Bandello is more sensitive to strictures on his literary style, and

makes a better defense. "They say that I have no style. I grant it;

nor do I profess to be a master of prose, believing that if those only

wrote who were consummate in their art, very few would write at all.

But I maintain that any history, composed in however rough and uncouth

a language, will not fail to delight the reader; and these novels of

mine (unless I am deceived by their narrators) are not fables but true

histories."[88] In another place he confesses that his manner is and

always has been "light and low and deficient in intellectual

quality."[89] Again, he meets the objection that his diction is not

modeled on the purest Tuscan masterpieces, by arguing that even

Petrarch wrote Italian and not Tuscan, and that if Livy smacked of

Patavinity, he, a Lombard, does not shrink from Lombardisms in his

style.[90] The line of defense is good; but, what is more, Bandello

knew that he was popular. He cared to be read by all classes of the

people rather than to be praised by pedants for the purity of his

language. Therefore he snapped his fingers at Speron Sperone and

Trifone, the so-called Socrates of his century. The _Novella_ was not

a branch of scholarly but of vulgar literature; and Bandello had far

better right to class himself among Italian authors than Straparola or

Giraldi, whose novels were none the less sought after with avidity and

read with pleasure by thousands. It is true that he was not a master

of the best Italian prose, and that his _Novelle_ do not rank among

the _Testi di Lingua_. He is at one and the same time prolix and

involved, ornate and vulgar, coarse in phraseology and ambitious in

rhetoric. He uses metaphors borrowed from the slang of the fashionable

world to express gross thoughts or actions. He indulges in pompous

digressions and overloads his narrative with illustrations. But, in

spite of these defects, he is rarely dull. His energy and copiousness

of diction never fail him. His style is penetrated with the passion of

the subject, and he delights our imagination with wonderfully varied

pictures drawn from life. It is probable that foreigners can render

better justice to the merits of Bandello as a writer, than Italians,

who are trained to criticise language from a highly refined and

technical point of view. We recognize his vividness and force without

being disgusted by his Lombardisms or the coarseness of his phrases.

Yet even some Italian critics of no mean standing have been found to

say a good word for his style. Among these may be reckoned the

judicious Mazzuchelli.[91]

[Footnote 88: Vol. iv. p. 226. Cp. vol. ix. p. 339.]

[Footnote 89: Vol. vi. p. 254.]

[Footnote 90: Vol. vii. p. 11.]

[Footnote 91: In the biography of Bandello he says, "Lo stile e

piuttosto colto e studiato, che che taluno n'abbia detto in contrario,

non pero in guisa che possa mettersi a confronto di quello del

Boccaccio."]

The author of _Le Cene_ presents a marked contrast to Bandello.

Antonfrancesco Grazzini belonged to an ancient and honorable family of

Staggia in Valdelsa.[92] Some of his ancestors held office in the

Florentine republic, and many were registered in the Art of the

Notaries. Born at Florence in 1503, he was matriculated into the

Speziali, and followed the profession of a druggist. His literary

career was closely connected with the academies of Gli Umidi and La

Crusca.[93] The sobriquet Il Lasca, or The Roach, assumed by him as a

member of the Umidi, is the name by which he is best known. Besides

_Novelle_, he wrote comedies and poems, and made the renowned

collection of _Canti Carnascialeschi_. He died in 1583 and was buried

in S. Pier Maggiore. Thus while Bandello might claim to be a citizen

of the great world, reared in the ecclesiastical purple and conversant

with the noblest society of Northern Italy, Il Lasca began life and

ended it as a Florentine burgher. For aught we know, he may not have

traveled beyond the bounds of the republic. His stories are written in

the raciest Tuscan idiom and are redolent of the humor peculiar to

Florence. If Bandello appropriated the romantic element in Boccaccio,

Il Lasca chose his comic side for imitation. Nearly all his novels

turn on _beffe_ and _burle_, similar to those sketched in Sacchetti's

anecdotes, or developed with greater detail by Pulci and the author of

_Il Grasso Legnaiuolo_.[94] Three boon companions, Lo Scheggia, Il

Monaco, and Il Pilucca are the heroes of his comedy; and the pranks

they play, are described with farcical humor of the broadest and most

powerful sort. Still the specific note of Il Lasca's novels is not

pure fun. He combines obscenity with fierce carnal cruelty and inhuman

jesting, in a mixture that speaks but ill for the taste of his

time.[95] Neither Boccaccio nor the author of _Il Grasso_ struck a

chord so vicious, though the latter carried his buffoonery to the

utmost stretch of heartlessness. It needed the depravity of the

sixteenth century to relish the lust, seasoned with physical torture

and spiritual agony, which was so cunningly revealed, so coldly

reveled in by Il Lasca.[96] A practical joke or an act of refined

vengeance had peculiar attraction for the Florentines. But the men

must have been blunted in moral sensibility and surfeited with strange

experiences, who could enjoy Pilucca's brutal tricks, or derive

pleasure from the climax of a tale so ghastly as the fifth _Novella_

of the second series.

[Footnote 92: See Sonnet 79, _Rime_ (ed. 1741).]

[Footnote 93: Founded respectively in 1540 and 1583. Grazzini

quarreled with them both.]

[Footnote 94: _Cena_ i. _Nov._ 3, is in its main motive modeled on

that novel.]

[Footnote 95: The contrast between the amiable manners of the young

men and women described in the introduction to _Le Cene_, and the

stories put into their mouths; between the profound immorality, frigid

and repellent, of the tales and Ghiacinto's prayer at the beginning;

need not be insisted on.]

[Footnote 96: As I shall not dilate upon these novels further in the

text, I may support the above censure by reference to the practical

joke played upon the pedagogue (i. 2), to the inhuman novel of _Il

Berna_ (ii. 2), to the cruel vengeance of a brother (ii. 7), and to

the story of the priest (ii. 8).]

This is a story of incest and a husband's vengeance. Substantially the

same as Parisina's tragedy, Il Lasca has invented for it his own

whimsically horrible conclusion. The husband surprises his wife and

son. Then, having cut off their hands, feet, eyes and tongues, he

leaves them to die together on the bed where he had found them. The

rhetoric with which this catastrophe is embellished, and the purring

sympathy expressed for the guilty couple, only serve to make its

inhumanity more glaring. Incapable of understanding tragedy, these

writers of a vitiated age sought excitement in monstrous situations.

The work produced is a proper pendent to the filth of the burlesque

_Capitoli_. Literature of this sort might have amused Caligula and his

gladiators. Prefaced by an unctuous prayer to God, it realizes the

very superfluity of naughtiness.[97]

[Footnote 97: See above, p. 56, note.]

In favor of the Florentines, we might plead that these _Novelle_ were

accepted as pure fictions--debauches of the fancy, escapades of

inventive wit. The ideal world they represented, claimed no contact

with realities of life. The pranks of Lo Scheggia and Il Pilucca,

which drove one man into exile, another to the hospital, and a third

to his death, had no more actuality than the tricks of clown and

pantaloon. A plea of this sort was advanced by Charles Lamb for the

dramatists of the Restoration; and it carries, undoubtedly, its

measure of conviction. Literature of convention, which begins by

stimulating curiosity, must find novel combinations and fresh

seasonings, to pique the palate of the public. Thus the abominations

of Il Lasca's stories would have to be regarded as the last desperate

bids for popularity, as final hyperboles of exhausted rhetoric. Yet,

after all, books remain the mirror of a people's taste. Whatever their

quality may be, they are produced to satisfy some demand. And the

wonderful vivacity of Il Lasca's coloring, the veracity of his art,

preclude him from the benefit of a defense which presupposes that he

stood in some unnatural relation to his age. While we read his tales,

we cannot but remember the faces painted by Bronzino, or modeled by

Cellini. The sixteenth-century Florentines were hard and cold as

steel. Their temper had been brutalized by servitude, superficially

polished by humanism, blunted by the extraordinary intellectual

activity of three centuries. Compared with the voluptuous but

sympathetic mood of the Lombard novelists, this cruelty means

something special to the race.

Some of Il Lasca's stories, fortunately, need no such strained apology

or explanation. The tale of Lisabetta's dream, though it lacks point,

is free from his worse faults[98]; while the novel of Zoroaster is not

only innocent, but highly humorous and charged with playful

sarcasm.[99] It contains a portrait of a knavish astrologer, worthy to

be set beside the _Negromante_ of Ariosto or Ben Jonson's _Alchemist_.

When Jerome Cardan was coquetting with chiromancy and magic, when

Cellini was raising fiends with the Sicilian necromancer in the

Coliseum, a novelist found sufficient stuff for comedy and satire in

the foibles of ghost-seekers and the tricks of philter-mongers. The

companion portrait of the dissolute monk, who sets his hand to any

dirty work that has the spice of fun in it, is also executed with no

little spirit.

[Footnote 98: _Cena_ ii. 3.]

[Footnote 99: _Cena_ ii. 4.]

Among the most graceful of the Tuscan novelists may be mentioned

Agnolo Firenzuola. His family derived its name from a village at the

foot of the Pistojan Apennines, and his father was a citizen of

Florence. Agnolo spent his youth at Siena and Perugia, where he made

the friendship of Pietro Aretino, leading the wild student life

described in their correspondence.[100] That he subsequently entered

the Vallombrosan order seems to be certain; but it is somewhat

doubtful whether he attained the dignity of Abbot which his

biographers ascribe to him.[101] Tiraboschi, unwilling to admit so

great a scandal to the Church, has adduced reasons why we should

suspend our judgment.[102] Yet the tradition rests on substantial

authority. A monument erected by Firenzuola to his uncle Alessandro

Braccio in the church of S. Prassede, at Rome, describes him as _aedis

hujus Abbas_. S. Maria di Spoleti and S. Salvator di Vaiano are

supposed to have been his benefices. Some further collateral proof

might be drawn from the opening of the dialogue _Sopra le Bellezze

delle Donne_. The scene of it is laid in the convent grounds of

Grignano, and Celso is undoubtedly Firenzuola. A portion of his

manhood was spent at Rome in friendship with Molza, Berni, and other

brilliant literary men. While resident in Rome he contracted a severe

and tedious illness, which obliged him to retire to Prato, where he

spent some of the happiest years of his life.[103] Nearly all his

works contain frequent and affectionate recollections of this sunny

little town, the beauty of whose women is enthusiastically celebrated

by him. Firenzuola died before the middle of the sixteenth century at

the age of about fifty. Neither his life nor his friendships nor yet

his writings were consistent with his monastic profession and the

dignity of Abbot. The charm of Firenzuola's _Novelle_ is due in a

large measure to his style, which has a wonderful transparency and

ease, a wealth of the rarest Tuscan phrases, and a freshness of humor

that renders them delightful reading. The storm at sea in the first

tale, and the night scene in the streets of Florence in the third, are

described with Ariostean brilliancy.[104] In point of subject-matter

they do not greatly differ from the ordinary novels of the day, and

some of the tales reappear in the collections of other novelists.[105]

Most of them turn upon the foibles and the vices of the clergy. The

fourth _Novella_, which is perhaps the best of all in style and humor,

presents a truly comic picture of the parish priest, while the fifth

describes the interior of a dissolute convent at Perugia, and the

tenth exposes the arts whereby confessors induced silly women to make

wills in the favor of their convents. Don Giovanni, Suor Appellagia,

and Fra Cherubino, the chief actors in these stories, might be

selected as typical characters in the Italian comedy of clerical

dissoluteness.

[Footnote 100: See the Letters of Aretino, vol. ii. p. 239.]

[Footnote 101: All my references are made to the _Opere di Messer

Agnolo Firenzuola_, 5 vols. Milan, 1802.]

[Footnote 102: _Storia della Lett. It._ lib. iii. cap. 3, sect. 27.]

[Footnote 103: In a letter to Aretino, dated Prato, Oct. 5, 1541, he

says he had been ill for eleven years. It seems probable that his

illness was of the kind alluded to in his _Capitolo_ "In Lode del

Legno Santo" (_Op. Volg._ iv. p. 204).]

[Footnote 104: _Op._ ii. pp. 94, 130.]

[Footnote 105: For example, _Nov._ iv. is the same as Bandello's II.

xx.; _Nov._ vii. is the same as Il Lasca's ii. 10. and Fortina's xiv.]

Firenzuola prefaced his novels with an elaborate introduction,

describing the meeting of some friends at Celso's villa near

Pazolatico, and their discourse on love.[106] From discussion they

pass to telling amorous stories under the guidance of a Queen selected

by the company.[107] The introductory conversation is full of a

dreamy, sensualized, disintegrated Platonism. It parades conventional

distinctions between earthly and heavenly love, between the beauty of

the soul and the beauty of the body; and then we pass without

modulation into the region of what is here called _accidenti amorosi_.

The same insincere Platonism gives color to Firenzuola's discourse on

the Beauty of Women--one of the most important productions of the

sixteenth century in illustration of popular and artistic taste.[108]

The author imagines himself to have interrupted a bevy of fair ladies

from Prato in the midst of a dispute about the beauty of Mona Amelia

della Torre Nuova. Mona Amelia herself was present; and so were Mona

Lampiada, Mona Amorrorisca, Mona Selvaggia, and Mona Verdespina.[109]

Under these names it is clear that living persons of the town of Prato

are designated; and all the examples of beauty given in the dialogue

are chosen from well-known women of the district. The composition must

therefore be reckoned as an elaborate compliment from Firenzuola to

the fair sex of Prato.[110] Celso begins his exposition of beauty by

declaring that "it is God's highest gift to human nature, inasmuch as

by its virtue we direct our soul to contemplation, and through

contemplation to the desire of heavenly things."[111] He then proceeds

to define beauty as "an ordered concord, or, as it were, a harmony

inscrutably resulting from the composition, union, and commission of

divers members, each of which shall in itself be well proportioned and

in a certain sense beautiful, but which, before they combine to make

one body, shall be different and discrepant among themselves."[112]

Having explained each clause of this definition, he passes to the

appetite for beauty, and tells the myth invented for Aristophanes in

Plato's _Symposium_. This leads by natural transitions to the real

business of the dialogue, which consists in analyzing and defining

every kind of loveliness in women, and minutely describing the

proportions, qualities, and colors of each portion of the female body.

The whole is carried through with the method of a philosopher, the

enthusiasm of an artist, and the refinement of a well-bred gentleman.

The articles upon _Leggiadria_, _Grazia_, _Vaghezza_, _Venusta_,

_Aria_, _Maesta_, may even now be read with profit by those who desire

to comprehend the nice gradations of meaning implied by these

terms.[113] The discourses on the form and color of the ear, and on

the proper way of wearing ornamental flowers, bring incomparably

graceful images before us[114]; and this, indeed, can be said about

the whole dialogue, for there is hardly a sentence that does not

reveal the delicate perceptions of an artistic nature.

[Footnote 106: Vol ii. p. 28. The poem put into Celso's mouth, p. 39,

is clearly autobiographical.]

[Footnote 107: There is the usual reference to Boccaccio, at p. 32. I

may take this occasion for citing an allusion to Boccaccio from the

Introduction to _Le Cene_, which shows how truly he was recognized as

the patron saint of novelists. See _Le Cene_ (Firenze, Lemonnier,

1857), p. 4.]

[Footnote 108: Vol. i. pp. 1-97. I may here allude to a still more

copious and detailed treatise on the same theme by Federigo Luigino of

Udine: _Il Libro della Bella Donna_, Milano, Daelli, 1863; a reprint

from the Venetian edition of 1554. This book is a symphony of grateful

images and delicately chosen phrases; it is a dithyramb in praise of

feminine beauty, which owes its charm to the intense sympathy, sensual

and aesthetic, of the author for his subject.]

[Footnote 109: Selvaggia was the lady of Firenzuola's _Rime_.]

[Footnote 110: See the _Elegia alle Donne Pratesi_, vol. iv. p. 41.]

[Footnote 111: Vol. i. p. 16. Compare the extraordinary paragraph

about female beauty being an earnest of the beauties of Paradise (pp.

31, 32).]

[Footnote 112: _Ibid._ p. 21.]

[Footnote 113: _Ibid._ pp. 51-62.]

[Footnote 114: Vol. i. pp. 75-80.]

Firenzuola's adaptation of the _Golden Ass_ may be reckoned among the

triumphs of his style, and the fables contained in his _Discorsi degli

Animali_ are so many minutely finished novelettes.[115] Both of these

works belong to the proper subject of the present chapter. His

comedies and his burlesque poems must be left for discussion under

different headings. With regard to his serious verses, addressed to

Mona Selvaggia, it will be enough to say that they are modeled upon

Petrarch. Though limpid in style and musical, as all Firenzuola's

writing never failed to be, they ring hollow. The true note of the

man's feeling was sensual. The highest point it reached was the

admiration for plastic beauty expressed in his dialogue on women. It

had nothing in common with Petrarch's melancholy. Of these minor poems

I admire the little ballad beginning _O rozza pastorella_, and the

wonderfully lucid version of Poliziano's _Violae--O Viole formose, o

dolci viole_--more than any others.[116]

[Footnote 115: Vol. iii. The _Golden Ass_ begins with an autobiography

(vol. i. p. 103).]

[Footnote 116: Vol. iv. pp. 19, 76.]

Except for the long illness which brought him to Prato, Firenzuola

appears to have spent a happy and mirthful life; and if we may trust

his introduction to the Novels, he was fairly wealthy. What we know

about the biography of Antonfrancesco Doni, who also deserves a place

among the Tuscan novelists, presents a striking contrast to this

luxurious and amorous existence.[117] He was a Florentine, and, like

Firenzuola, dedicated to religion. Born in 1513, he entered the

Servite order in the cloister of the Annunziata. He began by teaching

the boys intrusted to the monks for education. But about 1540 he was

obliged to fly the monastery under the cloud of some grave charge

connected with his pupils.[118] Doni turned his back on Florence; and

after wandering from town to town in Northern Italy, settled at last

in 1542 at Piacenza, where he seems for a short while to have applied

himself with an unwilling mind to law-studies. At Piacenza he made the

acquaintance of Lodovico Domenichi, who introduced him into the

Accademia Ortolana. This was a semi-literary club of profligates with

the Priapic emblems for its ensign. Doni's wild and capricious humor

made him a chief ornament of the society; but the members so

misconducted themselves in word and deed that it was soon found

necessary to suppress their meetings. While amusing himself with

poetry and music among his boon companions, Doni was on the lookout

for a place at Court or in the household of a wealthy nobleman. His

letters at this period show that he was willing to become anything

from poet or musician down to fool or something worse. Failing in all

his applications, he at last resolved to make what gains he could by

literature. His friend Domenichi had already settled at Venice, when

Doni joined him there in 1544. But his stay was of brief duration. We

find him again at Piacenza, next at Rome, and then at Florence, where

he established a printing-press. The principal event of this

Florentine residence was a definite rupture with Domenichi. We do not

know the causes of their quarrel; but both of them were such scamps

that it is probable they took good care, while abusing one another in

general terms, to guard the secrets of their respective crimes. During

the rest of Doni's life he pursued his old friend with relentless

animosity. His invectives deserve to be compared with those of the

humanists in the preceding century; while Domenichi, who had succeeded

in securing a position for himself at Florence, replied with no less

hostility in the tone of injured virtue.

[Footnote 117: My principal authority is Doni's Life by S. Bongi

prefixed to an edition of the _Novelle_, 1851, and reprinted in

Fanfani's edition of _I Marmi_, Florence, 1863.]

[Footnote 118: See Zilioli, quoted by Bongi, _I Marmi_, vol. i. p.

xiv.]

In 1547 Doni settled finally at Venice. The city of the lagoons was

the only safe resort for a man who had offended the Church by

abandoning his vows, and whose life and writings were a scandal even

in that age of license. Everywhere else he would have been exposed to

peril from the Inquisition. Though he had dropped the cowl, he could

not throw aside the cassock, and his condition as priest proved not

only irksome but perilous.[119] At Venice he lived a singular Bohemian

existence, inhabiting a garret which overlooked one of the noisiest of

the small canals, and scribbling for his daily bread. He was a rapid

and prolific writer, sending his copy to the press before it was dry,

and never caring for revision. To gain money was the sole object of

his labors. The versatility of his mind and his peculiar humor made

his miscellanies popular; and like Aretino he wheedled or menaced

ducats out of patrons. Indeed, Doni's life at Venice is the proper

pendent to Aretino's, who was once his friend and afterwards his

bitter foe. But while Aretino contrived to live like a prince, Doni,

for many years at any rate, endured the miseries of Grub Street. They

quarreled about a present which the Duke of Urbino had promised Doni

through his secretary. Aretino thought that this meant poaching on his

manors. Accordingly he threatened his comrade with a thorough literary

scourging. Doni replied by a pamphlet with this singular title:

"Terremoto del Doni fiorentino, con la rovina d'un gran Colosso

bestiale Antichristo della nostra eta." His capricious nature and

bizarre passions made Doni a bad friend; but he was an incomparably

amusing companion. Accordingly we find that his society was sought by

the literary circles of all cities where he lived. At Florence he had

been appointed secretary to the Umidi. At Venice he became a member of

the Pellegrini. This academy was founded before the League of Cambrai

in a deserted villa near the lagoons.[120] Mystery hung over its

origin and continued to involve its objects. Several wealthy noblemen

of Venice supplied the club with ample funds. They had a good library,

and employed two presses for the printing of their works. The members

formed a kind of masonic body, bound together by strict mutual

obligations, and sworn to maintain each other in peril or in want.

They also exercised generosity toward needy men of letters, dowered

poor girls, and practiced many charities of a similar description.

Their meetings took place in certain gardens at Murano or on the

island of S. Giorgio Maggiore. The two Sansovini, Nardi, Titian,

Dolce, and other eminent men belonged to the society; but Doni appears

to have been its moving spirit on all occasions of convivial

intercourse.

[Footnote 119: How Doni hated his orders may be gathered from these

extracts: "La bestial cosa che sia sopportare quattro corna in capo

senza belare unquanco. Io ho un capriccio di farmi scomunicare per non

cantare piu _Domine labia_, e spretarmi per non essere a noia a tutte

le persone." "L'esser colla chierica puzza a tutti." His chief

grievance was that he had made no money out of the Church.]

[Footnote 120: The greater part of what we know about the Pellegrini

occurs in Doni's _I Marmi_. See also a memoir by Giaxich, and the

notices in Mutinelli's _Diari Urbani_.]

The last years of this Bohemian life were spent beneath the Euganean

hills in a square castle, which, picturesquely draped with ivy, may

still be seen towering above Monselice. That Doni had accumulated some

capital by his incessant scribbling, is proved by the fact that he

laid out the grounds about his fortress with considerable luxury. A

passage quoted from the Venetian Zilioli serves to bring the man more

vividly before us: "At the summit of the hill above Monselice stands

the house where Antonfrancesco Doni indulged his leisure with

philosophy and poetry. He was a man of bizarre humor, who had but

little patience with his neighbors. Retiring from society, he chose

this abode in order to give full scope in his own way and without

regard for any one to his caprices, which were often very ludicrous.

Who could have refrained from laughter, when he saw a man of mature

age, with a beard down to his breast, going abroad at night barefooted

and in his shirt, careering among the fields, singing his own songs

and those of other poets; or else in daytime playing on a lute and

dancing like a little boy?" Doni died at Venice in the autumn of 1574.

Doni's _Novelle_ are rather detached scenes of life than stories with

a plot or theme. Glowing and picturesque in style, sharply outlined,

and smartly told, they have the point of epigrams. The fourth of the

series might be chosen to illustrate the extravagant efforts after

effect made by the Italian novelist with a view to stimulating the

attention of his audience. It is a tale of two mortal enemies, one of

whom kills the father and the brother of his foe. The injured man

challenges and conquers him in single combat, when, having the ruffian

at his mercy, he raises him from the ground, pardons him, and makes

him his bosom friend. Likelihood and moral propriety are sacrificed in

order that the _Novella_ may end with a surprise.

Doni's _Novelle_, taken by themselves, would scarcely have justified

the space allotted to him in this chapter. His biography has, however,

the importance attaching to the history of a representative man, for

much of the literature of amusement in the sixteenth century was

supplied by Bohemians of Doni's type. To give a complete account of

his miscellaneous works would be out of the question. Besides

treatises on music and the arts of design and a catalogue of Italian

books, which might be valuable if the author had not used it as a

vehicle for his literary animosities, he published letters and poems,

collections of proverbs and short tales under the title of _La Zucca_,

dialogues and dissertations on various topics with the name of _I

Mondi_, an essay on moral philosophy, an edition of Burchiello's poems

illustrated by notes more difficult to understand than the text, an

explanation of the Apocalypse proving Luther to be Antichrist, a libel

upon Aretino, two commonplace books of sentences and maxims styled _I

Cancellieri_, a work on villa-building, a series of imaginary

pictures, a comedy called _Lo Stufaiuolo_, and many others which it

would be tedious to catalogue. It is not probable that any one has

made a thorough study of Doni's writings; but those who know them

best, report that they are all marked by the same sallies of

capricious humor and wild fancy.[121]

[Footnote 121: Those I am acquainted with are _I Marmi_, _I Mondi_,

_Lo Stufaiuolo_, the _Novelle_, and two little burlesque caprices in

prose, _La Mula_ and _La Chiave_.]

A glance at the _Marmi_ will suffice to illustrate Doni's method in

these miscellanies.[122] In his preface to the reader he says it often

happens that, awaked from sleep, he spends the night-hours in thinking

of himself and of his neighbors--"not, however, as the common folk do,

nor like men of learning, but following the whimsies of a teeming

brain. I am at home, you see. I fly aloft into the air, above some

city, and believe myself to be a huge bird, monstrous, monstrous,

piercing with keen sight to everything that's going on below; and in

the twinkling of an eye, the roofs fly off, and I behold each man,

each woman at their several affairs. One is at home and weeping,

another laughing; one giving birth to children, one begetting; this

man reading, that man writing; one eating, another praying. One is

scolding his household, another playing; and see, yon fellow has

fallen starved to earth, while that one vomits his superfluous food!

What contrasts are there in one single city, at one single moment!

Then I pass from land to land, and notice divers customs, with variety

of speech and converse. In Naples, for example, the gentry are wont to

ride abroad and take the evening freshness. In Rome they haunt cool

vineyards, or seek their pleasure by artificial fountains. In Venice

they roam the canals in dainty gondolas, or sweep the salt lagoons,

with music, women, and such delights, putting to flight the day's

annoyances and heat. But above all other pleasures in the cool,

methinks the Florentines do best. Their way is this. They have the

square of Santa Liberata, midway between the ancient shrine of Mars,

now San Giovanni, and the marvelous modern Duomo. They have, I say,

certain stairs of marble, and the topmost stair leads to a large

space, where the young men come to rest in those great heats, seeing

that a most refreshing wind is always blowing there, and a delicious

breeze, and, besides, the fair white marbles for the most part keep

their freshness. It is there I find my best amusements; for, as I sail

through the air, invisibly I settle, soaring over them; and hear and

see their talk and doings. And forasmuch as they are all fine wits and

comely, they have a thousand lovely things to say--novels, stratagems

and fables; they tell of intrigues, stories, jokes, tricks played off

on men and women--all things sprightly, noble, noteworthy and fit for

gentle ears." Such is the exordium. What follows, consists of

conversations, held at night upon these marble slabs by citizens of

Florence. The dialogue is lively; the pictures tersely etched; the

language racy; the matter almost always worthy of attention. One

sustained dialogue on printing is particularly interesting, since it

involves a review of contemporary literature from the standpoint of

one who was himself exclusively employed in hack production for the

press.[123] The whole book, however, abounds in excellent criticism

and clever hints. "See what the world is coming to," says one of the

speakers, "when no one can read anything, full though it be of

learning and goodness, without flinging it away at the end of three

words! More artifice than patience goes nowadays to the writing of a

book; more racking the brains to invent some whimsical title, which

makes one take it up and read a word or two, than the composition of

the whole book demands. Just try and tell people to touch a volume

labeled _Doctrine of Good Living_ or _The Spiritual Life_! God

preserve you! Put upon the title page _An Invective against an Honest

Man_, or _New Pasquinade_, or _Pimps Expounded_, or _The Whore Lost_,

and all the world will grab at it. If our Gelli, when he wanted to

teach a thousand fine things, full of philosophy and useful to a

Christian, had not called them _The Cobbler's Caprices_, there's not a

soul would have so much as touched them. Had he christened his book

_Instructions in Civil Conduct_ or _Divine Discourses_, it must have

fallen stillborn; but that _Cobbler_, those _Caprices_ make every one

cry out: 'I'll see what sort of balderdash it is!'"

[Footnote 122: _I Marmi_, per Fanfani e Bongi, Firenze, Barbera, 1863,

2 vols.]

[Footnote 123: Parte ii. "Della Stampa."]

One might fancy that this passage had been written to satirize our own

times rather than the sixteenth century. More than enough, however,

remains from the popular literature of Doni's days to illustrate his

observation. We have already seen how ingeniously he titillated public

curiosity in the title of his invective against Aretino. "_The

Earthquake of Doni, the Florentine, with the Ruin of a Great Bestial

Colossus, the Antichrist of our Age_," is worthy to take rank among

the most capricious pamphlets of the English Commonwealth. Meanwhile

the Venetian press kept pouring out stores of miscellaneous

information under bizarre titles; such as the _Piazza_, which

described all sorts of trades, including the most infamous, and _Il

Perche_, which was a kind of vulgar cyclopaedia, with special reference

to physiology. Manuals of domestic medicine or directions for the

toilette, like the curious _Comare_ on obstetrics, and Marinello's

interesting _Ornamenti delle Donne_; eccentricities in the style of

the _Hospidale de' Pazzi_ or the _Sinagoga degli Ignoranti_; might be

cited through a dozen pages. It is impossible to do justice to this

undergrowth of literature, which testifies to the extent of the

plebeian reading public in Italy.

The Novelists of Siena form a separate group, and are distinguished by

a certain air of delicate voluptuous grace.[124] Siena, though it

wears so pensive an aspect now, was famous in the middle ages for the

refinements of sensuality. It was here that the _godereccia brigata_,

condemned to Hell by Dante, spent their substance in gay living.

Folgore da San Gemignano's pleasure-seeking Company was Sienese.

Beccadelli called the city _molles Senae_, and AEneas Sylvius dedicated

her groves and palaces to Venus--the Venus who appeared in dreams to

Gentile Sermini.[125] The impress of luxury is stamped upon the works

of her best novelists. They blend the _morbidezza_ of the senses with

a rare feeling for natural and artistic beauty. Descriptions of

banquets and gardens, fountains and wayside thickets, form a

delightful background to the never-ending festival of love. We wander

through pleasant bypaths of Tuscan country, abloom in spring with

acacia trees and resonant with song-birds. Though indescribably

licentious, these novelists are rarely coarse or vulgar. There is no

Florentine blackguardism, no acerbity of scorn or stain of blood-lust

on their pages. They are humorous; but they do not season humor with

cruelty. Their tales, for the most part, are the lunes of wanton love,

day-dreams of erotic fancy, a free debauch of images, now laughable,

now lewd, but all provocative of sensual desire. At the same time,

their delight in landscape-painting, combined with a certain

refinement of aesthetic taste, saves them from the brutalities of lust.

[Footnote 124: _Novelle di Autori Senesi_, edited by Gaetano Poggiali,

Londra (Livorno), 1796. This collection, reprinted in the _Raccolta di

Novellieri Italiani_, Milano, 1815, vols. xiv. and xv., contains

Bernardo Illicini, Giustiniano Nelli, Scipione Bargagli, Gentile

Sermini, Pietro Fortini, and others. Of Sermini's _Novelle_ a complete

edition appeared in 1874 at Livorno, from the press of Francesco Vigo;

and to this the student should now go. Romagnoli of Bologna in 1877

published three hitherto inedited novels of Fortini, together with the

rubrics of all those which have not yet been printed. Their titles

enable us to comprehend the scruples which prevented Poggiali from

issuing the whole series.]

[Footnote 125: _Imbasciata di Venere_, Sermini, ed. cit. p. 117.]

The foregoing remarks apply in their fullest extension to Sermini and

Fortini. The best passages from the _Ars Amandi_ of these authors

admit of no quotation. Attention, may, however, be called to the

graphic description by Sermini of the Sienese boxing-matches.[126] It

is a masterpiece of vigorous dialogue and lively movement--a little

drama in epitome or profile, bringing the excitement of the champions

and their backers vividly before us by a series of exclamations and

ejaculated sentences. Fortini does not offer the same advantage to a

modest critic; yet his handling of a very comic situation in the

fourteenth _Novella_ may be conveniently compared with Firenzuola's

and Il Lasca's treatment of the same theme.[127] Those, too, who are

curious in such matters, may trace the correspondences between his

twelfth _Novella_ and many similar subjects in the _Cent nouvelles

Nouvelles_. The common material of a _fabliau_ is here Italianized

with an exquisite sense of plastic and landscape beauty; and the crude

obscenity of the _motif_ craves pardon for the sake of its rare

setting.

[Footnote 126: _Il Giuoco della pugna_, Sermini, ed. cit. p. 105.]

[Footnote 127: See _Le Cene_, pt. ii. _Nov._ 10, and Firenzuola's

seventh _Novella_.]

Bargagli's tales are less offensive to modern notions of propriety

than either Sermini's or Fortini's. They do not detach themselves from

the average of such compositions by any peculiarly Sienese quality.

But his _Trattenimenti_ are valuable for their introduction, which

consists of a minute and pathetically simple narrative of the

sufferings sustained by the Sienese during the siege of 1553.

Boccaccio's description of the Plague at Florence was in Bargagli's

mind, when he made this unaffected record of a city's agony the

frontispiece to tales of mirth and passion. Though somewhat out of

place, it has the interest which belongs to the faithful history of an

eye-witness.

One beautiful story, borrowed from the annals of their own city, was

treated by the two Sienese novelists, Illicini and Sermini. The palm

of excellence, however, must be awarded to the elder of these authors.

Of Bernardo Lapini, surnamed Illicini or Ollicino, very little is

known, except that he served both Gian Galeazzo Visconti and Borso da

Este in the capacity of physician, and composed a commentary on the

_Trionfi_ of Petrarch. His _Novella_ opens with a conversation between

certain noble ladies of Siena, who agreed that the three most eminent

virtues of a generous nature are courtesy, gratitude, and liberality.

An ancient dame, who kept them company on that occasion, offered to

relate a tale, which should illustrate these qualities and raise

certain fine questions concerning their exercise in actual life. The

two Sienese families De' Salimbeni and De' Montanini had long been on

terms of coldness; and though their ancient feuds were passing into

oblivion, no treaty of peace had yet been ratified between their

houses, when Anselmo Salimbeni fell deeply in love with Angelica the

only sister of Carlo Montanini. Anselmo was wealthy; but to Carlo and

his sister there only remained, of their vast ancestral possessions,

one small estate, where they lived together in retirement. Delicacy

thus prevented the rich Anselmo from declaring his affection, until an

event happened which placed it in his power to be of signal service to

the Montanini. A prosperous member of the Sienese government desired

to purchase Carlo's house at the price of one thousand ducats. Carlo

refused to sell this estate, seeing it was his sister's only support

and future source of dowry. Thereupon the powerful man of state

accused him falsely of treason to the commonwealth. He was cast into

prison and condemned to death or the forfeit of one thousand ducats.

Anselmo, the very night before Carlo's threatened execution, paid this

fine, and sent the deed of release by the hands of a servant to the

prison. When Carlo was once more at liberty, he made inquiries which

proved beyond doubt that Anselmo, a man unknown to him, the member of

a house at ancient feud with his, had done him this great courtesy. It

then rushed across his mind that certain acts and gestures of Anselmo

betrayed a secret liking for Angelica. This decided him upon the

course he had to take. Having communicated the plan to his sister, he

went alone with her at night to Salimbeni's castle, and, when he had

expressed his gratitude, there left her in her lover's power, as the

most precious thing he could bestow upon the saviour of his life.

Anselmo, not to be surpassed in this exchange of courtesies, delivered

Angelica to the women of his household, and afterwards, attended by

the train of his retainers, sought Carlo in his home. There he made a

public statement of what had passed between them, wedded Angelica with

three rings, dowered her with the half of his estates, and by a formal

deed of gift assigned the residue of his fortune to Carlo. This is a

bare outline of the story, which Illicini has adorned in all its

details with subtle analyses of feeling and reflections on the several

situations. The problem proposed to the gentlewoman is to decide which

of the two men, Anselmo or Carlo, showed the more perfect courtesy in

their several circumstances. How they settled this knotty point, may

be left to the readers of _Novelle_ to discover.

Bandello more than adequately represents the Lombard group of

novelists; and since his works have been already discussed, it will

suffice to allude briefly to three collections which in their day were

highly popular. These are _I Proverbi_ of Antonio Cornazano, _Le

Piacevoli Notti_ of Straparola, and Giraldi's _Hecatommithi_.[128]

Cornazano was a copious writer both in Latin and Italian. He passed

his life at the Courts of Francesco Sforza, Bartolommeo Colleoni, and

Ercole I. of Ferrara. One of his earliest compositions was a Life of

Christ. This fact is not insignificant, as a sign of the conditions

under which literature was produced in the Renaissance. A man who had

gained reputation by a learned or religious treatise, ventured to

extend it by jests of the broadest humor. The _Proverbi_, by which

alone Cornazano's name is now distinguished, are sixteen

carefully-wrought stories, very droll but very dirty. Each illustrates

a common proverb, and pretends to relate the circumstances which gave

it currency. The author opens one tale with a simple statement: "From

the deserts of the Thebaid came to us that trite and much used saying,

_Better late than never_; and this was how it happened." Having stated

the theme, he enters on his narrative, diverts attention by a series

of absurdities which lead to an unexpected climax. He concludes it

thus: "The abbot answered: 'It is not this which makes me weep, but to

think of my misfortune, who have been so long without discovering and

commending so excellent an usage.' 'Father,' said the monk, '_Better

late than never_.'" There is considerable comic vigor in the working

of this motive. Our sense of the ridiculous is stimulated by a studied

disproportion between the universality of the proverb and the

strangeness of the incidents invented to account for it.

[Footnote 128: None of them are included in the Milanese _Novellieri

Italiani_. The editions I shall use are _Proverbii di Messer Antonio

Cornazano in Facetie_, Bologna, Romagnoli, 1865; _Le Piacevoli Notti_,

in Vinegia per Comin da Trino di Monferrato, MDLI.; _Gli Hecatommithi

di M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio, Nobile Ferrarese_, in Vinegia,

MDLXVI., Girolamo Scotto, 2 vols.]

Straparola breaks ground in a different direction. The majority of his

novels bear traces of their origin in fairy stories or _Volksmaerchen_.

Much interest attaches to the _Notti Piacevoli_, as the literary

reproduction of a popular species which the Venetian Gozzi afterwards

rendered famous. Students of folk-lore may compare them with the

Sicilian fables recently committed to the press by Signor Pitre.[129]

The element of bizarre fancy is remarkable in all these tales; but the

marvelous has been so mingled with the facts of common life as to give

each narrative the true air of the conventional _Novella_. One in

particular may be mentioned, since it is written on the same motive as

Machiavelli's _Belphegor_. The rubric runs as follows: "The Devil,

hearing the complaints of husbands against their wives, marries Silvia

Ballastro, and takes Gasparino Boncio for gossip of the ring, and

forasmuch as he finds it impossible to live with his wife, enters into

the body of the Duke of Melphi, and Gasparino, his gossip, expels him

thence." Between Straparola's and Machiavelli's treatment of this

subject, the resemblance is so close as to justify the opinion that

the former tale was simply modeled on the latter, or that both were

drawn from an original source. In each case it is the wife's pride

which renders life unendurable to her demon husband, and in both he is

expelled from the possessed person by mistaking a brass band in full

play for the approach of his tumultuous consort. But Straparola's

loose and careless style of narrative bears no comparison with the

caustic satire of Machiavelli's meditated art.[130] The same theme was

treated in Italian by Giovanni Brevio; and since Machiavelli's novel

first appeared in print in the year 1549, Straparola's seeing the

light in 1550, and Brevio's in 1545, we may reasonably conclude that

each version was an adaptation of some primitive monastic story.[131]

[Footnote 129: _Fiabe, Novelle, Racconti_, Palermo, Lauriel, 1875, 4

vols. I may here take occasion to notice that one _Novella_ by the

Conte Lorenzo Magalotti (_Nov. It._ vol. xiii. p. 362), is the story

of Whittington and his Cat, told of a certain Florentine, Ansaldo

degli Ormanni, and the King of the Canary Islands.]

[Footnote 130: John Wilson's play of _Belphegor_, Dekker's _If it be

not good the Divel is in it_, and Ben Jonson's _The Devil is an Ass_,

were more or less founded on Machiavelli's and Straparola's novels.]

[Footnote 131: Dunlop in his _History of Fiction_, vol. ii. p. 411,

speaks of a Latin MS. preserved in the library of S. Martin at Tours

which contained the tale, but he also says that it was lost at "the

period of the civil wars in France."]

On the score of style alone, it would be difficult to explain the

widespread popularity of Giraldi Cinthio's one hundred and ten

tales.[132] The _Hecatommithi_ are written in a lumbering manner, and

the stories are often lifeless. Compared with the brilliancy of the

Tuscan _Novelle_, the point and sparkle of _Le Cene_, the grace and

gusto of Sermini, or Firenzuola's golden fluency, the diction of this

noble Ferrarese is dull. Yet the _Hecatommithi_ were reprinted again

and again and translated into several languages. In England, through

Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_, they obtained wide circulation and

supplied our best dramatists, including Shakspere and Fletcher, with

hints for plays. It is probable that they owed their fame in no small

measure to what we reckon their defects. Giraldi's language was more

intelligible to ordinary readers of Italian than the racy Tuscan of

the Sienese authors. His stories had less of a purely local flavor

than those of the Florentines. They enjoyed, moreover, the singular

advantage of diffusion through the press of Venice, which then

commanded the book-market of Europe. But, if we put this point of

style aside, the vogue of Cinthio in Italy and Europe becomes at once

intelligible. There is a massive force and volume in his matter, which

proclaims him an author to be reckoned with. The variety of scenes he

represents, the tragic gravity of many of his motives, his intimate

acquaintance with the manners and customs of a class that never fails

to interest the vulgar, combined with great sagacity in selecting and

multiplying instances of striking crime, stood him in the stead of

finer art with the special public for whom _Novelle_ were

composed.[133] Compared even with Boccaccio, the prince of

story-tellers, Cinthio holds his own, not as a great dramatic or

descriptive writer but as one who has studied, analyzed, dissected,

and digested the material of human action and passion in a vast

variety of modes. His work is more solid and reflective than

Bandello's; more moralized than Il Lasca's. The ethical tendency both

of the tales and the discussions they occasion, is, for the most part,

singularly wholesome. In spite, therefore, of the almost revolting

frankness with which impurity, fraud, cruelty, violence, and bestial

lust are exposed to view, one rises from the perusal of the

_Hecatommithi_ with an unimpaired consciousness of good and evil. It

is just the negation of this conscience which renders the mass of

Italian _Novelle_ worse than unprofitable.

[Footnote 132: The title leads us to expect one hundred tales; but

counting the ten of the Introduction, there are one hundred and ten.

When the book first circulated, it contained but seventy. The first

edition is that of Monte Regale in Sicily, 1565. My copy of the

Venetian edition of 1566 is complete.]

[Footnote 133: The ten novels of the Introduction deal exclusively

with the manners of Italian prostitutes. Placed as a frontispiece to

the whole repertory, they seem intended to attract the vulgar reader.]

The plan of the _Hecatommithi_ deserves a passing notice, if only

because it illustrates the more than ordinary force of brain which

Cinthio brought to bear upon his light material. He begins with an

elaborate description of the Sack of Rome. A party of men and women

take refuge from its horrors of rape, pestilence and tortures in one

of the Colonna palaces. When affairs have been proved desperate, they

set sail from Civita Vecchia for Marseilles, and enliven their voyage

with story-telling. A man of mature years opens the discussion with a

long panegyric of wedded love, serving as introduction to the tales

which treat of illicit passion. From this first day's debate the women

of the party are absent. They intervene next day, and upon this and

the following nine days one hundred stories are related by different

members of the party upon subjects selected for illustration. Each

novel is followed by a copious commentary in the form of dialogue, and

songs are interspersed. Cinthio thus adhered, as closely as possible,

to the model furnished by Boccaccio. But his framework, though

ingeniously put together, lacks the grace and sweetness of the

Decameron. Not a few of the novels are founded upon facts of history.

In the tenth tale of the ninth decade, for example, he repeats the

legend of the Borgia family--the murder of the Duke of Gandia,

Alexander's death by poison, and Cesare's escape. The names are

changed; but the facts, as related by Guicciardini, can be clearly

discerned through the transparent veil of fiction.

In concluding this chapter on the _Novelle_, it may be repeated that

the species of narrative in question was, in its ultimate development,

a peculiar Italian product. Originally derived through the French

_fabliaux_ from medieval Latin stories, the _Novella_ received in

Italy more serious and more artistic treatment. It satisfied the

craving of the race for such delineation of life and manners as a

great literature demands; and it did this for reasons which will be

explained in the next chapter, with more originality, more adequacy to

the special qualities of the Italian people, than even their comedies.

What De Quincey wrote concerning our theater in the age of Elizabeth

and James, might almost be applied to the material which the

_Novellieri_ used: "No literature, not excepting even that of Athens,

has ever presented such a multiform theater, such a carnival display,

mask and anti-mask of impassioned life--breathing, moving, acting,

suffering, laughing:

"Quicquid agunt homines--votum, timor, ira, voluptas,

Gaudia, discursus."

But, when we quit material to think of form, the parallel fails. De

Quincey's further description of our dramas, "scenically grouped,

draped, and gorgeously colored," is highly inapplicable to the brief,

careless, almost pedestrian prose of the _Novelle_. In spite of their

indescribable wealth of subject-matter, in spite of those

inexhaustible stores of plots and situations, characters and motives,

which have made them a mine for playwrights in succeeding ages, they

rarely rise to the height of poetry, nor are they ever dramas. The

artistic limitations of the Italian _Novelle_ are among the most

interesting phenomena presented by the history of literature.

CHAPTER XI.

THE DRAMA.

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]

[Footnote 134: "Comedia de Timone per el Magnifico Conte Matheo Maria

Boyardo Conte de Scandiano traducta de uno Dialogo de Luciano.

Stampata in Venetia per Georgio di Rusconi Milanese, del MDXVIII. adi

iii di Decembre." From the play itself we learn that it must have been

represented on a double stage, a lower one standing for earth and a

higher one for heaven. The first three acts consist chiefly of

soliloquies by Timon and conversations with celestial personages--Jove,

Mercury, Wealth, Poverty. In the fourth act we are introduced to

characters of Athenians--Gnatonide, Phylade, Demea, Trasycle, who

serve to bring Timone's misanthropy into relief; and the fifth act

brings two slaves, Syro and Parmeno, upon the scene, with a kind of

underplot which is not solved at the close of the play. The whole

piece must be regarded rather as a Morality than a Comedy, and the

characters are allegories or types more than living persons.]

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.

[Footnote 135: To determine the question of priority in such matters

is neither easy nor important. Students who desire to follow the

gradual steps in the development of Italian play-writing before the

date of Ariosto and Machiavelli may be referred to D'Ancona's work on

the _Origini del Teatro_.]

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:

Those [_i.e._ plays] that frequent are

In Italy or France, _even in these days_,

_Compared with ours_, are rather jigs than plays:

when Marlowe in the first scene of _Edward II._ made Gaveston,

thinking how he may divert the pleasure-loving king, exclaim:

Therefore I'll have Italian masks by night,

Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows:

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]

[Footnote 136: I have enlarged on these points in my Essay on

Euripides (_Greek Poets_, Series i.). I may take occasion here to say

that until Sept. 1879, after this chapter was written, I had not met

with Professor Hillebrand's _Etudes Italiennes_ (Paris, Franck,

1868).]

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:

Therefore we proclaim,

If any spirit breathes within this round,

Uncapable of weighty passion--

As from his birth being hugged in the arms

And nuzzled twixt the breasts of happiness--

Who winks, and shuts his apprehension up

From common sense of what men were, and are,

Who would not know what men must be; let such

Hurry amain from our black-visaged shows:

We shall affright their eyes. But if a breast

Nailed to the earth with grief, if any heart

Pierced through with anguish pant within this ring,

If there be any blood whose heat is choked

And stifled with true sense of misery,

If aught of these strains fill this consort up,

They arrive most welcome.

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 e 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_.

[Footnote 137: Exception must be made in favor of some ancient

quasi-tragedies, which seem to prove that before the influences of

Boccaccio and the Renaissance had penetrated the nation, they were not

deficient in the impulse to dramatize history. The _Eccerinis_ of

Albertino Mussato (_c._ 1300), half dialogue and half narration, upon

the fate of Ezzellino da Romano, composed in the style of Seneca; the

dialogue upon the destruction of Cesena (1377) falsely attributed to

Petrarch; Giovanni Mangini della Motta's poem on the downfall of

Antonio della Scala (1387), Lodovico da Vezzano's tragedy of Jacopo

Piccinino; though far from popular in their character, and but

partially dramatic, were such as under happier auspices might have

fostered the beginnings of the tragic theater. Later on we hear of the

_Fall of Granada_ being represented before Cardinal Riario at Rome, as

well as the _Ferrandus Servatus_ of Carlo Verradi (1492).]

[Footnote 138: See the first cast of Jonson's _Every Man in his

Humor_.]

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 aesthetic 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]

[Footnote 139: See above, Part I, p. 276, where one ballad of the

Border type is discussed.]

[Footnote 140: It is certainly significant that the Spanish share with

the English the chief honors both of the ballad and the drama. The

Scandinavian nations, rich in ballads, have been, through Danish

poets, successful in dramatic composition. The Niebelungen Lied and

the Song of Roland would, in the case of Germany and France, have to

be set against the English ballads of action. But these Epics are

different in character from the minstrelsy which turned passing events

into poetry and bequeathed them in the form of spirit-stirring

narratives to posterity. Long after the epical impulse had ceased and

the British epic of Arthur had passed into the sphere of literature,

the ballad minstrels continued to work with dramatic energy upon the

substance of contemporary incidents.]

The deficiency of the tragic instinct among the Italians seems to be

further exhibited by their failure to produce novels of the higher

type.[141] Though Boccaccio is the prince of story-tellers, his

_Novelle_ are tales, more interesting for their grace of manner and

beautifully described situations, than for 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.

[Footnote 141: See above, p. 54, for the distinction between the

Italian _Novella_ and the modern novel.]

[Footnote 142: In the same way Alfieri's biography is a tragic and

Goldoni's a comic novel. The Memoirs of Casanova, which I incline to

accept as genuine, might rather be cited as a string of brilliantly

written _Novelle_.]

If a national drama could have been produced in Italy, it might have

appeared at Florence during the reign of Lorenzo de' Medici. In no

other place and at no other period was the Italian genius more alive

and centralized. But a city is not a nation, and the Compagnia di San

Giovanni was not the Globe Theater. The desires of the Florentines, so

studiously gratified by their merchant prince, were bent on carnival

shows and dances. In this modern Athens the fine arts failed to find

their meeting-point and fulfillment on the stage, because the people

lacked the spirit and the freedom necessary to the drama. Artists were

satisfied with decorating masks and cars. Poets amused their patrons

with romantic stories. Scholars were absorbed in the fervent 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.

[Footnote 143: Cantu quotes the prologue of a MS. play which goes so

far as to apologize for the scene not being laid at Athens (_Lett.

It._ p. 471):

Benche l'usanza sia

Che ogni commedia

Si soglia fare a Atene,

Non so donde si viene

Che questa non grecizza,

Anzi fiorentinizza.]

The similarity of conditions between late Greek and modern Italian

life facilitated this custom of leaning on antique models, and

deceived the poets into thinking they might safely apply Graeco-Roman

plots to the facts of fifteenth-century romance. With the Turk at

Otranto, with the Cardinals of Este and Medici opposing his advance in

Hungary, with the episodes of French invasion, with the confusions of

the Sack of Rome, there was enough of social anarchy and public peril

to justify dramatic intrigues based on kidnapping and anagnorisis. The

playwrights, when they adapted comedies of Plautus and Terence, were

fully alive to the advantage of these correspondences. Claudio in

Ariosto's _Suppositi_ had his son stolen in the taking of Otranto.

Bartolo in the _Scolastica_ lost sight of his intended wife at the

moment of Lodovico Sforza's expulsion from Milan. Callimaco in

Machiavelli's _Mandragola_ remained in Paris to avoid the troubles

consequent on Charles VIII.'s invasion. Lidio and Santilla in

Bibbiena's _Calandra_, Blando's children in Aretino's _Talanta_, were

taken by the Turks. Fabrizio in the _Ingannati_ was lost in the sack

of Rome. Maestro Cornelio in Ambra's _Furto_ was captured by the

German Lanzi. In the _Cofanaria_ of the same author there is a girl

kidnapped in the Siege of Florence. Slavery itself was by no means

obsolete in Italy upon the close of the middle ages; and the

slave-merchant of Ariosto's _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."

[Footnote 144: _Commedie di Antonfrancesco Grazzini_ (Firenze,

Lemonnier, 1859), p. 5.]

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

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

This polemic of Il Lasca, and, indeed, all that he says about the art

and aim of comedy, is very sensible. But at his date there was no hope

for a great comedy of manners. What between the tyranny of the Medici

and the pressure of the Inquisition, Spanish suspicion and Papal

anxiety for a reform of manners, the liberty essential to a new

development of the dramatic art had been extinguished. And even if

external conditions had been favorable, the spirit of the race was

spent. All intellectual energy was now losing itself in the quagmire

of academical discussions and literary disputations upon verbal

niceties. Attention was turned backward to the study of Petrarch and

Boccaccio. Authors aiming above all things at correctness, slavishly

observant of rules and absurdly fearful of each other's ferules, had

not the stuff in them to create. What has been said of comedy, is

still more true of tragedy. The tragic dramas of this period are stiff

and lifeless, designed to 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]

[Footnote 147: I have put into an Appendix some further notes upon the

opinions recorded by the playwrights concerning the progress of the

dramatic art.]

The first regular Italian tragedy was the _Sofonisba_ of Gian Giorgio

Trissino, finished in 1515, and six times printed before the date of

its first representation at Vicenza in 1562.[148] Trissino was a man

of immense erudition and laborious intellect, who devoted himself to

questions of grammatical and literary accuracy, studying the critics

of antiquity with indefatigable diligence and seeking to establish

canons for the regulation of correct Italian composition. He was by no

means deficient in originality of aim, and professed himself the

pioneer of novelties in poetry.[149] Thus, besides innovating in the

minor matter of orthography, he set himself to supply the deficiencies

of Italian literature by producing an epic in the heroic style and a

tragedy that should compete with those of Athens. He had made a

profound study of the _Poetics_ and believed that Aristotle's 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 Laelius and Scipio. She takes poison at her new husband's

orders, and her death forms the catastrophe. There is some attempt to

mark character in Lelio, Scipione, and 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.

[Footnote 148: My references to Italian tragedies will be made to the

_Teatro Italiano Antico_, 10 vols., Milano, 1809.]

[Footnote 149: This is shown by his device of a Golden Fleece,

referring to the voyage of the Argonauts. To sail the ocean of

antiquity as an explorer, and to bring back the spoils of their

artistic method was his ambition.]

[Footnote 150: Compare what Giraldi says in the dedication of his

_Orbecche_ to Duke Ercole II.: "Ancora che Aristotele ci dia il modo

di comporle." In the same passage he dwells on the difficulties of

producing tragedies in the absence of dramatic instinct, with an

ingenuousness that moves our pity: "Quando altri si da a scrivere in

quella maniera de' Poemi, che sono stati per tanti secoli tralasciati,

che appena di loro vi resta una lieve ombra." It never occurred to him

that great poetry comes neither by observation nor by imitation of

predecessors. The same dedication contains the monstrous critical

assertion that the Latin poets, _i.e._ Seneca, improved upon Greek

tragedy--_assai piu grave la fecero_.]

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

_mesalliance_, 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.

[Footnote 151: This tragedy was acted at Ferrara in Giraldi's house

before Ercole II., Duke of Ferrara, and a brilliant company of noble

persons, in 1541. The music was composed by M. Alfonso dalla Viuola,

the scenery by M. Girolamo Carpi.]

[Footnote 152: Giraldi, a prolific writer of plays, dramatized three

other of his novels in the _Arrenopia_, the _Altile_ and the

_Antivalomeni_. He also composed a _Didone_ and a _Cleopatra_.]

Lacking dramatic instinct, these Italian scholars might have redeemed

their essential feebleness by acute 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 personae_. The inherent vices of the _Novella_,

expanded to excessive length and invested with the forms of antique

art, neutralize the labors of the lamp and file that have been spent

upon them.[153] If it were requisite to select one play in which a

glimmer of dramatic light is visible, we could point to the _Marianna_

of Lodovico Dolce. Here the 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.

[Footnote 153: It may here be remarked that though the scholarly

playwrights of the Renaissance paid great attention to Aristotle's

_Poetics_, and made a conscientious study of some Greek plays,

especially the _Antigone_, the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, the _Phoenissae_,

and the _Iphigenia in Tauris_, they held the uncritical opinion,

openly expressed by Giraldi, that Seneca had improved the form of the

Greek drama. Their worst faults of construction, interminable

monologues, dialogues between heroines and confidantes, dry choric

dissertations, and rhetorical declamations are due to the preference

for Seneca. The more we study Italian literature in the sixteenth

century, the more we are compelled to acknowledge that humanism and

all its consequences were a revival of Latin culture, only slightly

tinctured with the simpler and purer influences of the Greeks. Latin

poetry had the fatal attraction of facility. It was, moreover, itself

composite and derivatory, like the literature of the new age. We may

profitably illustrate the attitude of the Italian critics by Sidney's

eulogy of _Gorboduc_: "full of stately speeches and well-sounding

phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of

notable morality which it doth most delightfully teach and so obtain

the very end of Poesy."]

The tragedies 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 _Phoenissae_ with very

indifferent success; while Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara defaced the

_Oedipus Tyrannus_ in his _Edippo_, by adding a final act and

interweaving episodical matter borrowed from Seneca. A more repulsive

tragi-comedy than this _pasticcio_ of Sophocles and Seneca, can

scarcely be imagined. Yet Quadrio and Tiraboschi mention it with

cautious compliment, and it received the honor of public recitation at

Vicenza in 1565, when Palladio erected a theater for the purpose in

the 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.

[Footnote 154: D'Ancona (_Origini del Teatro_, vol. ii. sec. xxxix.)

may be consulted upon the attempts to secularize the _Sacre

Rappresentazioni_ which preceded the revival of classical comedy.]

[Footnote 155: Leo X., with a Medici's true sympathy for plebeian

literature added to his own coarse sense of fun, patronized the farces

of the Sienese Company called Rozzi. Had his influence lasted, had

there been any one to continue the traditions of his Court at Rome, it

is not impossible that a more natural comedy, as distinguished from

the _Commedia erudita_, might have been produced by this fashionable

patronage of popular dramatic art.]

We therefore find that, at the close of the fifteenth century, it was

common to recite the plays of Plautus and Terence in their original

language. Paolo Comparini at Florence in 1488 wrote a prologue to the

_Menaechmi_, which his pupils represented, much to the disgust of the

elder religious Companies, who felt that the ruin of their _Feste_ was

involved in this revival of antiquity.[156] Pomponius Laetus at Rome,

about the same time, encouraged the members of his Academy to 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 Phaedra which clung to him through life. In the

pontificate of Alexander we hear of similar shows, as when, upon the

occasion of Lucrezia Borgia's espousal to the Duke of Ferrara in 1502,

the _Menaechmi_ was represented at the Vatican.[159]

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

[Footnote 157: Sabellico, quoted by Tiraboschi, says of him: "primorum

antistitum atriis suo theatro usus, in quibus Plauti, Terentii,

recentiorum etiam quaedam agerentur fabulae, quas ipse honestos

adolescentes et docuit et agentibus praefuit."]

[Footnote 158: See the letter of Sulpizio da Veroli to Raffaello

Riario, quoted by Tiraboschi; "eamdemque, postquam in Hadriani mole

Divo Innocentio spectante est acta, rursus inter tuos penates, tamquam

in media Circi cavea, toto consessu umbraculis tecto, admisso populo,

et pluribus tui ordinis spectatoribus honorifice excepisti. Tu etiam

primus picturatae scenae faciem, quum Pomponiam comoediam agerent,

nostro saeculo ostendisti."]

[Footnote 159: See _Lucrezia Borgia_, by Gregorovius (Stuttgart,

1874), vol. i. p. 201.]

The Court which accomplished most for the resuscitation of Latin

Comedy was that of the Estensi at Ferrara. Ercole I. had spent a

delicate youth in humanistic studies, collecting 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 _Menaechmi_ in 1486, which cost above 1000

ducats. In 1487 the courtyard of the castle was fitted up as a theater

for the exhibition of Nicolo da Correggio's Pastoral of _Cefalo_.[160]

Again, upon the occasion of Annibale de' Bentivogli's betrothal to a

princess of the Este family, the _Amphitryon_ was performed; and in

1491, when Anna Sforza gave her hand to Alfonso d'Este, the same

comedy was repeated. In 1493 Lodovico Sforza, on a visit to Ferrara,

witnessed a representation of the _Menaechmi_, which so delighted him

that he begged Ercole to send his company to Milan. The Duke went

thither in person, attended by his son Alfonso and by gentle actors of

his Court, among whom Lodovico Ariosto played a part. Later on, in

1499, we again hear of Latin comedies at Ferrara. Bembo in a letter of

that year mentions the _Trinummus_, _Poenulus_ and _Eunuchus_.[161]

[Footnote 160: Nicolo was a descendant of the princely house of

Correggio. He married Cassandra, daughter of Bartolommeo Colleoni. His

_Cefalo_ was a mixed composition resembling the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_

in structure. In the Prologue he says:

Requiret autem nullus hic Comoediae

Leges ut observentur, aut Tragoediae;

Agenda nempe est historia, non fabula.

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

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

It is probable that Latin comedies were recited at Ferrara, as at

Rome, in the original. At the same time we know that both Plautus and

Terence were being translated into Italian for the 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 Podesta (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.

[Footnote 162: Gregorovius in his book on _Lucrezia Borgia_ (pp.

228-239) has condensed the authorities. See, too, Dennistoun, _Dukes

of Urbino_, vol. i. pp. 441-448.]

[Footnote 163: The minute descriptions furnished by Sanudo of these

festivals read like the prose letterpress accompanying the Masks of

our Ben Jonson.]

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.

[Footnote 164: Il Lasca in his prologue to the _Strega_ (_ed. cit._ p.

171) says: "Questa non e fatta da principi, ne da signori, ne in

palazzi ducali e signorili; e pero non avra quella pompa d'apparato,

di prospettiva, e d'intermedj che ad alcune altre nei tempi nostri s'e

veduto."]

[Footnote 165: A fine example of the Italian Mask is furnished by _El

Sacrificio_, played with great pomp by the Intronati of Siena in 1531

and printed in 1537. _El Sacrificio de gli Intronati Celebrato ne i

giuochi del Carnovale in Siena l'Anno MDXXXI._ Full particulars

regarding the music, _mise en scene_, and ballets on such ceremonial

occasions, will be found in two curious pamphlets, _Descrizione

dell'Apparato fatto nel Tempio di S. Giov. di Fiorenza_, etc. (Giunti,

1568), and _Descrizione dell'Entrata della Serenissima Reina Giovanna

d'Austria_, etc. (Giunti, 1566). They refer to a later period, but

they abound in the most curious details.]

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]

[Footnote 166: See the details brought together by Campori, _Notizie

per la vita di Lodovico Ariosto_, p. 74, Castiglione's letter on the

_Calandra_ at Urbino, the private representation of the _Rosmunda_ in

the Rucellai gardens, of the _Orbecche_ in Giraldi's house, of the

_Sofonisba_ at Vicenza, of Gelli's _Errore_ by the Fantastichi, etc.]

[Footnote 167: _Stadt Rom_, viii. 350.]

[Footnote 168: See the article "Fornovo" in my _Sketches and Studies

in Italy_.]

[Footnote 169: At this point, in illustration of what has been already

stated, I take the opportunity of transcribing a passage which fairly

represents the conditions of play-going in the _cinque cento_. Doni,

in the _Marmi_, gives this description of two comedies performed in

the Sala del Papa of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence.[A] "By my faith,

in Florence never was there anything so fine: two stages, one at each

end of the Hall: two wonderful scenes, the one by Francesco Salviati,

the other by Bronzino: two most amusing comedies, and of the newest

coinage; the _Mandragola_ and the _Assiuola_: when the first act of

the one was over, there followed the first act of the other, and so

forth, each play taking up the other, without interludes, in such wise

that the one comedy served as interlude for the other. The music began

at the opening, and ended with the close."]

[Footnote A: Barbera's edition, 1863, vol. i. p. 67.]

The transition from Latin to Italian comedy was effected almost

simultaneously by three poets, Bernardo Dovizio, Lodovico Ariosto, and

Niccolo 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 _Menaechmi_ 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]

[Footnote 170: One of the chief merits of the _Calandra_ in the eyes

of contemporaries was the successful adaptation of Boccaccio's style

to the stage. Though Italians alone have the right to pronounce

judgment on such matters, I confess to preferring the limpid ease of

Ariosto and the plebeian freshness of Gelli. The former has the merit

of facile lucidity, the latter of native raciness. Bibbiena's somewhat

pompous phraseology sits ill upon his farcical obscenities.]

[Footnote 171: See the translation in Dennistoun, vol. ii. p. 141.]

[Footnote 172: See Vasari, viii. 227.]

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.

[Footnote 173: See D'Ancona, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 250, for the

special nature of the _Farsa_. See also _ib._ p. 211, the description

by Paolucci of Leo's buffooneries in the Vatican.]

[Footnote 174: See Campori, _Notizie Inedite di Raffaello di Urbino_,

Modena, 1863, quoted by D'Ancona, _op. cit._ p. 212. The entertainment

cost Leo 1,000 ducats.]

[Footnote 175: No doubt Paolucci refers to the obscene play upon the

word _Suppositi_, and to the ironical epithet of _Santa_ applied to

_Roma_ in a passage which does no honor to Ariosto.]

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]

[Footnote 176: For the dates of Ariosto's dramatic compositions, see

above, Part 1, p. 499. The edition I shall refer to, is that of

Giovanni Tortoli (Firenze, Barbera, 1856), which gives both the prose

and verse redactions of the _Cassaria_ and _Suppositi_. It may here be

incidentally remarked that there are few thoroughly good editions of

Italian plays. Descriptions of the _dramatis personae_, stage

directions, and illustrative notes are almost uniformly wanting. The

reader is left to puzzle out an intricate action without help. All the

slang, the local customs, and the passing allusions which give life to

comedy and present so many difficulties to the student, are for the

most part unexplained.]

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 _denouement_ 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 personae_

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.

[Footnote 177: Gabrielle added the last two scenes of the fifth act.

See his prologue. But whether he introduced any modifications into the

body of the play, or filled up any gaps, does not appear.]

[Footnote 178:

Poiche a Pavia levato era il salario

Alli dottor, ne piu si facea studio

Per le guerre che piu ogni di augumentano.]

[Footnote 179: Their opposite humors are admirably developed in the

dialogues of act ii. sc. 5, act iii. sc. 5.]

[Footnote 180: Compare Bartolo's soliloquy in act iv. sc. 6, with

Lazzaro's confidences to Bonfazio, whom he mistakes for Bartolo, in

act v. sc. 3.]

[Footnote 181: His action in the comedy is admirably illustrated by

the self-revelation of the following soliloquy (act iv. sc. 1):

Io vuo a ogni modo aiutar questo giovane,

E dir dieci bugie, perche ad incorrere

Non abbia con suo padre in rissa e in scandalo:

E cosi ancor quest'altro mio, che all'ultima

Disperazione e condotto da un credere

Falso e da gelosia che a torto il stimola.

Ne mi vergognero d'ordire, o tessere

Fallacie e giunti, _e far cio ch'eran soliti_

_Gli antichi servi gia nelle commedie_:

Che veramente l'aiutare un povero

Innamorato, non mi pare uffizio

Servil, ma di gentil qualsivoglia animo.]

[Footnote 182: The process is well indicated in the lines I have

italicized in Bonifazio's soliloquy. He is no longer a copy of the

Latin slaves, but a free agent who emulates their qualities.]

[Footnote 183: With all admiration for the _Lena_, how can we

appreciate the cynicism of the situation revealed in the first

scene--the crudely exposed appetites of Flavio, the infamous conduct

of Fazio, who places his daughter under the tutelage of his old

mistress?]

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]

Voi potete veder la bolla, e leggere

Le facultadi mie, che sono amplissime;

E come, senza che pigliate, Bartolo,

Questo pellegrinaggio, io posso assolvere

E commutar i voti; e maravigliomi,

Che essendo, com'io son, vostro amicissimo,

Non m'abbiate richiesto; perche, dandomi

Quel solamente che potreste spendere

Voi col famiglio nel viaggio, assolvere

Vi posso, e farvi schifar un grandissimo

Disconcio, all'eta vostra incomportabile:

Oltra diversi infiniti pericoli,

Che ponno a chi va per cammino occorrere.

[Footnote 184: Act iii. sc. 6.]

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:

Ma non mi sa decidere

Questo caso, che, come voi, teologo

Non e; sa un poco di ragion canonica.

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:

Ben si potra commutare in qualche opera

Pia. Non si trova al mondo si forte obbligo,

Che non si possa scior con l'elemosine.

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]

Porterollavi,

E ve la lascero vedere e leggere.

Siate pur certo che la bolla e amplissima,

E che di tutti i casi, componendovi

Meco, vi posso interamente assolvere,

Non meno che potria 'l Papa medesimo.

_Bartolo._ Vi credo; nondimeno, per iscarico

Della mia conscienza, la desidero

Veder, e farla anco vedere e leggere

Al mio parrocchiano.

_Frate._ Ora sia _in nomine_

_Domini_, porterolla, e mostrerolla

A chi vi pare.

[Footnote 185: Act iv. sc. 4. In the last line but one, ought we not

to read _mostreratela_ or else _mostrerollavi_?]

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]

[Footnote 186: Room must be found for a few of the sarcasms, uttered

chiefly by Accursio, which enliven the _Scolastica_. Here are the

humanists:

questi umanisti, che cercano

Medaglie, e di rovesci si dilettano.

Here is Rome:

Roma, dove intendono

Che 'l sangue degli Apostoli e de' Martiri

E molto dolce, e a lor spese e un bel vivere.