Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama Part 44

[153] 'Orfeo cantando giugne all' Inferno' is one of the stage directions.

[154] For an elaborate example (1547) of this kind of stage, on which various localities were simultaneously represented, see Pet.i.t de Julleville, _Histoire de la langue et de la litterature francaise_, ii.

pp. 416-7.

[155] Concerning the play see the account given by Symonds, together with his admirable translation in _Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece_, ii. p. 345, also an elaborate essay, 'L'Orfeo del Poliziano alla corte di Mantova,' by Isidoro del Lungo, in the _Nuova antologia_ for August, 1881, and A. D'Ancona, _Origini del teatro italiano_, ii. pp. 2 and 106. The standard edition of Poliziano's Italian works, that by Carducci, is unfortunately not in the British Museum.

[156] A note concerning the use of the term 'nymph' may save confusion.

Creizenach remarks that the introduction of a nymph as the beloved of a shepherd is a peculiarity of the renaissance pastoral which manifestly owes its origin to Boccaccio's _Ninfale fiesolano_ (_Geschichte des neueren Dramas_, ii. p. 196). In so far as this view implies that the 'nymphs' of pastoral convention are the same order of beings as those either of the _Ninfale_ or of cla.s.sical myth, it appears to me utterly erroneous. The 'nymphs' who love the shepherds in the renaissance pastorals are nothing but shepherdesses. The confusion no doubt began with Boccaccio. The nymph of Diana in the _Ninfale_ is, as we have already seen, nothing but a nun in pagan disguise. The nymphs of the _Ameto_ are represented as of the cla.s.sical type, but their amorous confessions reveal them as in nowise differing from mortal woman. The gradual change in the connotation of the word is one of the results of the blending of Christian and cla.s.sical ideas. The original elemental or local spirits even in Greek myth acquired some of the characteristics of votaries (as in the legeud of Calisto), and these Christian tradition tended to accentuate, while popular romance, and in many cases contemporary manners, facilitated the connecting of such characters with tales of secret pa.s.sion. Gradually, however, the idea of illicit love gave place to one merely of unrestrained natural desire, the religious elements of the character were forgotten as the supernatural had been earlier, and 'nymph' came to be no more than the feminine of 'shepherd' in an ideal society which by its freedom of intercourse, as by its honesty of dealing, presented a complete contrast to the polished circles of aristocratic Italy.

[157] A small circular picture in _chiaroscuro_ among the arabesques of the _cappella nova_ in the cathedral at Orvieto. It represents the youthful Orpheus crowned with the laureate wreath playing before Pluto and Proserpine upon a fiddle or crowd of antique pattern. At his feet lies Eurydice, while around are spirits of the other world.

[158] In some pa.s.sages of this speech the resemblance with Ovid is very close:

famaque si ueteris non est ment.i.ta rapinae, uos quoque iunxit Amor...

omnia debentur n.o.bis, paulumque morati serius aut citius sedem properamus ad unam...

haec quoque, c.u.m iustos matura peregerit annos, iuris erit uestri; pro munere poscimus usum.

quod si fata negant ueniam pro coniuge, certum est nolle redire mihi: leto gaudete duorum. (_Met_. x. 28, &c.)

[159] Cf. _Amores_, II. xii, ll. 1, 2, 5, and 16.

[160] This interpretation of the pa.s.sion of Orpheus, characteristic as it is of renaissance thought, was not original. Though unknown in early times, it is found in Phanocles, a poet probably of the third or fourth century B. C.

[161] So original: revision 'oe oe.'

[162] The earliest edition I have seen is that contained in the 'Opere' of June 10, 1507, where the heading runs: 'Fabula di Caephalo cposta dal Signor Nicolo da Correggia a lo Ill.u.s.trissimo. D. Hercole & da lui repsentata al suo flor?tissimo Populo di Ferrara nel. M. cccc. lx.x.xvi.

adi. xxi. Ianuarii.' In this edition, printed at Venice by Manfrido Bono de Monteferrato, the works are said to be 'Stampate nouamente: & ben corrette.' Bibliographers record no edition previous to 1510. The date in the heading is either a misprint, or refers to the year 1486-7 according to the Venetian reckoning. See D'Ancona, _Origini del teatro_, ii. p.

128-9. Symonds (_Renaissance_, v. p. 120) quotes some Latin lines as from the prologue to this play. This is an error. He has misread D'Ancona, to whom he refers (ed. 1877), and from whom he evidently copied the quotation. The lines actually occur in the prologue to a Latin play on the subject of the taking of Granada.

[163] Rossi, _Battista Guarini ed il Pastor Fido_, 1886, p. 171, note 2.

[164] I do not, of course, mean that no mythological plays were produced between the days of Correggio and those of Beccari, but that they show no signs of consistent development in a pastoral or indeed in any other direction.

[165] _Il Verato secondo_, 1593, p. 206.

[166] _Compendio della poesia tragicomica, tratto dai duo Verati_, 1602, pp. 49-50.

[167] In this and the following section I have used the texts of the exceedingly useful collection of _Drammi de' boschi_ in the 'Biblioteca cla.s.sica economica,' which comprises the _Aminta, Pastor fido, Filli di Sciro_, and _Alceo_.

[168] Symonds, in dealing with Ta.s.so in the sixth volume of his _Italian Renaissance_, lays, to my mind very justly, considerable stress upon this quality.

[169] Quoted by Sera.s.si, Ta.s.so's biographer, in his preface to the Bodoni edition of the play (Crisopoli, 1789), p. 8.

[170] See Angelo Solerti, _Vita di T. Ta.s.so_, Torino, Loescher, 1895, i.

p. 181, &c. Carducci, 'Storia dell' _Aminta_,' the third of the _Saggi_, 80, 1st edition.

[171] Leigh Hunt pointed out, in some interesting if rather uncritical remarks prefixed to his translation of the _Aminta_ (London, 1820), that some at any rate of the regular choruses cannot have formed part of the original composition. In fact the first edition (Aldus, 1581) contains those to Acts I and V only; that to Act II appeared in the second edition (Ferrara, 1581), and also in the collected _Rime_ (Aldus, 1581); the rest were added in the Aldine quarto of 1590.

[172] Supposing always that this representation, of which Filippo Baldinucci, in his _Notizie dei professori del disegno_ (sec. iv, dec.

vii; 1688, p. 102), has left a glowing account, was a representation of the _Aminta_, and not, as some have maintained, of the _Intrichi d'

amore_, another play sometimes ascribed to Ta.s.so.

[173] Amore had already spoken the prologue to Lodovico Dolce's _Dido_; and a mythological play by Sannazzaro, of which the opening alone is extant, introduces Venus in pursuit of her son, and warning the ladies of the audience against his wiles (Creizenach, ii. p. 209). The prologue to the _Pastor fido_ is put into the mouth of the river-G.o.d Alfeo, that of Bonarelli's _Filli di Sciro_, which begins with another Ovidian reminiscence (_Amores_, I. xiii. 40), and was written by Marino, is spoken by a personification of night, that of Ongaro's _Alceo_ by Venus, of Castelletti's _Amarilli_ by 'Apollo in habito pastorale,' of Cristoforo Lauro's _Frutti d'amore_ by Ja.n.u.s in similar garb, of Cesana's _Prova amoroso_, by Hercules. The list might be extended indefinitely. Contarini, at the beginning of the next century, followed precedent less closely; his _Finta Fiammetta_ has a dramatic prologue introducing Venus, Cupid, Anteros (the avenger of slighted love), and a chorus of _amoretti_; that of his _Fida ninfa_ is spoken by the shade of Petrarch.

[174] Most of the identifications made by Menagio in his edition, Paris, 1650, have generally been accepted since, except by Fontanini, who would identify Pigna with Mopso. There seems, however, to be little doubt possible on the point, though it is not to Ta.s.so's credit. For an audience conversant with the inner life of the court, the references to Elpino contained whole volumes of contemporary scandal. In Licori we may see Lucrezia Bendidio. This lady, the wife of Count Paolo Machiavelli, and sister-in-law of Guarini, is said to have been the mistress of Cardinal Luigi d' Este; but Pigna, too, courted her, and brooked no rivalry on the part of fledgling poets. Ta.s.so appears to have paid her imprudent attention in the early days of his residence at Ferrara, and thus incurred the secretary's wrath. The princess Leonora remonstrated with her poet on his folly, and Ta.s.so, by way of palinode, wrote a fulsome commentary on three of Pigna's wooden _canzoni_, ranking them with Petrarch's. Ta.s.so is appareutly allnding to this incident when he puts into Elpino's mouth the words:

Quivi con Tirsi ragionando andava Pur di colei che nell' istessa rete Lui prima e me dappoi ravvolse e strinse; E preponendo alla sua fuga, al suo Libero stato il mio dolce servigio. (V. i. 61.)

The origin of the name 'Licori' may possibly, as Carducci points out (p.

94), be sought in an epigram, _Ad Licorim_, found among Pigna's Latin _Carmina_ (1553). The whole incident throws a curious light on the pettiness of the Ferrarese Court, a characteristic in which it was, however, not peculiar. (See Rossi, pp. 34, &c.) It is perhaps worth while mentioning that by the _antro dell' Aurora_ was no doubt intended the room in the castle, said to have formed part of the private apartments of Leonora, still known as the _sala dell' Aurora_, from a wretched fresco on the ceiling by the local artist Dosso Dossi.

[175] _Aminta_, I. i; _Canace_, IV. ii.

[176] _Lettere del Guarini_, Veneta, Ciotti, 1615, p. 92. See Rossi, 56^{1}

[177] I have already had occasion to point out that, from the time of Boccaccio onwards, a nymph of Diana might represent a nun, but the whole of Silvia's relations with Dafne make it plain that she is in no way vowed to virginity. Her being represented as a follower of Diana implies no more than that she is fancy-free, and so in a sense under the protection of the virgin G.o.ddess. This use of the phrase is as old as Theocritus: 'Artemis, be not wrathful, thy votary breaks her vow' (_Idyl_ 27). And it is so used by Silvia herself in her proud and petulant retort to Aminta: 'Pastor, non mi toccar; son di Diana' (III. i).

[178] The idea pa.s.sed from Italian into English verse:

tell me why This goblin 'honour,' by the world enshrined, Should make men atheists, and not women kind--

to improve upon the exceedingly neat bowdlerization which the Rev. J. W.

Ebsworth has sought to palm off as the genuine text of Tom Carew.

[179] We have, in the pa.s.sages quoted, a foretaste of the priggish extravagance of the _Faithful Shepherdess_. That there should have been found critics to combine just but wholly otiose condemnation of Cloe with reverential appreciation of the absurdities of Clorin and Thenot, and to clap applause to the self-conscious virtue, little removed from smugness, in which the 'moral grandeur' of the Lady of the Ludlow masque is clothed, is indeed a striking witness to the tyranny of conventional morality. If virginal purity were in fact the hypocritical convention which it is to some extent possible to condone in the _Aminta_, but which becomes wholly loathsome in the work of Fletcher, the sooner it disappeared from the region of practical ethics the better for the moral health of humanity.

[180] Menagio's edition is said to have appeared in 1650, but I have only seen the edition of 1655, which I also notice is the date given by Weise and Percopo (p. 319). The play is said to have been printed in Italy alone some two hundred times; there are twenty French translations, five German, at least nine English, several in Spanish and other languages. A version in the Slavonic Illyrian dialect appeared in 1598; a Latin one in iambic trimeters by Andrea Hiltebrando, a Pomeranian physician, in 1615; another in modern Greek in 1745. See Carducci, p. 99.

[181] Published, together with Paglia's reply, by Antonio Bulifon in his _Lettere memorabili_, Naples, 1698, iii. p. 307. The play had already been adversely criticized by Francesco Patrizi and Gian Vincenzo Gravina.

[182] 'L'Aminta difeso e ill.u.s.trato da G. Fontanini,' Roma, 1700. Another edition appeared in 1730 at Venice, with further annotations by Uberto Benvoglienti.

[183] It is, however, perfectly true that the play, together with the writings in its defence and the notes, to be considered later, occupied the attention of the author for a period of fully twenty years, and it is possibly thus that the tradition arose. I may say that throughout this section I am under deep obligations to Rossi's monograph.

[184] Rossi, p. 183. I shall return to the point.

[185] In later days he was often called Giovanbattista, but the addition is without authority, in spite of its appearance in the British Museum catalogue.

[186] This preliminary history is drawn, as Guarini himself points out in his notes of 1602, from Pausanias (VII. 21), though less closely than he there implies. The rest of the plot he claimed as original, but it is to a large extent merely a rehandling of the same motive.

[187] Carino is said to represent Guarini in the same manner as Tirsi does Ta.s.so.

[188] There is a legend that this scene was placed on the Index. This, anyhow, cannot refer to the _Index Librorum Prohibitorum_, but only to the _Index Expurgatorius_, which was at no time an officiai publication. But the whole story appears to be without foundation.

[189] In comparing the two pieces, it is worth remembering that, whereas the _Aminta_ contains about 2,000 lines, the _Pastor fido_ runs to close upon 7,000.

[190] _Storia della letteratura italiana nel secolo XVI_, Milano, 1880, pp. 244-7. See Rossi, p. 264. His argument is that it antic.i.p.ated a revolt against the conventional nature of domestic love, reflecting better than any other dramatic work the ideas that towards the end of the _cinquecento_ were, according to him, leading in the direction of a moral regeneration of Italian Society. It is, however, difficult to reconcile his theory with what we know of Italy in the days of the counter-reformation; while it may at the same time be doubted whether a tone of anaemic sentimentality is, in itself, preferable to one of cynical convention. It should be added that there is little regeneration of domestic love to be found in the partly pathetic and partly sordid tragedy of Guarini's own family.

[191] The quotations are from the opening scene of either play. The parallel is that selected by Symonds for quotation, and is among the most striking examples of Guarini's method, but similar instances might be collected from almost every scene.