Part II.
THE ITALIAN COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE OR IMPROMPTU COMEDY.
1. A brief sketch of the origins of written comedy during the Italian Renaissance—Its dependence upon Latin models.—2. Further description of the so-called Commedia Erudita.—3. Emergence of dialectical literature in Italy during the period of the Catholic reaction—Improvised comedy begins to supersede the written drama of the Renaissance.—4. Farces at Naples and Florence—The Sienese company of I Rozzi—The Paduan Beolco—The four principal masks—Pantalone, Il Dottore, Arlecchino, Brighella.—5. Relation of modern impromptu comedy to the old Latin comedy of mimes and exodia—the Osci Ludi, Fescennini Verses, Satura, &c.—In what sense the modern masks are descended from those antique elements—Infusion of fixed characters adopted from the plays of Plautus and Terence.—6. Lombard, Neapolitan, Florentine ingredients in the Commedia dell' Arte—Lasca's carnival song of the Zanni and Magnifichi about the year 1550.—7. A review of the principal masks and their subordinate species, as these were finally developed—Modifications introduced into the masks, or fixed parts, of the Commedia dell' Arte, by men of genius who supported them.—8. The plots and subjects of improvised comedies—Buffoonery and indecency.—9. Description of the scenari or plays in outline which were acted impromptu by the comic companies—Method of concerting a comedy and distributing its parts—The function of the Capo Comico.—10. Qualifications of a good impromptu comedian—Stock repertories, commonplaces, speeches to be introduced on set occasions, soliloquies, &c.—The Lazzi or sallies of buffoonery and byeplay—Tendency to degeneration in this improvisatory art of comedy.—11. European celebrity of the Italian comedians—In Paris, Spain, Portugal, London—References to Italian companies in England during the sixteenth century.—12. The decadence of the Commedia dell' Arte—Moral and artistic germs of dissolution—Goldoni's severe criticism—Garzoni's description of strolling actors, and their association with quacks, mountebanks, and clowns.
I.
THE history of the Italian theatre is closely connected with the history of the Classical Revival.[19] The literary drama—as distinguished from performances by tumblers, mimes, and masquers, from sacred plays and from plebeian farces—began with the representation of Latin tragedies and comedies. At the close of the fifteenth century it was usual to crown courtly festivals with scenic recitations of favourite pieces by Terence and Plautus. Rome vied with Florence, Venice with Naples, Ferrara with Urbino, in the magnificence of these spectacles. At a time when humanistic erudition formed the main preoccupation of society, and when to be illiterate was unfashionable, princes and great prelates afforded their guests the refined amusement of seeing the Menœchmi or Amphitryon, the Eunuchus or Miles Gloriosus, on their private stages. At the same time, obeying the decorative instinct of the Renaissance, they set these jewels of classical antiquity in arabesques of the richest and most fantastic workmanship. Allegorical masques, dances with musical accompaniment and pantomimic interludes, were interposed between each of the five acts, enhancing the simplicity of the Roman plays and gratifying the vulgar by an appeal to their senses. These hybrid spectacles, eminently characteristic of Italian taste in the age which produced them, contained the germs of several dramatic species, afterwards known as the Commedia Erudita, the pastoral play, the ballet, and the opera. Meanwhile Italian literature, stimulated and powerfully influenced by humanism, acquired independence; and the comedies of Plautus and Terence were translated and performed in the vernacular. During the last years of the fifteenth century these translations began to take the place of the originals upon the temporary stages of princely patrons. As yet there were no public theatres.
Such, briefly sketched, was the origin of Italian comedy; and the specific character of the Commedia Erudita, or written comedy of the sixteenth century, may be ascribed to the peculiar conditions out of which it grew. The genius of men like Ariosto, Machiavelli, and Aretino never wholly freed the form they handled from subservience to Latin models. It remained, in spite of their close imitation of contemporary life and their audacious realism, a sub-species of that dramatic art which the Romans adapted to their uses from the new comedy of the Attic stage.
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.