In this tragedy, abandoning the indirectly liberal
teachings of the Foscarini, Niccolini set himself to the purpose
of awakening a Tuscan hatred of foreign rule. The subject is the
expulsion of the French from Sicily; and when the French ambassador
complained to the Austrian that such a play should be tolerated by
the Tuscan government, the Austrian answered, "The address is to the
French, but the letter is for the Germans." The Giovanni da Procida
was a further development of Niccolini's political purposes in
literature, and at the time of its first representation it raised the
Florentines to a frenzy of theater-going patriotism. The tragedy
ends with the terrible Sicilian Vespers, but its main affair is with
preceding events, largely imagined by the poet, and the persons are in
great part fictitious; yet they all bear a certain relation to fact,
and the historical persons are more or less historically painted.
Giovanni da Procida, a great Sicilian nobleman, believed dead by
the French, comes home to Palermo, after long exile, to stir up the
Sicilians to rebellion, and finds that his daughter is married to the
son of one of the French rulers, though neither this daughter Imelda
nor her husband Tancredi knew the origin of the latter at the time of
their marriage.
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