we are filled with a sense of surprise bordering on horror. What must the people among whom Machiavelli lived, have been, to justify his delineation of a ruffian so vicious as Ligurio, a confessor so lost to sense of duty as Timoteo, a mother who scruples not to prostitute her daughter to the first comer, a lover so depraved as Callimaco, a wife so devoid of womanly feeling as Lucrezia? On first reflection, we are inclined to believe that the poet in this comedy was venting Swiftian indignation on the human nature which he misconceived and loathed. The very name Lucrezia seems chosen in irony—as though to hint that Rome's first martyr would have failed, if Tarquin had but used her mother and her priest to tame her. Yet, on a second reading, the Mandragola reveals no scorn or anger. It is a piece of scientific anatomy, a demonstration of disease, executed without subjective feeling. The argument is so powerfully developed, with such simplicity of language, such consistency of character, such cold analysis of motives, that we cannot doubt the verisimilitude of the picture. No one, at the date of its appearance, resented it. Florentine audiences delighted in its comic flavor. Leo X. witnessed it with approval. His hatred of the monks found satisfaction in Timoteo. Society, far from rising in revolt against the poet who exposed its infamy with a pen of poisoned steel, thanked the man of genius for rendering vice amusing. Of satire or of moral purpose there is none in the Mandragola. Machiavelli depicted human nature just as he had learned to know it. The sinister fruits of his studies made contemporaries laugh.

The Mandragola was the work of an unhappy man. The prologue offers a curious mixture of haughtiness and fawning, only comparable to the dedication of the Principe and the letter to Vettori.[204] A sense of his own intellectual greatness is combined with an uneasy feeling of failure:

Non È componitor di molta fama.

As an apology for his application to trivialities, he pleads wretchedness and ennui:

These verses, indifferent as poetry, are poignant for their revelation of a disappointed life. Left without occupation, unable to display his powers upon a worthy platform, he casts the pearls of his philosophy before the pleasure-seeking swine. The sense of this degradation stings him and he turns upon society with threats. Let them not attempt to browbeat or intimidate him:

Throughout his prologue we hear the growl of a wounded lion, helpless in his lair, yet conscious that he still has strength to rend the fools and knaves around him.

Aretino completed the disengagement of Italian from Latin comedy. Ignoring the principles established by the Plautine mannerists, he liberated the elements of satire and of realism held in bondage by their rules. His reasoning was unanswerable. Why should he attend to the unities, or be careful to send the same person no more than five times on the stage in one piece? His people shall come and go as they think fit, or as the argument requires.[205] Why should he make Romans ape he style of Athens? His Romans shall be painted from life; his servants shall talk and act like Italian varlets, not mimicking the ways of Geta or Davus.[206] Why should he shackle his style with precedents from Petrarch and Boccaccio? He will seek the fittest words, the aptest phrases, the most biting repartees from ordinary language.[207] Why condescend to imitation, when his mother wit supplies him with material, and the world of men lies open like a book before his eyes?[208] Why follow in the footsteps of the pedants, who mistake their knowledge of grammar for genius, and whose commentaries are an insult to the poets they pretend to illustrate?[209]

Conscious of his own defective education, and judging the puristic niceties of the age at their true value, Aretino thus flung the glove of defiance in the face of a learned public. It was a bold step; but the adventurer knew what he was doing. The originality of his Ars Poetica took the world by surprise. His Italian audience delighted in the sparkle of a style that gave point to their common speech. Had Aretino been a writer of genius, Italy might now have owed to his audacity and self-reliance the starting-point of national dramatic art.[210] He was on the right path, but he lacked the skill to tread it. His comedies, loosely put together, with no constructive vigor in their plots and no grasp of psychology in their characters, are a series of powerfully-written scenes, piquant dialogues, effective situations, rather than comedies in the higher sense of the word. We must not look for Ariosto's lucid order, for Machiavelli's disposition of parts, in these vagaries of a brilliant talent aiming at immediate success. We must be grateful for the filibustering bravado which made him dare to sketch contemporary manners from the life. The merit of these comedies is naturalness. Such affectation of antithesis or labored epigram as mars their style, was part of Aretino's self. It reveals the man, and is not wearisome like the conceits of the pedantic school. What he had learned, seen or heard in his experience of the world—and Aretino saw, heard and learned the worst of the society in which he lived—is presented with vigor. The power to express is never shackled by a back-thought of reserve or delicacy. Each character stands outlined with a vividness none the less convincing because the study lacks depth. What Aretino cannot supply, is the nexus between these striking passages, the linking of these lively portraits into a coherent whole. Machiavelli's logic, perverse as it may be, produces by its stringent application a more impressive Æsthetical effect. The doctrine of style for style's sake, derided by Aretino, satisfies at least our sense of harmony. In the insolence of freedom he spoils the form of his plays by discussions, sometimes dull, sometimes disgusting, in which he vents his spite or airs his sycophancy without regard for the exigencies of his subject. Still, in spite of these defects, Aretino's plays are a precious mine of information for one who desires to enter into direct communication with the men of the Renaissance.

Aretino's point of view is that of the successful adventurer. Unlike Machiavelli, he has no sourness and reveals no disappointment. He has never fallen from the high estate of an impersonal ambition. His report of human depravity is neither scientific nor indignant. He appreciates the vices of the world, by comprehending which, as means to ends, he has achieved celebrity. They are the instruments of his advance in life, the sources of his wealth, the wisdom he professes. Therefore, while he satirizes, he treats them with complacence. Evil is good for its own sake also in his eyes. Having tasted all its fruits, he revels in recalling his sensations, just as Casanova took pleasure in recording his debaucheries. His knowledge of society is that of an upstart, who has risen from the lowest ranks by the arts of the bully, flatterer and pander. We never forget that he began life as a lackey, and the most valuable quality of his comedies is that they depict the great world from the standpoint of the servants' hall. Aretino is too powerful and fashionable to be aware of this. He poses as the sage and satirist. But the revelation is none the less pungent because it is made unconsciously. The Court, idealized by Castiglione, censured by Guarini, inveighed against by La Casa, here shows its inner rottenness for our inspection, at the pleasure of a charlatan who thrives on this pollution. We hear how the valets of debauched prelates, the parasites of petty nobles, the pimps who battened on the vices of the rich, the flatterer who earned his bread by calumny and lies, viewed this world of fashion, how they discussed it among themselves, how they utilized its corruption. We shake hands with ruffians and cut-throats, enter the Roman brothels by their back-door, sit down in their kitchens, and become acquainted with the secrets of their trade. It may be suggested that the knowledge supplied by Aretino, if it concerns such details, is neither profitable nor valuable. No one, indeed, who is not specially curious to realize the manners of Renaissance Italy, should occupy his leisure with these comedies.

The Cortigiana is a parody of Castiglione's Cortegiano. A Sienese gentleman, simple and provincial, the lineal descendant of Pulci's Messer Goro, arrives in Rome to make his fortune.[211] He is bent on assuming the fine airs of the Court, and hopes to become at least a Cardinal before he returns home. On his first arrival Messer Maco falls into the clutches of a sharper, who introduces him to disreputable society, under color of teaching him the art of courtiership. The satire of the piece consists in showing Rome to be the school of profligacy rather than of gentle customs.[212] Before he has spent more than a few days in the Eternal City, the country squire learns the slang of the demi-monde and swaggers among courtesans and rufflers. Maestro Andrea, who has undertaken his education, lectures him upon the virtues of the courtier in a scene of cynical irony:[213] "La principal cosa, il cortigiano vuol sapere bestemmiare, vuole essere giuocatore, invidioso, puttaniere, eretico, adulatore, maldicente, sconoscente, ignorante, asino, vuol sapere frappare, far la ninfa, et essere agente e paziente." Some of these qualities are understood at once by Messer Maco. Concerning others he asks for further information: "Come si diventa eretico? questo È 'l caso.—Notate.—Io nuoto benissimo.—Quando alcuno vi dice che in Corte sia bontÀ, discrezione, amore, o conoscenza, dite no 'l credo ... in somma a chi vi dice bene de la Corte, dite: tu sei un bugiardo." Again, Messer Maco asks: "Come si dice male?" The answer is prompt and characteristic of Aretino:[214] "Dicendo il vero, dicendo il vero." What Maestro Andrea teaches theoretically, is expounded as a fact of bitter experience by Valerio and Flamminio, the gentlemen in waiting on a fool of fortune named Parabolano.[215] These men, admitted to the secrets of a noble household, know its inner sordidness, and reckon on the vanity and passions of their patron. A still lower stage in the scale of debasement is revealed by the conversations of the lackeys, Rosso and Cappa, who discuss the foibles of their master with the coarseness of the stables.[216] In so far as the Cortigiana teaches any lesson, it is contained in the humiliation of Parabolano. His vices have made him the slave and creature of foul-minded serving-men, who laugh together over the disgusting details of his privacy, while they flatter him to his face in order to profit by his frivolities.[217] Aretino's own experience of life in Rome enabled him to make these pictures of the servants' hall and antechamber pungent.[218] The venom engendered by years of servitude and adulation is vented in his criticism of the Court as censured from a flunkey's point of view. Nor is he less at home in painting the pleasures of the class whom he has chosen for his critics of polite society. Cappa's soliloquy upon the paradise of the tavern, and Rosso's pranks, when he plays the gentleman in his master's fine clothes, owe the effect of humor to their realistic verve.[219] We feel them to be reminiscences of fact. These scenes constitute the salt of the comedy, supported by vivid sketches of town characters—the news-boy, the fisherman of the Tiber, and the superannuated prostitute.[220]

In the Cortigiana it was Aretino's object to destroy illusions about Court-life by describing it in all the vileness of reality.[221] The Marescalco is a study of the same conditions of society, with less malignity and far more geniality of humor.[222] A rich fool has been recommended by his lord and master, the Duke of Mantua, to take a wife. He loathes matrimony, and shrinks from spending several thousand ducats on the dower. But the parasites, buffoons and henchmen of the prince persuade and bully him into compliance. He is finally married to a page dressed as a woman, and his relief at discovering the sex of his supposed wife forms the climax of the plot. The play is conducted with so much spirit that we may not be wrong in supposing Shakspere in Twelfth Night and Ben Jonson in Epicoene to have owed something to its humor. We look, however, in vain for such fine creatures of the fancy as Sir Toby Belch, or for a catastrophe so overwhelming as the crescendo of noise and bustle which subdue the obstinacy of Morose. On the other hand, the two companion scenes in which Marescalco's nurse enlarges on the luxuries of married life, while Ambrogio describes its miseries, are executed with fine sense of comic contrast.[223]

In the Talanta we return to Roman society. This comedy is a study of courtesan life, analyzed with thorough knowledge of its details. The character of Talanta, who plays her four lovers one against the other, extracting presents by various devices from each of them, displays the author's intimate acquaintance with his subject.[224] Talanta on the stage is a worthy pendant to Nanna in the Ragionamenti. But the intrigue is confused, tedious and improbable; and after reading the first act, we have already seen the best of Aretino's invention. The same may be said about the Ipocrita and the Filosofo, two comedies in which Aretino attempted to portray a charlatan of Tartufe's type and a student helpless in his wife's hands. These characters are not ill conceived, but they are too superficially executed to bear the weight of the plot laid upon them. In like manner the pedant in the Marescalco and the swashbuckler in the Talanta are rather silhouettes than finished portraits. Though well sketched, they lack substance. They have neither the lifelike movement of Shakspere's minor persons, nor the impressive mechanism of Jonson's humors. Bobadil and Master Holofernes, though caricatures, move in a higher region of the comic art. The characters Aretino would imitate supremely well, were a page like Giannico in the Marescalco, a footman like Rosso in the Cortigiana, or a woman of the town like Talanta. His comedies are never wanting in bustle and variety of business; while the sarcasm of the author, flying at the best-established reputations, sneering at the most fashionable prejudices of society, renders them effective even now, when all the jealousies he flouted have long been buried in oblivion.[225]

Bibbiena's Calandra is a farce, obscene but not malignant. Ariosto's comedies are studies of society from the standpoint of the middle class. If he is too indulgent to human frailty, too tolerant of vice, we never miss in him the wisdom of a genial observer. Machiavelli's Mandragola casts the dry light of the intellect on an abyss of evil. Nothing but the brilliance of the poet's wit reconciles us to his revelation of perversity. Aretino, by the animation of his sketches, by his prurient delight in what is vile, makes us comprehend that even the Mandragola was possible. Machiavelli stands outside his subject, like Lucifer, fallen but disdainful. Aretino is the Belial who acknowledges corruption for his own domain. Ariosto and Machiavelli are artists each in his kind perfect. Aretino is an improvvisatore, clever with the pen he uses like a burin.

It would be difficult to render an account of the comedies produced by the Italians in the sixteenth century, or to catalogue their authors. A computation has been made which reckons the plays known to students at several thousands. In spite of this extraordinary richness in comic literature, Italy cannot boast of a great comedy. No poet arose to carry the art onward from the point already reached when Aretino left the stage. The neglect that fell on those innumerable comedies, was not wholly undeserved. It is true that their scenes suggested brilliant episodes to French and English playwrights of celebrity. It is true that the historian of manners finds in them an almost inexhaustible store of matter. Still they are literary lucubrations rather than the spontaneous expression of a vivid nationality. Nor have they the subordinate merit of dealing in a scientific spirit with the cardinal vices and follies of society. We miss the original plots, the powerful modeling of character, the philosophical insight which would have reconciled us to a Commedia erudita.

When we examine the plays of Firenzuola, Cecchi, Ambra, Gelli, Il Lasca, Doni, Dolce, we find that a hybrid form of art had been established by the practice of the earlier playwrights. This hybrid implied Plautus and Terence as a necessary basis. It adopted the fusion of Latin arguments with Italian manners which was so ably realized by Ariosto and Machiavelli. It allowed something for the farce traditions which the Rozzi made fashionable at Rome. It assumed ingredients from the Burle and Novelle of the marketplace, reproduced the language of the people, and made use of current scandals to give piquancy to its conventional plots. But notwithstanding the admixture of so many modern elements, the stereotyped Latinism of its form rendered this comedy unnatural. Ingenious contaminatio, to use a phrase in vogue among Roman critics, was always more apparent than creative instinct.

The Commedia erudita presented a framework ready-made to the playwright, and easily accepted on the strength of usage by the audience he sought to entertain. At the same time it left him free, within prescribed limits, to represent the manners of contemporary life. The main object of a great drama "to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," is thrust into the second rank; and the most valuable portions of these clever works of skill are their episodes—such scenes, for example, as those which in the Aridosio of Lorenzino de' Medici reveal the dissoluteness of conventual customs in a scholastic rifacimento of the Adelphi and the Mostellaria.[226] Had the fusion of classical and modern elements been complete as in the Epicoene of Jonson, or had the character-drawing been masterly as in MoliÈre's Avare, we should have no cause for complaint. But these are just the qualities of success missed by the Italian playwrights. Their studies from nature are comparatively slight. Having exhibited them in the presentation of the subject or introduced them here and there by way of interludes, they work the play to its conclusion on the lines of Latinistic convention.[227]

Such being the form of cinque cento comedy, it follows that its details are monotonous. The characters are invariably drawn from the ranks of the rich burgher classes; and if we may trust the evidence furnished by the playwrights, the morality of these classes must have been of an almost inconceivable baseness. We survey a society separated from the larger interests than elevate humanity, without public ambition or the sense of national greatness, excluded from the career of arms, dead to honor, bent upon sensual enjoyment and petty intrigues. The motive which sustains the plot, is illicit love; but in its presentation there is no romance, nothing to cloak the animalism of an unchecked instinct. The young men who play the part of primi amorosi, are in debt or without money. It is their object to repair their fortunes by a rich marriage, to secure a maintenance from a neighbor's wife they have seduced, to satisfy the avarice of a greedy courtesan, or to conceal the results of an intrigue which has brought their mistress into difficulties. From the innumerable scenes devoted to these elegant and witty scapegraces, it would be difficult to glean a single sentence expressive of conscience, remorse, sense of loyalty or generous feeling. They submit to the most odious bargains and disreputable subterfuges, sacrificing the honor of their families or the good fame of the women who depend upon them, to the attainment of some momentary self-indulgence.[228] Without respect for age, they expend their ingenuity in robbing their parents and exposing their fathers to ridicule.[229] Nor is it possible to feel much sympathy for the elders, who are so brutally used. The old man of these comedies is either a superannuated libertine, who makes himself ridiculous by his intrigues with a neighbor's wife, or a parsimonious tyrant, or else an indulgent rake, who acts the pander for his good-for-nothing rascal of a son.[230] Mere simpletons like Machiavelli's Nicia, or Aretino's Messer Maco, furnish another type of irreverent age, unredeemed by the comic humor of Falstaff or the gigantic lusts of Sir Epicure Mammon. Between son and father the inevitable servant plays the part of clever rogue. It is he who weaves the meshes of the intrigue that shall cut the purse-strings of the stingy parent, blind the eyes of the husband to his wife's adultery, or cheat the creditor of his dues. Our sympathy is always enlisted on the side of the schemers; and however base their tricks may be, we are invited to applaud the success which crowns them. The girls are worthy of their lovers. Corrupted by nurses; exposed to the contaminating influences of the convent; courted by grooms and servants in their father's household; tampered with by infamous duennas; betrayed by their own mothers or intrusted by their fathers to notorious prostitutes; they accept the first husband proposed to them by their parents, confident in the hope of continuing clandestine intrigues with the neighbor's son who has seduced them.[231] The wives are such as the Novelle paint them, yielding to the barest impulses of wantonness, and covering their debauchery with craft that raises a laugh against the husbands they have cozened. Such are the main actors, the conventional personages, of the domestic comedy. The subordinate characters consist of parasites and flatterers; ignorant pedants and swaggering bravi; priests who ply the trade of pimps; astrologers who thrive upon the folly of their clients; doctors who conceal births; prostitutes and their attendant bullies; compliant go-betweens and rapacious bawds; pages, street urchins, and officers of justice. The adulterous intrigue required such minor persons as instruments; and it often happens that scenes of vivid comic humor, dialogues of the most brilliant Tuscan idiom, are suggested by the interaction of these puppets, whose wires the clever valet and the primo amoroso pull.

The point of interest for contemporary audiences was the burla—the joke played off by a wife upon her husband, by rogues upon a simpleton, by a son upon his father, by a servant on his master's creditors, by a pupil on his pedantic tutor. Accepting the conditions of a comedy so constructed, and eliminating ethical considerations, we readily admit that these jokes are infinitely amusing. The scene in Gelli's Sporta where Ghirigoro de' Macci receives the confidences of the youth who has seduced his daughter, under the impression that he is talking about his money-box, is not unworthy of MoliÈre's Avare. Two scenes in Gelli's Errore, where Gherardo Amieri, disguised as an old woman, is tormented by a street urchin whom his son has sent to teaze him, and afterwards confronted by his angry wife, might have adorned the Merry Wives of Windsor.[232] Cecchi's comedies in like manner abound in comical absurdities, involving exquisitely realistic pictures of Florentine manners.[233] For the student of language, no less than for the student of Renaissance life, they are invaluable. But the similarity of form which marks the comedies of the cinque cento, renders it impossible to do justice to their details in the present work. I must content myself with the foregoing sketch of their structure derived from the perusal of such plays as were accessible in print, and with the further observation that each eminent dramatist developed some side of the common heritage transmitted by their common predecessors. Thus Firenzuola continued the Latin tradition with singular tenacity, adapting classical arguments in his Lucidi and Trinuzia to modern themes with the same inimitable transparency of style he had displayed in his rifacimento of the Golden Ass.[234] Gelli adapted the Aulularia in his Sporta, and closely followed the Clizia in his Errore. The devotion professed for Machiavelli by this playwright, was yielded by Cecchi to Ariosto; and thus we notice two divergent strains of tradition within the circle of Florentine art.[235] Cecchi was a voluminous dramatic writer. Besides his comedies in sdrucciolo and piano verse, he composed Sacre Rappresentazioni and plays of a mixed kind derived from a free handling of that elder form.[236] While Gelli and Cecchi severally followed the example of Machiavelli and Ariosto, Il Lasca attempted to free the Italian drama from the fetters of erudite convention.[237] His comedies are exceedingly witty versions of Novelle, forming dramatic pendants to his narratives in that style. Yet though he strove to make the stage a mirror of contemporary customs, he could not wholly escape from the mannerism into which the dramatic art had fallen. Nor was it possible, now that the last gleam of liberty had expired in Italy, when even Florence accepted her fate, and the Inquisition was jealously watching every new birth of the press, to create what the earlier freedom of the Renaissance had missed. The drama was condemned to trivialities which only too faithfully reflected the political stagnation, and the literary trifling of a decadent civilization.[238]

It is worthy of notice, as a final remark upon the history of the comic stage, that at this very moment of its ultimate frustration there existed the germ of a drama analogous to that of England, only waiting to be developed by some master spirit. That was the Farsa, which Cecchi, the most prolific, original and popular of Florentine playwrights, deigned to cultivate.[239] He describes it thus: "The Farsa is a new third species between tragedy and comedy. It enjoys the liberties of both, and shuns their limitations; for it receives into its ample boundaries great lords and princes, which comedy does not, and, like a hospital or inn, welcomes the vilest and most plebeian of the people, to whom Dame Tragedy has never stooped. It is not restricted to certain motives; for it accepts all subjects—grave and gay, profane and sacred, urbane and rude, sad and pleasant. It does not care for time or place. The scene may be laid in a church, or a public square, or where you will; and if one day is not long enough, two or three may be employed. What, indeed, does it matter to the Farsa? In a word, this modern mistress of the stage is the most amusing, the most convenient, the sweetest, prettiest country-lass that can be found upon our earth."[240] He then goes on to describe the liberty of language allowed in the Farsa, rounding off a picture which exactly applies to our Elizabethan drama. The Farsa, in the form it had assumed when Cecchi used it, was, in fact, the survival of an ancient, obscure species of dramatic art, which had descended from the period of classical antiquity, and which recently had blent with the traditions of the Sacre Rappresentazioni. Had circumstances been favorable to the development of a national drama in Italy, the popular elements of the Pagan farce and the medieval Mystery would have naturally issued through the Farsa in a modern form of art analogous to that produced in England. But the Italians had, as we have seen, no public to demand the rehabilitation of the Farsa; nor was Cecchi a Shakspere, or even a Marlowe, to prove, in the face of Latinizing playwrights, that the national stage lay in its cradle here. It remained for the poets of a far-off island, who disdained Italian jigs and owed nothing to the Farse of either Florentine or Neapolitan contemporaries, acting by instinct and in concert with the sympathies of a great nation, to take this "sweetest, prettiest country-lass" by the hand and place her side by side with Attic Tragedy and Comedy upon the supreme throne of art.

The Italian comedies offer an even more startling picture of social vice than the Novelle.[241] To estimate how far they represent a general truth, is difficult; especially when we remember that they were written in a conventional style, to amuse princes, academicians, and prelates.[242] Comparing their testimony with that of private letters and biographical literature (the correspondence, for example, of Alessandra degli Strozzi, Alberti's treatise on the Family, and statements gleaned from memoirs and Ricordi), we are justified in believing that a considerable difference existed at the commencement of this epoch between public and domestic manners in Italy; between the Court and the home, the piazza and the fireside, the diversions of fashionable coteries and the conversation of friends and kinsmen. The family still retained some of its antique simplicity. And it was not as yet vitiated by the institution of Cicisbeism. But the great world was incredibly corrupt. Each Court formed a nucleus of dissolute living. Rome, stigmatized successively by men so different as Lorenzo de' Medici, Pietro Aretino, Gian-Giorgio Trissino, and Messer Guidiccioni, poisoned the whole Italian nation. Venice entertained a multitude of prostitutes, and called them benemeritÆ in public acts. Since, therefore, these centers of aristocratic and literary life drew recruits from the burgher and rural classes, the strongholds of patriarchal purity were continually being sapped by contact with fashionable uncleanliness. And thus in the sixteenth century a common standard of immorality had been substituted for earlier severity of manners. The convulsions of that disastrous epoch, following upon a period of tranquillity, during which the people had become accustomed to luxury, submerged whole families in vice. "Wars, famines, and the badness of the times," wrote Aretino, "inclining men to give themselves amusement, have so debauched all Italy (imputtanita tutta Italia), that cousins and kinsfolk of both sexes, brothers and sisters, mingle together without shame, without a shadow of conscience."[243] Though it is preposterous to see Aretino posing as a censor of morals, his acuteness was indubitable; nor need we suppose that his acquaintance with the disease rendered him less sagacious in detecting its causes. What Corio tells us about Lodovico Sforza's capital, what we read about the excess of luxury into which the nobles of Vicenza and Milan plunged, amid the horrors of the French and Spanish occupation, confirms his testimony.[244] After the Black Death, described by Matteo Villani, the Florentines consoled themselves for previous sufferings by an outburst of profligate and reckless living. So now they sought distraction in unbridled sensuality. Society was in dissolution, and men lived for the moment, careless of consequences. The immorality of the theater was at once a sign and a source of this corruption. "O times! O manners!" exclaims Lilius Giraldus:[245] "the obscenities of the stage return in all their foulness. Plays are acted in every city, which the common consent of Christendom had banned because of their depravity. Now the very prelates of the faith, our nobles, our princes, bring them back again among us, and cause them to be publicly presented. Nay, priests themselves are eagerly ambitious of the infamous title of actors, in order to bring themselves into notoriety, and to enrich themselves with benefices."

It must not be supposed that the immorality of the comic stage consists in the license of language, incident or plot. Had this been all, we should hardly be justified in drawing a distinction between the Italians of the Renaissance and our own Elizabethan playwrights. It lies far deeper, in the vicious philosophy of life paraded by the authors, in the absence of any didactic or satirical aim. MoliÈre, while exposing evil, teaches by example. A canon of goodness is implied, from which the deformities of sin and folly are deflections. But Machiavelli and Aretino paint humanity as simply bad. The palm of success is awarded to unscrupulous villainy. An incapacity for understanding the immutable power of moral beauty was the main disease of Italy. If we seek the cause of this internal cancer, we must trace the history of Italian thought and feeling back to the age of Boccaccio; and we shall probably form an opinion that misdirected humanism, blending with the impieties of a secularized Papacy, the self-indulgence of the despots, and the coarse tastes of the bourgeoisie, had sapped the conscience of society.