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Updated: June 13, 2025
The catalogue shows that the Duke's store had consisted mainly of the writings of the Fathers and Arabian works on science: there were a few classics, including a Quintilian, and Aristotle and Plato in Latin: the works of Capgrave and Higden were the only English chronicles; but the Duke was a devotee of the Italian learning, and his gifts to Oxford included more than one copy of the Divina Commedia, three separate copies of Boccaccio, and no less than seven of Petrarch.
Dante, Jacopo, son of the poet, was visited in a dream by his father, who conversed with him and told him where to find the missing thirteen cantos of the Commedia. Tasso saw and conversed with beings invisible to those about him. Goethe saw his own double riding by his side under conditions which really occurred years later. His father, mother, and grandmother were all ghost-seers.
But "The New Life" has an interest of another sort, and a claim, not yet sufficiently acknowledged, upon all who would read the "Divina Commedia" with fit appreciation, in that it contains the first hint of the great poem itself, and furnishes for it a special, interior, imaginative introduction, without the knowledge of which it is not thoroughly to be understood.
The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian commedia dell' arte wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as one or two MS. "Plats," designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant to testify.
The original Italian scenes from which the French farce is taken belonged to that impromptu Comedy, 'Commedia dell' Arte all' Improviso, which so far from being printed was but rarely even committed to writing.
Norton, who was then completing his version of the 'Vita Nuova'. This has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow's translation of the 'Commedia'. In fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know whether Mr.
Had Dante's scope been narrowed to contemporary Italy, the "Divina Commedia" would have been a picture-book merely. But his theme was Man, and the vision that inspired him was of an Italy that never was nor could be, his political theories as abstract as those of Plato or Spinoza. Shakespeare shows us less of the England that then was than any other considerable poet of his time.
Of these years, then, of disappointment and exile the Divina Commedia was the labor and fruit. A story in Boccaccio's life of Dante, told with some detail, implies, indeed, that it was begun, and some progress made in it, while Dante was yet in Florence begun in Latin, and he quotes three lines of it continued afterward in Italian.
They would be supplying a novelty to which all Nantes should flock provided that the work were really well done, and Scaramouche undertook pledged himself that if matters were left in his own hands, his projected revival of the Commedia dell' Arte in all its glories would exceed whatever expectations the public of Nantes might bring to the theatre.
In 1368 he revisited Venice, and in 1371 Naples; but in May 1372 he returned to Florence, where on 25th August 1373 he was appointed lecturer on the Divina Commedia, with a yearly stipend of 100 fiorini d'oro. His commentary is still occasionally quoted.
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