Commedia Dell'Arte by Carlo Goldoni - Essay Example

? Carlo Goldoni: Man Who Revolutionized the Commedia dell'Arte Introduction The Age of Enlightenment was a time of great reform for the Italian thea­ter. At its outset around the turn of the eighteenth century, a significant tradition of writ­ten, spoken drama barely existed in Italy. There was the commedia erudita, but this form consisted of rarefied, scholarly adaptations or imitations of "classical" texts for court audiences. Opera, as a sung form of drama, was popular and widespread, but its conventions had become excessive and its texts were corrupt from a literary standpoint. Commedia dell'Arte, though well into its decline, was still immensely popular; but it was an unwritten, partially improvised form (Vince 153-158). The theorists of the Arcadian Academy provided the first concerted im­petus for change through their demand that drama return to semplicita-simplicity, which in practical terms signified the dictum that opera be "purified" of its many extra­neous devices, and that tragedy be reworked in terms of French neoclassic precepts (Vince 160). Algarotti's influential book became a reformer's handbook, and eventually formed the basis of a new opera aesthetic. That opera should receive the major focus of serious attention during the early eighteenth century demonstrates how widely it was accepted as Italy's prevailing dramatic form. Its reformation infused spoken drama with new life as well. Late in the century Vittorio Alfieri linked tragic subjects to romantic, nationalistic themes with some popular success. Tragedy, however, was never truly accepted as a dominant dra­matic form during this period, especially in pleasure-loving Venice. Comedy, which had been slowly weaning itself from commedia dell'Arte at least since Machiavelli, fared much better. For that reason, the most conspicuous of all the theater reformers was Goldoni, who revolutionized the comic theater. Contribution of Goldoni Into this commotion came Carlo Goldoni, determined to change the way theater was written, rehearsed, and attended. His timing was propitious; he was heir to a thriving and highly competitive artistic environment in which itinerant players, foreign touring companies, resident groups, amateur theatricals, and even the indigenous civic spectacles and processions all competed for the approbation of an insatiable public. Goldoni had inherited commedia dell'Arte as the prototype for comic theater-a form that represented, by the eighteenth century, hundreds of years of tradi­tion. The budding dramatist had the good fortune to write much of his early comedy for the inspired Imer company. Giuseppe Imer hired Antonio Sacchi to be the company's leader, a man who personified the improvised comedy (Steele 48-49). He came from a noted acting family; his father had been a famous interpreter of the Gaetano character, and his uncle was the famous Coviello Gennaro, who originated the highly individualized servo role that would henceforth bear his name. Like so many outstanding troupes of the time, his father's company spent much of the year touring, and Sacchi himself was born in Vienna during such a tour (Molinari 189) In his adult years, Sacchi spent even more time touring-such was the fate of a commedia company in the genre's years of declining popularity. Neverthe­less, Sacchi was so renowned for his creation of the Truffaldino character (a Venetian version of Arlecchino) that his name became synonymous with that role, and he gained several years of relative permanence in and around the Veneto. For much of the 1740s he performed in Giuseppe Imer's company, working at the San Samuele Theater during the time that Goldoni was formulating and initiating his comic reforms. Goldoni com­plained of Sacchi' s constant tendency to extemporize, and to wreak dramatic havoc by inserting dazzling but extraneous concetti into the playwright's carefully crafted come­dies, "which produced notable and ruinous dissonances" (Molinari 189). Even the zealous reformer Goldoni was eventually constrained to set aside certain parts of his scripts as areas of free play for the commedia master. In this way he was able to contain Sacchi and his extraordinary talent for a short time. In fact one of Goldoni's greatest successes in this early phase of playwriting was the commedia romp II servitore di due padrone, which he composed specifically for Sacchi. Knowing exactly what he wanted from his scenarist, Sacchi dictated the title and plot from a sce­nario that had been in the Theatre-Italienne repertory in Paris as early as 1718 (Steele 48-49). The scenes without Sacchi were written down; everything else depended on the master ac­tor's improvising. Only later, when the Paperini edition of Goldoni's plays were to be printed (in Florence, 1755), did Goldoni write out the entire play (Steele 49-50). Although The Servant of Two Masters (and a stream of similar successes much like it, including Arlecchino Lost and Found and Son of Arlecchino) were lucra­tive efforts, it was clear that the capocomico's skill and the reformer's dramaturgy were essentially incompatible. One day Sacchi suddenly left Imer's company-"who knows for what reason," Goldoni remarked with uncharacteristic terseness, though he must have known that he and his comic reforms were at least part of it (Steele 48-49). There was no room for an actor of Sacchi's style in Goldoni's New Comedy; and the widespread assumption about the newly formed Truppo di Sacchi, when it left Venice in the early 1750s, was that it could no longer attract enough patrons to support the old commedia tradition. The Sacchi episode was instructive. It showed Goldoni that he could not just dispose of the popular performing style, despite the fact that commedia was an out­moded form (one that had become, by the 1740s, offensive to many people because of its excessive lewdness). Old-fashioned or not, it had hundreds of years of tradition be­hind it, and was the idiom all actors were trained to work in. Not for nothing was "comico" the standard term for an actor of any style at this time (Steele 48-51). Yet Goldoni did not conceive of his changes as constituting sweeping re­forms at first. In fact, a survey of his early successes in the theater indicate his debt to the commedia idiom-The 32 Disgraces of Arlecchino is a representative example. But Goldoni was also acutely conscious of how this style compared with the performing tra­ditions of other countries. While studying at the University of Pavia, he had found time to read theatrical works of French, Spanish and English playwrights (Chatfield-Taylor 51-53). According to his Memoires, it occurred to the future dramatist at this time that he wanted "passionately to see [his] homeland raised to the level of art and hoped to contribute to it" (Chatfield-Taylor 54). With this in mind, he later read Machiavelli's La Mandragola and the works of Giambattista della Porta, which pointed the way to a recuperation of his native comic heritage. Almost at once, Goldoni managed to initiate small changes that paved the way for reform. He deliberately courted the unruly groundlings-in particular the gon­doliers, who were so disruptive that they were not even allowed inside the theater. Goldoni not only made a point of inviting them to his plays, but also went so far as to write particular gondoliers into his plays as characters (Chatfield-Taylor 54). Though occasionally this action has been cited as evidence of Goldoni's democratic bonhomie, it was a cagey, calculated business move on his part that was to have important commercial consequences. By gaining the groundlings' goodwill, he cultivated a predisposition to relative quiescence during his plays. This helped to ensure that the new style of fixed dialogue-so critical to comprehension of his new plots-was intelligible. Gozzi would later refer to maneu­vers such as this as evidence of Goldoni's covertly subversive agenda. In the late 1740s, Goldoni was hired as playwright-in-residence at the Teatro Sant' Angelo, which allowed him to tinker with dramatic form more freely than before. While many of the plays he produced there were more or less traditional comme­dia, he also introduced a number of innovations. In a free-wheeling adaptation of Ter­ence called I due gemelli veneziani (The Venetian Twins), the Pantalone character appeared for the first time without a mask- or at least it was the first time that the Venetian audience was charmed enough by a play sporting this novelty to accept the breach of convention. One of Goldoni's most popular plays of this period, La vedova scaltra (The Cunning Widow), returned to the use of masks, but also successfully introduced "national comedy"-that is, its characters were based on recognizable, con- temporary Italian life and people rather than commedia stereotypes (Chatfield-Taylor 54, 150). Goldoni went even further with his La putta onorata (The Respectable Girl), which was his first realistic rendering of Venetian common people. Venice was delighted by the novelty of seeing itself represented realistically onstage, and demanded to see more of the same. From this period on (1749), Goldoni referred to his efforts as reform. Goldoni's success attracted rivals. The most important one at this phase of Goldoni's career was an abbot of extreme worldliness (even by Italian standards of the day) named Pietro Chiari. Critical tradition maintains that Chiari was a hack who thrived by catering to the public demand for the novel and the fashionable (Goldoni 247). Chiari's reputation, like that of Gozzi's, is due for reevaluation, but he did profit parasitically from Goldoni's success. His favorite tactic was to wait for Goldoni to have a success and then to throw together a barely disguised send-up of it. Goldoni protested that on occasion Chiari's plays were more plagiarism than parody: …Saint Samuel announced a new comedy, called "The School for Widows." I was told it was a parody of my play [The Clever Widow], but it was no such thing; it was my widow herself, with the same plot and the same inci­dents. Nothing was changed but the dialogue, which was filled with insulting in­vectives against myself and my comedians. One actor uttered a few phrases of my original, another added, "Silly stuff." Some of the bon-mots and pleasant­ries of my piece were repeated, and a cry was set up in the chorus of "Stupid! Stupid!"(Goldoni 247) After this flagrant savaging of his work, Goldoni avenged himself by penning an "Apolo­getic Prologue to The Clever Widow," which defended his dramaturgy against Chiari's criticisms (Miller 75). Probably this part of the pamphlet interested few. More galvanizing, from the Republic's official point of view, was Goldoni's accusation that Chiari's pastiche was insulting and injurious to the city's thriving tourist trade because it contained slurs against foreign nationals and religious beliefs. Three thousand copies of the pamphlet were disseminated in cafes, theater lobbies and other public venues, and the resulting controversy was enough to get both the satire and the original shut down (Vince 161). Goldoni won the battle; but as a result of his suit, theatrical censorship was instituted for the first time in Venetian history. The continual exchanges of pamphlets, plays, prologues, letters and libretti did have a positive effect, from the standpoint of theater history; it sharpened the critical faculties of the normally sanguine Goldoni, and goaded him into articulating what his goals really were. The "Apologetic Prologue" was the first outline of what would ultimately constitute his theatrical reform. Among its tenets was the idea that comedy should use what is reasonable as a guide to its dramatic form, and not obey the artificial and outmoded rules inherited from commedia dell’Arte. By 1750, Goldoni evidently felt Chiari was a serious threat to his liveli­hood, for he resorted to a desperate measure to vanquish his rival. At the end of that season, he astounded theatergoers by announcing that he would do sixteen new come­dies in the upcoming year (six to eight was customary). When the time came, he opened the Sant' Angelo's new season with II teatro comico, a metatheatrical piece that reiter­ated his boast and explicitly outlined what New Comedy would look like in its Venetian incarnation. The play's basic concetto revolved around a house manager auditioning actors for the new acting style, and therefore needing to explain the way acting was done in his company. Since, according to the stage manager, drama should reflect the reasonable and customary behavior of real life, such actorly indulgences as paying atten­tion to the audience instead of the others onstage, bursting into song or into impromptu poetry recitals, or interrupting the plot to speak to the audience, did not belong on stage. Act Three of II teatro comico represented a fitful rehearsal in which the manager was obliged to dissuade the indignant actors (now appearing in masks as their commedia counterparts) from their bad habits so that they could appear natural and life-like. Astonishing as it is that the real actors went along with this self-parody, it is perhaps even more amazing that the audience tolerated paying for a dramatized manifesto. In fact, they actually embraced it (Cope 143-144). The piece inaugurated one of Goldoni's most successful seasons. In the decade that followed, Goldoni wrote some of his best work, in­cluding the famous La locandiera (often translated into English as either Mirandolina or The Mistress of the Inn). Increasingly he wrote plays he considered antidotes to the ex­cesses of commedia dell' arte. By gradually substituting fully written texts to replace the loose canovaccio actors had formerly worked from, he curbed their tendency to extemporize. Goldoni also purged fantastic and obscene elements from plots in an effort to create a theater in which no one had to worry about the wholesomeness of what they would experience. Conclusion In conclusion, Goldoni revolutionized the comic theater. He strived to create a drama that satisfied, and reflected, the largely middle-class audiences that were becoming more and more the theater's constituency. Once Goldoni accustomed his company to an exact adherence to the lines he had written out for them, his principal task became the gradual rehabilitation of the commedia stereotypes into recognizable Venetian characters. The most complete of these transformations occurred in his renovation of the Pantalone character, who Goldoni changed from a penny-pinching antagonist (ranging in commedia scenarios from a mere bumbler to an active agent of harm) into a typical middle-class merchant. In this way, Goldoni yoked traditional characterizations to his own purposes. By using the tradition yet simultaneously playing against it, he was gradually able to introduce novel dramatic frissons. Work Cited Chatfield-Taylor, H.C. Goldoni: A Biography London: Chatto & Windus, 1914. Cope, Jackson. Dramaturgy of the Daemonic, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Goldoni, Carlo. Memoirs. Translated by John Black, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Miller, John W. The Comic Theater, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969. Molinari, Cesare La Commedia dell' Arte , Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1985. Steele, Eugene, Carlo Goldoni. Life, Work, and Times .Ravenna: Longo Editore. Vince, Ronald W. Neoclassical Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook, New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Read More