Then the soldier meets his wife. She is interested, not moved. Having had to shift for herself in his absence, she cannot now break off convenient relations for sentiment. Here is interaction, even a situation, and the lines given to the man and to the woman clearly suggest it; but more than lines are needed to make it a play. So Ruzzante took this second part for the motive of his Second Dialogue. He saw the situation; he gave it some complication, and closed upon violent action; but he did not sustain the interaction of man and woman, and his third person, her senile lover, remains almost separate.
So Ruzzante’s collected pieces[50] generally show less achievement than promise. He was learning rapidly from the stage itself. Imperfect playwright at his untimely death, he was already famous as a writer and actor of “parts.” These Italian stage experiments of the 1530’s were essentially like the Elizabethan fifty years later in giving to an old field new stage values. Though they had rather a local success than any general influence, they are significant now for what they opened.
In 1586 John Lyly gave the persons of his Endymion Greek or Latin names. But the myth suggested by his title does not take shape as plot. Indeed, there is hardly any action, none that is dramatically determining. The persons are on the stage to talk, the main persons in orations, the Latin-comedy servants in repartee. Endymion’s dream is presented by a dumb show in Act II, and recounted in Act IV. The close is flatly by Cynthia’s fiat. The allegory, clearer of course to the audience than to us, seems to be both personification of qualities and suggestion of actual persons, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In both aspects it now makes a dull play duller.
Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale is as random as its title, adding rustics to classics and allegory to folklore. Not a story play, it is a collection of little shows, each rather for itself than for any sequence. The folklore material and the rustics are interesting; the play is not. That anything so shapeless could have gained the stage in 1590 is sufficient evidence of Elizabethan willingness to experiment. Within five years Shakspere found the dramatic solution of myth and pastoral, folklore and rustics, for court show in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. Forthwith Lyly’s pedantic encomium and clumsy dumb show, Peele’s jolly rustics and half-fairies, become as antiquated as the many Elizabethan gropings through the moralities and pastoral. The court show has arrived at fairyland. For this is all faery: the ancient heroic world from Boccaccio and Chaucer, and the sprites with classical names. The classical story of Pyramus and Thisbe is transmitted by rustics; and Bottom himself is translated. Through all hovers the authentic elfin minister Puck.
Midsummer Night’s Dream is a complete fusion, not only of style as Tasso’s Aminta, but also in dramatic movement. As Theseus, Puck, and Bottom, the lovers and yokels, are all conformed to the same world, so they all interact in a single sequence toward a uniting issue. Even the place is single. Such slight shifts as there may have been in the Elizabethan theater are negligible; for of all its many presentations the most convincing have stayed on a lawn before a green thicket. Midsummer Night’s Dream is a one-act play, Greek dramaturgy beyond Garnier’s or Tasso’s. But instead of saying that Shakspere conformed to the dramatic unities, we should rather say that he learned the dramatic importance of holding fairyland together. Sixteenth-century stage experience, then, as well as classical theory and imitation, opened the great drama of the seventeenth century. The experience of court shows with the feebleness of allegory, the escape of pastoral, the vitality of rustic realism, opened the way for both romantic and realistic comedy. The experience of the “histories” opened a new appeal in tragedy. For Corneille, as well as Shakspere, was a man of the stage.
Chapter VII
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY POETICS
The revival of classical Latin was promoted by manuals and discussions, and accompanied by still others directed to vernacular poetry. Though none of these ranks as a poetic in the sense of a contribution to the theory of poetry, not a few reveal or define habits of thought and taste, directions of study, literary ideals and methods. Thus their importance, far beyond their intrinsic values, is in their clues to literary preoccupations and trends, their indications for a Renaissance weather map.
1. VIDA
The ecclesiastic, Marco Girolamo Vida, addressed his three cantos of Latin hexameters De arte poetica (1527) to the Dauphin, son of Francis I, with due invocation of the Muses.