ancing and spectacle. Only
a single form of the Italian drama, improvised comedy, remained truly
national; and this was of its nature dissociated from higher literary
effort. The revival of Italian tragedy in later times is due partly to
the imitation of French models, partly to the endeavour of a brilliant
genius to infuse into his art the historical and political spirit.
Comedy likewise attained to new growths of considerable significance,
when it was sought to accommodate its popular forms to the
representation of real life in a wider range, and again to render it
more poetical in accordance with the tendencies of modern romanticism.

The regular Italian drama, in both its tragic and its comic branches,
began with a reproduction, in the Latin language, of classical
models--the first step, as it was to prove, towards the transformation
of the medieval into the modern drama, and the birth of modern dramatic
literature. But the process was both tentative and tedious, and must
have died away but for the pomp and circumstance with which some of the
patrons of the Renaissance at Florence, Rome and elsewhere surrounded
these manifestations of a fashionable taste, and for the patriotic
inspiration which from the first induced Italian writers to dramatize
themes of national historic interest. Greek tragedy had been long
forgotten, and one or two indications in the earlier part of the 16th
century of Italian interest in the Greek drama, chiefly due to the
printing presses, may be passed by.[13] To the later middle ages
classical tragedy meant Seneca, and even his plays remained unremembered
till the study of them was revived by the Paduan judge Lovato de' Lovati
(Lupatus, d. 1309). Of the comedies of Plautus three-fifths were not
rediscovered till 1429; and though Terence was much read in the schools,
he found no dramatic imitators, _pour le bon motif_ or otherwise, since
Hrosvitha.

Thus the first medieval follower of Seneca, Albertino Mussato
(1261-1330) may in a sense be called the father of modern dramatic
literature. Born at Padua, to which city all his services were given, he
in 1315 brought out his _Eccerinis_, a Latin tragedy very near to the
confines of epic poetry, intended to warn the Paduans against the
designs of Can Grande della Scala by the example of the tyrant Ezzelino.
Other tragedies of much the same type followed during the ensuing
century; such as L. da Fabiano's _De casu Caesenae_ (1377) a sort of
chron