ITALIAN DRAMA IN THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY |
FOR
Italy, as for other sections of Europe, the seventeenth century
was a period of political and military strife, with the art of
the stage in a precarious condition. By the beginning of the
eighteenth century the commedia
dell' arte, or improvised comedy, had begun to decline.
The stock types represented by the masks and the conventional
comic situations, however, continued to hold the stage. So firmly
were they entrenched in the popular favor that talented new writers
could but with difficulty dislodge them. The low farcical entertainments
constituted the most disreputable rival to regular comedy; but
the new art of opera, which had developed with surprising rapidity,
was the most powerful rival of all.
Regular comedy in Italy was apparently
about to expire when Carlo
Goldoni (1707-1793) appeared to bring it back to life. He
was a native of Venice, and began his career by writing opera
librettos. Gaining in experience and in technical skill, he cautiously
attempted to replace the empty and pornographic entertainments,
which too often passed for comic drama, by plays of innocent
action representing contemporary events and characters. One hundred
and sixty comedies remain from his pen, twenty of which are in
verse, the remainder in prose, either of the Venetian dialect
or the national language. He is said to have written as many
as sixteen pieces in one year. His invention was remarkably fertile,
and his sense of comedy sprang from his understanding of the
human emotions, as real comedy always does. He was not profound,
but he was charming, witty, true to nature, with buoyant spirits
and an inexhaustible humor.
Another attempt at the purification of
the stage was made on quite a different principle by Carlo Gozzi
(1722-1806), who introduced the fantastic and remote. He dramatized
the familiar fairy tales, such as Bluebeard and The
Sleeping Beauty, provided them with magnificent settings,
and gave them to the public with considerable pomp and ceremony.
Gozzi disliked the bourgeois style and parodied the comedies
of Goldoni.
The writers of tragedy continued to treat
the well known plots in the same old way, growing more and more
stale with each repetition. Near the end of the seventeenth century
the Academy of Arcadians had been instituted in Rome. This organization
attempted to inject new life into tragedy, to broaden the field,
and to abolish the old-time stage trappings. Among the few names
which deserve to be remembered is that of Scipione Maffei (1675-1775),
who possessed undisputed talent combined with sincere feeling.
His tragedy Merope (1713) not only won great success,
but aroused the admiration of Voltaire,
and inspired the English John Hume with the idea of Douglas.
It is the last good play of the older Italian school. Metastasio
(1698-1782) was educated as a musician under the Neapolitan composer
Porpora, but won fame through his librettos. The earliest of
these, Dido abandonata (1724), like almost all of the
work of Metastasio, is well constructed and entertaining on the
stage even without the adjunct of music. He stands out, among
the writers of the world in any language, as excelling in pure
and harmonious lyric verse. In the later years of his life Metastasio
held the post of court poet at Vienna.
The name of Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803)
is one of the greatest among Italian playwrights. He was of a
wealthy and noble family, and, like Voltaire, was born with a
passion for liberalizing the human spirit. He believed that the
drama of his country could be purified most effectively through
a re-introduction of the classic modes--and he therefore followed
in the footsteps of Racine,
taking up one, and only one, thread of action, discarding underplots
and "relief," and concentrating on the advancement
of the plot. The personages of his plays do not grow, but remain
the same from the beginning to the end. He was attracted by horrible
crimes and abnormal passions, was sombre in temperament and inclined
to be somewhat violent in his expressions, but possessed a kind
of flaming intensity. Despising sentimentality and the merely
pretty adjuncts of drama, he was able to infuse into his tragedies
a kind of dark wisdom and sublimity. In almost every play he
revealed his detestation of tyranny (which he considered identical
with royalty), and his passion for liberty, which he regarded
as the dearest thing in life. In five of his nineteen dramas
the theme is the struggle for freedom, and one of them is dedicated
to Washington, "Liberator dell' America." He
pictured the degradation of Florence under the rule of Medici,
and deeply resented the condition of Italy in his own time.
This article was originally
published in A Short History of the Drama. Martha Fletcher
Bellinger. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1927. pp. 276-8.
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