[134] "Comedia de Timone per el Magnifico Conte Matheo Maria Boyardo Conte de Scandiano traducta de uno Dialogo de Luciano. Stampata in Venetia per Georgio di Rusconi Milanese, del MDXVIII. adì iii di Decembre." From the play itself we learn that it must have been represented on a double stage, a lower one standing for earth and a higher one for heaven. The first three acts consist chiefly of soliloquies by Timon and conversations with celestial personages—Jove, Mercury, Wealth, Poverty. In the fourth act we are introduced to characters of Athenians—Gnatonide, Phylade, Demea, Trasycle, who serve to bring Timone's misanthropy into relief; and the fifth act brings two slaves, Syro and Parmeno, upon the scene, with a kind of underplot which is not solved at the close of the play. The whole piece must be regarded rather as a Morality than a Comedy, and the characters are allegories or types more than living persons.
[135] To determine the question of priority in such matters is neither easy nor important. Students who desire to follow the gradual steps in the development of Italian play-writing before the date of Ariosto and Machiavelli may be referred to D'Ancona's work on the Origini del Teatro.
[136] I have enlarged on these points in my Essay on Euripides (Greek Poets, Series i.). I may take occasion here to say that until Sept. 1879, after this chapter was written, I had not met with Professor Hillebrand's Études Italiennes (Paris, Franck, 1868).
[137] Exception must be made in favor of some ancient quasi-tragedies, which seem to prove that before the influences of Boccaccio and the Renaissance had penetrated the nation, they were not deficient in the impulse to dramatize history. The Eccerinis of Albertino Mussato (c. 1300), half dialogue and half narration, upon the fate of Ezzellino da Romano, composed in the style of Seneca; the dialogue upon the destruction of Cesena (1377) falsely attributed to Petrarch; Giovanni Mangini della Motta's poem on the downfall of Antonio della Scala (1387), Lodovico da Vezzano's tragedy of Jacopo Piccinino; though far from popular in their character, and but partially dramatic, were such as under happier auspices might have fostered the beginnings of the tragic theater. Later on we hear of the Fall of Granada being represented before Cardinal Riario at Rome, as well as the Ferrandus Servatus of Carlo Verradi (1492).
[138] See the first cast of Jonson's Every Man in his Humor.
[139] See above, [Part I, p. 276], where one ballad of the Border type is discussed.
[140] It is certainly significant that the Spanish share with the English the chief honors both of the ballad and the drama. The Scandinavian nations, rich in ballads, have been, through Danish poets, successful in dramatic composition. The Niebelungen Lied and the Song of Roland would, in the case of Germany and France, have to be set against the English ballads of action. But these Epics are different in character from the minstrelsy which turned passing events into poetry and bequeathed them in the form of spirit-stirring narratives to posterity. Long after the epical impulse had ceased and the British epic of Arthur had passed into the sphere of literature, the ballad minstrels continued to work with dramatic energy upon the substance of contemporary incidents.
[141] See above, [p. 54], for the distinction between the Italian Novella and the modern novel.
[142] In the same way Alfieri's biography is a tragic and Goldoni's a comic novel. The Memoirs of Casanova, which I incline to accept as genuine, might rather be cited as a string of brilliantly written Novelle.
[143] Cantù quotes the prologue of a MS. play which goes so far as to apologize for the scene not being laid at Athens (Lett. It. p. 471):