ALFIERI, VITTORIO, COUNT (1749-18o3), famous tragic dramatist of Italy, was born at Asti in Piedmont, of rich and noble parents. His father died when he was an infant and his mother married again, but an uncle took an interest in his educa tion and sent him in his tenth year to the Academy of Turin. By the death of this uncle he was left, at the age of 14, to enjoy without control his vast paternal inheritance, augmented by the recent accession of his uncle's fortune; but for three more years he remained at the academy, though he seems to have learned very little there except contempt for his studies and for the life which he saw about him. Eager to escape from it, he obtained leave of the king to travel, and left Turin in 1766 under the care of an English tutor, from whom, however, he soon parted.
For nearly seven years he travelled about Europe, visiting most of the capitals, and indulging in a series of amorous adventures, of which he gives some account in his interesting autobiography; but although much of his time was wasted in dissipation, he found in England the political liberty which became his ideal, and in France the literature which seems to have influenced him most profoundly. He studied Voltaire, Rousseau and, above all, Montesquieu; and his reading confirmed in him that love of freedom and hatred of all tyranny which were henceforward his most marked characteristics.
In 1772 he returned to Turin, but two more years were wasted in yet another intrigue before he found in Plutarch's Lives—his "book of books," as he called it—a stimulus to literary composi tion, and, identifying himself with the love-sick Antony, wrote a play entitled Cleopatra, which was acted in 1775. Well aware of its defects, he. persuaded the producer to withdraw it after the second performance; but its immediate success filled him with ambition to excel as a dramatist, and, since no great tragic poet had yet arisen in Italy, he determined to devote himself to the composition of tragedies.
As a Piedmontese who had spent so many years abroad, he was gravely handicapped by his ignorance of classical Italian, and indeed his first two tragedies, Filippo and Polinice, were conceived and written in French prose. Much hard study was required before he could translate them into Italian blank verse (for which Cesarotti's version of Ossian served him as a model), but he had at last found an object in life, and so ardently did he devote himself to its achievement that in eight years he had 14 tragedies to his credit, ten of which were published at Siena in During the same period he found time to write many translations and original lyrics, including five odes on American independence, as well as a treatise, Della Tirannide, which how ever was not published until many years later. His first series of tragedies culminated in Saul, which many critics besides himself have regarded as his best play, and when he wrote it he intended it to be his last.
Meanwhile, in 1777, he had found in the Countess of Albany (q.v.) a new love, to whom he remained faithful for the rest of his life; and, in order to be free to follow her, in 1778 he ended his allegiance to Piedmont by making over his estate there to his sister. One of his plays, Maria Stuarda, was dedicated to the countess, but it was not until she had left Italy to reside at Colmar in Alsace (1784) that he was able to see her freely, and thenceforward until his death he lived with her. Immediately after Vittorio Alfieri joined her he was moved to break his pre vious resolution and write five more tragedies, one of which, Mirra, has been preferred by some good judges even to Saul; and it was at this time, too, that he completed his treatise Del Principe e delle Lettere, an exercise in the manner of Machiavelli, which was not published until 1801. From Alsace the lovers moved to Paris, and there in 1788-89 Alfieri supervised the printing of a complete edition of his tragedies by Didot.
When the Revolution began he hailed it with an ode on the taking of the Bastille; but the excesses of the populace could not fail to disgust a republican who, as Byron said of him, "was an aristocrat at heart." In 1792 he escaped with the Countess from France and settled in Florence, where they lived for the rest of his life. The property which he had left in France was con fiscated, on the plea that he was an emigrant, and this fact helps to explain the hatred of all things French which found expression in his Misogallo, a collection of violent polemics in prose and verse, which was published in the year when the French troops first entered Florence. Although he never ceased to rage against tyranny—not only of kings and priests, but of revolution aries as well—the last years of his life were undisturbed and he devoted them to quiet study, teaching himself Greek, and even trying to write comedies, for which he had no real gift. These, like his autobiography, his satires, and many of his lyric poems, were not published until after his death, which occurred at Florence, Oct. 8, 1803. He was buried in Santa Croce, and there the Countess of Albany caused a monument by Canova to be dedicated to his memory seven years later. A collected edition of his works was published at Florence in 22 volumes (1805-15).
Alfieri's literary reputation rests chiefly on his 19 tragedies, which were all strictly classical in form, adhering even more closely than their models to the unity of action or interest. Sub ordinate episodes and verbal ornaments were ruthlessly excluded from them, and no more than four principal characters were admitted on the stage. But the genius of their author was es sentially lyrical, and the situation which he treats most often and with most success—that of the hero defying tyranny—is one in which he was able to identify himself with the "splendid rebel," and use him as a mouthpiece for his passionate denunciation of tyrants or praises of freedom. For this his somewhat harsh style, pensato e non cantato, which was an offence to his contemporaries, is now recognized to be the most appropriate vehicle.
But plays written to serve as weapons for political warfare are rarely successful dramatically, and Alfieri too often sacrificed dramatic propriety to special pleading. It is as a precursor of the Risorgimento that he is specially honoured in Italy to-day, and it was in a section of the Misogallo that he first turned from generalizations about freedom to make a direct appeal to his countrymen to recover their own. By that appeal and by many of his lyrics, which he claimed to have written as spurs to arouse the new generations and make them worthy of their Roman ancestors, he certainly helped to revive the national spirit and earned the title of Vate d'Italia by which he is honoured to-day.
See Antoine de Latour, Memoires de Victor Alfieri (French trans. Paris, 184o) ; Sismondi, De la lit. du midi de l'Europe; J. C. Walker, Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy (1799) ; Giorn. de Pisa, tom. lviii. ; Centofanti, Life of Alfieri (1842) ; Emilio Teza, Vita, Giornuli, Lettere di Alfieri (1861) ; Antonini and Cognetti, Vittorio Alfieri (1898).