character, partly to the political and ecclesiastical experiences which Italy was fated to undergo. The Italians were alike strangers to the enthusiasm of patriotism, which was as the breath in the nostrils of the English Elizabethan age, and to the religious devotion which identified Spain with the spirit of the Catholic revival. The clear-sightedness of the Italians had something to do with this, for they were too intelligent to believe in their tyrants, and too free from illusions to deliver up their minds to their priests. Finally, the chilling and enervating effects of a pressure of foreign domination, such as no Western people with a history and a civilization like those of Italy has ever experienced, contributed to paralyse for many generations the higher efforts of the dramatic art. No basis was permanently found for a really national tragedy; while literary comedy, after turning from the direct imitation of Latin models to a more popular form, lost itself in an abandoned immorality of tone and in reckless insolence of invective against particular classes of society. Though its productivity long continued, the poetic drama more and more concentrated its efforts upon subordinate or subsidiary species, artificial in origin and decorative in purpose, and surrendered its substance to the overpowering aids of music, dancing and spectacle. Only a single form of the Italian drama, improvised comedy, remained truly national; and this was of its nature dissociated from higher literary effort. The revival of Italian tragedy in later times is due partly to the imitation of French models, partly to the endeavour of a brilliant genius to infuse into his art the historical and political spirit. Comedy likewise attained to new growths of considerable significance, when it was sought to accommodate its popular forms to the representation of real life in a wider range, and again to render it more poetical in accordance with the tendencies of modern romanticism.
The regular Italian drama, in both its tragic and its comic branches, began with a reproduction, in the Latin language, of classical models—the first step, as it was to prove, towards the transformation of the medieval into the modern drama, and the birth of modern dramatic literature. But the process was both tentative and tedious, and must have died away but for the pomp and circumstance with which some of the patrons of the Renaissance at Florence, Rome and elsewhere surrounded these manifestations of a fashionable taste, and for the patriotic inspiration which from the first induced Italian writers to dramatize themes of national historic interest. Greek tragedy had been long forgotten, and one or two indications in the earlier part of the 16th century of Italian interest in the Greek drama, chiefly due to the printing presses, may be passed by.[1] To the later middle ages classical tragedy meant Seneca, and even his plays remained unremembered till the study of them was revived by the Paduan judge Lovato de’ Lovati (Lupatus, d. 1309). Of the comedies of Plautus three-fifths were not rediscovered till 1429; and though Terence was much read in the schools, he found no dramatic imitators, pour le bon motif or otherwise, since Hrosvitha.
Thus the first medieval follower of Seneca, Albertino Mussato (1261–1330) may in a sense be called the father of modern dramatic literature. Born at Padua, to which city all his services were given, he in 1315 brought out his Eccerinis, a Latin tragedy very near to the confines of epic poetry, intended to warn the Paduans against the designs of Can Grande della Scala by the example of the tyrant Ezzelino. Other tragedies of much the same type followed during the ensuing century; such as L. da Fabiano’s De casu Caesenae (1377) a sort of chronicle history in Latin prose on Cardinal Albornoz’ capture of Caesena.[2] Purely classical themes were treated in the Achilleis of A. de’ Loschi of Vicenza (d. 1441), formerly attributed to Mussato, several passages of which are taken verbally from Seneca; in the celebrated Progne of the Venetian Gregorio Cornaro, which is dated 1428–1429, and in later Latin productions included among the translations and imitations of Greek and Latin tragedies and comedies by Bishop Martirano (d. 1557), the friend of Pope Leo X.,[3] and the efforts of Pomponius Laetus and his followers, who, with the aid of Cardinal Raffaele Riario (1451–1521), sought to revive the ancient theatre, with all its classical associations, at Rome.
In this general movement Latin comedy had quickly followed suit, and, as just indicated, it is almost impossible, when we reach the height of the Italian Renaissance under the Medici at Florence and at Rome in particular, to review the progress of either species apart from that of the other. If we possessed the lost Philologia of Petrarch, of which, as of a juvenile work, he declared himself ashamed, this would be the earliest of extant humanistic comedies. As it is, this position is held by Paulus, a Latin comedy of life on the classic model, by the orthodox P. P. Vergerio (1370–1444); which was followed by many others.[4]
Early in the 16th century, tragedy began to be written in the native tongue; but it retained from the first, and never wholly lost, the impress of its origin. Whatever the source of its subjects—which, though mostly of classical origin, were occasionally derived from native romance, Italian tragedy in the 16th century.or even due to invention—they were all treated with a predilection for the horrible, inspired by the example of Seneca, though no doubt encouraged by a perennial national taste. The chorus, stationary on the stage as in old Roman tragedy, was not reduced to a merely occasional appearance between the acts till the beginning of the 17th century, or ousted altogether from the tragic drama till the earlier half of the 18th. Thus the changes undergone by Italian tragedy were for a long series of generations chiefly confined to the form of versification and the choice of themes; nor was it, at all events till the last century of the course which it has hitherto run, more than the aftergrowth of an aftergrowth. The honour of having been the earliest tragedy in Italian seems to belong to A. da Pistoia’s Pamfila (1499), of which the subject was taken from Boccaccio, introduced by the ghost of Seneca, and marred in the taking. Carretto’s Sofonisba, which hardly rises above the art of a chronicle history, though provided with a chorus, followed in 1502. But the play usually associated with the beginning of Italian tragedy—that with which “th’ Italian scene first learned to glow”—was another Sofonisba, acted before Leo X. in 1515, and written in blank hendecasyllables instead of the ottava and terza rima of the earlier tragedians (retaining, however, the lyric measures of the chorus), by G. G. Trissino, who was employed as nuncio by that pope. Other tragedies of the former half of the 16th century, largely inspired by Trissino’s example, were the Rosmunda of Rucellai, a nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1516); Martelli’s Tullia, Alamanni’s Antigone (1532); the Canace of Sperone Speroni, the envious Mopsus of Tasso, who, like Guarini, took Sperone’s elaborate style for his model; the
- ↑ The Χριστὀς πάσχων, an artificial Byzantine product, probably of the 11th century, glorifying the Virgin in Euripidean verse, was not known to the Western world till 1542.
- ↑ Of G. Manzini della Motta’s Latin tragedy on the fall of Antonio della Scala only a chorus remains. He died after 1389. Probably to the earlier half of the century belongs the Latin prose drama Columpnarium, the story of which, though it ends happily, resembles that of The Cenci. Later plays in Latin of the historic type are the extant Landivio de’ Nobili’s De captivitate Ducis Jacobi (the condottiere Jacopo Piccinino, d. 1464); C. Verardi’s Historia Baetica (the expulsion of the Moors from Granada) (1492), and the same author’s Ferdinandus (of Aragon) Servatus, which is called a tragi-comedy because it is neither tragic nor comic. The Florentine L. Dali’s Hiempsal (1441–1442) remains in MS. A few tragedies on sacred subjects were produced in Italy during the last quarter of the 15th century, and a little later. Such were the religious dramas written for his pupils by P. Domizio, on which Politian cast contempt; and the tragedies, following ancient models, of T. da Prato of Treviso, B. Campagna of Verona, De passione Redemptoris; and G. F. Conti, author of Theandrothanatos and numerous vanished plays.
- ↑ Imber aureus (Danae), &c.
- ↑ L. Bruni’s Poliscena (c. 1395); Sicco Polentone’s (1370–1463) jovial Lusus ebriorum s. De lege bibia; the papal secretary P. Candido Decembrio’s (1399–1477) non-extant Aphrodisia; L. B. Alberti’s Philodoxios (1424); Ugolino Pisani of Parma’s (d. before 1462) Philogenia and Confutatio coquinaria (a merry students’ play); the Fraudiphila of A. Tridentino, also of Parma, who died after 1470 and perhaps served Pius II.; Eneo Silvio de’ Piccolomini’s own verse comedy, Chrisis, likewise in MS., written in 1444; P. Domizio’s Lucinia, acted in the palace of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1478, &c.
