VIII.
Intrigue of a simple kind formed the staple of these improvised comedies. Anything like refined studies of character or the development of calculated motives was rendered impossible by the conditions under which they were presented to the public. An artist pleased or displeased by the exhibition of his personality in masquerade, and his creation of a shade of difference for some known type. The plot, whether borrowed from the written drama, from Latin plays, or from the gossip of the market-place, was always of an amorous complexion. Fathers, lovers, guardians, varlets, priests, and panders played their parts in it. The action proceeded by means of disguises, sleeping-potions, changelings, pirates, sudden recognitions of lost relatives, phantoms, demoniacal possessions, burlesque exorcisms, shipwrecks, sacks of cities, bandits, kidnapped children. It is singular in what a narrow circle the machinery revolves. Unlike our own Romantic drama, the Commedia dell' Arte made but few excursions into the regions of history, fable, mythology, and fancy. Its scene was an Italian piazza; and though we hear of thrilling adventures by land and sea, in forest and on fell, these are only used to loose a knot or to elucidate the transformation of some personage. We ought not to marvel at the limitations of this drama. They are explained by that close connection, on which I have already insisted, between the Commedia dell' Arte and the Commedia Erudita. The new comedy supplied little but its masks; and these masks, as we have seen, were types of bourgeois and rustic characters, capable of infinite modification within prescribed boundaries. The end in view was not the delectation of the audience by a scenic drama, but the caricature and travesty of life as it appeared to every one. That caricature, executed with inexhaustible finesse and piquant sallies of fresh personality, accommodated itself to the antiquated framework of plots as old as Plautus.
If the Commedia dell' Arte lacked fancy and invention in its ground-themes, this defect was compensated by audacious realism and Gargantuan humour. The indecency of these plays cannot be described. Men and women appeared naked on the stage. Unmentionable vices were boldly paraded. Buffoonery of the vilest description enhanced the finest strokes of burlesque sarcasm. Actors who created types which made the spirit of a nation live in effigy, condescended to tricks unworthy of a Yahoo. We have to accept the species, not as a branch of the legitimate drama, but as a carnival masquerade, in which humanity ran riot, jeering at its own indignities and foibles.