Alfieri's Saul as Enlightenment Tragedy

Alfieri's Saul as Enlightenment Tragedy Jerome Mazzaro Vittorio Alfieri's Saul was written in 1782, six years after the American colonies declared their independence from England and while the Italian playwright was involved with the Countess of Albany, wife of the aging Young Pretender to the British crown, Charles Edward Stuart. Alfieri had already written Of Tyranny (1777), assisted the Countess in her escape from her raving husband, and had as well composed the first four odes of All America libera (1781). This last had been dedicated to George Washington and affirmed the Italian writer's support for the principles ofpolitical freedom that underscored the American Revolution. Like other intellectuals of his day, Alfieri opposed oppression and superstition, advocating right reason and political freedom; given the circumstances of his personal life and perhaps rumors of King George's incipient madness, it is not surprising that, having been led into a view of art as political action, he should choose a mad king for a subject. Like so many Enlightenment figures, he was interested in the human drives and larger principles upon which various forms of government were created and supported, in particular the form of government that most suited his needs. Nor is it surprising that, as a writer born and brought up in Piedmont with French as a first language, he should be influenced in the development of his art by the "rules" of French classical tragedy. Saul in its investigations of oppression and monarchy under assault observes the unities of plot, time, and action first established by Scaliger and Castelvetro and brought into prominence by the dramas of Racine. In so doing, the work compresses ideas and events surrounding the reign of the first king of Israel into 24 hours, locates them in an Israelite camp at Mt. Gilboa, and restricts its incidents and characters to a single action. In keeping with Tasso's recommendation, history is preferred to fiction and, perhaps as a consequence of his involvement with the Countess, a Cornellian love interest, absent from Alfieri's earlier works, appears. 125 1 26Alfieri 's Saul as Enlightenment Tragedy Along with these Renaissance "rules" of drama, Saul subscribes to Aristotle's notions of tragedy's involving the purgation of pity and fear.1 Pity, which for the Greek philosopher was "the affective meaning of present incidents as they are related to the past," involves in Alfieri's work "sufferings which arise in friendships, as well as killing or something else of this sort" occurring among family or near-family relations.2 Fear, which for Aristotle was "the affective meaning of present incidents as they are related to the future," is intertwined in Alfieri and other writers of his day with the essence of tyranny.3 For Alfieri as for Montesquieu earlier, a tyrant was anyone who "obtained the absolute reigns of government and believed [himself] to be and [was] above the law." He was both a source and an object of fear, and in the course of his tragedies, Alfieri's dominant central theme involves conflicts between this tyrant and a hero, the aim of their struggle being "political and personal liberty."4 By watching the actions being staged, audiences were to be purged until they were themselves capable of heroic deeds in pursuit of their own liberty. These elements of tyrant and hero appear in Saul as an individual internal struggle to control and redirect irrational instincts by belief in a force that allows improvement of oneself. The struggle takes place on two planes, inwardly in the mind of Saul and outwardly in the conflict between high priest and prince over right action and jurisdiction that had analogues in the contemporary struggle between Pope Pius VI and secular governors like the Emperor Joseph II. Despite Alfieri's own hatred of religion and its tyranny, he hoped at one time to dedicate the play to Pius VI and read it "to an assembly chiefly formed of high dignitaries of the Church" for their approval. "The Holy Father ," Alfieri writes in his Vita, "excused himself by saying that he could not agree to have any theatrical pieces dedicated to him ofwhatever kind they might be."5 The...