Such a public edifice as a theatre was at that time unknown in Italy. True, many princes had halls constructed in their palaces for dramatic representations, and the Olympic Academy of Vicenza erected a building for the purpose, which was completed on the designs of Palladio.
As for the dramas represented, it is easy to understand their inferiority when we know that Guarini's Pastor Fido gained a reputation not yet entirely lost, by reason not of its merit, but because of the inferiority of every dramatic production of the time.
The costumes, decorations, and mise en scène formed the main attractions, but the plays themselves loudly proclaimed the decay of literature. They possessed neither originality, invention, nor poetry. When we contemplate our own elevated and purified stage of the present period, with its bouffe, Black Crook, blondes, and brigands, how profoundly should we not pity the benighted Italians of 1585!
About this time, the first edition of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered made its appearance. Issued without the author's consent, it was both defective and incorrect. In spite of the enmity of the Grand Duke Francis and, what was more to be feared, of the opposition of the Della Cruscan Academy, the Jerusalem at once achieved an immense success—a success purely due to its beauty of diction. Contemporary criticisms of Italian poets whose names have since become immortal read strangely now. Tasso was sneered at, Ariosto's merit seriously contested, and Dante absolutely condemned.
"This poet," says Giuseppe Malatesta, a distinguished writer of that day, "has borrowed the wings of Icarus to remove himself as far as possible from the vulgar, and, by dint of searching for the sublime, he has fallen into an obscure sea of obscurities. He is both philosopher and theologian. Of the poet he has only the rhyme. To measure his hell, his purgatory, his paradise, one needs astrolabes. To understand them, one should constantly have at hand some theologian capable of commenting upon his text. He is crude and barbarous; he strives to be disgusting and obscure when it would really cost him less effort to be clear and elegant, resembling in this certain great personages who, possessed of an admirable calligraphy, nevertheless, through pure affectation, write as illegibly as possible."
THE MOTHER OF PRINCE GALITZIN.[96]
In presenting our American Catholic readers with a notice of the Life of the Princess Amelia Galitzin, it would be sufficient apology to mention that this illustrious lady was the mother of the great religious pioneer of Pennsylvania—that worthy priest whose services in the cause of Catholicity in our country have endeared his name to the American church and have kept his memory still alive in the filial love born of a new generation whose fathers he evangelized.
But even if this apostle-prince had never landed on American shores; never sacrificed an opulent position and a brilliant career, to labor as a humble missionary in the wild western forests of Pennsylvania; never indelibly engraved his name, as he has done, on that soil, now teeming with industrial and religious life, there is that in the life of the princess, his mother, which would amply recommend it to our interested attention.