Old Picture Books, With Other Essays on Bookish Subjects

by Alfred W. Pollard

FROM SAVONAROLA'S 'DELLA ORATIONE MENTALE,' S.A.

We have said that the choice of the work in which appeared the first typical Florentine woodcut was not without interest for our subject. Jacopone da Todi, whom the cut exhibits kneeling in an ecstasy of prayer before a vision of the Blessed Virgin, was a Franciscan mystic, eccentric to the verge of madness in his manners, but a spiritual poet of no mean ability, and the reputed author of the 'Stabat Mater.' He died in 1306, and was probably old enough to have remembered that strange epidemic of the Battuti, when thousands of frenzied men and women marched from city to city, scourging themselves almost to death for the sinfulness of the world, till their career had to be stopped by the free use of the gallows. When the frenzy was past, those who survived it formed themselves into companies for the continuance of their religious exercises in a more moderate form, and from their meeting together to sing their 'Laude,' hymns of a peculiarly personal fervour, in the chapels of their guilds, they obtained the name 'Laudesi.' Of the writers of these 'Laude,' Jacopone da Todi was the greatest, and it was out of the 'Laude' that the later 'Rappresentazioni' were gradually developed. In his excellent account of the 'Rappresentazioni,' to which I have already alluded, Mr. J. A. Symonds seems to me to have laid rather undue stress on the manner in which this development took place, as offering a contrast to the history of the religious drama in other countries. It is true that in England the plays which have come down to us belong almost exclusively to the great cycles which unrolled the history of man from the creation till the crack of doom, but we have mention of several plays on the lives of the Saints—e.g. one on S. George and the Dragon, and another (which survives) on S. Mary Magdalene, and the popularity at one time of these Miracle Plays, properly so called, is witnessed by the fact that it is their name under which the cycles of Scriptural dramas generally passed. At Florence these longer dramas were not wholly unknown, but they seem to have been acted only in pantomime or dumb-show, in the great pageants on S. John's Day, the shorter plays developing from the 'Laude' just as, at an earlier period, the liturgical dramas had developed in France and England out of the dramatic recital of the gospel of the day. It is worth noting, by the way, that the 'Laude' themselves were not superseded, but continued to be written and sung when the 'Rappresentazioni' were already becoming popular. Two of the writers of them during this period have a special interest for us—Maffeo Belcari, as the author also of the earliest printed 'Rappresentazione,' and Girolamo Benivieni, as the friend and disciple of Savonarola, whose doctrine and prophecies he defended in 1496 in a tract, printed, this also, by Buonaccorsi.

FROM 'LAUDE DEVOTE DI DIVERSI AUTORI,' S.A.

In an edition of a collection of 'Laude' by various writers, there is an interesting cut representing the 'Laudesi,' standing before a Madonna, singing her praise. In course of time dramatic divisions had been admitted into the 'Laude,' and under the name of 'Divozioni' they were recited with appropriate action in dialogue form. The actors were for the most part boys, who were formed into confraternities, while the expenses of the plays were doubtless defrayed by their parents. As the dramatic element in the performances became more decided, the plays came at last to be generally termed 'Rappresentazioni,' and under this name they attained a great popularity during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and the first of its successor.

Unlike the northern Miracle Plays, which are almost without exception anonymous, many of the earliest 'Rappresentazioni' which have come down to us contain the names of their authors, and in editions separated by half a century the text remains substantially unaltered. In English plays the text often appears to have grown up by a process of accretion, so that a cycle, or even a single play, in the form in which it has survived, could hardly with justice be assigned to a single author, even if we knew the name of the first writer concerned in it. The difference is not unimportant, and is one of numerous small signs which tell us that the religious drama in Florence, at least in this stage of its development, was less popular, less spontaneous, than in our own country, and more the result of deliberate religious effort.

The earliest 'Rappresentazione' printed was the 'Abraham' of the Maffeo (or Feo) Belcari, whom we have already mentioned. It was printed in 1485, the year after Belcari's death at a good old age (he was born in 1410), so that all Belcari's plays were published posthumously. Among them are plays on the Annunciation, on S. John the Baptist visited by Christ in the Desert, and on S. Panuntius. Of the last two of these I have seen fifteenth-century editions—the one at the British Museum, the other at the Bodleian Library, each with a single charming woodcut. No less a person than Lorenzo de' Medici was the author of the play of 'San Giovanni e San Paolo,' which has also come down to us in its original edition with a graceful cut; and Bernardo Pulci, who died in the first year of the sixteenth century, produced a play on the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat. But the most prolific of these dramatists seems to have been a woman, Bernardo's wife Antonia, to whose pen we owe plays on the Patriarch Joseph, the Prodigal Son, S. Francis of Assisi, S. Domitilla, S. Guglielma, etc. The names of a few other writers are known; but there were also numerous anonymous plays, written very much on the same lines, to some of which we shall have to allude.

Almost invariably the plays begin with a Prologue spoken by an Angel, who is represented in the title-cut of Lorenzo de' Medici's 'San Giovanni e San Paolo' as standing behind the two saints in a kind of pulpit. In other early plays the Angel is represented in a separate woodcut (shown at the beginning of this article) whose lower border is cut off, so as to fix on to the border of the special title-cut of the play. Later on, another design was substituted for this, without any border at all. I think it probable that these angelic prologuisings were mostly spoken from some machine at the back of the stage, especially contrived for celestial appearances. In other respects, the services of the stage-carpenter do not seem to have been much called for. The plays were acted, we are told, either in the chapel of the guild or confraternity, or in the refectory of a convent, and the arrangements were probably very similar to those in modern school-plays, the imagination of the spectators being often required to take the place of a change of scene. In the so-called 'Coventry' Plays we hear of a device by which a new scene, or perhaps rather a new centrepiece, with the actors all in their places, could be wheeled round to the front; but more often all the dramatis personae were grouped at the back or sides, and individual actors merely stepped forward when their turn came. In the play of 'San Lorenzo' we are expressly told that two scenes were shown simultaneously on different parts of the stage, Decius and his satellites offering their heathen sacrifices on the one side, while Pope Sixtus comforts the faithful against the coming persecution on the other. This combination of two scenes in one is a familiar feature in mediæval art, and is not unknown even in these Florentine woodcuts, small as they are: witness our cut on p. 29, in which the bartering at the pawnshop, and the indignities offered to the sacred wafer, tell the story of the play by means of its two most prominent scenes.

Of the literary value of the 'Rappresentazioni' it is not possible to speak with much enthusiasm. From a literary standpoint, indeed, the lives of the Saints, with which most of them have to do, are a difficult and not very promising subject. Most stories of heroism are best told in ten lines at longest; and to attempt to spin them out into several hundred, without any considerable material in the way of authentic detail, leads inevitably to weakness and exaggeration. In this respect the 'Rappresentazioni' are neither much worse nor much better than the average 'Legenda Sanctorum' in verse or prose.