First published Exeunt Magazine, September 2011
The National Theatre’s current hit show One Man, Two Guvnors is a modernised version by Richard Bean of Carlo Goldoni’s 1745 Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters). Anyone seeing this knockabout farce may feel they’ve witnessed a typical Goldoni play but that’s not the case. To experience true Goldonian comedy it’s necessary to fast-forward to the 1750s and 60s, when his experimentation in form and content produced works that anticipated Pirandello, Brecht and Chekov, rather than Feydeau or Ray Cooney.
Goldoni was born in Venice in 1707. He trained, and spent his early working life, as a lawyer but found himself gradually drawn into the world of theatre, first as an amateur writer and then as the self-styled reformer of Italian comedy. His earliest efforts, some ill-fated tragedies aside, were transcriptions of commedia dell’arte scenarios, which he soon improved with his own ideas. We’re dependent, to a large extent, on his memoirs published in French at the end of his life, for the history of his early days and it’s generally thought that this rambling, picaresque collection of memories is as much a work of fiction as one of his plays. He seemed to have had a knack of reinventing history and painting himself in a better light in the process.
One aspect of the memoirs that is often considered to be imaginary is his claim that he consciously set out to reform theatrical form and practice. It’s difficult to say whether this assertion was retrospective thinking or not but when you trace the rapid development of his style and the distance he travelled in his 45 year writing career, it’s hard to believe it was a purely natural evolution. The commedia dell’arte, a form of rough and bawdy street theatre, had been at its height in the preceding two centuries and by the early 1700s was very much in decline. Over a short period in the 1740s, Goldoni got his actors to stop using masks, to speak words he’d written for them (rather than improvise), and to portray more and more naturalistic and ordinary situations.
The Servant of Two Masters is typical of what he was writing by 1745 and has a lot in common with contemporaneous works like I due gemelli veneziani (The Venetian Twins). By then, he’d got rid of the masks and made the actors learn his lines but he was still hampered by the commedia-based characters and situations. These plays, probably the best-known of his comedies today, depend upon a central conceit – in the first a servant takes on two masters in order to earn two wages and, in the second, one actor plays identical twins. Il servitore allows for a great set piece scene, where the servant has to serve dinner to both of his masters simultaneously without either finding out about the other, and this sort of contrivance is a typical showpiece for the physical skills of his actors. It’s not far from the commedia scenarios they’d been performing for a very long time.
Goldoni was still using similar devices five years later with a lesser-known, but equally ingenious, piece called Il bugiardo (The Liar), where a compulsive liar on the make gets himself into all sorts of scrapes by pretending to be different people (here he’s a nobleman rather than the wily servant of Il servitore). By then he was embarking on a new course, though, with a series of plays that forged ahead into a new naturalism. During the 1750-1 season he wrote La buona figliuola (The Good Girl), not a very good play but one in which gondoliers argued and waited round for their masters outside the theatre and La bottega del caffè (The Coffee Shop), where characters sat around in the street, reflecting the everyday lives of the audience. The stock characters were on the way out and at the beginning of the following season came La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn, often known in English translation by the name of its heroine, Mirandolina); true Goldonian comedy had begun.
The three earlier plays mentioned – The Servant of Two Masters, The Venetian Twins and The Liar – are peopled by characters drawn from the commedia stereotypes: Arlecchino (or Truffaldino), Pantalone, Brighella, Il Dottore, Columbina and lovers with names likes Lelio, Florindo, Rosaura and Beatrice. With La locandiera and La bottega del caffè, Goldoni dropped the names, although the character types to some extent remained. Mirandolina, a sexy, conniving hotel-owner who plays along with a set of upper-class, would-be lovers, is not so very different from Columbina, and the Count and Marquis who woo her are lusting, toothless old men very like Pantalone. Nevertheless, they are closer to the original characters Goldoni was soon to create than anything he’d written before.
Another fascinating work written in the previous season was, in some respects, even more forward looking. Il teatro comico (The Comic Theatre) not only does away with the comic types, it also gives hints of the extreme naturalism that was to follow, with plot contrivances almost completely dismissed. The play is as much a treatise as a comedy, spelling out Goldoni’s views on theatre in an almost Pirandellian manner. It opens with an argument about whether the curtain should be up or down and goes on to show a troupe of actors in rehearsal. The stock commedia characters do appear, in a play within a play, but what Il teatro comico mainly shows is a group of real people arguing about their profession.
Stanislavski’s illustration of his theories comes to mind in the scenes where the theatre manager explains the craft to a would-be actor (cf the teacher/student relationship in Stanislavski’s books on the art of acting):
ORAZIO: Signor Lelio, who do you think you’re speaking to?
LELIO: But can’t you see I was acting?
ORAZIO: Yes, I understand that, but while you’re acting, who are you speaking to?
LELIO: Well, to myself. I’m making an entrance. It’s a soliloquy.
ORAZIO: And when you speak to yourself do you say “I’ve been to see my beloved”? A man on his own doesn’t speak like that. Instead it seems as if you’ve come on the stage to tell someone where you’ve been.
LELIO: Alright, then, I was addressing the audience.
ORAZIO: Just as I thought. Don’t you understand that you simply can’t speak to the audience? When an actor’s alone on the stage he supposes that he can’t be seen or heard. Speaking to the audience is an unbearable habit, and it should never be allowed.
And there’s something of Hamlet’s advice to the players when the same character tutors an aspiring actress:
ORAZIO: As a beginner you’re acceptable. Your voice isn’t strong, but you will acquire that over time. Make sure you stress the final syllables so that you can be understood. Speak slowly, but not too much, and in the emotional parts you must build your voice and speed-up the words more than usual. Be careful, above all, not to sing the text or declaim, but speak your words naturally as in everyday life. Drama is an imitation of nature, and you should show only what’s believable. As for gestures, they should also be natural. Move your hands according to the sense of the words.
Goldoni is here laying out his manifesto for a new theatre and style of acting. He was to follow those extraordinary scenes a few years later with Il campiello (1756), moving into a completely new sphere by giving a slice-of-life commentary on contemporary society. A campiello is a small square, many of which can still be seen all over Venice, and the play describes a day in the life of the folk who live and work there. It shows the comings and goings, arguments and flirtations that held a mirror up to the audience, with no machinations, coincidences or mistaken identities. It’s highly structured but, with minimal plot and the focus on character, it gives the impression of a camera pointed at the square for 12 hours and left to run its course. The original Italian (actually Venetian dialect and in verse) has a great poetic beauty, with language used like musical themes.
La guerra (The Battlefield) of 1760 can scarcely be considered a comedy. Its subject is war and, while Goldoni never went in fully for satire or social criticism, it has a clear anti-war message. He had witnessed a battle at first hand and was sickened by the destruction and killing. What is most striking about La guerra now is the very close similarity of two of the characters to Brecht’s Mother Courage and it’s hard to believe that the later playwright didn’t know Goldoni’s work (there were certainly German translations of the play available). The quartermaster Polidoro and canteen woman Orsolina (who follows the army dragging her cart of wares) talk exactly like Brecht’s character:
POLIDORO: War is a marvelous thing. I always speak well of it. There’s no danger of me voting for peace. You could say I’m like the hangman’s wife who prayed to heaven to provide her husband with plenty of customers.
ORSOLINA: Oh yes, God bless and preserve the war and let it never end.
Like Mother Courage, their venality overcomes any personal loss they suffer through their trade (Orsolina has already lost her husband to the war) and one can’t help feeling that Goldoni, like Brecht, was warning his audience against perpetuating war for personal interests.
On a much more domestic level, Goldoni wrote La casa nova (The New House) during the same year. It has a similarly natural feel to Il campiello, as a family move into a new and better residence and show all the aspirations and desires of a bourgeois family, with the inevitable love stories thrown in (there isn’t a Goldoni play that doesn't have love at its heart). With La villeggiatura of 1761, we see Goldoni at his most Chekovian. Slice of life reality had become the norm by now and with this wonderful trilogy, which describes the fashionable summer outing to the countryside beloved of the upper classes, he introduces a poetic wistfulness that is truly moving. He followed it a year later with Le baruffe chiozzotte (The Chioggian Squabbles), written in Venetian dialect , which chronicles the ebb and flow of disputes between ordinary fishing folk while a Goldoni-like lawyer observes with affectionate amusement.
Towards the end of his career, we see Goldoni making a slight return to coincidence and misunderstanding as plot-drivers. This could be seen as a decline in his powers or could also be interpreted as something akin to Ibsen’s yearning for the poetic expression of his youth in his final plays. Il ventaglio (The Fan) of 1765 does show a dependence on contrivance but is a wonderfully mature and satisfying work that brings together many elements of a lifetime’s craft. He spent the last 30 years of his life in self-imposed exile in Paris, writing his final plays in French. His penultimate play Le bourru bienfaisant (The Beneficent Bear), 1771, fulfilled his wish of being performed at La Comédie-Française, home of his beloved Moliere. It’s set in a Parisian chateau and describes a domestic situation like so many others he’d created. The central character, Monsieur Geronte could be from an earlier play, with much of the action stemming from his strong personality trait, a quick temper that belies his true nature. He’s a loveable grumpy old man who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation but has the best interest of his loved ones very much at heart. While this return to a comedy of “types” might seem retrogressive, its apparent naivety rather adds to the play’s charm.
There’s dispute among Goldoni commentators as to how many works he actually wrote during his long life (it could be as many as 400) but none that the quality varies enormously. Even when he’d reached maturity as a playwright, he was capable of churning out poor work, maybe inevitable given his level of output and the fact that he was constantly working to deadlines. This brief survey can only mention a few of the extant plays but, hopefully, gives a taste of the great range of his work. It’s unfortunate that Goldoni is known in this country for just a few plays, and ones that don’t represent his full achievement. The Servant of Two Masters and The Venetian Twins will always be popular as they are great fun works but they are immature and tell us more about the outdated traditions that Goldoni was leaving behind, while an exploration of the later plays opens up a wealth of mature dramatic expression.
