The first Italian comedies, like the tragedies, were written in rhyme. One early example is entitled to notice, both on account of the subject and as the work of an excellent poet, the _Timone_ of Boiardo. It is little more than a translation of Lucian’s Dialogue, yet was, we feel confident, the channel through which Shakespeare gained the acquaintance with that work revealed in his _Timon of Athens_. The history of Italian comedy as a recognised form of art should, however, be dated from the _Calandra_ of Cardinal Bibbiena, first performed about 1508. It hardly attempts delineation of character, but, as Symonds remarks, “achieved immediate success by reproducing both the humour of Boccaccio and the invention of Plautus in the wittiest vernacular.” The plot is taken from the _Menæchmi_ of Plautus, the source of Shakespeare’s _Comedy of Errors_; but Bibbiena’s idea of making the indistinguishable twins brother and sister enhances the comic effect at the expense of morality, little considered by cardinals in those days. The great success of Bibbiena’s comedy was calculated to encourage rivalry, and it chanced that two of the first men in Italy of the day possessed the dramatic instinct, combined with a decided gift for satire. In the year following the exhibition of the _Calandra_ (1509), Ariosto gave the _Cassaria_, a comedy of intrigue on the Plautine model. The same description is applicable to his other comedies, the _Suppositi_, the _Lena_, the _Negromante_, and the _Scolastica_. In all except the _Negromante_ the action turns upon the stratagems of a knavish servant to obtain for his master the money indispensable for the gratification of his amorous desires. This style of comedy requires a well-contrived plot, and the maintenance of the interest throughout by a series of ingenious surprises and unforeseen incidents. In these Ariosto fully attains his object. Writing for the amusement of a court, he does not care to stray from the conventions which he knows will satisfy, and his pieces afford no measure of the success he might have attained if he had appealed to the public and essayed to depict Italian society as it existed. One of the characters is exceedingly lifelike, the accommodating Dominican in the _Scolastica_, who, armed with all imaginable faculties from the Pope, is ready to commute the fulfilment of an inconvenient vow into the performance of some good work profitable to his order. This play was left unfinished, but was written before the _Lena_ and the _Negromante_, which probably appeared about 1528.