In form it does not greatly differ from the ‘Sacre Rappresentazioni’ of the fifteenth century, as those miracle plays were handled by popular poets of the earlier Renaissance.  But while the traditional octave stanza is used for the main movement of the piece, Poliziano has introduced episodes of terza rima, madrigals, a carnival song, a ballata, and, above all, choral passages which have in them the future melodrama of the musical Italian stage.  The lyrical treatment of the fable, its capacity for brilliant and varied scenic effects, its combination of singing with action, and the whole artistic keeping of the piece, which never passes into genuine tragedy, but stays within the limits of romantic pathos, distinguish the ‘Orfeo’ as a typical production of Italian genius.  Thus, though little better than an improvisation, it combines the many forms of verse developed by the Tuscans at the close of the Middle Ages, and fixes the limits beyond which their dramatic poets, with a few exceptions, were not destined to advance.  Nor was the choice of the fable without significance.  Quitting the Bible stories and the Legends of Saints, which supplied the mediaeval playwright with material, Poliziano selects a classic story:  and this story might pass for an allegory of Italy, whose intellectual development the scholar-poet ruled.  Orpheus is the power of poetry and art, softening stubborn nature, civilising men, and prevailing over Hades for a season.  He is the right hero of humanism, the genius of the Renaissance, the tutelary god of Italy, who thought she could resist the laws of fate by verse and elegant accomplishments.  To press this kind of allegory is unwise; for at a certain moment it breaks in our hands.  And yet in Eurydice the fancy might discover Freedom, the true spouse of poetry and art; Orfeo’s last resolve too vividly depicts the vice of the Renaissance; and the Maenads are those barbarous armies destined to lay waste the plains of Italy, inebriate with wine and blood, obeying a new lord of life on whom the poet’s harp exerts no charm.  But a truce to this spinning of pedantic cobwebs.  Let Mercury appear, and let the play begin.

THE FABLE OF ORPHEUS

  MERCURY announces the show.

  Ho, silence!  Listen!  There was once a hind,
    Son of Apollo, Aristaeus hight,
    Who loved with so untamed and fierce a mind
    Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus wight,
    That chasing her one day with will unkind
    He wrought her cruel death in love’s despite;
    For, as she fled toward the mere hard by,
    A serpent stung her, and she had to die.

  Now Orpheus, singing, brought her back from hell,
    But could not keep the law the fates ordain: 
    Poor wretch, he backward turned and broke the spell;
    So that once more from him his love was ta’en. 
    Therefore he would no more with women dwell,
    And in the end by women he was slain.