ABSTRACT
Intellectualism in one form or another stamps the Italian comedy. The vernacular erudite drama of the sixteenth century was a far more living and complex thing than is often supposed, but it was created in a spirit of emulation and calculation which inhibited its development to an extent people can only guess at. The history of the formulation of the recipe is a long one in which theory and experiment alternate. Throughout the fifteenth century humanists wrote Latin plays as an academic pastime drawing on various traditions for their inspiration, on medieval popular and religious themes, on novellistic sources and on classical models, with results that were diverting if heterogeneous. The structural rules are familiar, and the codifiers seem to echo each other over most matters. Space has been given to these law-givers because, however much one may find their approach contrary to the spirit of comic and poetic invention, their achievement was the definition of a genre.
