fixed dialogue necessarily presupposes
extempore talk.

I am perfectly aware that an objection may
be raised to my theory of dramatic development,
from the fact that the most primitive plays
which we have in a printed shape are precisely
those which seem to consist almost wholly of
talk, with scarcely any action whatever. Not
to enlarge on this subject, to which I may return
on some future occasion, I would say that
I am not here referring to the growth of dramatic
literature, but to the beginning of the drama,
before its connexion with literature arose. The
very existence of a dramatic literature is a
comparatively modern fact—modern, I mean, with
reference to the civilisation of the different
countries in which it has been manifest.

Certain, too, it appears that Francesco
Cherea could not have been the inventor of
those masked figures by which the business of
the commedia dell' arte, as well as those of
the masked comedy (of which presently) were
carried on, and which are indirectly represented
by our Christmas pantomimes. The masks,
there is every reason to believe, were old familiar
figures, whose origin belongs to the remotest
ages, and cannot be assigned to one fertile brain,
even though it were the brain of an inventive
Italian.

We may, however, assume that Cherea was
among the first—perhaps the very first—to bring
together, on the same stage, the masked figures
who had previously been scattered over various
districts. He may also have reduced the
commedia dell' arte to a shape more regular than
previously belonged to it. The peculiar use
made of the harlequin in connecting the scenes
may have been his device, and he may have
substituted a written plot for one merely talked
over by the performers.

Possibly, too, the performances by his troop
first received the name "commedia dell' arte."
Whether any of these truly national comedies
were even seen by Leo the Tenth seems doubtful.
Francesco Cherea was called Terentiano Cherea,
from the very admirable manner in which he
played the character in the Eunuchus of Terence;
and certainly if he made much out of a part so
unpromising, he was a very clever fellow. There
is no inconsistency, it should be observed, in
the supposition that the same actor played in an
"erudite comedy" on one day, and in a
"commedia dell' arte " on the next. Indeed, such
was then the common practice of Italian
performers, who, however accustomed to extempore
dialogue, seem always to have been ready
to learn any words that were set down for
them. Even the early English actors of the
Elizabethan period were not devoid of a faculty
of acting extempore, which was applied even to
tragedy. Among one of the most curious relics
of the olden time, is a "platt" or plot, entitled
the "Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins,"
written by Tarleton the clown, and preserved
at Dulwich College. To this "platt," which
comprises three tragical stories, with a sort of
connecting chorus, the actors had to supply the
dialogue, and among the names of those
employed occurs that of Richard Burbadge,
afterwards so distinguished as an actor of
Shakespeare's plays.

However, it seems very doubtful whether
Francesco Cherea ever favoured his patron, Pope
Leo, with a "commedia dell' arte." He seems
to have introduced this class of drama into
Venice, when driven from the papal dominions by
the famous sack of Rome, that took place in 1527,
during the papacy of Clement the Seventh. Did
he merely take an extempore drama from one
city to another, or did he find at Venice a public
which required a theatrical entertainment of a
kind different from that which found favour at
Rome, and begin, as it were, a new professional
career, by presenting in a new form a material
that had long been familiar with the public
mind, and to which a national interest was
attached? That Venice was particularly fitted for
the birth of a formal "commedia dell' arte"
may be inferred from the enthusiasm with which
the strange plays of Carlo Gozzi were received
there more than two centuries afterwards, and
which was owing to the novel manner in which
the old masked figures were employed. An early
reformer of the "commedia dell' arte" was
Flamminio Scala, who not only introduced a new
method of impersonation and gesticulation, but
printed the plots which had previously been
given in manuscript.

Akin to the "commedia dell' arte," but, as I
have already observed, not to be confounded
with it, was the "masked comedy," in which
the dialogue, though spoken by the conventional
personages, was regularly written down,
as in a "commedia erudita." There was,
however, this peculiarity of the dialogue of the
"masked comedy," that it was written in the
dialects of which the several characters were
representatives. The founder of this kind of
drama seems to have been one Beolco,
professionally named Ruzanti, who flourished in Padua
early in the sixteenth century, and is said first
to have introduced the masked figure,
Pantaloon, who always spoke in the dialect of a
Venetian tradesman. Bergamo supplied him
with two comic servants, Harlequin, the stupid
bungler, and Scapin, the knavish valet, who
were classed together as the "Zanni," or
"Zanies" of the troop. From Ferrara he
took Brighella, a mustachioed rogue, and
Pullicenella, anglicised as Punch, came, I need hardly
say, from Naples. The result of this
heterogeneous mixture of nationalities is, that the
comedies of Ruzanti, of which there are six
extant, are scarcely readable even by literary
Italians.

Though the name of "masked comedy" is
given to the class of drama of which Ruzanti
was the originator, it must not be supposed that
every one of the persons wore masks on their
faces. Only pantaloon, brighella, harlequin, and
the Bolognese doctor were thus disguised. Still
the general appearance and dialect of each
person remained the same into whatever piece he
was introduced. It is this fixity of the dramatis