The learned historian of Italian literature does not seem to have the remotest suspicion, that a large and deep knowledge of human nature, that the wide and penetrating observation of its similitudes and dissimilitudes, its contrasts, inconsistencies, and analogies, which supply wit with its material, and the genial power of sympathising with its thousand moods, which generates humour, may be either necessary or desirable to a comic writer. If Tiraboschi may be accepted as spokesman for his countrymen in this matter, we have an abundantly sufficient explanation of the small share, which the Muses of the sock and buskin have had in forming that portion of the national mind which takes its shape from the national literature, and to which their sisters of the Nine have notably contributed.
But even comedy, though not in the same degree as tragedy, laboured under the additional disqualification inflicted on it by the prevailing mania for classical imitation. In this case the model worked from was Latin instead of Greek, and generally rather Plautus than Terence. An instance worthy of note may be cited in the "Sporta" or "Money–bag" of Giambattista Gelli, the celebrated Florentine shoemaker, who became Consul of the Academy of Florence. In the prologue to this comedy he urges, in excuse for all shortcomings, that "it is surely a wonder that he has accomplished so much, having all day long to ply scissors and needle, which, womanly tools though they be, were never, as far as his reading tells him, taken in hand by the Muses." Here we have a man of the people, from whom some original conceptions drawn from native popular life might have been expected. But the shoemaker was as classical as his superiors; and his "Sporta" is little more than a disguisement of Plautus in Florentine costume.
Macchiavelli's well known comedy, the "Mandragola," is the most notable exception to what has been said of the plays of Isabella Andreini's day. A genuine type of character altogether belonging to his own time, and full of the elements of high comedy, was embodied in Frà Timoteo, the tartuffe monk, by the daring Secretary. But it is an exception, which but proves the rule.
What then are the sort of characters, in which we are to suppose that Isabella produced an effect so extraordinary? The testimonies of the extent of her power over her audiences are abundant. Padua, her native city, enrolled her at an early age in the list of the "Intenti" academicians. Among these "Intent" votaries of literature, her nickname, according to the puerile practice of such bodies, was "l'Accesa"—"the Inflamed one." The company of comedians, to which she, and her husband Francesco Andreini, also an actor and writer, belonged, were called the "Gelosi"—"Jealous ones." So that Isabella's full style and titles, as they stand in the title pages of her works, run thus; "Isabella Andreini, Comica Gelosa, Accademica Intenta, detta l'Accesa."