Tragedy was paralysed by the influence of the Greek models, which the sixteenth century writers made it their chief aim to copy. The servility of imitation, which was pernicious in every department of literature, was fatal to that, which above all others needs to be the expression of life, when it strove to force it into the forms of a social existence long since dead. A very cursory examination of the "Sophonisba" of Trissino, of the "Rosmonda" and the "Orestes" of Rucellai, or of the more celebrated "Canacci" of Speroni—works which attained a higher celebrity in their time than most of their contemporaries or followers—will be sufficient to show why such productions could never be to the Italians what the Elizabethan dramatic literature has been to us.
As to comedy, Tiraboschi[136] complains that the comic writers and actors of that period "strove to obtain that applause which they had no hope of so easily gaining in any other way, by a brazen–faced impudence of words, gestures, and action; so that in those free and dissolute times, it was too much the case that a comedy was the more applauded the more filthy it was." And Giglio Gregorio Giraldi (Olympia Morata's gouty old friend) exclaims in one of his dialogues:[137] "O tempora! O mores! Every abomination is again reproduced upon the stage. Everywhere stories are represented, which the general feeling of the Christian world had rejected, banished, and abolished. And these are now recalled and placed upon the stage by prelates and bishops, not to speak of princes!" But a more cogent reason why these indecent productions, as well as those not deserving of condemnation on this ground, could never have taken any real hold on the national mind, may be found in worthy Tiraboschi's notion of what was necessary to make such works all that could be wished.
"Comedy," says he,[138] "the personages of which are for the most part plebeian, or at least of private station, and the action of which is generally familiar and domestic in its character, is of its own nature low and trivial. And if it is not sustained by a certain elegance of style—which is all the more difficult to attain, in that it must be natural—and by an ingenious, and at the same time probable plot, abounding in movement and surprising turns, it altogether falls to earth; and it is almost impossible to endure either the representation or the perusal of it."