January 17, 2013 | Theatre,

Carlo Goldoni: One of the Greatest Italian Dramatists

Courtesy of the Guthrie Theater

As the author of more than 130 comedies, Carlo Goldoni is among the greatest dramatists of Italy and, with Carlo Gozzi, was one of the pillars of a revitalized 18th-century Italian drama. Goldoni’s most significant achievement was to breathe new life into the Italian theatre by providing a literary foundation for the commedia dell’arte. Actors of commedia companies portrayed popular stock characters wearing traditional masks and largely improvised their performances, using familiar comic scenarios as starting points. Goldoni stepped into this tradition with a playwright’s voice, creating an impressive body of fully scripted plays that moved beyond the conventions of comic acting improvisations. His imaginative plots were drawn from observations of real life, with memorable, fully drawn characters engaged in social interactions of greater complexity than those found in commedia.

Goldoni was born in 1707 in Venice to a middle-class family with a passion for theatre. Goldoni was initially prepared for a medical career, following in his father’s footsteps, but he had already developed a taste for the theatre (even running away for three days with a group of traveling actors). In part to remove him from a distracting environment, he was apprenticed to his lawyer uncle at age 14. But Goldoni fed his passion for theater and became determined to bring Italian theater to the level of Spanish, English and French drama. He found in the comedies of Molière in particular a great inspiration.

His theatre career proper began in 1734 in the unlikeliest of ways when, after having earned a law degree and serving in the foreign ministry, he resigned his position to return home. On the way he was attacked and robbed, but he was taken in by a troupe of actors and went with them to Venice. His tragicomedy Belisario was staged the same year and Goldoni later toured with the company as its official playwright. Three years later, Goldoni was appointed director of the San Giovanni Crisostomo theater in Venice and began writing steadily. Pursuing dual careers in the theatre and the law, in 1745 Goldoni fatefully met two leading actors within the commedia dell’arte and began to write scenarios for them. That year he wrote The Servant of Two Masters and in the years that followed produced The Venetian Twins and many other plays, including 16 comedies written in one year in order to bolster faltering subscriptions.

By 1762, Italian audiences had begun to prefer the plays of rival playwright Gozzi, so Goldoni moved to Paris, where he continued to write for the Comédie-Italienne. He became the tutor to the illegitimate daughter of Louis XV and resided at the palace at Versailles. He spent the remainder of his life in France, where his last plays and his three-volume Memoirs were written. He even got caught up in the French Revolution – he lost his royal pension. He died at age 86 in 1793.