II.
The first attempts at national Italian comedy were the Calandra of Bibbiena and Ariosto's Cassaria. The former appeared at Urbino between 1503 and 1508; the latter, in its earlier prose form, at Ferrara in 1508. During the next fifty years a large number of comedies were produced by a great variety of authors. Men of letters like Machiavelli, Cecchi, Dolce, and Il Lasca, men of fashion like Lorenzino de'Medici, philosophers like Bruno, free lances of the pen like Aretino and Doni, artisans like Gelli, devoted themselves to this species of composition. The type remained fixed, although some notable exceptions, especially in the case of Aretino's plays, arrest attention. Taking the intrigue of Latin comedy for their ground material, these playwrights adapted it to conditions of Italian society. The avaricious father, the cunning courtesan, the parasite, the slave merchant, the swaggering soldier, the young spendthrift in love with a virgin of unknown parentage, the astute serving-man, the faithless wife, the pedant, the cynical priest or friar, the vicious old man in his dotage, the reckless adventurer, the pirate, the country-girl exposed to the corruptions of the town; such are the stock characters of this dramatic hybrid. Everywhere we find the plots of Terence or of Plautus interwoven with a Novella in the style of Boccaccio. As in Latin comedy, the knot is frequently loosed by unexpected discoveries of lost relatives; and the magnificent realism with which contemporary manners are depicted, clashes too often with the stiff and antiquated ossatura, or dramatic mechanism, to which the authors felt themselves obliged by fashion to adhere. From hints in prologues and prefaces we are able to discern that playwrights chafed against these traditional limitations of the Commedia Erudita.
Aretino, as I have just observed, broke the fetters of convention, and presented scenes of pure Italian life; but his plays were too hastily composed or ill-constructed to start a new style. The originality of Machiavelli in his Mandragora was not of the sort to encourage a departure from the beaten track. Like many other masterpieces of Italian art, the Mandragora stands forth by itself, a sole inimitable monument of genius; peculiar and personal; accomplished by one single act of vigorous expression. Before a really national species of written comedy emerged into distinctness from the Commedia Erudita, the literary impulse of the Renaissance began to decline, and the Italians in the middle of the sixteenth century entered upon that new phase of intellectual evolution which is marked by the Tridentine Council and the subsequent metamorphosis of Catholicism.