[153] It may here be remarked that though the scholarly playwrights of the Renaissance paid great attention to Aristotle's Poetics, and made a conscientious study of some Greek plays, especially the Antigone, the Œdipus Tyrannus, the Phœnissæ, and the Iphigenia in Tauris, they held the uncritical opinion, openly expressed by Giraldi, that Seneca had improved the form of the Greek drama. Their worst faults of construction, interminable monologues, dialogues between heroines and confidantes, dry choric dissertations, and rhetorical declamations are due to the preference for Seneca. The more we study Italian literature in the sixteenth century, the more we are compelled to acknowledge that humanism and all its consequences were a revival of Latin culture, only slightly tinctured with the simpler and purer influences of the Greeks. Latin poetry had the fatal attraction of facility. It was, moreover, itself composite and derivatory, like the literature of the new age. We may profitably illustrate the attitude of the Italian critics by Sidney's eulogy of Gorboduc: "full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality which it doth most delightfully teach and so obtain the very end of Poesy."

[154] D'Ancona (Origini del Teatro, vol. ii. sec. xxxix.) may be consulted upon the attempts to secularize the Sacre Rappresentazioni which preceded the revival of classical comedy.

[155] Leo X., with a Medici's true sympathy for plebeian literature added to his own coarse sense of fun, patronized the farces of the Sienese Company called Rozzi. Had his influence lasted, had there been any one to continue the traditions of his Court at Rome, it is not impossible that a more natural comedy, as distinguished from the Commedia erudita, might have been produced by this fashionable patronage of popular dramatic art.

[156] See D'Ancona, Or. del Teatro, vol. ii. p. 201.

[157] Sabellico, quoted by Tiraboschi, says of him: "primorum antistitum atriis suo theatro usus, in quibus Plauti, Terentii, recentiorum etiam quædam agerentur fabulæ, quas ipse honestos adolescentes et docuit et agentibus præfuit."

[158] See the letter of Sulpizio da Veroli to Raffaello Riario, quoted by Tiraboschi; "eamdemque, postquam in Hadriani mole Divo Innocentio spectante est acta, rursus inter tuos penates, tamquam in media Circi cavea, toto consessu umbraculis tecto, admisso populo, et pluribus tui ordinis spectatoribus honorifice excepisti. Tu etiam primus picturatæ scenæ faciem, quum Pomponiam comœdiam agerent, nostro sæculo ostendisti."

[159] See Lucrezia Borgia, by Gregorovius (Stuttgart, 1874), vol. i. p. 201.

[160] Nicolò was a descendant of the princely house of Correggio. He married Cassandra, daughter of Bartolommeo Colleoni. His Cefalo was a mixed composition resembling the Sacre Rappresentazioni in structure. In the Prologue he says:

Requiret autem nullus hic Comœdiæ
Leges ut observentur, aut Tragœdiæ;
Agenda nempe est historia, non fabula.

See D'Ancona, op. cit. vol. 2, pp. 143-146, 155.