SOURCE: “The Birth of a Theater,” in Vittorio Alfieri, Twayne Publishers, 1984, pp. 1-20.

[In the following excerpt, Betti examines Alfieri's early writings for evidence of his methods for writing tragedy, his political stance on tyranny, and his cultural context.]

THE AUTHOR

Vittorio Alfieri was born on the eve of the second half of the eighteenth century, on January 17, 1749. A year earlier an important historical event had taken place in Europe: the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which brought to an end the Austrian wars of succession—a power struggle which had engaged all major European states.

The political structure determined by that event enjoyed a certain stability and lasted for about four decades, until the crisis of 1789 and the French Revolution¹. That span of time encompassed most of Alfieri's life (he died in 1803) and saw the major body of his work—his tragic theater—come into existence.

Alfieri is commonly regarded as one of the greatest Italian poets, yet in his lifetime Italy did not yet exist as a political entity. It had a geographical unity and a religious one as well, but even culturally—given the heterogeneous composition of its many dialects—the matter of oneness remained dubious. Alfieri was born in Piedmont and was therefore a citizen of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Only later did he make the laborious and successful attempt to, as he put it, “de-piedmontize” himself. Such an enterprise required him not only to surrender his commission in the Royal Guard and to give up the bulk of his estate, but also to master the Italian language as it was spoken in Tuscany, for his first language, if we exclude the Piedmontese dialect, had actually been French.

The Italy of Alfieri's time was indeed a jigsaw puzzle of states, many of which were independent in theory only. Piedmont, however, was independent and, under the centuries-old rule of the House of Savoy, had been able in the early eighteenth century to extend its territory to include the island of Sardinia, from which the Kingdom now took its name. However, with the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the Savoyard expansionistic policy came to an end. This was due to several reasons, but mainly to the fact that Lombardy, on Piedmont's eastern border, was now under the direct control of Austria and was practically impregnable, as was the territory of Genoa, to the South, under the protection of France. At the same time, King Charles Emmanuel III's sincere desire for peace—after twenty years of war—should be taken into consideration as a more than legitimate reason.

At the date of Alfieri's birth, then, Piedmont was in a stage of consolidation. This was for the Kingdom of Sardinia an historical era characterized by an almost xenophobic sense of closedness to any outside influence, backed by a stubborn determination to preserve the old absolutist (feudal) structure of the state². In neighboring Lombardy the Austrian regime that had come to power after almost two centuries of stifling Spanish domination was about to promote—under the aegis of enlightened despotism—a climate of social and economic changes and progress. Piedmont, on the other hand, was to experience a rather high degree of sociopolitical involution.

Charles Emmanuel III devoted all his energy to the Kingdom's internal administration, on which he reserved to himself all power of decision. Even the public—and all too often the private—lives of his subjects were directly regulated by the monarch's sense of austere morality. So much so that in an epoch in which most European courts were marked by a careless spirit of gaiety and luxury, the capital of the kingdom of Sardinia, Turin, offered to the outsider a drab picture of stiff social rules and behavior³. Bearing this in mind, we can better understand why the young and impetuous Alfieri decided to relinquish his position in such a society.

In his autobiography Alfieri has left us both a most intimate account of his public and private life and a vivid picture of the Italy—indeed of most of Europe—of his time. We shall see, however, that his role on the political scene was mainly that of a brooding, pessimistic observer. Only when forced by unavoidable circumstances will he become a participant of a sort in contemporary historical events—witness his dramatic escape from Paris during the revolutionary movements of 1792-93⁴. Yet we would be hard put to find another poet of his time who had a stronger sense of history than Vittorio Alfieri.

The fact is that he was never willing, nor able, to lower his lofty, aristocratic, heroic ideals and libertarian aspirations to the level of the political reality of the Italian states in the second half of the eighteenth century. All the inner strength of his passionate character, inspired and nurtured by the examples of the great heroes of antiquity as he had come to know them through the pages of Plutarch, could only find a proper mode of expression in love and poetry.

The constantly felt antagonistic discrepancy between the heroic humanity he dreamed of and the present-day reality determined the ideological and emotional tension that will become typical of the Romantic idealists of the turn of the century, and which we find in both Alfieri the man and Alfieri the poet.

Looking around at what he regarded as a dismal, hopeless political situation, he could not recognize among his contemporaries any of the larger-than-life heroes he felt were needed to establish the new order of things envisioned by the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Only through the creation of tragic characters, capable of feeling at the highest level of human emotion, could Alfieri find a way to channel the dictates of a strong, individualistic will, and to transform them into symbolic action.

A TRAGIC VOCATION

Alfieri wrote his first tragic composition, Antonio e Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra), in 1774, at the age of twenty-five. A year later, following the first performance of that work, his literary “conversion” had, according to the Vita (his autobiography), taken place: he had become certain of his vocation as a writer of tragedies⁵. By that time he had already traveled widely throughout Europe: from Paris, where he had been introduced to Louis XV, to England, from Spain to Russia and Sweden. He had also experienced three tumultuous love affairs: in Holland, England, and Italy.

It was in Turin, during a period of convalescence of his current flame, the wife of the Marquis Turinetti di Priè, that he attempted to write his first tragedy. The subject matter was inspired by chance, it seems, by a tapestry in the lady's palazzo, where episodes from the love story of Antony and Cleopatra were represented⁶. The surface account of the incident conceals of course certain determining factors other than those dictated by mere chance. Alfieri had been, and still was, at that time, trying his hand at poetry. The verses he later rejected bear the stamp of the then fashionable “Arcadian,” pastoral poetry, and many of those compositions seem metrically, rhythmically, and stylistically close to the verses of Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), the most illustrious Italian poet of the time⁷. Later, under the pretext of patriotism, Alfieri displayed disdain, and even contempt, for his famous colleague; but we should not exclude another, and more compelling reason for his hostility—rivalry⁸. We might thus assume that the aspiring young poet was emulating the acclaimed Metastasio, and not simply following the example of the French poets of the preceding century, such as Corneille and Racine, as he himself declared.

As a matter of fact, Metastasio had already done just that, and he had chosen to project his poetical creations against the background of classical antiquity. It is true that Alfieri, in writing his tragedies, was influenced by the reading of Plutarch, and by the study of Italian authors such as Dante and Machiavelli, but it would be wrong to exclude the more immediate example of a poet whose contemporary fame was as great as Metastasio's—perhaps not just as an example to be imitated, but rather as one to be surpassed.

The two poets had in fact completely different temperaments. In Metastasio's melodramma, a grandiose opera where poetry, music, and pomp were uniquely harmonized, the emphasis is on the musicality of the language needed to express the sentimentality of the characters. Where Metastasio was sentimental and superficial, Alfieri was willful and profound; where the language of the first tended to become music, the other's stylistic mode will resort to harshness and vigorously hammered out rhythmic phrases. Furthermore, while Metastasio was a consummate courtier who wrote during most of his career under the patronage of the Austrian emperor, Alfieri was fiercely independent.

In any event, well before Alfieri's “conversion,” the fashionable Arcadian poetry that had culminated in Metastasio's synthesis of poetry and music had run its course. Both public and critics alike had proclaimed their rebellion—as was well illustrated by Saverio Bettinelli (1718-1808) in his Virgilian Letters (1758)—under the banner of a poetics that clamored for “things, not words,” thus implying a renewal not only in content but in style⁹. Alfieri responded above and beyond the cultural imperative of his time.

An important factor contributing toward the choice of the tragic form must be identified with Alfieri's aspiration toward the highest level of poetical achievement, the level which tradition assigned to tragedy. This aspiration remained dominant even though he never gave up writing lyric poetry, mostly in the canonized form of the sonnet¹⁰. As for the fortuitous first spark of inspiration—the love story of Antony and Cleopatra, Alfieri himself reminds us of his own identification with Antony, enslaved by love, as he saw himself falling under the embarrassing spell of the Marchioness Turinetti di Priè¹¹.

That Alfieri's first theatrical labor was not very successful, that it was rejected by the author himself as a failure, does not really matter. What is significant is the fact that it marked, historically, the birth of Italy's modern tragic theater. True, tragedy had begun to flourish in Italy during the Age of the Renaissance. Giangiorgio Trissino (1478-1550), deriving his inspiration from the classical works of Sophocles and Euripides, composed the first Italian tragedy, Sofonisba, between 1514 and 1515. Other authors, such as Giovanni Rucellai (1475-1525), Giambattista Giraldi Cintio (1504-1573), and Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) were also hard at work. Even an already famous poet like Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) met the challenge of the tragic theater with his Torrismondo (1586)¹².

The following century, the Age of the Baroque, saw the successful growth and expansion of the melodramma, or opera, born out of, as we mentioned above, the felicitous union of drama and music. Yet, tragedy held its own with works by Federico Della Valle (1560-1628) and Carlo De' Dottori (1618-1685). In Alfieri's own century at least one author, Scipione Maffei (1675-1755), had acquired an international reputation with his Merope (1713), a tragedy that was even going to be imitated in France by the celebrated Voltaire (1694-1778).

In spite of all this activity, the Italian tragic theater could not boast authors such as Shakespeare (1564-1616), the Spanish Lope De Vega (1562-1635) and Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), the French Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and Louis Racine (1692-1763). Not until Alfieri.

THE FIRST TRAGEDIES

From the very beginning of his career as a tragic poet, Alfieri adopted a working method which he never abandoned¹³. It consisted of three phases (respiri—“breaths”), or stages of composition, which he broke down as follows: first, the conception (ideare) of the tragedy; second, the act of writing down (stendere) a prose draft in five acts; and third, the versification (versificare) of the composition. The conception involved the writing of a few pages (at times just one page) consisting of the names of the characters and the distribution, act by act, of the scenes and their content. The sketching out of the five acts made up the second phase, and it was done very rapidly, approximately one act per day, with no concern for style—mainly in prose, but with the intrusion of “bad” lines of poetry as well. What counted most during this stage was the “strong feeling,” the passion, which he had to experience himself and which had to be put down on paper in the most urgent manner possible. Alfieri felt that if he were not successful in doing this, he could not produce a good tragedy. The final stage was then achieved by selecting “the best thoughts” and transposing them into verse.

Alfieri was convinced that once the work reached the third stage successfully, the stylistic concern—now necessary—could not hurt or impede the immediate expression of powerful feelings which he regarded as the preeminent quality of a good tragedy. In fact, this preoccupation with the immediacy of the feelings, which had to be kept alive at all costs within the structure of the work in its total unfolding, remains possibly the most relevant characteristic of Alfieri's theater, and forms the very foundation of his poetics.

FILIPPO

After the rejected Antony and Cleopatra, Alfieri's first acknowledged tragedy, the Filippo (Philip) is one of his best. Though first conceived in 1775, it was not published until 1783, after intensive revision—from the first draft in French prose, on down. The revision went well beyond even the edition of 1783, for Alfieri kept polishing his Philip to the last minute, before the Paris printing of his works in 1790¹⁴.

The final Philip should therefore be regarded as a work of the poet's maturity, not of his apprenticeship. In fact, the unity, the organic quality of style, that characterizes Alfieri's best works—and for that matter his entire theater—stems precisely from this constant care in revising and refining them, down through the years. In a way, the poet, in certain periods of intense labor, worked on all of his tragedies at the same time. Such a situation makes it somewhat arbitrary, a mere question of practicality, to analyze them in a given chronological sequence.

Only later, in his treatise Del Principe e delle Lettere (The Prince and Letters), will Alfieri dwell at length on the work and function of the poet as seen in his relationship to society and the state. Many of the principles expounded in the Prince clarify and justify the tragedies he had already written, and those still to come. One such principle remains at the basis of all of Alfieri's works; it is the supremacy given to historical events as a source of inspiration. Not a novelty in itself, it is noteworthy because of the extreme faith Alfieri had in it: “The author succeeds in arousing emotions in many ways; but in no way more effectively than by depicting in noble, moving, and strong colors, enterprises great in themselves from which important results have sprung. He generally achieves this by poetic fiction, or by drawing on historical sources …”¹⁵. Philip provides the first successful implementation of this basic principle.

The action takes place in Madrid around the year 1568. It centers around the figures of the Hapsburg Emperor Philip II (1527-1598)—whose name gives the play its title—his son by a former marriage, Don Carlos, and Isabella, his queen. The drama is precipitated by the jealousy aroused in the emperor by his suspicion of a love affair between Don Carlos and Isabella. The jealousy is masked under a trumped-up accusation of treason. Only two secondary characters enrich the plot, introducing the elements (complementary to the main protagonists) of generous friendship—Perez—on the one hand, and the most abject, villainous kind of courtiership—Gomez—on the other. The tension of the situation culminates with the death of both Isabella and Don Carlos.

Alfieri has the action adroitly begin with a soliloquy spoken by Isabella. By introducing the only feminine presence in the drama before any other, the author establishes an aura of frail beauty, an aura reinforced in the form of her name, Isabella, which Alfieri substituted for the alternative form, Elisabetta. Her soliloquy presents her secret: love in all the complexity of its contrasting elements. Through her words we also get a glimpse of the young hero before he appears on the scene. Isabella's doubts, fears, the hopelessness of the situation are all concentrated in her rhetorical question: “Philip's faithless wife / Dare I behold with fondness Philip's son?” There the menacing repetition of the emperor's name, with its double possessive, establishes forthwith a sense of tyrannical ownership. But her love seems to be determined by a superior force: “Yet who beholds that son and loves him not?”; for Don Carlos is endowed with:

A heart though bold, humane; a lofty nature;
An intellect sublime; and in a form
Most fair, a soul of corresponding worth.

[1.1]

With the rhetorical question on her lips, Isabella succumbs to a passion stronger than her will.

Her preoccupation will henceforth be to keep her feeling hidden from the world, with the sad awareness, however, that even though she may succeed in deceiving others, she cannot deceive herself—a situation that seems to anticipate the inner conflict of a later tragedy, Mirra (Myrrha).

Alfieri's first heroine foreshadows the Romantic conflict between heart and reason—with the balance tipping in favor of the heart. She reminds one of Dante's Francesca da Rimini. We know from his Vita that Alfieri was an avid reader of Dante's Divine Comedy, and surely he must have been greatly fascinated by the tragic account of Francesca's passion for her brother-in-law, Paolo. Thus in the second scene, when Don Carlos appears and is troubled by the fact that Isabella wants to avoid him, she reassures him, weaving into her speech an allusion to her native land: “Quel dolce primo / Amor del suol natio” (“That sweet, first love for one's native soil”). The motif as well as the rhythm and cadence of the phrase remind us of Francesca and her nostalgic description of her place of origin.

Don Carlos, we are told, is handsome, noble, and generous of heart; he possesses all the basic qualities of a heroic character. However, he does not really succeed in achieving a truly tragic dimension, except perhaps in the final death scene. As the “good” character destined to be crushed by the “evil” one, he is overshadowed by Isabella. It is she who, an innocent caught in the middle of father-son oedipal rivalry—she had been promised to Carlos until Philip changed his mind and married her himself—assumes the full role of victim, thereby depriving the character of the young prince of a greater share of our sympathy. Again, how can we forget Dante's Paolo, upstaged by Francesca, silently weeping at her side as she emotionally relates their tragic story.

Alfieri titled his tragedy Philip rather than Don Carlos, contrary to the practice of several later European poets who treated the same subject. Philip is clearly the character who gripped Alfieri's imagination most, in his multiple role as tyrant, pitiless father, and cruel husband. The moving force of the tragedy is hate rather than love. Love is only the catalyst which serves to precipitate the action.

Philip, according to a recurring technique, does not appear until the second act, but we already know him through Don Carlos and Isabella. His invisible presence has already permeated the stage with a funereal gloom and hopelessness that his physical appearance can only accentuate. The resulting atmosphere of ineluctability weighs on the entire action and lends to it that oppressive quality that the poet wanted to achieve. From Don Carlos we had learned about Philip's hatred of him, “Suddito e figlio / Di assoluto signor” (“at once subject, and son, of monarch absolute” [1.2]), and about “gli avvolgimenti infami / D'empia corte” (“treacherous intrigues of this vile court”). The theme of intrigue is strengthened by the words of Isabella, who, in order to alleviate Carlos's pain, suggests that in the emperor's heart there could be no hate, only the suspicions of betrayal planted there by his base courtiers.

Philip's way of ascertaining Isabella's love for his son is devious. He accentuates the element of political betrayal and is aided in this by his minister, Gomez. Don Carlos is accused of plotting against the throne by supporting the cause of the rebellious Netherlands. All this is artfully done, in such a way that Isabella cannot help betraying herself. As Philip already knew her feelings—as well as his own—toward Don Carlos, he finds in the plot a way to justify his own behavior, not merely to the others, but to himself.

Only in the fifth scene of the fourth act are we told by Gomez, who has penetrated the heart and mind of his lord, the reason for Philip's hate: envy. Gomez reveals the truth to the queen in the process of lying to her in order to bring her feelings out into the open: “in veder virtù verace / Tanta nel figlio, la virtù mentita / Del rio padre si adira” (“Philip's simulated virtue / Cannot endure the painful spectacle / Of undissembled virtue in a son”). He then adds, speaking of the emperor, “ed, empio, ei vuole / Pria spento il figlio, che di sè maggiore” (“Impious in his envy, he prefers / To that superiority, his death”). Intuitively, we knew this all along. In fact, ever since the confrontation of the second act, the fate of the two victims has been taking shape in Philip's mind. Don Carlos has also fully understood, and, at the beginning of the third act, he communicates his fear to Isabella, begging her, for her own sake, never to pronounce his name with pity to the emperor, for “Grave oltraggio al tiranno è un cor pietoso” (“The spectacle of pity in another / Maddens the cruel bosom of a tyrant”).

In the following scenes Philip accuses his son before the Council of State, stating that he has tried to murder him. Gomez adds that Don Carlos is also conspiring with France; therefore, he should be put to death. After a stormy confrontation between father and son, ending with the arrest of Don Carlos, the fourth act centers mainly on Isabella. She is told by Philip of Don Carlos's imprisonment, and afterwards is informed by Gomez of the death sentence decreed by the Council upon the prince. Gomez, feigning pity and understanding, offers to arrange a meeting between the two of them. In the final act, the first scene has Don Carlos alone, meditating on his destiny—fearing death, but at the same time welcoming it. His greatest concern is for his beloved Isabella. He fears for her safety, he fears that Philip has discovered his love for the queen and that he will take revenge upon her, “Che del tiranno la vendetta sempre / Suol prevenir l'offesa” (“Vengeance that always, where a tyrant rules / Precedes the crime”).

Don Carlos finally realizes that Isabella has been betrayed by the devious courtier Gomez, but nothing can be done, for at that moment Philip appears upon the scene. Philip's first words echo Don Carlos's: “tutta or m'è d'uopo / La mia virtude; or, che fatal si appressa / L'ora di morte …” (“I have need to summon all my fortitude / Now that the fatal hour of death approaches”), confirming them and adding to them the ring of unescapable doom: “Ora di morte è giunta: / Perfido, è giunta: io te l'arreco” (“Perfidious one, that hour of death is come: I bring it to thee”). Isabella realizes with horror that they have indeed been betrayed. Don Carlos declares his readiness for death, but the emperor wants first to abuse them verbally. It is now that they are really bound together as one couple. Philip's hatred actually joins them forever:

Wretch, thou shalt die: but first, ye impious pair,
My fulminating accents hear, and tremble.
Ye vile ones! long, yes, long I've known it all.
That horrid flame that burns in you with love.
In me with fury, long has fix'd its torment.

After the emperor has threatened them with his vengeance, a “revenge full, unexampled,” we are led to believe that his fury is not really aroused by jealousy—for he could never have loved anyone like Isabella—but by the offense done to him, to his pride, as king. In his words: “Thou hast in me the king offended, then / And not thy lover!” However, his impassioned words are indeed dictated by jealousy, and, again, he is only trying to avoid admitting the origin of his feelings so as not to suffer any further humiliation. This remains true even if we regard him as an exclusively political man, a tyrant embodying a state that imposes the ironclad laws of its necessities upon him.

It is indeed Philip who acquires the accents of a tragic character. He becomes a man capable of experiencing the force of hatred so strongly as to crave for the blood of his own son and of his wife. The action culminates with the offering of a dagger and a cup of poison to the two innocent victims. Don Carlos stabs himself with the blade presented to him by the evil Gomez—the same blade which the latter has just used to murder Carlos's trusted friend Perez. Isabella is ready to take the poison, but Philip now wants to make his revenge even more cruel by denying it to her:

Thou shalt live
Spite of thyself, shalt live …
Yes, thou
Sever'd from him, shalt live; live days of woe;
Thy ling'ring grief will be a joy to me.
And when at last, recover'd from thy love,
Thou wishest to live on, I, then, will kill thee.

But Isabella grabs the dagger and kills herself, thus leaving Philip alone, his vengeance accomplished, but with a bitter question on his lips: “I have at last obtain'd an ample, and horrid vengeance … But am I happy?” These words reveal his feelings directly for the first time, and make us better understand his existential drama, torn between conflicting impulses of a father, a husband, and a tyrant.

THE AWARENESS OF POETICS

The most relevant structural elements of Philip break down, following Alfieri's own suggestion, into (a) invention; (b) arrangement of scenes (sceneggiatura); (c) style. The three components correspond roughly to the three stages of Alfieri's method of composition, and an analysis of them may help to determine and understand Alfieri's poetics. In the first tragedy all the aesthetic principles of Alfieri's theater are already well established; they will remain constant in all his works, in spite of the diversification of situation and characters. He said of his body of work that if it had a fault, it would be the one of uniformity, to the point that if one were to examine and understand the structure (ossatura) of any one of his tragedies, one would understand all of them. We might disagree with Alfieri in judging such organic uniformity as a defect, but we can certainly accept the rest of his statement as realistic and helpful¹⁶.

If we consider the central element of structure, the arrangement of scenes or sceneggiatura, we can easily discern in Philip the characteristics of Alfieri's general scheme. They are: a brief first act; the appearance of the protagonist by the second act; a lack of incidents compensated for by dialogue; the fifth act as brief and “rushing” as possible, with the emphasis on action; the speeches of the dying hero being kept to a minimum. The norm of the Aristotelian unities (time, place, and action) was faithfully espoused by the author, but the unity that he considered really important was that of action. According to him, when one narrates, or shows, a certain event, the listener, or spectator, does not wish to hear or see anything else that might distract him or lessen his concentration.

Even if we do not choose to regard the primacy of the unity of action as an Alfierian anticipation of Romantic aesthetics, it is nevertheless easy to see how well it suited his passionate nature. A natural inclination led him toward that spiritual and aesthetic principle of the forte sentire (“strong feeling”), which he sought in his characters—as he did in himself—and led in turn to the artistic necessity of a continuous rushing, and unity, of the tragic action. This characteristic typifies Alfieri's work. The subjective dimension of his spiritual biography is injected into the sphere of the historical characters that populate his theater.

In the second printing of his tragedies (1789) Alfieri methodically stated his “opinions” on them. But he had already attempted to clarify the nature of his work by answering two critical letters written to him in 1783 and 1785 respectively, by noted men of letters: Ranieri De' Calsabigi (1714-1795), and the better-known Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730-1808). In his reply to Calsabigi, Alfieri stated that he had tried to give form to a tragedy that would meet the following prerequisites: five acts, all of them as filled as possible with one single subject, woven on one main thread only; the drama of the situation expressed by the main characters without the aid of confidants or spectators, as rapidly as the passion (which nevertheless requires a certain amount of time to unfold) would allow it; as simply as possible; as gloomy and ferocious as nature can be; and, above all, as passionate as he felt within¹⁷.

Although the letter is more lively, animated as it is by an immediate thrust of polemical enthusiasm in explaining the originality of his work to his correspondent, the statement is very close to his later, more pondered and articulate “opinion.”

In this subdivision of tragical prerequisites, the defense of soliloquy is very significant. To his correspondent's contention that the frequency of such a technique is boring and not verisimilar, he answered that a soliloquy, when it is not too long, and when it reflects the passionate character of a great hero, is much to be preferred to a dialogue of the same content with a confidant. The mere presence of a character who is not moved by the same feeling as the main protagonist would only tend to dampen the scene and alienate the participation of the audience. As for the possible lack of verisimilitude induced by such a device, Alfieri dismissed it by bringing as proof of the legitimacy of soliloquy the fact that he himself indulged quite often in such a mode of self-expression—another revealing example of how much the poet identified emotionally with the characters he was creating.

In the particular case of Philip the author points out that the play begins with a soliloquy of Isabella's. She unfolds her inner conflict between love and duty directly, and not through a confidant, as had been the case in a first draft of the tragedy. Such a noble character could not reveal her innermost feelings to a social and spiritual inferior. Alfieri insists on this mode of expression with a profusion of examples. For him, all extremes of passion tend to concentrate in man's heart, rather than becoming externalized in conversation. Only weak souls—and feelings—find solace in words, thus becoming, at most, tender, but not tragic personages.

Concerning the notion of invention, Alfieri makes a sharp distinction: if by invention we understand the treatment of a subject that has never been treated before, he felt that no one had “invented” less than he had. If, on the other hand, we give the word a wider meaning, that of creating something new out of a well-known subject—as was the case with all the Greek and Roman subject matter he made his—then he was certain no other author had created more. He has his originality reside mainly in the method he employed in dealing with any given subject. It goes without saying that the line of separation between the method in question and the arrangement of scenes is somewhat tenuous. In speaking of his method Alfieri has in mind the treatment of the plot, the line of action, and its unfolding on the stage. It has to do with the number of characters, who will be reduced to four, and above all with the treatment of peripheral incidents, which will be completely eliminated. Such a principle of elimination coincides in essence with Alfieri's defense of the soliloquy.

The new structure of tragedy Alfieri felt he had identified tended therefore toward a maximum of concentration of the essential elements. All the spurious mechanisms—and props—traditionally used on the stage, such as ghosts, lightning and thunder, eavesdropping on confidential conversations, useless killing, nonverisimilar recognitions, secret notes, locks of hair, and similar devices he called mezzucci or “cheap means.” These are absent from his theater. The dynamics of the action are supplied by the simple and natural means suggested by the situation itself. The author followed with particular care two main expedients: never to have the subject of the drama introduced in the first act by an ad hoc character created merely for that purpose; and never to substitute in the final act a narrative for what could be seen on the stage without offending common decency and verisimilitude. Should it be absolutely necessary, the narrative had to be delivered, not by a messenger—as it was traditionally done—but by one of the main protagonists.

In stressing the originality of his theater, Alfieri was ready to challenge the critic to a comparison between his works and those of other Italian and French authors such as Scipione Maffei (1675-1755), Crebillon (1674-1762), and Voltaire (1694-1788). He does not mention directly the English theater, or Shakespeare, as Calsabigi himself praised Shakespeare's originality, and the fact that he had chosen to represent nature in all its raw force, without embellishments. Calsabigi also approved of the use of all the devices and props which were, on the contrary, condemned by Alfieri; he only deplored the fact that the English author had employed such devices ad nauseam¹⁸.

We may surmise that when Alfieri stresses the originality he had achieved without the support of what he considered mezzucci, or cheap means, he was so doing because he was moved by a polemical attitude toward the work of the famous British playwright and his followers.

Both Alfieri's and Calsabigi's statements were dictated by the rationalistic aesthetics which had been evolving in Italy for almost a century as a consequence of the anti-baroque reaction typified by the Academy of the Arcadia and exemplified in the works of Gianvincenzo Gravina (1664-1718) and Ludovico Muratori (1672-1750)—to mention only two of the most influential theoreticians of that time. The same aesthetics were at the basis of the neoclassical literary theory and practice which dominated the second half of the eighteenth century¹⁹.

Neoclassical principles will also be evident in Alfieri's view of his stylistic originality. He was convinced, as he wrote to both Calsabigi and Cesarotti, that he had forged a personal style. It was unique in its brevity, simplicity, dignity, and energy; it was fully worthy of the definition of tragic. He does admit to certain defects, especially in the early period of his activity; he recognizes that his style is somewhat obscure and harsh, though boasting that the same imputation had been brought against Dante's Divine Comedy. He admits to having made an overabundant use of prepositions and monosyllables which tended to give his verses a choppy, tormented rhythm, but he is quick to add that he had done so in order to avoid the singsong trivialities that, he felt, were emasculating the Italian poetry of his time²⁰.

A POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

In other speculative works Alfieri places the issue of poetry, politics, and morality in tight correlation. Essays such as the Prince and Letters (1789) and On Tyranny (1789) bring to the fore two most cogent issues: on the one hand, they make a contribution to the traditional debate on the purpose of literature and the function of the writer in society; on the other hand, they delineate a sharper profile of the figure of the tyrant²¹. While the common denominator of both works is the figure of the prince, what connects them is in fact the author's desire to define a personal line of poetics. In The Prince and Letters a particular theme recurring with regular frequency is the debate about the “usefulness” and “delectability” of literature. The third chapter of the first book of the Prince defines the theme: Alfieri seems to accept fully the Horatian principle of miscere utile dulci (“mixing the useful and the pleasurable”). At the time, the principle of combining instruction with textual pleasure had already been well integrated with the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which, however, stressed the utilitarian component of the classical principle.

Alfieri's brief chapter condenses many of the issues current in his age—the age, we may remember, of “enlightened despotism”—and can be regarded as typical of the polemical interrelation Alfieri establishes among letters, politics, and morality. If letters are intended to instruct by developing the heart of man, “inducing toward good, dissuading him from evil, enlarging his ideas, filling him with noble and useful enthusiasm,” they cannot, however, achieve these goals under the auspices of a monarchical form of government²².

From this perspective, even literary style is determined—and regulated—by the absolutist regime. According to Alfieri: “The predominating characteristics of a work of genius originating in a principality must then necessarily be rather elegance of expression than sublimity and force of thought.” Princes in general, in their policy of subjugating letters, have deflected them more and more toward “mere pleasure” rather than strengthening them by making them more useful²³. The purpose of the man of letters is diametrically opposed to the goal of the prince, who, in order to retain his power, wants his subjects to be “blind, ignorant, spiritless, deceived, and oppressed,” while the writer hopes that his work brings to the people “light, truth, and pleasure.” The actual goal of the man of letters is glory, yet there cannot be real glory without usefulness for the majority of the people.

Alfieri will rate an author as really great only if he has succeeded according to this criterion. How the writer can achieve this utility is, in great measure, determined by his ability to uphold “reason” and “truth.” Again and again Alfieri will elaborate on these principles.

The author puts a particular effort into rendering his concepts more concrete. He relies constantly on historical examples, obviously patterning his procedure on the earlier work by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) Il Principe (The Prince). Conceptually, the essay culminates in the tenth chapter of the third book, which affirms the superiority of the literary word even over law, when the aim is to “confirm healthy public opinion” through reason and truth. It is easier, he says, to instill some truth in “the hearts of a multitude by presenting it as entertainment in a play which everyone understands and enjoys rather than by a public speech”²⁴. After two short chapters, the book concludes by restating the overall importance of the twin principles of delight and utility, stressing the fact that, since every moral truth is hostile to all illegitimate power, letters can only flourish in a climate of liberty.

True to these principles, Alfieri dedicated his treatise On Tyranny to liberty. This work is yet another example of Alfieri's rationalistic poetics. Again he states that he is attempting to elucidate his thoughts with precision, simplicity, and clarity. His wish is to develop only the truths consonant with reason. The statement and the desire are reminiscent both of the first chapter of Machiavelli's Prince and of the neo classical aesthetics of Alfieri's time²⁵.

As a whole, On Tyranny is not as inspiring a work as The Prince and Letters. It contains many of the clichés about tyranny common to the eighteenth century. To the reader of Alfieri's tragedies, it is nonetheless a useful instrument, for it places in focus the figure of the tyrant. The third chapter illustrates the fact that tyranny is based on “fear.” Fear is experienced not only by the oppressed, but by the oppressor. The tyrant's terror stems from the knowledge he has of the enormous distance between his “imagined” power and his actual weakness²⁶. The portrait of the tyrant we derive from this presentation is that of a man who trembles in his palace at the very thought of how deep a hatred his boundless power must inspire in everybody's heart. The tyrant trembles also at the very mention of the word justice. Everything that appears to be dictated by reason arouses his suspicions: he fears good citizenship; he can never feel safe unless the most important matters of business are conducted by his “trusted” men—that is, by men like himself—but still more cruel, more unjust, and still more possessed by fear.

The postulate supporting these principles is that human nature fears and abhors anything—anybody—that might mean harm, even though the harm is justly determined. Moreover, any unlimited power, by being a nefarious usurpation of the natural rights of man, instills a deep terror of his capability to hurt one and all. Alfieri's tyrant, in his complexity, is a man isolated at the top of the pyramid of power, a solitary and vulnerable figure.

Philip subsumes all the essential elements of Alfieri's poetics, from the division into five acts, the elimination of confidants, props, and so forth to the technique of the soliloquy, as well as incorporating his particular conceptualization of the tyrant. Alfieri created the character of Philip to give substance to a figure he abhorred and, at the same time, found fascinating in his innate tragic dimension of solitude. Even Philip's wife and son are seemingly his enemies. He can rely only on Gomez, the basest of abject courtiers. The palace is a nest of intrigue and deceit. Under the pretext of the so-called “reason of state”—the expression recurs twice in the second scene of the second act—Philip suspects and condemns his son. Is he “happy”? His last words confirm and seal his constant state of uncertainty, suspicion, and fear, but the consciousness of it appears well before the last words:

O wretched lot of kings! They cannot utter,
Tremble to utter, much less dare obey,
Nature's benign affections. Nay, so far
From even daring to make mention of them,
They are compell'd, by interest of state
To stifle and dissemble utterly
Natural impulses.

[2.2]

If Alfieri's treatises deal theoretically with the institution of monarchy, identifying the king as merely the modern version of the tyrant, the tragedies dramatize the conflict in individuals. The classical dramatic tradition had clearly established how effective, indeed tragic, is the intermingling of family affairs with interests of state. The dialectic tension deriving from such situations is potentially tremendous, and practically all of Alfieri's works will seek their generating force in it.

Philip's words to Carlos exemplify his consciousness of his dual role and its divisive power:

Approach me, Prince. Now tell me, when dawns
That day in which, with the fond name of son,
Thy father may accost thee? Then should'st see,
(Ah, would'st thou have it so!) combined together
The name of father and of king; ah, why,
Since thou lov'st not the one, fear'st not the other?

[2.4]

Although Philip is being (or thinks he is) subtly deceitful, he is a victim of his own prerogative, like all tyrants, and therefore just as oppressed, in an absolute sense, as his subjects. The oedipal rivalry between father and son, which in private citizens would mainly be concerned with securing the affection (possession) of the wife-mother, is here complicated by the political struggle, the conquest of power or its retention.

Philip satisfies the requirements of both the “useful” and “pleasurable.” A powerful tragedy, well-written, built on a strong, yet simple structure, it never slackens in pace, nor deviates from its main line of action. From the point of view of its message, the play aspires to teach the love of liberty and of personal dignity. It aspires to fire a hatred of tyranny, the inevitable outcome of all power in the mind of the author. Not too many years later Ugo Foscolo (1787-1828) would immortalize Alfieri in his poem Dei Sepolcri (On Sepulchres) for achieving just such goals. We would like, however, to include Alfieri in the words of praise that Foscolo dedicated to Machiavelli in the same poem. According to Foscolo, Machiavelli

                    humbling the proud sceptres of earth's kings,
Stripped thence the illusive wreaths, and showed the
                    nations
What tears and blood defiled them …

In these lines it is suggested that Machiavelli, under the pretext of giving practical advice to the princes of his time, was in reality making it known to everybody on what evil deeds power is founded²⁷. Foscolo's intuition was not only in joining the great Florentine and the great Piedmontese in his imaginary line of geniuses, it was also in calling up the idea of a secret affinity between the two. In fact, his praise of Machiavelli's Prince applies to Alfieri's Philip and to his theater in general.

Notes

1. Ettore Passerin d'Entrèves, “L'Italia nell'età delle riforme; il regno di Sardegna,” in Storia d'Italia, ed. Nino Valeri (Turin, 1965), 3:45-74.

2. Ibid., p. 46.

3. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

4. Vita, a cura di Luigi Fassò (Asti, 1951), 1:294-96.

5. Vita, a cura di Luigi Fassò, Prima redazione inedita della Vita, Giornali, Annali e documenti autobiografici, 2:121-23 (vol. 2 of the Opere). Concerning the events related in the Vita up to the year 1790, we have chosen to rely on the first draft, convinced that it preserves the immediacy of their occurrence better than the subsequent corrected version.

6. Ibid., p. 118. Also: “Lettera a Ranieri De' Calzabigi” in Parere sulle tragedie e altre prose critiche, a cura di Morena Pagliai, in Opere (Asti, 1978), pp. 217-18 (vol. 35 of the Opere).

7. Vittore Branca, Alfieri e la ricerca dello stile (Florence, 1959), pp. 227-35.

8. Carmine Jannaco, Studi alfieriani vecchi e nuovi (Florence: Leo S. Olscki, 1974), p. 135. Jannaco's concern—which follows a suggestion made by Fubini—is centered here around the formation of Alfieri's style; the idea of a possible rivalry the poet felt toward Metastasio is ours.

9. Cf. Saverio Bettinelli, Lettere virgiliane e inglesi, a cura di Vittorio Enzo Alfieri (Bari: Laterza, 1930), and Franco Betti, Storia critica delle lettere virgiliane (Verona: Fiorini, 1972).

10. Vita, 2:148-52. Also: Del Principe e delle Lettere, in Scritti morali e politici, I a cura di Pietro Cazzani, in Opere (Asti, 1951) (vol. 3 of the Opere). Here the poet is given a privileged position with respect to his “utility” to society. But cf. especially La virtù sconosciuta, in the same volume, p. 279.

11. Vita, 2:118-19.

12. Ibid., 2:157-59. Cf. also La tragedia classica, a cura di Giammaria Gasparini, ed. Mario Fubini, vol. 56 (Turin: U.T.E.T., 1963), pp. 19-28. In I classici italiani, vol. 56.

13. Benedetto Croce, Poesia e non poesia (Bari, 1950), p. 2.

14. Carmine Jannaco, in Vittorio Alfieri, Tragedie, 1:xxxii ff. (vol. 6 of the Opere). Also: Tragedies, ed. Edgar Alfred Bowring, C.B. (Westport, Conn., 1970), p. 3. This English version of Alfieri's Tragedies is derived, with numerous revisions, from that of Charles Lloyd (London, 1815). All subsequent English quotations are from this version. Numbers enclosed in brackets following quotations in the text refer to act and scene: [5.2] refers to act 5, scene 2.

15. The Prince and Letters (Toronto, 1972), trans. Beatrice Corrigan and Julius Molinaro, p. 27. Also: Del Principe e delle Lettere, 1:131.

16. Parere, 35:144-50.

17. Ibid., “Risposta dell'Alfieri,” pp. 220-21.

18. Ibid., “Lettera di Ranieri De' Calzabigi,” p. 181.

19. Cf. Betti, Storia critica, especially Chap. 2.

20. Parere, 35:157-66.

21. Prince and Letters, Introduction.

22. Ibid., p. 13.

23. Ibid., p. 106.

24. Ibid., p. 153.

25. Ibid., p. 8.

26. Della Tirannide in Scritti morali e politici, 1:17.

27. Elizabeth Ellet, Poems translated and original. By Mrs. E. F. Ellet (Philadelphia: Key & Biddle, 1835), p. 35.