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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Milton writes in his preface to Samson Agonistes that “Chorus is here introduc'd after the Greek manner, not antient only but modern, and still in use among the Italians”; that “In the modeling therefore of this Poem … the Antients and Italians are rather follow'd, as of much more authority and fame.” It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect to find in Italian drama of the seventeenth century these evidences of classical usage to which he refers. Milton is here concerned, it would appear, only with the use of chorus, and he implies that there was common in Italy in his day an imitation of Greek drama which differed from similar efforts in other countries in the handling of the chorus. He is not writing of dramatic criticism, but of dramatic practice. An interest in Minturno and Castelvetro does not explain so direct a statement. Furthermore, the phrase, “still in use,” cannot be accepted as a reference to drama of the sixteenth century, however convenient it would be to fall back upon proved relationships. Trissino's Sophonisba, for example, so close a copy of Sophocles and Euripides, presents many parallels to Samson Agonistes, but it was written more than a hundred and fifty years earlier (in 1515), and presented in 1562. Certain sixteenth-century Italian pastoral plays, such as the Aminta, show interest in the use of chorus which is derived from Greek tragedy, but the Aminta, in spite of its classical ancestry, and Milton's known admiration for its author, was written in 1573, and can scarcely answer for chorus “still in use among the Italians.” Even the seventeenth-century revivals of it would be too infrequent to account for a statement as broad as Milton's. Much the same may be said of the Pastor Fido. Moreover, at the same time, between 1550 and 1590, Jodelle and Garnier in France were writing tragedies at least as much after the Greek manner as were Tasso and Guarini. We must return to the fact that Milton is concerned with a trend in his own century.
1 The following lines in the prologue of Niccolò da Correggio's Cefalo (1487) are evidence that the chorus of the pastoral is derived—and consciously so—from Greek tragedy: “I do not present this work as a comedy, for it is not exactly that, nor do I want you to think that it is tragedy, even though you do see a chorus of nymphs:”
Even in the Aminta,, the chorus is still much less important than it later becomes. It takes no part at all in Acts i and ii, and the choral passages at the end of the acts were not used in the first performance. Tasso's Il Torrismondo is dated 1587, and in the specific use of chorus is more Senecan than Greek. The chorus is used only sparingly during the act, not at all within Acts i and iii.
2 Jodelle composed at least one play, Cleopâtre (1552), in which the use of chorus is striking. The chorus is primarily lyrical, but it takes definite part in the action. In Garnier's Les Juifves (1583) the chorus is also a vital part of the action, and its fate depends on the outcome of the play. The kinship of Les Juifves and Samson Agonistes has been noted by a modern critic who writes of the former: “its literary type is still clear in the nobler Samson Agonistes of Milton.”—Charles Sears Baldwin, Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (New York, 1939), p. 144. Even in Garnier's Porcie (1568), which is much more Senecan, the chorus takes up quite as much space as it does in the Aminta. By 1600, however, the Senecan influence had asserted itself in France and almost eliminated the Greek.
3 Lives of the English Poets.
4 Denis Saurat, Milton; Man and Thinker (1925), p. 221.
5 George Edmundson, Milton and Vondel (London, 1885), p. 168.
6 W. R. Parker, Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1937).
7 Pierre de Laudun d'Aigaliers presents the usual attitude toward chorus: “Les choeurs … disent apres chacun acte, de peur que le theatre ne demeurast vuide et que le people fust distraict,… ”—L'Art poélique français (1597); ed. Joseph Dedieu (Toulouse, 1909), p. 163. De Laudun criticizes Garnier because he used chorus within the act. Troterel, sieur d'Aves, affirms that he has seen presented “plus de mille tragédies … auxquelle il n'avait jamais vu déclamer les choeurs.”—Eugène Rigal, Alexandre Hardy et le théatre français (Paris, 1889), p. 255. Desmarets, in the preface to Scipion (Paris, 1639), says that the public will not tolerate a chorus. François Ogier, in his 1628 preface to Jean de Schelandre's Tyr et Sidon, Tragédie (1608), condemns all choruses as unpleasant.
8 The exceptions are to be found in Lady Pembroke's group, which was strongly influenced by Robert Gamier, but they—Thomas Watson, Fulke-Greville, Daniel—tended to imitate Garnier's Senecan qualities rather than the Greek, or, especially Fulke-Greville, to exaggerate the lyrical element and to write amazingly long and philosophical choral odes which stood independent of the play as political or moral debates. Even in this group the use of chorus declined. See A. M. Witherspoon, The Influence of Robert Gamier on Elizabethan Drama, Yale Studies in English, lxv (1924).
9 Joseph S. Kennard, The Italian Theatre (New York, 1932), i, 200.
10 Horatio Persio's tragedies Pompeo (1603) and Il Mitridate (1615) are without chorus, as is Prospero Bonarelli's Solimano (Venice 1619, 1621, 1639; Florence 1620; Rome 1632). Filippo Cappello in his tragedy Arcinda (Vicenza, 1614), uses chorus scarcely at all except at the end of acts. In Theosena, a tragedy by Pietro Antonio Toniani (Vicenza, 1617) the chorus is introduced but takes up a very small percentage of the lines in an exceedingly long play. Ansaldo Cebà uses chorus only at the end of acts in Alcippo Spartana (1623).
11 Stefano Arteaga, Le rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano dalla sua origine fine al presente (Bologna, 1783), i, p. 201. The criticism is of Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, Istoria della volgar poesia (1698).
12 See John Murray Gibbon, Melody and the Lyric (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930).
13 Trissino, for instance, wrote in his Arte Poetica: “Vero è, che sì come gli antiqui Poeti ne li loro Cori poneano ditirambi, et anapesti, i quali si cantavano, a me è paruto in vece di quelli usare ne la lingua nostra Canzoni, e Rime, che sono cose attissime a cantarsi.”—ed. 1729, ii, p. 112. The choruses of Speroni's Canace (1542) were sung. Lodovico Dolce writes of his Marianna (1565) that it was done “col canto.”—see Antonio Capri, Il melodramma dalle origini ai nostri giorni (Modena, 1938), p. 21. The music of Andrea Gabrieli exists for the final choruses of Oedipus Rex performed at Vicenza in 1585. In France, the interest of the Pléiade in the union of poetry and music makes it most probable that Jodelle and Gamier intended to use music. Pierre De Laudun writes in 1597: “Les choeurs—doivent estre chantez en musique.”—op. cit., p. 163.
14 Discours de l'utilité et des parties du poeme dramatique (1660).
15 L'art poétique, Chant iii.
16 By Ottavio Rinuccini (Florence, 1600).
17 Text by Alessandro Striggio; music by Monteverde (Matua, 1607).
18 Ridolfo Campeggi (Bologna, 1610).
19 Gabriello Chiabrera (Florence, 1615).
20 Rome, 1636; Naples, 1637.
21 The reference to it is in the preface to the first volume of Prose fiorentine (Florence, 1661). All of these works, except the Andromeda, and the Isola d'Alcina, are reprinted by Angelo Solerti in Gli albori del melodramma (Milano, 1904).
22 Crescimbeni, for example, in 1698, in discussing the use of chorus in tragedy, refers to its use in the Rappresentazione di Anima e Corpo of Emilio Cavalieri (Rome, 1600), which is certainly pastoral and which is included in every study of “melodramma.”—op. cit., p. 311. Arteaga deplores the fact that his predecessors in criticism have not differentiated between “opera” and “tragedy” and he finds it necessary to devote an entire chapter to so doing. Even he points out fairly superficial differences.
23 Departures from the classical standards—and they were frequent—were recognized as such. Rinuccini excuses the change of scene in L'Euridice by claiming the precedence of the Ajax of Sophocles. When a chorus was desired for choreographic or other entertaining effects the author maintained the classical norm by having two choruses—a “coro stabile” and a “coro mobile.” Il Narciso by Rinuccini lists a “Coro di Cacciatori” and a “Coro di Ninfe stabile.” For the former there is a specific stage direction: “Il coro dei cacciatori parte.”
24 In La Dafne, the chorus has 164 lines out of 445, about 37 per cent of the whole, and almost all is in the form of choral ode. In L'Euridice the chorus has almost one third of the total 790 lines and slightly more of that is choral dialogue.
25 Antonio Capri, op. cit., p. 62.
26 Op. cit., pp. 140–141.
27 I have discussed the relation of this work to Lycidas in a forthcoming article.
28 Even in this hybrid sort of performance, however, the chorus was associated with ancient drama. Menestrier, for instance, considers it necessary to differentiate between ballet and tragedy, and he claims that the Italians kept alive the use of the ancient chorus in their interludes: “Les Italiens pour retenir la maniere des anciens Choeurs ont des intermedes dans leurs Tragedies & leurs Comedies où l'on danse des entrées de Ballet au son des voix & des instrumens.”—Des ballets anciens et modernes (Paris, 1682), p. 293.
29 See my article Comus, Dramma per Musica, Studies in Philology, xxxvii, 3, July, 1940.
30 From the “Argomento” of the work printed in Florence in 1625.
31 La Flora, also by Salvadori, was performed in 1628. It is still further from classical model and resembles the masque much more. I do not find any record of a “melodramma” entitled La Medusa. Dr. Alfred Einstein suggests that it may be a misprint for L'Aretusa, by Filippo Vitali, produced in Rome in 1620.
32 Scholars who are interested in the question of whether Milton visited the Barberin Palace on his first or on his second visit to Rome seem to have ignored the valuable evidence of the authority on the theater in Rome of that period. Alessandro Ademollo, who, in his I teatri di Roma nel secolo XVII (Rome, 1888), says definitely that it must, without doubt, have been in February that Milton saw the entertainment there which he describes in his letter to Holstenius. There was given, he says, in the last part of 1638 and the first months of 1639, only one entertainment which could possibly fit Milton's description. That was the performance of the musical drama Chi soffre speri. Ademollo goes on to say that Milton could not possibly have met Leonora Baroni at the Palazzo Barberini. In the first place no women were allowed to sing in the performances there, and in the second place no women were allowed to attend unless they were accompanied by their husbands and at this time Leonora was not married. Ademollo supports his contention by quoting two contemporary descriptions of the festival which are similar to Milton's, both in the archives in Modena. The first is a dispatch from Montecuccolli to the duke of Modena, dated the second of March, 1639, which states that he saw on the preceding day (the carnival in that year lasted until the eighth of March, and the Barberini entertainment usually came near the end of Carnival) the “comedia Barberina.” He says in this dispatch that it was Cardinal Antonio Barberini (not Francesco, as Milton says) who stood at the door in “so great a crowd”—greeting everyone who came. Even Montecuccoli comments on being greeted personally, as was everyone else in his party, and says that both cardinals worked with the greatest diligence to seat as many of the thirty-five hundred guests as possible. Cardinal Francesco went from bench to bench “Con modi humanissimi, e di somma cortesia” urging people to sit closer and make room for more. The cardinal Antonio undertook the more active job of throwing out a young man of twenty-five, who was noisy and impolite. Prunières thinks that Mazarin was also present at the performance. Mazarin headed the list of the domestic officers of Cardinal Antonio Barberini for the year 1637–39. He was an intimate friend of Leonora.—Henri Prunières, L'Opera italien en France avant Lulli (Paris, 1913), p. 43. The manuscript copy of Chi soffre speri is in the Vatican Library. There is a copy of the Argomento et Allegoria (Rome, 1639), in the Library of Congress.
33 See Ab. Girolamo Tiraboschi, Vita del Conte Fulvio Testi (Modena, 1780), p. 152: “Ivi ancor vedesi L'Isola d'Alcina, Tragedia, un Componimento Drammatico per Musica nel dì natalizio della Duchessa di Modena ….”
34 Allacci records an Il Sansone—dialogo per musica by Pietro dell' Isola printed in Palermo in 1638—Drammaturgia di Leone Allacci (Rome, 1666, brought to date Venice, 1755). Scipione Maffei wrote an oratorio, Il Sansone, a short piece for three solo voices printed in 1699 but composed earlier. Of special interest is Il Sansone by Benedetto Ferrari, to be discussed later.
35 As evidence of the seventeenth century classification of oratorio as drama one may point out the comments of so able a judge as Arcangelo Spagna. He, writing in 1706, in Oratorii overo Melodrammi sacri, etc. (Rome. Reprinted by Alaleona, op. cit., pp. 382–395), laments the use of the narrator in oratorio because it prevents the oratorio from being what he calls a perfect spiritual “melodramma,” and in a discussion of his own oratorio, Deborah (1656), he notes that it conforms to Aristotle's demands for unity of time and dramatic form: “Prothesi, Epitasi e Catastrofe.” He applies to the oratorio the rules of Senecan technique, in itself an indication of reduced use of chorus, but the fact that he discusses oratorio in terms of dramatic usage classifies it as dramatic production. Tiraboschi classifies oratorio thus: “Al genere Drammatico ridur si possono gli Oratorii per Musica.”—Storia della Letteratura Italiana, ed. 1793, viii, p. 493. Even in England, Francis Peck in the preface to his Herod the Great which he published in his New Memoirs of Milton (1740), associates oratorio and tragedy—and incidentally gives Milton a sharp criticism: “Writers of poetical genius do wrong to go off from profane history to Scripture for subjects of their tragedies and oratorios.”
36 See Domenico Alaleona, Studi su la storia dell'oratorio musicale in Italia (Torino, 1908).
37 Preface to D. Gio. Francesco Anerio, Teatro Armonico Spirituale, etc. (Rome, 1619). Reprinted by Alaleona, op. cit., pp. 345–349.
38 Reprinted by Alaleona, op. cit., p. 70.
39 Nicias Erythraeus (Cologne, 1642), ii, p. 217. See Prunières, op. cit., p. 15.
40 In La Fede, printed in Le rime del signor Francesco Balducci (Venetia, 1662).
41 Responce faite á un curieux sur le sentiment de la musique d'Italie, escrite à Rome le 1er octobre 1639 (Paris: Thoinan, 1865), pp. 29–30. The oratorios in the Crocifisso were in Latin and their roots differ from those of the oratorio in Italian which developed in Vallecelli. They followed the Biblical text more closely, but they felt the same influences of the secular drama.
42 Carissimi's dates are almost the same as Milton's: 1605–74.
43 See the discussion of it in Alaleona, op. cit., p. 255.
44 The manuscript is in Modena. Ferrari was in Modena from 1645 to 1651, again from 1653 to 1662, and from 1674 to 1681.
45 For the occasion he wrote the text of Andromeda, for which Manelli composed the music. In 1638 Ferrari wrote the text for La Maga fulminata, given also at San Cassiano and dedicated to Feilding. In 1639 he wrote both text and music for L'Armida, presented at the theater of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, where in the same year appeared L'Adone by Monteverde. Both of these works were probably given in the fall and winter of 1639, not in the spring, when Milton was in Venice.
46 Feilding returned to England in May, 1639, however, and Milton may possibly have missed him. Note the case argued for the acquaintanceship of Feilding and Milton by Feilding's descendent, Cecilia, Countess of Denbigh, in her biography of Feilding, Royalist Father and Roundhead Son (London, 1915).
47 J. H. Hanford, A Milton Handbook (New York, 1936), p. 169.