Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/249

Rh incidents. In these Ariosto fully attains his object. Writing for the amusement of a court, he does not care to stray from the conventions which he knows will satisfy, and his pieces afford no measure of the success he might have attained if he had appealed to the public and essayed to depict Italian society as it existed. One of the characters is exceedingly lifelike, the accommodating Dominican in the Scolastica, who, armed with all imaginable faculties from the Pope, is ready to commute the fulfilment of an inconvenient vow into the performance of some good work profitable to his order. This play was left unfinished, but was written before the Lena and the Negromante, which probably appeared about 1528.

The other Italian comic writer of genius was one of more powerful intellect and more serious character than Ariosto, if less richly endowed as a poet. Released from prison after the overthrow of his party and the loss of his political position in 1512, Machiavelli found solace in the composition of the Mandragola (Mandrake), a piece acted before the Pope in that day, and which could hardly be represented anywhere in this. Its cynicism is worse than its immorality, the plot consisting in the stratagem by which an innocent young wife is persuaded to admit a lover; all the personages, including the husband, who is nevertheless himself deceived in a material point, co-operating for so laudable an end. Disagreeable as the situation is, it is probably founded upon fact; and at all events the play is no pale copy of Plautus or Terence, but full of consistent and strongly individualised characters, and scenes of the most drastically comic effect. The portrait of the rascally father confessor is particularly vigorous, and proves of itself