Goldoni, Carlo

GOLDONI, CARLO. - Playwright, b. in Venice on 26 Feb. 1707, d. in Paris on 6 Feb. 1793.

His life is so intimately interwoven, even in its external events, with his art, that the Mémoires, written in his very last years in the easy French of eighteenth-century international culture, are the most suitable guide to understanding his theater. Born in Venice of a family originally from Modena, he accompanies his father's adventurous wandering, studies grammar and rhetoric under the Jesuits in Perugia, and scholastic philosophy under a learned Dominican of Rimini, is a medical assistant in Chioggia, a law student at the Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia, an adjunct and coadjutor in the criminal chancelleries of Chioggia and Feltre, graduated in Padua in '51, and a Venetian lawyer. He gains his experiences of the theater, as author and as actor, during this novitiate of studies; and then, passing from dilettantism to the profession, when, having left Venice, he begins his wandering life: «avventuriero onorato», he called himself in a comedy; and «povero allegro venturier modesto» Carducci defined him in a little crown of sonnets in which his portrait is pleasantly framed against a historical and picturesque background. Passing through the composition of «intermezzi», musical farces to be performed between one act and another of the major opera, and of tragicomedies in verse, pompous and well-meaning, he slowly comes to discover his own nature.

His activity as a playwright can be divided into the three periods that center on the three Venetian theaters: that of S. Samuele (with the Imer company; and there he passed from tragicomedies and intermezzi to the comedy of character, writing the whole part of Momolo in certain scenarios dedicated to the Pantalone Golinetti); that of S. Angelo (where he settled with the Medebac company, returning to Venice
after some years of comic wandering and of Pisan law
practice; and this is the most intense period of his work,
when he studies and studies with indefatigable ardor: the
period of the Vedova scaltra, the Putta onorata, the
Famiglia dell'antiquario, the Locandiera, the Figlia obbediente); that of S. Luca (where, in a vaster setting,
with a graver engagement of public and of literary polemic
against Pietro Chiari and Carlo Gozzi, he exerts himself in
two different directions, that of the adventurous comedy
in martellian verses, the trilogy of Ircana, for example, and that
of the comedies in Venetian dialect, now free from
every encumbrance of masks, wonderfully fluent and
moving, I rusteghi, Le baruffe chiocotte, La casa nuova;
but there are also masterpieces of most daring psychological observation, such as the trilogy of the Villeggiatura
and Gli innamorati). The last period is the Parisian one, from Aug.
1762: he went to revive the declining fortunes of
Italian comedy in France; and he had to start over from
the beginning, working on the habits of the actors of the
arte, bending to them, the better to persuade them. But among the scenarios he wrote, in the very manner of the arte, the most harmonious invention of the Ventaglio, a pure scenic game,
free from every preoccupation other than that of timing
and dance; and he composed in French two comedies, Le
bourru bienfaisant and L'avare fastueux, a homage of the Venetian to the tradition and the house of Molière.

He thus passes from a novitiate to a theatrical mission,
to put it in a Goethean manner that underscores
the poet's engagement in that most theatrical century of his.

As the founder of the new Italian comedy, at the center
of the fable he placed the observation of morality and of
custom, gathering into it the play of a most free and most joyful imagining. But the art of the expert and humane author does not easily resign itself to the aridity of a formula, always
ready for the surprise of unthought-of novelties amid old
appearances, always attentive to the vicissitude of his creatures
and to the infinite variety of human nature and of the chances of
life. Nor is he a playwright who proposes a program
to be discussed anywhere other than in the warm and shifting circle
of the spectators: even when he spoke of «reform»
of comedy, which was growing lazy and degrading itself in the scurrility of the commedia dell'arte actors, or of «characters», almost to
justify according to the canons of verisimilitude the invention of comic personages, he was concerned only with
establishing, with the present and future audience, a stable and conscious
understanding. Intellectual ambitions, doctrinal pedantries,
vainglories were foreign to a man who
gathered from his century its most graceful aspects, its
festive complaisances, its profound trust in the human and the
reasonable. Italian comedy opens with him to its
third season, after having known the mimic fragmentariness
of medieval jesting and the technical organization of the
commedia dell'arte; but in the patient and most fruitful labor of his cautious arranging, of his willing proposing,
the traditions of an expressive form that had
been so great a part of the custom of Italy remain intact
in their authentic meaning. His dialogue has such an immediacy that it seems to ask only of the evidence
of the thing directly seen and of the word immediately
heard, within a very brief circle of suggestion,
its persuasive force. Mimic dialogue, precisely; and the
structure of his comedies is so exactly calculated,
that the wisdom of the composition and the clarity of the scenic
coloring seem spontaneously to be born in the act of
reciting: with the illusion of improvising that belonged to
the arte. To arrive at this summary, which opened onto the
modern without losing anything of the ancient, and to win
without revolutions the people of Italy to a new word and
to a more attentive participation in the moral life, he avails
himself of the novelties introduced over a century into the French
and our own theater; and literary comedy, developed from
Molière through his French and Italian epigones, has no
secrets for him; but every discovery matures in the concreteness of a minutely circumstantiated experience, which
calculates all the possibilities of the actors and the exact response
of the audience.

His greatness lies in the spontaneity he attains, portraying a human nature that with admirable ease takes shape, never entirely ugly and wounded, but reasonably disposed toward the better. An innate goodness, therefore, and the gifts of a trusting — yet all too easily satisfied — Christian society, a society in which Christianity had absorbed everything into custom, nor dared to propose anew the themes of theological speculation. From the theater, in which he experiments with enormous effort, attaining splendid effects of clarity and agile modulation, he passes to a moral observation that grounds human coexistence precisely in terms of reasonableness, of well-ordered living, of wise disposition: vices and passions appear there, but attenuated by wise caution and as it were distanced by a thought that makes moral norm and good dispositions prevail over every excess of will and passion. And that moral observation is summed up in a keen and limpid harmony, as though the poet offered a cipher for recomposing in thoughtful yet trusting grace the image of all life. It is all too easy to reduce, within the limits of eighteenth-century custom and morality, so mature and complex an experience, as shrewd and discerning as it is averse to clamor and proclamation, alien to romantically surprising good faith and good sense and common sense. In reality, G. is the most mature heir of Italian humanistic civilization, and from there, from his comedy and his proposal, move the custom and social life of the Italian nineteenth century, in what it had of most actively engaged and most willing and most trusting: inexplicable, without G., is the history of Manzonian poetics; but incomprehensible too is the very social life of the peninsula: even though G., in European theater, remains the unreachable model of the most discerning theatricality, which seems to resolve everything in the harmony of gesture and line.

Mario Apollonio