A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 2 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Tragedy was paralysed by the influence of the Greek models, which the sixteenth century writers made it their chief aim to copy. The servility of imitation, which was pernicious in every department of literature, was fatal to that, which above all others needs to be the expression of life, when it strove to force it into the forms of a social existence long since dead. A very cursory examination of the "Sophonisba" of Trissino, of the "Rosmonda" and the "Orestes" of Rucellai, or of the more celebrated "Canacci" of Speroni—works which attained a higher celebrity in their time than most of their contemporaries or followers—will be sufficient to show why such productions could never be to the Italians what the Elizabethan dramatic literature has been to us.

As to comedy, Tiraboschi[136] complains that the comic writers and actors of that period "strove to obtain that applause which they had no hope of so easily gaining in any other way, by a brazen–faced impudence of words, gestures, and action; so that in those free and dissolute times, it was too much the case that a comedy was the more applauded the more filthy it was." And Giglio Gregorio Giraldi (Olympia Morata's gouty old friend) exclaims in one of his dialogues:[137] "O tempora! O mores! Every abomination is again reproduced upon the stage. Everywhere stories are represented, which the general feeling of the Christian world had rejected, banished, and abolished. And these are now recalled and placed upon the stage by prelates and bishops, not to speak of princes!" But a more cogent reason why these indecent productions, as well as those not deserving of condemnation on this ground, could never have taken any real hold on the national mind, may be found in worthy Tiraboschi's notion of what was necessary to make such works all that could be wished.

ITALIAN NOTION OF COMEDY.

"Comedy," says he,[138] "the personages of which are for the most part plebeian, or at least of private station, and the action of which is generally familiar and domestic in its character, is of its own nature low and trivial. And if it is not sustained by a certain elegance of style—which is all the more difficult to attain, in that it must be natural—and by an ingenious, and at the same time probable plot, abounding in movement and surprising turns, it altogether falls to earth; and it is almost impossible to endure either the representation or the perusal of it."

The learned historian of Italian literature does not seem to have the remotest suspicion, that a large and deep knowledge of human nature, that the wide and penetrating observation of its similitudes and dissimilitudes, its contrasts, inconsistencies, and analogies, which supply wit with its material, and the genial power of sympathising with its thousand moods, which generates humour, may be either necessary or desirable to a comic writer. If Tiraboschi may be accepted as spokesman for his countrymen in this matter, we have an abundantly sufficient explanation of the small share, which the Muses of the sock and buskin have had in forming that portion of the national mind which takes its shape from the national literature, and to which their sisters of the Nine have notably contributed.

But even comedy, though not in the same degree as tragedy, laboured under the additional disqualification inflicted on it by the prevailing mania for classical imitation. In this case the model worked from was Latin instead of Greek, and generally rather Plautus than Terence. An instance worthy of note may be cited in the "Sporta" or "Money–bag" of Giambattista Gelli, the celebrated Florentine shoemaker, who became Consul of the Academy of Florence. In the prologue to this comedy he urges, in excuse for all shortcomings, that "it is surely a wonder that he has accomplished so much, having all day long to ply scissors and needle, which, womanly tools though they be, were never, as far as his reading tells him, taken in hand by the Muses." Here we have a man of the people, from whom some original conceptions drawn from native popular life might have been expected. But the shoemaker was as classical as his superiors; and his "Sporta" is little more than a disguisement of Plautus in Florentine costume.

Macchiavelli's well known comedy, the "Mandragola," is the most notable exception to what has been said of the plays of Isabella Andreini's day. A genuine type of character altogether belonging to his own time, and full of the elements of high comedy, was embodied in Frà Timoteo, the tartuffe monk, by the daring Secretary. But it is an exception, which but proves the rule.

What then are the sort of characters, in which we are to suppose that Isabella produced an effect so extraordinary? The testimonies of the extent of her power over her audiences are abundant. Padua, her native city, enrolled her at an early age in the list of the "Intenti" academicians. Among these "Intent" votaries of literature, her nickname, according to the puerile practice of such bodies, was "l'Accesa"—"the Inflamed one." The company of comedians, to which she, and her husband Francesco Andreini, also an actor and writer, belonged, were called the "Gelosi"—"Jealous ones." So that Isabella's full style and titles, as they stand in the title pages of her works, run thus; "Isabella Andreini, Comica Gelosa, Accademica Intenta, detta l'Accesa."

IN FRANCE.