But, when we quit material to think of form, the parallel fails. De Quincey's further description of our dramas, "scenically grouped, draped, and gorgeously colored," is highly inapplicable to the brief, careless, almost pedestrian prose of the Novelle. In spite of their indescribable wealth of subject-matter, in spite of those inexhaustible stores of plots and situations, characters and motives, which have made them a mine for playwrights in succeeding ages, they rarely rise to the height of poetry, nor are they ever dramas. The artistic limitations of the Italian Novelle are among the most interesting phenomena presented by the history of literature.

CHAPTER XI.

THE DRAMA.

First attempts at Secular Drama—The Orfeo and Timone—General Character of Italian Plays—Court Pageants and Comedies borrowed from the Latin—Conditions under which a National Drama is formed—Their absence in Italy—Lack of Tragic Genius—Eminently Tragic Material in Italian History—The Use made of this by English Playwrights—The Ballad and the Drama—The Humanistic Bias in Italy—Parallels between Greek and Italian Life—Il Lasca's Critique of the Latinizing Playwrights—The Sofonisba of Trissino—Rucellai's Rosmunda—Sperone's Canace—Giraldi's Orbecche—Dolce's Marianna—Transcripts from the Greek Tragedians and Seneca—General Character of Italian Tragedies—Sources of their Failure—Influence of Plautus and Terence over Comedy—Latin Comedies acted at Florence, Rome, Ferrara—Translations of Latin Comedies—Manner of Representation at Court—Want of Permanent Theaters—Bibbiena's Calandra—Leo X. and Comedy at Rome—Ariosto's Treatment of his Latin Models—The Cassaria, Suppositi, Lena, Negromante, Scolastica—Qualities of Ariosto's Comedies—Machiavelli's Plays—The Commedia in Prosa—Fra Alberigo and Margherita—The Clizia—Its Humor—The Mandragola—Its sinister Philosophy—Conditions under which it was Composed—Aretino disengages Comedy from Latin Rules—His Point of View—The Cortegiana, Marescalco, Talanta—Italy had innumerable Comedies, but no great Comic Art—General Character of the Commedia Erudita—Its fixed Personages—Gelli, Firenzuola, Cecchi, Ambra, Il Lasca—The Farsa—Conclusion on the Moral Aspects of Italian Comedy.

Contemporaneously with the Roman Epic, the Drama began to be a work of studied art in Italy. Boiardo by his Timone and Poliziano by his Orfeo gave the earliest specimens at Ferrara and Mantua of secular plays written in the vulgar tongue. The Timone must have been composed before 1494, the date of Boiardo's death; and we have already seen that the Orfeo was in all probability represented in 1472. It is significant that the two poets who were mainly instrumental in effecting a revival of Italian poetry, should have tried their hands at two species of composition for the stage. In the Orfeo we find a direct outgrowth from the Sacre Rappresentazioni. The form of the Florentine religious show is adapted with very little alteration to a pagan story. In substance the Orfeo is a pastoral melodrama with a tragic climax. Boiardo in the Timone followed a different direction. The subject is borrowed from Lucian, who speaks the prologue, as Gower prologizes in the Pericles of Shakspere. The comedy aims at regularity of structure, and is written in terza rima. Yet the chief character leaves the stage before the end of the fifth act, and the conclusion is narrated by an allegorical personage, Lo Ausilio.[134]

These plays, though generally considered to have been the first attempts at secular Italian dramatic poetry, were by no means the earliest in date, if we admit the Latin plays of scholars.[135] Besides some tragedies, which will afterwards be mentioned, it is enough here to cite the Philogenia of Ugolino Pisani (Parma, 1430), the Philodoxius of Alberti, the Polissena of Leonardo Bruni, and the Progne of Gregorio Corrado. It is therefore a fact that, in addition to religious dramas in the mother tongue, the Italians from an early period turned their attention to dramatic composition. Still the drama never flourished at any time in Italy as a form of poetry indigenous and national. It did not succeed in freeing itself from classical imitation on the one hand, or on the other from the hampering adjuncts of Court-pageants and costly entertainments. Why the Italians failed to develop a national theater, is a question easier to ask than to answer. The attempt to solve this problem will, however, serve to throw some light upon their intellectual conditions at the height of the Renaissance.

Plays in Italy at this period were either religious Feste of the kind peculiar to Florence, or Masks at Court, or Comedies and Tragedies imitated by men of learning from classical models, or, lastly, Pastorals combining the scenic attractions of the Mask with the action of a regular drama. None of these five species can be called in a true sense popular; nor were they addressed by their authors to the masses of the people. Performed in private by pious confraternities or erudite academies, or exhibited on state occasions in the halls of princely palaces, they were not an expression of the national genius but a highly-cultivated form of aristocratic luxury. When Heywood in his prologue to the Challenge for Beauty wrote:

Those [i.e. plays] that frequent are
In Italy or France, even in these days,
Compared with ours, are rather jigs than plays: