“Vittorio Alfieri, British Literature, and The Liberal: Neoclassical-Romantic Transitions”
(Diego Saglia, University of Parma)
Between the later Enlightenment and the beginnings of Romanticism, Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) emerged on the international literary scene as a leading author of verse, drama, and prose. An embodiment of the spirit and practices of the eighteenth-century “Republic of letters”, he was also admired and imitated by Romantic-period authors all over Europe for his vigorous affirmation of individual conscience against all forms of imposition, subjugation, and enslavement. In Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), the eponymous protagonist declares of Alfieri: “Il est vraiment grand par son caractère et par son âme” (“He is truly great because of his character and his soul”; Staël 1985: 187). Alfieri’s literary output, especially his tragedies, could be invoked to counter widespread assessments of Italy’s literary decline and cultural marginality. However, his works were not exempt from criticism. In Corinne, Staël also notes that “[i]l a voulu marcher par la littérature à un but politique: ce but était le plus noble de tous sans doute; mais n’importe, rien ne dénature les ouvrages d’imagination comme d’en avoir un” (“[h]e wanted to move towards a political goal by way of literature: that goal was undoubtedly the noblest of all; but no matter – nothing distorts works of imagination like having one”; Staël 1985: 187). Alfieri was also notoriously controversial for his personality and political convictions. His intensely civic and political passion, coupled with his uncompromising literary positions, earned him an international reputation but also provoked strictures and condemnations.
True to Neoclassical dramatic principles, and especially the Aristotelian unities, Alfieri’s tragedies explore Romantic themes such as the struggle for liberty and the affirmation of individual and collective identity. Centred on confrontations between tyrants and their opponents, his tragic output relentlessly explores the conflict between oppressive power and freedom. Alfieri’s first fully developed tragedy, Filippo, was initially composed between 1775 and 1776. Saul (written in 1782) and Mirra (written in 1786) stand out among his mature productions. His later Abele, composed around 1790, is a blend of tragedy and melodrama, which testifies to an evolving experimentalism. Despite being perceived as polemical and politically suspect, his plays were repeatedly published across Italy, often staged (sometimes in defiance of censorship), and remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. In addition, his political writings – including the treatises Della tirannide (published in 1777) and Del principe e delle lettere (written in 1778-1786) – convey an intense libertarian ethos and a passionately civic commitment. Alfieri strongly believed that tyranny and literature are incompatible, since literature is an expression of liberty and poetry itself is a form of action. In his view, the poet acts in defence of liberty, adopting a fundamentally public, civic, and patriotic role. At the same time, Alfieri’s life and output testify to the socio-political shifts of an age of transition, as they crystallize a broader crisis of aristocratic subjectivity, marked by a rejection of traditional codes and an acute awareness of personal and social constraints.
Foreshadowing the principles and ideals of the Italian Risorgimento, Alfieri’s biography and writings were celebrated as harbingers of the national process of spiritual and political reawakening. Ugo Foscolo recognized his pioneering status in Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802, 1816), where Alfieri is a crucial figure for the emotionally troubled and staunchly patriotic protagonist. Before his first suicide attempt, Jacopo declaims lines from Saul (Foscolo 2012: 151). He subsequently declares that “L’unico mortale ch’io desiderava conoscere era Vittorio Alfieri; ma odo dire ch’egli non accoglie persone nuove” (“The only mortal I wished to meet was Vittorio Alfieri; but I hear that he does not receive new acquaintances”; Foscolo 2012: 175). Later in the novel, Jacopo is shown reading passages from Saul and Sofonisba (Foscolo 2012: 230). As Alfieri’s tormented characters and fraught tragic plots continued to inspire Italian authors and artists, his patriotic ideas contributed to his transformation into a cultural and political hero. His sonnet to Dante, “O gran padre Alighier, se dal ciel miri” (1783), written during a visit to the poet’s tomb in Ravenna, was primarily occasioned by anger over the harsh criticisms of his own plays, but it is also deeply infused with veneration for the national poet and founder of Italy’s linguistic and cultural identity.
In Britain, Alfieri was the only Italian tragic author to gain a degree of popularity and recognition between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In his Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy (1799), Joseph Cooper Walker stressed Alfieri’s pre-eminent position in a dramatic tradition lacking in outstanding tragedies, and provided a detailed account of his life, themes and techniques, as well as synopses and discussions of each play. The question of Alfieri’s unique status in Italy’s dramatic history featured also in the lengthy section dedicated to him in the “Essay on the Present Literature of Italy” (mainly written by Ugo Foscolo) included in John Cam Hobhouse’s Historical Illustrations to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (1818). In 1820, in a review of Alessandro Manzoni’s Il Conte di Carmagnola in The London Magazine, the anonymous author noted that “[b]efore the time of Alfieri, Italy, critically speaking, cannot be said to have possessed any tragedies […]. We repeat, therefore, without fear of being justly blamed for rashness or illiberality, that, before the time of Alfieri, the Italians possessed no tragedies – although many of their obscure poets often made miserable attempts, and tottered in the path of tragedy” (“On Italian Tragedy” 1820: 284-5).
As this reviewer suggests, other Italian playwrights were mentioned in essays and reviews, but Alfieri alone attracted significant critical engagement and a readership, albeit one composed largely of literati. English editions of his tragedies and autobiography appeared regularly in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Antonio Montucci, who had been in correspondence with Alfieri in 1791, edited a volume of Quindici Tragedie di Vittorio Alfieri published in London and Edinburgh in 1806. Alfieri’s autobiography, Vita di Vittorio Alfieri scritta da esso (1806), appeared in English as a two-volume Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Victor Alfieri (1810). In 1815, Charles Lloyd’s translation of fifteen of Alfieri’s tragedies was published as a three-volume set titled The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri. Frequently reviewed and discussed in the British press in the early years of the century, Alfieri’s life and works attracted the attention and interest of literary figures, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and Walter Savage Landor (Brand 1957: 120-4).
Alfieri cannot be regarded as an unconditionally liberal-minded author in view of his entrenched aristocratic ideas and attitudes, visible in his deep contempt for the mob and the materialistic and acquisitive mindset of the bourgeoisie (the latter takes centre stage in his twelfth satire, which Leigh Hunt partly translated in the third of the “Letters from Abroad”). Nonetheless, he was a highly significant figure for the authors of The Liberal owing to his towering cultural prestige, international resonance, oppositional politics, and – not least – his relevance for Italy’s cultural-national identity. They might also have been aware that, in Restoration Tuscany, the performances of Alfieri’s plays were closely monitored and, in the case of his most controversial works, prohibited from the stage. In 1821-22, the Tuscan censors banned performances of La congiura dei pazzi, Don Garzia, Caio Gracco, Bruto I and Suor Virginia (Gabriele 2013: 32). These facts may partly explain the presence of several of Alfieri’s short poems, in translation and in the original, in the four issues of the Pisan periodical: an epigram (“Capitano è parola”) in the first issue; “Alfieri’s Benediction” (“Sia pace ai frati”), “An Ultra License” (“Approvazione / di fra Tozzone”) and “Portrait of Himself” (“Sublime specchio di veraci detti”) in the second; the opening stanzas of his twelfth satire on commerce (“E in te pur, d’ogni lucro Idolo ingordo”) and “To Genoa” (“Nobil città, che delle Liguri onde”) in the third of the “Letters from Abroad”, in the third issue; and “Dialogue between a Chair in Italy and a Gentleman from England” (“Signor, perché del tuo disutil peso”) and “Dialogue between Alfieri and his Florentine Laundress, Nera Colomboli” (“Che diavol fate voi, Madonna Nera?”) in the fourth.
Of all the members of the Pisan Circle, Byron was Alfieri’s most fervent admirer. His familiarity with the playwright predated his exile to the continent, and deepened further during his residence in Italy. In the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), in the section on the Florentine church of Santa Croce and the great men commemorated there, Alfieri features – with Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli – as one of “four [Italian] minds, which, like the elements, / Might furnish forth creation” (4.55.1-2, Byron 1980-93: II, p. 142). In a letter of 2 August 1821 to Thomas Moore, Byron remembered meeting August Wilhelm Schlegel at Coppet in 1816, and “having some talk […] about Alfieri, whose merit he denies” (Byron 1973-94: VIII, p. 164). After seeing a performance of Mirra in Bologna in August 1819, in a letter to John Murray, he wrote: “Last night I went to the representation of Alfieri’s Mirra – the two last acts of which threw me into convulsions. – I do not mean by that word – a lady’s hysterics – but the agony of reluctant tears – and the choaking shudder which I do not often undergo for fiction” (Byron 1973-94: VI, p. 206).
On 4 January 1821, in the first entry of his Ravenna Journal, Byron noted: “Carriage at 8 or so – went to visit La Contessa G[uiccioli]. – found her playing on the piano-forte – talked till ten, when the Count, her father, and the no less Count, her brother, came in from the theatre. Play, they said, Alfieri’s Filippo – well received” (Byron 1973-94: VIII, p. 12). Teresa’s husband Count Alessandro Guiccioli admired Alfieri, with whom he was acquainted and with whom he discussed the possibility of establishing “in Italia una specie di teatro modello ove, da eccellenti artisti, venissero rappresentate le migliori tragedie dell’età antica e moderna” (“in Italy a kind of model theatre where the best tragedies of the ancient and modern ages would be staged by excellent artists”; qtd in Domini 2019: 13). Though Byron refrains from commenting, the staging of a play by Alfieri – and one specifically denouncing the tyrannical figure of King Philip II of Spain – was highly significant in the politically explosive context of the Romagna in early 1821.
In the same period, Byron began composing his historical tragedies – Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari – which he chose to model on the Italian tragedian’s style (“simple and severe”, Byron 1973-94: VIII, p. 152), thus deliberately rejecting the irregular tradition of English, that is Shakespearean and Renaissance, drama. He explicitly informed his publisher John Murray that his plays were devised “more upon the Alfieri School than the English” (Byron 1973-94: VIII, p. 218). While in Pisa, in conversation with Thomas Medwin, he again held up Alfieri as a model: “what has poetry to do with a play, or in a play? There is not one passage in Alfieri strictly poetical” (Medwin 1966: 94). In what reads like a heated vindication of the Italian author, Byron told Medwin: “Look at Alfieri’s plays, and tell me what is wanting in them” (Medwin 1966: 95).
In his recent reassessment of Alfieri’s significance for Byron, Alan Rawes highlights the importance of the Italian’s “conceptualization and representation of tyranny and revolution” (Rawes 2021: 123). In turn, he connects Byron’s engagement with Alfieri to how Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley also “absorbed and adapted” (123) his political ideas and dramatic practice, and redeployed them in The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Valperga.
In Pisa, on 26 April 1822, Percy Shelley saw Alfieri’s Rosmunda at the Teatro Rossi in the company of Edward and Jane Williams. Mary Shelley started to translate Mirra in September 1818, a task she probably never completed. During the autumn of 1818, she read at least seven other plays by Alfieri, as well as his Vita, which she had already read in English translation in October 1814. Together with Charles Lloyd’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Vittorio Alfieri (1821), the Vita provided much of the information in her biographical essay on Alfieri for the three-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835-37). While carrying out research for this essay in April 1835, she consulted Gabriele Rossetti, the intellectual and political émigré who had become Professor of Italian language and literature at King’s College in 1831, and possibly also Gaetano Polidori, the father of Byron’s one-time personal physician, John William Polidori, and the playwright’s secretary in 1785-89.
In the case of Leigh Hunt, who was responsible for the poems by Alfieri in The Liberal, these works – marginal pieces in Alfieri’s canon – raise the question of Hunt’s aim in introducing them in The Liberal. One reason was to acquaint readers with an unfamiliar portion of Alfieri’s oeuvre. As Hunt remarks in the third of the “Letters from Abroad”, “the miscellaneous poetry of Alfieri is little known in England”. At the same time, though seemingly light or trivial, some of the pieces Hunt selected convey anti-Establishment ideas and attitudes with a tone of subversive jocosity and irreverence that is also central to the Liberal. Therefore, it seems likely that these compositions were seen as the means to engage Alfieri’s reputation for ideological heterodoxy and political oppositionality. Apparently inconsequential, these short poems could contribute to the overall cultural and ideological project of The Liberal as envisaged and promoted by Hunt.
Although Hunt was “well versed on Alfieri” (Eberle-Sinatra 2005: 148), he seems to have harboured or perhaps gradually developed reservations about him as a dramatist, a poet, and a champion of liberty. In his Autobiography (1850), he voiced a stern assessment of the Italian author. There he records how, during his journey from Italy back to England in 1825, he stopped at Asti, Alfieri’s birthplace, to “look at the Alfieri palace, and tried to remember the poet with pleasure; but I could not like him. To me, his austerity is only real in the unpleasantest part of it. The rest seems affected. The human heart in his hands is a tough business; and he thumps and turns it about in his short, violent, and pounding manner, as if it were an iron on a blacksmith’s anvil. Alfieri loved liberty like a tyrant, and the Pretender’s widow [the Countess of Albany] like a slave” (Hunt 1948: 405).
Alfieri attracted interest and admiration for a variety of political, ideological, biographical, and aesthetic reasons. His plays were praised for restoring masculine dignity, austerity, and energy to Italian theatre. He was lauded “as its rescuer from the ‘effeminacy’ of Metastasio” and the artificial sentimentality of his librettos (Brand 1957: 120). However, as Hunt’s comments suggest, contemporary responses were not uniformly favourable: critics often noted that his plays were constrained by the classical unities, featured few characters, and tended towards a didactic and sermonizing tone. Even so, Alfieri remained a crucial point of reference for early nineteenth-century liberal authors and intellectuals. Madame de Staël mentioned him in De la littérature (1800) and, as seen above, discussed him at greater length in Corinne. Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi devoted considerable attention to his biography, style, and works in De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813). Lady Morgan, in her controversial travelogue Italy (1821), traced his continued presence and cultural influence in the country during the early 1820s, at the time when The Liberal was being conceived and published.
In many ways, Alfieri constituted an ideal model and a source of inspiration for the authors of The Liberal. In his life and works they saw a sustained promotion of liberal ideas, condemnations of tyranny, and a conception of literature as a form of civic, politically engaged action. In Alfieri they also found a voice from Europe’s South and an embodiment of cultural transnationalism. Perhaps most significantly, they saw him as a representative of a literature without a nation, from a marginal region of Europe – the Mediterranean South – subjected to the forms of control decreed by the congress system instituted at Vienna in 1814-15 and implemented by the Holy Alliance.
Brand remarks that, in Britain, “[t]he interest in Alfieri is on the decline by 1830” (1957: 124). Undoubtedly, the reduction in the number of translations and reviews reflects a waning of the general interest in his works. However, the force of earlier engagements ensured his continued relevance as a major literary figure and an ideological and political reference point. Just as the effects of the southern European constitutional and independentist revolts of 1820-21 reverberated across subsequent decades, laying the groundwork for later movements, so too did Alfieri and his oeuvre continue to inspire politically oppositional literary practices on a transnational scale – in Italy, Britain, and beyond.
Works Cited
Brand, C.P., Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1957.
Domini, Donatino, “Introduzione”, in Dove visse Byron a Ravenna: Palazzo Guiccioli, a cura di Donatino Domini, Argelato, Minerva, 2019, pp. 9-19.
[Byron, George Gordon, Lord,] The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980-93.
[Byron, George Gordon, Lord,] Lord Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols, London, John Murray, 1973-94.
Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene: A Reception History of His Major Works, 1805-1828, New York-London, Routledge, 2005.
Foscolo, Ugo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, ed. Maria Antonietta Terzoli, Rome, Carocci, 2012.
Gabriele, Nicola, “Tra ‘buona sociabilità’ e avanguardia patriottica: censura teatrale e costruzione del consenso in età risorgimentale”, Memoria e ricerca 44 (2013), pp. 25-42.
Hunt, James Henry Leigh, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J.E. Morpurgo, London, The Cresset Press, 1948.
[Medwin, Thomas,] Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966.
“On Italian Tragedy: Introductory to Remarks on Il Conto [sic] di Carmagnola, (The Count of Carmagnola,) A Tragedy, by Alexander Manzoni”, The London Magazine 2 (September 1820), pp. 284-291.
Rawes, Alan, “Romanticism’s Tyrannical Revolutions: Alfieri, Byron, and the Shelleys”, European Romantic Review 32 (2021), pp. 123-44.
Staël, Madame de, Corinne ou l’Italie, ed. Simone Balayé, Paris, Gallimard, 1985.
Ultimo aggiornamento
23.11.2025