Alps.  The Italy of the Renaissance fascinated our dramatists with a strange wild glamour—­the contrast of external pageant and internal tragedy, the alternations of radiance and gloom, the terrible examples of bloodshed, treason, and heroism emergent from ghastly crimes.  Our drama began with a translation of Ariosto’s ‘Suppositi’ and ended with Davenant’s ’Just Italian.’  In the very dawn of tragic composition Greene versified a portion of the ‘Orlando Furioso,’ and Marlowe devoted one of his most brilliant studies to the villanies of a Maltese Jew.  Of Shakspere’s plays five are incontestably Italian:  several of the rest are furnished with Italian names to suit the popular taste.  Ben Jonson laid the scene of his most subtle comedy of manners, ‘Volpone,’ in Venice, and sketched the first cast of ‘Every Man in his Humour’ for Italian characters.  Tourneur, Ford, and Webster were so dazzled by the tragic lustre of the wickedness of Italy that their finest dramas, without exception, are minute and carefully studied psychological analyses of great Italian tales of crime.  The same, in a less degree, is true of Middleton and Dekker.  Massinger makes a story of the Sforza family the subject of one of his best plays.  Beaumont and Fletcher draw the subjects of comedies and tragedies alike from the Italian novelists.  Fletcher in his ‘Faithful Shepherdess’ transfers the pastoral style of Tasso and Guarini to the North.  So close is the connection between our tragedy and Italian novels that Marston and Ford think fit to introduce passages of Italian dialogue into the plays of ‘Giovanni and Annabella’ and ‘Antonio and Mellida.’  But the best proof of the extent to which Italian life and literature had influenced our dramatists, may be easily obtained by taking down Halliwell’s ‘Dictionary of Old Plays,’ and noticing that about every third drama has an Italian title.  Meanwhile the poems composed by the chief dramatists—­Shakspere’s ‘Venus and Adonis,’ Marlowe’s ’Hero and Leander,’ Marston’s ‘Pygmalion,’ and Beaumont’s ’Hermaphrodite’—­are all of them conceived in the Italian style, by men who had either studied Southern literature, or had submitted to its powerful aesthetic influences.  The Masques, moreover, of Jonson, of Lyly, of Fletcher, and of Chapman are exact reproductions upon the English court theatres of such festival pageants as were presented to the Medici at Florence or to the Este family at Ferrara.[20] Throughout our drama the influence of Italy, direct or indirect, either as supplying our playwrights with subjects or as stimulating their imagination, may thus be traced.  Yet the Elizabethan drama is in the highest sense original.  As a work of art pregnant with deepest wisdom, and splendidly illustrative of the age which gave it birth, it far transcends anything that Italy produced in the same department.  Our poets have a more masculine judgment, more fiery fancy, nobler sentiment, than the Italians of any age but that of Dante.  What Italy gave, was the impulse toward creation, not patterns to be imitated—­the excitement of the imagination by a spectacle of so much grandeur, not rules and precepts for production—­the keen sense of tragic beauty, not any tradition of accomplished art.