One prominent feature of this transitional epoch was the reappearance of popular forms of art and literature in Italy. The Italian provinces had retained their local characteristics with undiminished vitality through centuries of civic conflict and the dominance of humanistic culture. Now that this culture was decaying, each district and each city contributed some novelty of its own local vintage. Things which had been overgrown and screened by scholarship put forth their native vigour. A rich jungle of dialectical poetry sprouted from long-hidden roots. Men of birth and breeding began to pique themselves upon the use of their provincial language. A polite public, tired perhaps of too much polish, yielded to the charm of realism. The habits of the peasantry and artisans were transmitted to writing by educated pens. Scenic representations of a simple character, which had formed the delight of villagers from time immemorial, claimed the attention of learned coteries. Farces and morris-dances became fashionable. The buffoons and mimes and masquers, against whom the Church had fulminated in the Middle Ages, and whom the scholars of the Revival looked down upon with condescending indulgence, now lifted up their heads. Suddenly, by an imperceptible process of development, which it is impossible to trace in all its stages, Italy found herself in possession of what looked like a novel type of comedy. This improvised comedy, or Commedia dell' Arte, as we must henceforth call it, was not really new.[20] On the contrary, the elements out of which it sprang were among the oldest, most vital, most national possessions of the race. Yet it was due to the peculiar conditions of the last years of the Renaissance, to the reaction against exhausted forms of artificial literature, and to the fresh interest in dialects, that this hitherto neglected plaything of the proletariate assumed a rare and bizarre shape of beauty. The Italians, still capable of exquisite artistic creation, had just now lost their liking for the Commedia Erudita. Public theatres were beginning to be built. These naturally introduced a more popular tone into the drama. Spectacles were adapted to the taste of a mixed audience. Improvised comedy succeeded to the heritage of written comedy. This younger daughter of Thalia invested the motley characters and masks of her invention with the cast-off mantle of her elder sister. She entered the sphere of the fine arts by continuing the tradition of Italian comedy upon an altered system, and with novel elements of humour.

To talk of younger and elder with reference to these two types of comedy involves some confusion of ideas. Nothing is more significant of Italy than the antiquity and complexity of all the forms of art which flourished there. The Commedia Erudita, as we have seen, was derived from Latin, and through Latin from Athenian sources. The Commedia dell' Arte had an even longer pedigree than this. In a powerfully mimetic race like the Italians, the rudiments out of which it was constructed were, as we shall see, indigenous. Before Rome rose upon the Tiber, the comedy of masks and improvisation had, in some shape or other, amused the people. The fall of the Empire, the formation of the Christian polity, the centuries of the Middle Ages, the culture of the Renaissance, did not extirpate it. Though we know but little of its history during that long period, there is every reason to believe that the elements which gave it individuality survived all changes. To this topic I shall have to return. For the present, it is enough to point out that the blending of the vulgar improvised comedy of vintage festivals and market-places with what remained of polite written comedy after the middle of the sixteenth century, determined the Commedia dell' Arte, considered as a specific and strongly marked type of dramatic art. In this sense, and in this sense only, it may be denominated the younger sister of the Commedia Erudita.

IV.

Farces formed a popular species of entertainment all through the years of the Renaissance. At Naples they had the name of Coviole, at Florence of Farse. The playwright Cecchi has left us several specimens of the written Farsa, together with a general description of the type, which proves it to have been not unlike the earliest of our own romantic plays.[21] A company formed itself at Siena, called I Rozzi, for the representation of rustic farces. Composed of artisans and mechanics, this company acquired such celebrity that Leo X. invited them in 1517 to the Vatican; and their influence must be reckoned in the evolution of the new Italian drama. A Paduan actor and playwright also deserves mention here. Angelo Beolco, born in 1502, made himself known upon the stage as Il Ruzzante, or the Frolic. He wrote rustic comedies with simple plots, distinguished by their realistic humour and their strong incisive pathos; and created the ideal character of the peasant or Il Villano. Beolco formed a school in the Venetian provinces, and died in 1542.[22]

Such are some of the traces we possess of a dramatic type in growth, which, after the middle of the sixteenth century, obtained predominance in Italy. It is not possible, however, for the critical historian to explain the several steps whereby the Commedia dell' Arte arrived at maturity. Like Harlequin, bounding from the sides and capering before the footlights, this new species makes a sudden apparition. We find it in full energy, possessing the public theatres and claiming the attention of all classes, at the close of the cinque cento. Described briefly, this comedy trusted to the improvisatory talent of trained actors and made use of masks. Companies were formed under the direction of a Capocomico, who took his name from one of the masks. Their stock in trade was a collection of plays in outline, scenari or plats (to use an old English phrase),[23] which the troupe studied under the direction of their leader. The development of the intrigue by dialogue and action was left to the native wit of the several players, and the performance varied according to the personal qualities of the members who composed the company. The masks or fixed characters were derived from all provinces of Italy, and represented types peculiar to each district.[24] Venice contributed Pantalone; Bologna lent the Dottore; Bergamo supplied the two Zanni—Arlecchino and Brighella; Naples gave Pulcinella, Tartaglia, and the Captain. Tuscany made up the characters of the comedy with the soubrette and lovers. These Tuscan personages were unmasked and spoke Florentine Italian.[25] The masks reproduced their native dialects.[26] Like Harlequin in his coat of many colours, the Commedia dell' Arte wore motley. Displacing the literary drama, which reduced contemporary life in Italy to the conventional standard of classical Rome or Athens, this new drama brought into salience local oddities and notes of provincial eccentricity. The masks were permanent; yet they admitted of genial handling, since these parts in the comedy were rarely written, and every fresh sustainer of a mask had the opportunity of impressing his own individuality upon the type he represented.[27] In this way, as will soon appear, each mask multiplied and made a hundred. Plasticity and adaptability were the essential qualities of a dramatic species which relied on improvisation, and had only the unwritten code of immemorial tradition.

V.

At this point it is necessary to inquire into the relation between the modern Italian Commedia dell' Arte and the old Italian comedy of mimes and exodia. Much has been written, with meagre and dubious results, about the origins of the Latin drama. One thing, however, appears certain, after shaking the dust from ponderous tomes of erudition. The Romans, like the modern Italians, had their Commedia Erudita and Commedia dell' Arte. Of the two species, in classical times as afterwards, the Commedia dell' Arte was indigenous and popular, the Commedia Erudita derived and literary. The latter, whether it affected Greek manners, as in the so-called Fabula palliata, or Roman manners, as in the so-called Fabula togata, remained in the hands of scholarly authors and serious actors (histriones). The former had its natural origin in popular habits, and only at a comparatively late period submitted to regular artistic treatment. It was represented by masked buffoons, Sanniones, Planipedes, Stupidi, and so forth. We hear of Osci ludi and Fescennini versus, the former pointing to Campania and the vintage, the latter to Etruria and village sports.[28] The Satura, which seems to have been an offshoot from the Fescennina, corresponded pretty closely to what we now call farce, and eventually developed into the exodia or hors d'œuvre of the later Roman theatre.[29] Out of these indigenous elements, but with special relation to the Osci ludi, grew a literary form of comedy which obtained the name of Atellana. It is supposed to have originated in the Oscan city of Atella, close to Acerra, Pulcinella's birthplace. In all these native forms of drama, dialects were spoken and masks were used; and this is a main point of connection between them and the modern Italian Commedia dell' Arte. Another feature in common is the rank realism and open obscenity which marked the humours of both species.

Among the ancient Roman masks four types are known to us by name—Maccus, a Protean fool or Harlequin; Bucco, a garrulous clown or blockhead; Pappus, a miserly, amorous, befooled old man; Dossenus, a moralising charlatan. We also hear of the Stupidus and Morio, Manducus, a notable glutton, and the Sanniones, so called possibly from their grin.

Further familiarity with the modern Commedia dell' Arte will make it clear how tempting it is to conjecture a direct transmission of these Roman masks from ancient to modern times. Maccus and Bucco bear a strong resemblance to the two Zanni. The very word Zanni seems to suggest Sanniones; although it is probably derived from the Bergamasque name for a varlet—Jack; Zanni being a contraction of Giovanni. Pappus looks uncommonly like Pantalone, and Dossenus like the Dottore. The Stupidus has an air of our clown or Mezzettino or Il Villano. Manducus might be any glutton with a huge pair of champing jaws. Yet nothing could be more uncritical than to assume that the Italian masks of the sixteenth century A.D. boasted an uninterrupted descent from the Roman masks of the fifth century B.C. That assumption closes our eyes to a far more interesting aspect of the phenomenon. The fact seems to be that ancient and modern Italy possessed the same mimetic faculty and used it in the same fashion. The peasants of modern Tuscany indulged in their Fescennine jibes, stained themselves with wine-lees, and jumped through bonfires, like their most remote ancestors.[30] The grape-gatherers of modern Nola and Capua ridiculed their neighbours with obscene jests, and pranked themselves in travesty, like the earliest Oscans or the first colonists from Hellas.[31] Out of the same persistent habits emerged the same kind of native drama; and just as the Atellanæ of ancient Rome eventually brought the comedy of the proletariate upon the public stage in cities, so at the close of the sixteenth century the Commedia dell' Arte worked up the rudiments of popular farce and satire into a new form which delighted Europe for two hundred years.

Many details derived from the Commedia Erudita rendered the resemblance between the modern improvised drama and the vernacular comedy of ancient Rome superficially striking. The conventional characters of Plautus and Terence, the senex, the servus, the meretrix, the mango, the ancilla, the miles gloriosus, and the parasitus reappeared. In truth, this peculiar and highly complex hybrid combined strains of manifold varieties. Upon the wild and native briar, which in former times produced the Osci ludi, Fescennini versus, and Satura, and which went on living its own natural life beneath the drums and tramplings of so many conquests, was now grafted the cultivated rose of the Commedia Erudita. This, in its turn, contained elements of the Fabula palliata and togata. The result was a species eminently characteristic of sixteenth-century Italy, and similar to the Atellan farces of the Romans.