We have now passed in review the main classes of non-dramatic pastoral both abroad and in this country. Such preliminary survey was necessary in order to obtain an idea of the history and nature of pastoral composition in general. It was further rendered imperative by more particular considerations which will appear in the course of the present chapter, for we shall find that the pastoral drama comes into being, not through the infusion of the Arcadian ideal into pre-existing dramatic forms, but through the actual evolution of a new dramatic form from the pre-existing non-dramatic pastoral.
It is time to retrace our steps and to pick up the thread which we dropped in a former chapter, the development, namely, of the vernacular eclogue in Italy. If in so doing we are forced to enter at greater length upon the discussion of individual works, we shall find ample excuse, not only in their intrinsic merit, but likewise in their more direct bearing upon what is after all the main subject of this volume. The pastoral drama of Italy is the immediate progenitor of that of England. Further, it might be pleaded that special interest attaches to the Arcadian pastoral as the only dramatic form of conspicuous vitality for which Italy is the crediter of European letters.
The history of the rise of the pastoral drama in Italy is a complicated subject, and one not altogether free from obscurity. Many forces were at work determining the development of the form, and these it is difficult so to present as at once to leave a clear impression and yet not to allow any one element to usurp an importance it does not in reality possess. Any account which gives a specious appearance of simplicity to the case should be mistrusted. That I have been altogether successful in my treatment I can hardly hope, but at least the method followed has not been hastily adopted. I propose to consider, first of all and apart from the rest, the early mythological drama, which while exercising a marked influence over the spirit of the later pastoral can in no way be regarded as its origin. Next, I shall trace the evolution of the pastoral drama proper from its germ in the non-dramatic eclogue, by way of the ecloghe rappresentative, and treat incidentally the allied rustic shows, which form a class apart from the main line of development. Lastly, I shall have to say a few words concerning the early pastoral plays by Beccari and others before turning to the masterpieces of Tasso and Guarini, the consideration of which will occupy the chief part of this chapter[152].
The class of productions known as mythological plays, which powerfully influenced the character of the pastoral drama, sprang from the union of classical tradition with the machinery of native religious representations, in Poliziano's Favola d' Orfeo. This was the first non-religious play in the vernacular, and its dependence on the earlier religious drama is striking. Indeed, the blending of medieval and classical forms and conventions may be traced throughout the early secular drama of Italy. Boiardo's Timone, a play written at some unknown date previous to 1494, preserves, in spite of its classical models, much of the allegorical character of the morality, and was undoubtedly acted on a stage comprising two levels, the upper representing heaven in which Jove sat enthroned on the seat of Adonai. The same scenic arrangement may well have been used in the Orfeo, the lower stage representing Hades[153]; while Niccolò da Correggio's Cefalo was evidently acted on a polyscenic stage, the actors passing in view of the audience from one part to another[154]. At a yet earlier period Italian writers in the learned tongue had taken as the subjects of their plays stories from classical legend and myth, and among these we find not only recognized tragedy themes such as the rape of Polyxena dramatized by Lionardo Bruni, but tales such as that of Progne put on the stage by Gregorio Corrado, both of which preceded by many years the work of Politian and Correggio.
The earliest secular play in Italian is, then, nothing but a sacra rappresentazione on a pagan theme, a fact which was probably clearly recognized when, in the early editions from 1494 onwards, the piece was described as the 'festa di Orpheo[155].' It was written in 1471, when Poliziano was about seventeen, and we learn from the author's epistle prefixed to the printed edition that ît was composed in the short space of two days for representation before Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua. From the same epistle we learn that the author desired, or at least assumed the attitude of desiring, that his composition should share the fate of the ill-fashioned Lacedaemonian children; 'Cognoscendo questa mia figliuola essere di qualità da fare più tosto al suo padre vergogna che onore; e più tosto atta a dargli malinconia che allegrezza.' The favola as originally put forth continued to be reprinted without alteration, till 1776, when Ireneo Affò published the Orphei Tragoedia from a collation of two manuscripts. This differs in various respects from the printed version, among others in being divided, short as it is, into five acts, headed respectively 'Pastorale,' 'Ninfale,' 'Eroico,' 'Negromantico,' and 'Baccanale.' It is now known to represent a revision of the piece made, probably by Antonio Tebaldeo, for representation at Ferrara, and in it much of the popular and topical element has been eliminated. The action of the piece is based in a general manner upon the story given by Ovid in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses.
The performance begins with a prologue by Mercury which is nothing but a short argument of the whole plot. 'Mercurio annunzia la festa' is the superscription in the original, evidently suggested by the appearance of 'un messo di Dio' with which the religious rappresentazioni usually open. At the end of this prologue a shepherd appears and finishes the second octave with the couplet:
State attenti, brigata; buono augurio;
Poi che di cielo in terra vien Mercurio.
In the Ferrarese revision these stanzas appear as 'Argomento' without mention of Mercury, while for the above lines are substituted the astonishing doggerel:
Or stia ciascuno a tutti gli atti intento,
Che cinque sono; e questo è l' argomento.
Thereupon (beginning Act I of the revision) enters Mopso, an old shepherd, meeting Aristeo, a youthful one, with his herdsman Tirsi. Mopso asks whether his white calf has been seen, and Aristeo, who fancies he has heard a lowing from beyond the hill, sends his boy to see. In the meanwhile he detains Mopso with an account of his love for a nymph he met the day before, and sings a canzona:
Ch' i' so che la mia ninfa il canto agogna[156].
It runs on the familiar themes of love: 'Di doman non c' è certezza.'
Digli, zampogna mia, come via fugge
Con gli anni insieme la bellezza snella;
E digli come il tempo ne distrugge,
Ne l' età persa mai si rinovella;
Digli che sappi usar sua forma bella,
Che sempre mai non son rose e viole...
Udite, selve, mie dolci parole,
Poi che la ninfa mia udir non vole.
The boy Tirsi now returns, having with much trouble driven the strayed calf back to the herd, and narrates how he saw an unknown nymph of wondrous beauty gathering flowers about the hill. Aristeo recognizes from this description the object of his love, and, leaving Mopso and Tirsi to shake their heads over his midsummer madness, goes off to find her.
So far we might be reading one of the ecloghe rappresentative which we shall have to consider shortly, but of which the earliest known examples cannot well be less than ten or twelve years later than Poliziano's play. With the exception, indeed, of one or two in Boccaccio's Ameto, it is doubtful whether any vernacular eclogues had appeared at the time. The character of Tirsi belongs to rustic tradition, and must be an experiment contemporary with, if not prior to, Lorenzo's Nencia. The portion before the canzone is in terza rima; that after it, like the prologue, in octaves.
The original proceeds without break to the song of Aristeo as he pursues the flying Euridice (Act II in the revision):
Poi che 'l pregar non vale,
E tu via ti dilegui,
El convien ch' io ti segui.
Porgimi, Amor, porgimi or le tue ale.
While Aristeo is following Euridice, Orfeo enters upon the scene with a Latin ode in Sapphic metre in honour of Cardinal Gonzaga. A note informs us that this was originally sung by 'Messer Braccio Ugolino, attore di detta persona d' Orfeo.' In place of this ode the revised text contains a long 'Coro delle Driadi,' with two speeches in terza rima by the choragus, announcing and lamenting the death of Euridice, who as she fled from Aristeo has been stung in the foot by a serpent. After this the news of her death is reported to Orfeo--by a shepherd in the original, by a dryad in the revised version. That the substitution of the chorus for the Sapphic ode is an improvement from the poetic point of view will hardly be denied, yet this improvement has been attained at the cost of some dramatic sacrifice. In the original Orfeo is introduced naturally enough in his character of supreme poet and musician to do honour to the occasion, and it is only after he has been on the stage some time that the news of Euridice's death is brought. In the revision he is merely introduced for the purpose of being informed of his wife's death--he has hardly been so much as mentioned before. He thus loses the slight opportunity previously afforded him of presenting a dramatic individuality apart from the very essence of his tragedy.
The announcement to Orfeo of Euridice's death begins the third act of the revised text, which is amplified at this point by the introduction of a satyr Mnesillo, who acts as chorus to Orfeo's lament. The character of a friendly satyr is interesting in view of the role commonly assigned to his species in pastoral.
After this we have in the original the direction 'Orfeo cantando giugne all' Inferno,' while in the revision there is again a new act, the fourth. Symonds pointed out that the merits of the piece are less dramatic than lyrical, and that fortunately the central scene was one in which the situation was capable of lyrical expression. The pleading of Orfeo before the gates of Hades and at the throne of Pluto forms the lyrical kernel of the play, and gives it its poetic value. The bard appears before the iron-bound portals of the nether world, and the pains of hell surcease. 'Who is he?' asks Pluto--
Chi è costui che con sì dolce nota
Muove l' abisso, e con l' ornata cetra?
Io veggo ferma d' Ission la rota,...
Nè più P acqua di Tantalo s' arretra;
E veggo Cerber con tre bocche intente,
E le furie acquietar il suo lamento.
At length he stands before Pluto's throne, the seat of the God of the sacre rappresentazioni, the rugged rock-seat surrounded by the monstrous demons of Signorelli's tondo[157]. Here in presence of the grim ravisher and of his pale consort, in whom the passionate pleading of the Thracian bard stirs long-forgotten memories of spring and of the plains of Enna, Orfeo's song receives adequate expression. It is closely imitated from the corresponding passage in Ovid, but the lyrical perfection and passionate crescendo of the stanzas are Poliziano's own. Addressing Pluto, Orfeo discovers the object of his quest:
Non per Cerber legar fo questa via,
Ma solamente per la donna mia.
May not love penetrate even the forbidden bounds of hell?--
se memoria alcuna in voi si serba
Del vostro celebrato antico amore,
Se la vecchia rapina a mente avete,
Euridice mia bella mi rendete.
Why should death grudge the few years at most which complete the span of human life?--
Ogni cosa nel fine a voi ritorna;
Ogni vita mortal quaggiù ricade:
Quanto cerchia la luna con sue corna
Convien che arrivi alle vostre contrade--
or why reap amid the unmellowed corn?--
Così la ninfa mia per voi si serba,
Quando sua morte gli darà natura.
Or la tenera vite e l' uva acerba
Tagliata avete con la falce dura.Chi è che mieta la sementa in erba
E non aspetti ch' ella sia matura?
Dunque rendete a me la mia speranza:
Io non vel chieggio in don, questa è prestanza.
Next he invokes the pity of the stern god by the name of Chaos whence the world had birth, and by the dread rivers of the nether world, by Styx and Acheron: 'E pel sonante ardor di Flegetonte'; and lastly, turning to 'the faery-queen Proserpina,'
Pel pome che a te già, Regina, piacque,
Quando lasciasti pria nostro orizzonte.
E se pur me la niega iniqua sorte,
Io no vo' su tornar, ma chieggio morte![158]
Hell itself relents, and, as Boccaccio had written,
forse lieta gli rendeo
La cercata Euridice a condizione--
the condition being that he shall not turn to behold her before attaining once again to the land of the living. The condition, of course, is not fulfilled. Orfeo seeks to clasp 'his half regain'd Eurydice,' with the triumphant cry of Ovid holding the conquered Corinna in his arms:
Ite triumphales circum mea tempora lauri.
Vicimus: Eurydice reddita vita mihi est.
Haec est praecipuo Victoria digna triumpho.
Hue ades, o cura parte triumphe mea[159].
He turns, and his unsubstantial love sinks back into the realm of shadows with the cry:
Oimè che 'I troppo amore
Ci ha disfatti ambe dua.
Ecco ch' io ti son tolta a gran furore,
Nè sono ormai più tua.Ben tendo a te le braccia; ma non vale, Che indietro son tirata. Orfeo mio, vale.
As he would follow her once more a fury bars the road.
Desperate of his love, the bard now forswears for ever the company of women (Act V of the revised text).
Da qui innanzi vo corre i fior novelli ...
Ouesto è più dolce e più soave amore;
Non sia chi mai di donna mi favelli,
Poi che morta è colei ch' ebbe il mio core.
Now that she is dead, what faith abides in woman?--
Quanto è misero l' uom che cangia voglia
Per donna, o mai per lei s' allegra, o duole!...
Che sempre è più leggier ch' al vento foglia,
E mille volte il di vuole e disvuole.
Segue chi fugge; a chi la vuol, s' asconde,
E vanne e vien come alla riva l' onde.
The cry wrung from him by his grief anticipates the cynical philosophy of later pastorals. Upon this the scene is invaded by 'The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals,' eager to avenge the insult offered to their sex[160]. They drive the poet out, and presently returning in triumph with his 'gory visage,' break out into the celebrated chorus 'full of the swift fierce spirit of the god.' This gained considerably by revision, and in the later text runs as follows:
Ciascun segua, o Bacco, te;
Bacco, Bacco, oè oè.
Di corimbi e di verd' edere
Cinto il capo abbiam così
Per servirti a tuo richiedere
Festeggiando notte e dì.
Ognun beva: Bacco è quì;
E lasciate here a me.
Ciascun segua, ec.Io ho vuoto già il mio corno:
Porgi quel cantaro in qua.
Questo monte gira intorno,
O 'l cervello a cerchio va:
Ognun corra in qua o in là,
Come vede fare a me.
Ciascun segua, ec.Io mi moro già di sonno:
Sono io ebra o sì o no?
Più star dritti i piè non ponno.
Voi siet' ebri, ch' io lo so;
Ognun faccia com' io fo;
Ognun succe come me.
Ciascun segua, ec.Ognun gridi Bacco, Bacco,
E poi cacci del vin giù;
Poi col sonno farem fiacco,
Bevi tu e tu e tu.
Io non posso ballar più;
Ognun gridi Evoè.[161]
Ciascun segua, o Bacco, te;
Bacco, Bacco, oè oè.
Lyrical beauty rather than dramatic power was, it has already been remarked, Poliziano's aim and achievement. The want of characterization in the hero, the insignificance of the part allotted to Euridice, the total inadequacy of the tragic climax, measure the author's power as a dramatist. It is the lyrical passages--Aristeo's song, Orfeo's impassioned pleading, the bacchanalian dance chorus--that supply the firm supports of art upon which rests the slight fabric of the play.
The same simplicity of construction, a simplicity in nature rather narrative than dramatic, characterizes Niccolò da Correggio's Cefalo. The play was represented in state in the great courtyard of the ducal palace at Ferrara, on the occasion of the marriage of Lucrezia d' Este with Annibale Bentivogli, on January 21, 1487[162]. Like the Orfeo, the piece exhibits traces of its origin in the religious shows, though, unlike the original draft of Poliziano's play, it is divided into five acts each of some length, and is provided with regular choruses on the classical model. In spite of its inferiority to the Orfeo in lyric power and its possibly even greater deficiency from a dramatic point of view, it will be worth while giving some account of the piece in order to get as clear an idea as possible of the nature and limitations of the mythological drama, and also because it has never, I believe, been reprinted in modern times, and is in consequence practically unknown to English readers.
The author, a descendant of the princely house of Correggio, was born about 1450, and married the daughter of the famous condottiere Bartolommeo Colleoni. He lived for some years at Milan at the court of Lodovico Sforza; later he migrated to that of the Estensi. In 1493 he sent an allegorical eclogue to Isabella Gonzaga at Mantua, which may possibly have been represented, though we have no note of the fact, and the poem itself has perished[163]. He died in 1508.
After a prologue which resembles that of the Orfeo in giving an argument of the whole piece, the first act opens with a scene in which Aurora seeks the love of Cefalo. Offended at finding her advances repulsed, the goddess hints that the wife to whom Cefalo is so careful of his faith is, for her part, more free of her favours; and upon Cefalo indignantly refusing credence to the slander, suggests that he should himself in disguise make trial of her fidelity. This the unfortunate youth resolves to do. He approaches Procri in the habit of a merchant, with goods for sale, and takes the opportunity thus afforded of declaring his love. She turns to fly, but the pretended passion of his suit stays her, and she is brought to lend an ear to his cunning. He retails the commonplaces of the despairing lover:
Deh, non fuggire, e non si altiera in vista;
Odime alquanto, e scolta i preghi mei.
Che fama mai per crudeltà se acquista?
Bellissima sei pur, cruda non dei.
Non sai che Amor non vol che se resista
A colpi soi? così vinto mi dei
Subito ch' io ti viddi; eh, non fuggire,
Forza non ti farò; deh, stammi audire.
Not Jove or Phoebus he to assume strange shapes for her love; he is but her slave, and can but offer his pedlar's pack; but he knows of hidden treasure in the earth, and hers, too, shall be vesture of the fairest. After gold and soft raiment comes the trump card of the seducer--secrecy:
Cosa secreta mai non se riprende;
El tempo che si perde mai non torna;
Qui non serai veduta, or che se attende
Quel se ha a dolere, che al suo ben sogiorna.
Secreto è il loco, el sol pur non vi splende;
Bella sei tu, sol manca che sii adorna
Di veste come io intendo ultra il tesoro.
Deh, non mi tener più; vedi ch' io moro.
She is almost won; one last assault, and her defences fall. Why, indeed, should she hesitate--
Poi ch' Amor dice, ogni secreta è casta?
This stroke of cynicism is put forward as it were but half intentionally, and with no appreciation of its intense irony in the mouth of the husband. Throughout the scene indeed he appears merely as a common seducer, and the author seems wholly to have failed to grasp the real dramatic value of the situation. On the other hand, the lesser art of the stage has been mastered with some success, and there is an adaptation of language to action which at least argues that the author had a vivid picture of the staging of his play in his mind when he wrote.
The moment Procri has consented to barter her honour, Cefalo discovers himself, and the unhappy girl flies in terror. Seeing now, too late, the resuit of his foolish mistrust, Cefalo follows with prayers and self-reproaches--
Son ben certo
Che tu mi cognoscesti ancor coperto--
but in vain. The act ends with a song in which Aurora glories in the success of her revenge--
Festegiam con tutto il core;
Biastemate hor meco Amore!
In the second act Procri, having recovered from her fright, is bent on avenging herself for the deceit practised by Cefalo, upon whose supposed love for Aurora she throws the blame in the matter. She seeks the grove of Diana, where she is enrolled among the followers of the goddess. Cefalo, who has followed her flight, rejoins her in the wood, and there renews his prayers. She refuses to recognize him, denies being his wife, and is about to renew her flight, when an old shepherd, attracted by Cefalo's lamentation, stays her and forces her to hear her husband's pleading. Other shepherds appear on the scene, and the act ends with an eclogue. In the next we find her reconciled to Cefalo, to whom she gives the wind-swift dog and the unerring spear which she had received as a nymph of Diana. Cefalo at once sets the hound upon the traces of a boar, and goes off in pursuit, while his wife returns home. He shortly reappears, having lost boar and hound alike, and, tired with the chase, falls asleep. Meanwhile a faun, finding Procri alone, tells her that he had seen Cefalo meeting with his love Aurora in the wood--a piece of news in return for which he seeks her love. She, however, resolves to go and surprise the supposed lovers, and setting fire to the wood, herself to perish with them in the flames. On Cefalo's return he is met with bitter reproaches, and the act ends with a chorus of fauns and satyrs. The fourth contains the catastrophe. Procri hides in the wood in hope of surprising her husband with his paramour. Cefalo enters ready for the chase, and, seeing what he takes to be a wild beast among bushes, throws the fatal spear, which pierces Procri's breast. A reconciliation precedes her death, and the close of the act is rendered effective by the successive summoning of the Muses and nymphs in some graceful stanzas. With a little polishing, such as Poliziano's bacchanalian chorus received in revision, the scene would not be unworthy of the time and place of its production.
Oimè sorelle, o Galatea, presto!
Donate al cervo ormai un poco pace;
Soccorrete al pianger quel caso mesto.
Oimè sorelle, Procri morta giace,
L' alma spirata, e il ciel guardando tace.
At Cefalo's desire Calliope summons her sister Muses, Phillis the nymphs, after which all join in a choral ode calling upon the divinities of mountain, wood, and stream to join in a universal lament:
Weep, spirits of the woods and of the hills,
Weep, each pure nymph beside her fountain-head,
And weep, ye mountains, in a thousand rills,
For the fair child who here below lies dead:
Mourn, all ye gods, the last of human ills,
Your sacred foreheads all ungarlanded.
Here the traditional story of Cephalus and Procris, as founded on the rather inferior version in the seventh book of the Metamorphoses, ends. There remains, however, a fifth act, in which Diana appears, raises Procri, and restores her to her husband.
The play, composed for the most part in octaves with choruses in terza rima, is, from the dramatic point of view, open to obvious and fatal objections. The preposterous dea ex machina of the last act; the inconsequence of motive and inconsistency of character, partly, it is true, inherent in the original story, but by no means made less obvious by the dramatist; the insufficiency of the action to fill the necessary space, and the inability of the author to make the most of his materials, are all alike patent. On the other hand, we have already noticed a certain theatrical ability displayed in the writing of the first act, and we may further attribute the alteration by which Procri is represented as jealous of Cefalo's original lover, Aurora, instead of the wholly imaginary Aura, as in Ovid, to a desire for dramatic unity of motive.
The extent to which either the Orfeo or Cefalo can be regarded as pastoral will now be clear, and it must be confessed that they do not carry us very far. The two fifteenth-century plays constitute a distinct species which has attained to a high degree of differentiation if not of dramatic evolution, and critics who would see in them the origin of the later pastoral drama have to explain the strange phenomenon of the species lying dormant for nearly three-quarters of a century, and then suddenly developing into an equally individualized but very dissimilar form[164]. It should, moreover, be borne in mind that contemporary critics never regarded the Arcadian pastoral as in any way connected with the mythological drama, and that the writers of pastoral themselves claimed no kinship with Poliziano or Correggio, but always ranked themselves as the followers of Beccari alone in the line of dramatic development. On the other hand, there can be no reasonable doubt that such performances went to accustom spectators to that mixture of mythology and idealism which forms the atmosphere, so to speak, of the Aminta and the Pastor fido. This must be my excuse for lingering over these early works.