GOLDONI, CARLO
GOLDONI, CARLO – Portrait, in a contemporary painting. Rome, Biblioteca Angelica.
He joined the Medebac company, returning to Venice after several years of wandering as a comic actor and practicing law in Pisa; this was the most intense period of his work, when he studied and labored with indefatigable zeal: the period of *La Vedova scaltra*, *La Puttana onorata*, *La Famiglia dell’antiquario*, *La Locandiera*, *La Figlia obbediente*; of *S. Luca* (where, in a broader setting, with a more serious commitment to the public and to literary polemics against Pietro Chiari and Carlo Gozzi, he devoted himself in two different directions: that of adventurous verse comedies in *martelliani* meter, such as the trilogy *Ircana*, and that of comedies in Venetian dialect, now free from the constraints of masks, wonderfully fluid and moving, *I rustegai*, *Le baruffe chiozzotte*, *La casa nova*; but masterpieces of exquisitely observed psychology are also counted among them, such as the trilogy *La Villeggiatura* and *Gli innamorati*). The final period was the Parisian one, from August 1762: he went to revive the declining fortunes of Italian comedy in France; and he had to start over, working with the conventions of the commedia dell’arte actors, bending to their ways in order to better persuade them. Yet among the scenarios he wrote, in the manner of the *arte*, was the supremely harmonious invention of *Il Ventaglio*, a pure scenic play, unburdened by any concern other than witty dialogue and dance; and he composed in French two comedies, *Le bourru bienfaisant* and *L’avare fastueux*, a Venetian’s homage to the tradition and house of Molière.
He thus passed from an apprenticeship to a theatrical mission, to use a Goethean manner that underscores the poet’s commitment in that most theatrical of centuries.
Founder of the new Italian comedy, he placed at the center of his plots the observation of morality and custom, uniting it with the play of a most free and most compassionate imagination. Yet within the aridity of a figure it is difficult to contain the art of this expert and humane author, always ready for the surprise of unexpected novelties amid old appearances, always attentive to the lives of his creatures and to the infinite variety of human nature and the vicissitudes of life. Nor is he a playwright who proposes a program to be debated elsewhere than within the warm and shifting circle of spectators: even when he spoke of a “reform” of comedy, which had grown sluggish and degraded into the scurrility of the commedia dell’arte, or of “characters,” almost to justify the invention of comic figures according to the canons of verisimilitude, he was concerned only with establishing, with his present and future audiences, a stable and conscious understanding. Intellectual ambitions, doctrinal pedantry, and vain-glory were foreign to a man who captured in his own century its most graceful aspects, its festive indulgences, its profound trust in the human and the reasonable. Italian comedy opens with him to its third season, after having known the minimal fragmentation of medieval farce and the technical organization of the commedia dell’arte; yet in the patient and fruitful labor of his cautious arrangement, of his willing proposals, the traditions of an expressive form—which had been so much a part of Italian custom—remain intact in their authentic meaning. His dialogue is so immediate that it seems to demand only the evidence of the thing seen directly and the word heard immediately, within a very brief circle of suggestion, for its persuasive force. It is a mimetic dialogue, indeed; and the structure of his comedies is so precisely calculated that the wisdom of the composition and the clarity of the scenic coloring seem to arise spontaneously in the act of performance: with the illusion of improvisation that was the hallmark of the *arte*. To achieve this synthesis, which opened to the modern without losing anything of the ancient, and to win over the people of Italy to a new language and a more attentive participation in moral life without revolutionary upheaval, he made use of the innovations introduced into French and Italian theater over the previous century; and literary comedy, evolved from Molière through his French and Italian epigones, held no secrets for him; yet every discovery matured within the concreteness of minutely circumstantial experience, which calculated all the possibilities of the actors and the exact responsiveness of the public.
His greatness lies in the spontaneity he attained, representing a human nature that with marvelous ease assumes a form that is never entirely ugly or wounded, but reasonably disposed toward the best. A goodness innate to him, then, and the gifts of a confident, though too easily satisfied, Christian society, which had absorbed Christianity entirely into custom and did not seek to revisit the themes of theological speculation. From the theater, where he labored with enormous effort, achieving splendid effects of clarity and agile melodization, he moved to a moral observation that grounded human coexistence in terms of reasonableness, of upright living, of wise disposition: vices and passions appear in it, but are tempered by prudent caution and as it were distanced by a thought that makes moral norms and good dispositions prevail over every excess of will and passion. And that moral observation is distilled into witty and limpid harmony, as if the poet offered a cipher to reassemble, in thoughtful yet confident grace, the image of all life. It is too facile to reduce such a mature and complex experience, so shrewd and discreet, so averse to clamor and proclamations, alien to romantically surprising good faith and common sense, within the limits of eighteenth-century morality and custom. In reality, G. is the most mature heir of Italian humanistic civilization, and from it, from his comedy and his proposal, there arises the customs and social life of nineteenth-century Italy, in so far as they were most actively engaged and most willing and most hopeful: without G., the history of Manzonian poetics would be inexplicable; but so too would the very social life of the peninsula be incomprehensible. Even if, in European theater, G. remains as the unattainable model of the most refined theatricality, which seems to resolve everything in the harmony of gesture and line.
