GOLDONI, CARLO (1707–1793)

GOLDONI, CARLO (1707–1793), Italian dramatist. Carlo Goldoni was born in Venice to a family that had immigrated from Modena and that had members in both the professional class and the nobility. Fascinated by the theater from an early age, Goldoni wrote his first play before he was ten. While attending school in Rimini, he became friendly with a comedy troupe that included women, banned from the stage in much of Italy, and departed with them for Chioggia. In 1723 he undertook the study of law at the University of Pavia, but he was expelled in 1725 for a satire of the city's women. After his father died in 1731, Goldoni completed his degree at the University of Padua, but he departed for Milan in 1732 to avoid financial and sentimental obligations.

In 1734 he began his association with the Imer troupe of actors. By the late 1730s he was working regularly in theaters in Venice and other cities and had begun his reform of the improvised commedia dell'arte tradition. He wrote out individual parts and then entire plays, blending Tuscan-speaking aristocratic characters of the erudite tradition with dialect-speaking nonaristocratic characters. While retaining some elements of commedia dell'arte masks and writing a masterpiece in Il servitore di due padroni (1747; Servant of two masters) Goldoni endowed his characters with new psychological depth and realism. La vedova scaltra (The artful widow) of 1748, the first comedy fully implementing these reforms, was favorably received by many. It was also criticized by others, especially Goldoni's rival and imitator Pietro Chiari, the polemic resulting in the censure of theaters by the Venetian government.

Goldoni responded with plays in a wide range of styles, including the famous sixteen comedies of the 1751 Carnival season and his memorable dialect comedies. Mirandolina (The mistress of the inn), staged in 1753, tells of a young proprietress of an inn who exercises great freedom in her dealings with aristocratic suitors. The Villeggiatura (The country vacation) trilogy (1761) pokes fun at city aristocrats who take their artifice-filled habits with them on country vacations. In Le baruffe chiozzotte (Chioggian quarrels) (1762) a girl whose needlework earns her good money attracts rival suitors. Opposition to Goldoni's work intensified, with accusations by the satirist and author of theatrical fables Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) that Goldoni was inverting the social order by associating aristocratic characters with vice and the popular classes with virtue. Gozzi mounted a successful theatrical alternative, a series of exotic tales set in a world of aristocratic privilege.

In 1762, worn down by polemics, Goldoni moved to Paris to work with the Comédie italienne. The French public's expectation that Italian comedy conform to the traditional commedia dell'arte style left him few professional satisfactions. He nevertheless remained in Paris, writing a number of well-received plays and his memoirs.

The strength of Goldoni's theater lies in its inclusion of divergent and even conflicting elements that occur in daily life and that are part of theatrical tradition. The complicated relations of men and women, the generations, and social classes fascinated him. His most consistent focus is on forces that strengthen those bonds or that, on the contrary, break them by setting individuals on destructive paths. While Goldoni appreciated the vitality of the lower social orders, he feared their violence, and while he appreciated aristocrats' elegance, he feared their arrogant vanity. What remained was the sober and directed energy of the middle social orders.

As the plots of his plays show, Goldoni understood that bad choices often result either from indulgence in pleasure or from despair. He also knew that human beings favor those who attract them, and that this causes them to neglect those to whom they are obligated. Thus his plays include husbands who abandon their wives for their drinking companions, wives who prefer their husbands to the children who depend upon them, and servants more interested in gossip than work.

Goldoni experimented with a variety of measures designed to maintain prudent behavior, both internalized social rules, such as an acceptance of authority figures, and severe consequences for irregular behavior, such as the poverty that results from gambling and the damage and death that result from violence. He also showed how authority figures, including fathers and members of the aristocratic class, bring their subordinates into line through both kind and harsh measures, as he kept his characters in line by writing out the parts rather than continuing the improvisation of the commedia dell'arte.

At the same time Goldoni understood that subordination to men creates difficulties and even dangers for women. While most of his numerous and prominent female characters accept and even embrace submissiveness to men, a few of them enjoy a combination of financial security and a lack of male relatives that permits an unprecedented emotional independence. Mirandolina the innkeeper's marriage to her servant rather than to a misogynistic nobleman shows that she intends to remain mistress of her life.

Secondary Sources

Angelini, Franca. Vita di Goldoni. Rome, 1993.

Baratto, Mario. La letteratura teatrale del Settecento in Italia: studi e letture su Carlo Goldoni. Vicenza, 1985.

Branca, Vittore, and Nicola Mangini, eds. Studi goldoniani. Venice, 1960. The acts of an important conference with papers by respected scholars.

Ferroni, Giulio. Storia della letteratura italiana dal Cinquecento al Settecento. Milan, 1991.

Fido, Franco. Guida a Goldoni: Teatro e società nel Settecento Turin, 1977.

——. Nuova guida a Goldoni: Teatro e società nel Settecento. Turin, 2000.

Günsberg, Maggie. Playing with Gender: The Comedies of Goldoni. Leeds, U.K., 2001.

Siciliano, Enzo. La letteratura italiana. 3 vols. Milan, 1986–1988.

Spezzani, Pietro. Dalla commedia dell'arte a Goldoni: studi linguistici. Padua, 1997.

GOLDONI, CARLO (1707–1793)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources