Carlo Goldoni: The Playwright Who Rewrote Italian Comedy

Before Goldoni, Italian comic theater relied mostly on commedia dell’arte: actors did not perform a written text but developed a canovaccio, an outline of the plot, on the spot. According to Treccani, commedia dell’arte was “performed, for the first time in Europe, by regularly established troupes of actors who made their living from their craft” — professionals, not amateurs, who emerged around the middle of the 16th century and remained active into the early 19th.

What commedia dell’arte actually was

In commedia dell’arte, Treccani writes, “only the outline, the plot, was written down, leaving the development of dialogue and stage business to improvisation.” That did not mean actors made everything up in the moment: each one built and memorized a personal “formulario,” a ready repertoire of lines adapted from performance to performance.

The most recognizable feature of the genre was its fixed stock characters: types that a single actor played for an entire career, giving up the chance to take on different roles in order to specialize in just one. Harlequin is the best-known example: he first appeared on stage in the second half of the 16th century as a descendant of Hellequin, a comic devil figure from French medieval drama, and by the 18th century had become, in Treccani’s words, “one of the liveliest and most distinctive of the masks,” the cunning, none-too-bright servant packed into a costume of colored diamond patches.

Goldoni’s reform: from scenario to script

Carlo Goldoni was born in Venice on February 25, 1707. He studied first with a private tutor, then in boarding school, and earned a law degree at the University of Padua, becoming a lawyer in Venice the following year. Only later did theater become his actual profession.

According to Treccani, the comedy “La donna di garbo” marks “the new genre of comedy” that Goldoni took up: from that point on, he wrote plays conceived in full, rather than loose outlines meant for improvisation. The change was not immediate. Some transitional plays kept “three or four scenes per act” — the dramatically most important ones — fully written out, while the remaining scenes were still improvised. It was a gradual move of characters away from the stereotyped figures of commedia dell’arte, not a leap accomplished in a single play.

Goldoni himself describes the method behind the reform in the preface to the first collection of his Comedies, Bettinelli edition, 1750: “the two books I have meditated on most… were the World and the Theater.” Watching real people, alongside reading the classics, became his source for new characters. The comedy “Il teatro comico” then puts the core ideas of this reform literally on stage: it works as the reform’s own staged manifesto.

Practical example: “La Locandiera” (1752), “Il servitore di due padroni” (A Servant of Two Masters), and “Il bugiardo” (The Liar) are three mature Goldoni comedies, fully written, with characters far removed from fixed stock types: Mirandolina, the innkeeper of La Locandiera, represents, according to the critics cited by Treccani, one of the high points of Goldoni’s art.

The reform in practice

Between 1753 and 1757 Goldoni wrote fifty comedies, according to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Treccani) — a figure covering those five years, not a total for his entire output.

The realistic characters of Goldoni’s mature plays, built on his observation of everyday life in Venice, echo in part the attention to ordinary people that Giovanni Verga’s Verismo would push to its extreme more than a century later, with a different method and in a different form, the novel.

From Venice to Paris

Goldoni stayed in Venice, aside from a few short trips, until his departure for Paris on April 22, 1762, together with his wife and his nephew Antonio. In Paris he became, in 1765, teacher of Italian to Princess Maria Adelaide, and in 1775 tutor of Italian to the two sisters of Louis XVI, a post he held until 1780. He died in Paris on February 6, 1793: his pension, revoked during the Revolution, was restored after a formal appeal, but word of it arrived on February 7, the day after his death.