Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/383

 of Christianity by one of personal passion scarcely to be paralleled save in the decaying republics of ancient Greece. At first glance the Italian towns would seem the veritable home of a drama full of individual characterisation. But excessive individualism is almost as fatal to dramatic progress as a corporate life in which all differences of personality are lost. Innumerable units, raised out of individual littleness by no bond of corporate union, become too ephemeral to attract the analyses of the artist, who will soon prefer to turn to physical nature or to Fate. Individual being, which only comes out distinctly on a great background of social sentiments, could not alone supply the Italian republics with an original drama. Moreover, the similarity of the Italian dialects to Latin turned men's attention to classical models, in which they found a spirit like their own already expressed; and, when the plays of Seneca were supplemented by the recovered masterpieces of Greece, it was clear that any indigenous Italian drama was doomed.

Thus their social conditions and the peculiar nearness of classical associations united to make the Italian drama an imitation of classical models. Such, for example, was the Rosmunda of Rucellai, represented before Leo X. at Florence in 1515—a play which retains the classical chorus, and contains direct imitations of the Antigone; such, also, is the Sophonisba of Trissino, which (though not published till 1524) suggested the former, and is written on the Greek model, being divided, not into acts, but only by choral odes. It is significant that Trissino found his mode; in Euripides, the tragedian of Attic individualism. The declamatory tone, which had been one of the marks of decadence in the Athenian drama, and (as has been pointedly observed) "fixes the attention of the hearer on the person of the actor rather than on his