been a good outline for an abler hand to have clothed with substance. Trissino had abundance of successors and imitators, most of whom had more poetical endowment, but few more genuine vocation, and all of whom are devoid of any impulse except the ambition of literary distinction. This could only be reached by the prescribed path; and no vestige of originality appears in any of them except Sperone Speroni's innovation, not laudable in a tragedy, although a fruitful suggestion for the pastoral drama, of mingling lyrical metres with the regulation blank verse. The subject of his play, the incest of Macareus and Canace, infinitely overtaxed his elegant talent. Of the other tragedies of the time, the best known are the Rosmunda of Rucellai, the Mariamne of Lodovico Dolce, and the Orbecche of Cinthio the novelist, whose Epitia contains the rude germ of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.[1] At a later date tragedy was attempted by a true poet of great genius, who would assuredly have produced something memorable under favourable circumstances. But the composition of Tasso's Torrismondo, commenced in his youth, was long interrupted, and the play was completed in 1586 under the depressing circumstances of his Mantuan exile. It thus wants energy; and, as Carducci remarks, Tasso is too much of an eclectic, striving by a combination of the advantages of all styles to supply the one indispensable gift of poetical inspiration, which misfortune had all but extinguished.
- ↑ The novel by Cinthio himself on which this play is founded was dramatised by Whetstone; but that Shakespeare had seen Cinthio's dramatic version also may be inferred from a minute circumstance. Cinthio's play, not his novel or Whetstone's adaptation of it, has a character named Angela, whose name disappears from Measure for Measure, but who bequeaths Angelo as that of her brother, whom Cinthio calls Juristi, and Whetstone Andrugio.
