His private life was eventful, chiefly through his many sentimental attachments, its deepest experience being his profound love and friendship for the Countess of Albany,—­Louise Stolberg, mistress and afterward wife of the “Young Pretender,” who passed under the title of Count of Albany, and from whom she was finally divorced.  The production of Alfieri’s tragedies began with the sketch called ‘Cleopatra,’ in 1775, and lasted till 1789, when a complete edition, by Didot, appeared in Paris.  His only important prose work is his ‘Auto-biography’ begun in 1790 and ended in the year of his death, 1803.  Although he wrote several comedies and a number of sonnets and satires,—­which do not often rise above mediocrity,—­it is as a tragic poet that he is known to fame.  Before him—­though Goldoni had successfully imitated Moliere in comedy, and Metastasio had become enormously popular as the poet of love and the opera—­no tragedies had been written in Italy which deserved to be compared with the great dramas of France, Spain, and England.  Indeed, it had been said that tragedy was not adapted to the Italian tongue or character.  It remained for Alfieri to prove the falsity of this theory.

Always sensitive to the charge of plagiarism, Alfieri declared that whether his tragedies were good or bad, they were at least his own.  This is true to a certain extent.  And yet he was influenced more than he was willing to acknowledge by the French dramatists of the seventeenth century.  In common with Corneille and Racine, he observed strictly the three unities of time, place, and action.  But the courtliness of language, the grace and poetry of the French dramas, and especially the tender love of Racine, are altogether lacking with him.

Alfieri had a certain definite theory of tragedy which he followed with unswerving fidelity.  He aimed at the simplicity and directness of the Greek drama.  He sought to give one clear, definite action, which should advance in a straight line from beginning to end, without deviation, and carry along the characters—­who are, for the most part, helplessly entangled in the toils of a relentless fate—­to an inevitable destruction.  For this reason the well-known confidantes of the French stage were discarded, no secondary action or episodes were admitted, and the whole play was shortened to a little more than two-thirds of the average French classic drama.  Whatever originality Alfieri possessed did not show itself in the choice of subjects, which are nearly all well known and had often been used before.  From Racine he took ‘Polynice,’ ‘Merope’ had been treated by Maffei and Voltaire, and Shakespeare had immortalized the story of Brutus.  The situations and events are often conventional; the passions are those familiar to the stage,—­jealousy, revenge, hatred, and unhappy love.  And yet Alfieri has treated these subjects in a way which differs from all others, and which stamps them, in a certain sense, as his own.  With him all is sombre and melancholy; the scene is utterly unrelieved by humor, by the flowers of poetry, or by that deep-hearted sympathy—­the pity of it all—­which softens the tragic effect of Shakespeare’s plays.