achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy
reached the same height in the Italian's Saul that it touched in the
Greek's Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic
creations of any literature." Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the
literary ineducation of Alfieri was the principal exterior cause of
this prodigious development, that a more regular course of study would
have restrained his creative genius, and, while smoothing the way
before it, would have subjected it to methods and robbed it of
originality of feeling and conception. "Tragedy, born sublime,
terrible, vigorous, heroic, the life of liberty, ... was, as it were,
redeemed by Vittorio Alfieri, reassumed the masculine, athletic forms
of its original existence, and recommenced the exercise of its lost
ministry."

I do not begin to think this is all true. Alfieri himself owns his
acquaintance with the French theater before the time when he began to
write, and we must believe that he got at least some of his ideas of
Athens from Paris, though he liked the Frenchmen none the better for
his obligation to them. A less mechanical conception of the Greek idea
than his would have prevented its application to historical subjects.
In Alfieri's Brutus the First, a far greater stretch of imagination is
required from the spectator in order to preserve the unities of time
and place than the most capricious changes of scene would have asked.
The scene is always in the forum in Rome; the action occurs within
twenty-four hours. During this limited time, we see the body of
Lucretia borne along in the distance; Brutus harangues the people with
the bloody dagger in his hand. The emissaries of Tarquin arrive and
organize a conspiracy against the new republic; the sons of Brutus are
found in the plot, and are convicted and put to death.