The most important, however, of the writers between Casalio and Beccari is the well-known Ferrarese novelist Giovanbattista Giraldi, surnamed Cintio, the author of the Ecatommiti, and of a number of tragedies on the classical model. The first piece of his which claims our attention is a satira entitled Egle, which was privately performed at the author's house in February, 1545, and again the following month in the presence of Duke Ercole and his brother, the Cardinal Ippolito d' Este.[[401]] The play is an avowed and solitary attempt to revive the 'satyric' drama of the Greeks, a kind of which the Cyclops of Euripides is the only extant example. The action is simple. The rural demigods, fauns, satyrs, and the like, having long sought the love of the nymphs of Diana in vain, enter, at the suggestion of Egle the mistress of Silenus, upon a plan whereby they may have the careless maidens in their power. They make a show of leaving Arcadia in high dudgeon, abandoning their families of little fauns and satyrs. On these the unwary maids take pity, and begin forthwith to dance and play with them in the woods. The deceitful divinities, however, have only hidden for a while, and when opportunity serves are placed by Egle where they may surprise the nymphs at sport. They suddenly break cover, follow and seize the flying girls, and are on the point of enjoying the success of their plot when Diana intervenes, transforming her outraged followers into trees, streams, and so forth. The metamorphosis is related by Pan himself, who returns bearing in his hand a reed, all that is left of his beloved Syrinx. Thus the piece may be regarded as a dramatization of Sannazzaro's Salices, expanded by the free introduction of mythological characters, and bears no connexion with the real nature of pastoral, the life-blood of which, whether in the idyls of Theocritus, the Arcadia of Sannazzaro, or the Aminta of Tasso, is primarily and essentially human.
The other work of Cintio with which we are here concerned, a fragment which remained in MS. till published by Carducci in 1896 as an appendix to his essays on the Aminta, may be at once pronounced the most important attempt at writing a really pastoral drama previous to Beccari's Sacrifizio. It is found with the heading 'Favola pastorale' in an autograph MS., along with several other works of the author, including Egle, but with no indication of the date of composition. The author survived till 1573, but we may reasonably suppose that the piece was written before his departure from Ferrara in 1558. It consists of what are apparently intended for two acts, headed respectively Parte prima and Parte quinta, each consisting of several scenes, though these are not distinguished. The first two form a sort of introduction, in which Cupid and Diana mutually defy one another on account of the nymph Irinda, whom the boy-god has wounded with love for Filicio. The shepherd returns her love, but finds a rival in Viaste, whose blind passion, though unreturned, will admit no discourse of reason. It is, however, ultimately discovered that Irinda and Viaste are cousins, a fact which is regarded as a sufficient reason for the infatuated swain to free himself wholly and immediately from his passion, and accept the love of the faithful Frodignisa, who has followed him throughout.[[402]] The story, which resembles that of Cazza's Erlusto, is thus of a simple order, and it is chiefly in the composition that the likeness of the play to the regular pastoral is seen. What the author intended for the middle three acts it is hard to say, since the action at the opening of the fifth is precisely at the point at which the first left it. Probably they were never written, and the author may even have abandoned his work owing to the difficulty of filling the hiatus. In both Cintio's pieces the metre is blank verse (hendecasyllabic), diversified in the case of the Egle with a rimed chorus.[[403]]
One point becomes, I think, apparent from the foregoing examination; namely, that while the fully developed pastoral owes its origin to the evolution of the eclogue as a dramatic kind, its final form was arrived at, not merely by a natural and inevitable process of growth, but as the result of direct experimenting on certain lines. The evolution, that is, was at the last conscious, not spontaneous. While up to a certain point the dramatic germs latent in the eclogue develop upon a natural line of growth, each advance being the reasonable resuit of the action of surrounding conditions upon a previous stage of evolution, there comes a time when authors seem to have felt that the form was in a state of unstable equilibrium, that it was advancing towards a final expression, which it had so far failed to find, but which each individual writer sought to realize in his work. The supposition of a theoretic preoccupation on the part of these writers is reasonable enough, considering the critical atmosphere in which the pastoral developed, and the heated controversy which soon centred round the accomplished form; and it serves at the same time to explain the liabilities of writers before Tasso to run metaphorically into blind alleys. The conscious endeavour after a stable and adequate form appears to me a determining factor in the work of Casalio, Cintio, and finally Beccari.
Of the Sacrifizio of Agostino Beccari[[404]] have already spoken at some length in the text (p. 174). From the account there given it will be seen that the plot, though from its threefold character it attains a certain degree of complexity, is in reality little more than the scenic combination of three distinct stories, each of which might well have formed the subject of an eclogue, and the whole play is thus closely connected with the dramatic simplicity of its origin.[[405]] The verse, which is blank, interspersed with lyrical passages, shows, like Cintio's, the influence of the regular drama. For the satyr we need seek no individual source; he was already as much a recognized character of the Italian pastoral as the Vice was of the English interlude. The magical element is doubtless ultimately traceable to a romantic source; it is one which almost entirely drops out of the later pastoral drama, in which the more distinctively classical oracle gradually won for itself a place. Finally, I may remark that Beccari's claim to be considered the originator of the pastoral drama was made in spite of his being perfectly well acquainted with Cintio's Egle, as a passage in the first scene of Act III testifies. There is, indeed, no reason to suppose that any writer before Carducci ever considered Cintio's play as belonging to the realm of pastoral.
Beccari's immediate successors were of no great interest in themselves, and contributed little to the development of the form. In 1556 appeared a 'comedia pastorale,' by the Piedmontese Bartolommeo Braida, a hybrid composition in octave rime, written possibly for representation at the court of Claudio of Savoy, governor of Provence and Marseilles, to whose wife it is dedicated.[[406]] This piece resembles Poliziano's play, not only in metrical structure, but in having a prologue spoken by Mercury, while by its general character it connects itself with such old-fashioned productions as Cavassico's Bellunese eclogue of 1513, and the representation reported from Bologna by Dulfo in 1496. On the other hand, the introduction of three pairs of lovers, and the incident of the nymph being bound to a tree, suggest that Braida may at least have heard of the Ferrarese Sacrifizio. The whole is a strange medley of various and incongruous elements--mythological in Mercury and Somnus; pastoral in the shepherds, Tindaro, Ruffo, Alpardo, and their loves; rustic in the clown Basso, who speaks Piedmontese in shorter measure; satirical in the wanton hermit; allegorical in the figure of Disdain; romantic in the wild man of the woods and the magic herb. Thus on the whole Braida's work represents a decided retrogression in the development of pastoral; or perhaps it may be more accurate to say that it renects the tradition of an outlying district in which that development had been retarded.
To this period likewise, if we are to believe the author, belongs a 'nova favola pastorale' entitled Calisto, by Luigi Groto, the blind littérateur of Adria, whose preposterous pastoral, Il pentimento amoroso, was produced between the Aminta and the Pastor fido. According to a note in the original edition, the piece was first represented at Adria in 1561, revived and rewritten in 1582, and first printed the following year.[[407]] It is founded on the well-known tale of the love of Zeus for Calisto, a nymph of Artemis, who by him became the mother of the Arcadians, as related by Ovid in the second book of the Metamorphoses (ll. 401, &c.). It may, therefore, so far as the subject is concerned, be classed among the mythological plays, but the author has mingled with his main theme much of the vulgar indecency of the Latin comedy as adopted in the cinquecento on to the Italian stage. The piece is composed in sdrucciolo blank verse.
With our next author, the orator Alberto Lollio, we return once more to Ferrara. In 1563 a play entitled Aretusa[[408]] was presented before Alfonso II and his brother the cardinal, by the students of law at Ferrara, at the command, it is said, of Laura Eustoccia d' Este. The verse is blank, diversified by a single sonnet, but the piece is again a hybrid of an earlier type--a love-knot solved by the discovery of consanguinity--with certain elements of Plautine comedy added. There is also extant in MS. the plot, or prose sketch, of another comedy by Lollio, entitled Galatea, on the same model as the Aretusa, but with somewhat greater complexity of construction.[[409]]
It is evident that, though in the Sacrifizio the final form of the pastoral drama had been attained, the fact was not immediately recognized. Indeed, until the seal had been set upon that form by the genius of Tasso, it must have been difficult for any one to realize what had been achieved. The form had been discovered, but it remained to prove that it was the right form, and to show its capabilities. In 1567 a return was made to the tradition of Beccari in Agostino Argenti's play Lo Sfortunato.[[410]] With this piece also, composed in blank verse with a couple of lyric songs, we have already been sufficiently concerned (p. 175). I only wish to draw attention to one point here, namely, that if Guarini's Silvio is a companion portrait to Tasso's Silvia, she in her turn is but the feminine counterpart of Argenti's Silvio. The Sfortunato stands on the threshold of the Aminta, and its performance may have suggested to Tasso the composition of his pastoral masterpiece, but it contributed little either to the evolution of the form, or to the poetic supremacy of its successor.
We have arrived at the end of the catalogue, and it is for the reader to decide whether or not I have succeeded in establishing a formal continuity between the eclogue and the pastoral drama, and so answering the most serious of Carducci's objections.