Carlo+Goldoni

=Carlo Goldoni=

Statue of Goldoni
 * Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni ** (25 February 1707 – 6 February 1793) was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title "Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade," which he claimed in his memoirs the "Arcadians of Rome" bestowed on him. There is an abundance of autobiographical information on Goldoni, most of which comes from the introductions to his plays and from his //Memoirs//. However, these memoirs are known to contain many errors of fact, especially about his earlier years. In these memoirs, he paints himself as a born comedian, careless, light-hearted and with a happy temperament, proof against all strokes of fate, yet thoroughly respectable and honorable. Such characters were common enough in Italy.

**Theatrical career** He entered the Italian theatre scene with a tragedy, //Amalasunta//, produced in Milan. The play was a critical and financial failure. Goldoni thanked his critic, went back to his inn and ordered a fire, into which he threw the manuscript of his //Amalasunta//. His next play, //Belisario//, written in 1734, was more successful, though of its success he afterward professed himself ashamed. During this period he also wrote librettos for opera seria and served for a time as literary director of the San Giovanni Grisostomo, Venice's most distinguished opera house. He wrote other tragedies for a time, but he was not long in discovering that his bent was for comedy. He had come to realize that the Italian stage needed reforming; adopting Molière as his model, he went to work in earnest and in 1738 produced his first real comedy, //L'uomo di mondo// ("The Man of the World"). He also wrote //Momolo Cortesan// in 1738. By 1743, he had perfected his hybrid style of playwriting (combining the model of Molière with the strengths of Commedia dell'arte and his own wit and sincerity). This style was typified in //La Donna di garbo//, the first Italian comedy of its kind. In 1757, he engaged in a bitter dispute with playwright Carlo Gozzi, which left him utterly disgusted with the tastes of his countrymen; so much so that in 1761 he moved to Paris, where he received a position at court and was put in charge of the Theatre Italien. He spent the rest of his life in France, composing most of his plays in French and writing his memoirs in that language. Among the plays which he wrote in French, the most successful was //Le Bourru bienfaisant//, produced on the occasion of the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1771. He enjoyed considerable popularity in France; when he retired to Versailles, the King gave him a pension. He lost this pension after the French Revolution. The Convention eventually voted to restore his pension the day after his death.

Goldoni relates in considerable length in his //Memoirs// the state of Italian comedy when he began writing. At that time, Italian comedy revolved around the conventionality of the Commedia dell'arte, or improvised comedy. Goldoni took to himself the task of superseding the comedy of masks and the comedy of intrigue by representations of actual life and manners. Goldoni's importance lay in providing good examples rather than precepts. Goldoni's plays are gentler and more optimistic in tone than Molière's.
 * Goldoni's Impact on Italian Theatre **

Goldoni's plays that were written while he was still in Italy ignore religious and ecclesiastical subjects. This may be surprising, considering his staunch Catholic upbringing. No thoughts are expressed about death or repentance in his memoirs or in his comedies. After his move to France, his position became clearer, as his plays took on a clear anti-clerical tone and often satirized the hypocrisy of monks and of the Church. Goldoni was inspired by his love of humanity and the admiration he had for his fellow men. The moral and civil values that Goldoni promotes in his plays are those of rationality, civility, humanism, the importance of the rising middle-class, a progressive stance to state affairs, honor and honesty. Goldoni had a dislike for arrogance, intolerance and the abuse of power. Goldoni's main characters are no abstract examples of human virtue, nor monstrous examples of human vice. They occupy the middle ground of human temperament. Goldoni maintains an acute sensibility for the differences in social classes between his characters as well as environmental and generational changes. Goldoni pokes fun at the arrogant nobility and the pauper who lacks dignity. (Source: []
 * Themes **

// La Donna di garbo // // Belisario // // L'uomo di mondo // // Momolo Cortesan // // Le Bourru bienfaisant //
 * Top Plays: **

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