"Painter and son of nature," wrote Voltaire, at that time the arbitrator and the dispenser of fame in cultured Europe, to Carlo Goldoni, then a rising dramatist, "I would entitle your comedies, 'Italy liberated from the Goths.'" The sage of Ferney's quick critical faculty had once again hit its sure mark, for it is Goldoni's supreme merit, and one of his chief titles to fame and glory, that he released the Italian theatre from the bondage of the artificial and pantomime performances that until then had passed for plays, and that, together with Moliere, he laid the foundations of the drama as...
"Painter and son of nature," wrote Voltaire, at that time the arbitrator and the dispenser of fame in cultured Europe, to Carlo Goldoni, then a rising...
One of the first and most important Italian playwrights to move away from the commedia dell'arte tradition of improvisation, Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) wrote more naturalistic "comedies of character" that featured the dialect and situations of everyday life in Venice.
Five Comedies collects a selection of Goldoni's finest plays, annotated and translated into English: The New House, The Coffee House, and "The Holiday Trilogy" (Off to the Country, Adventures in the Country, and Back from the Country). Editor Michael Hackett...
One of the first and most important Italian playwrights to move away from the commedia dell'arte tradition of improvisation, Carlo Goldoni...
Goldoni's eighteenth-century masterpiece is an enduring story of love, passion, and mistaken identity. Young Venetian Clarice can't marry her lover, Silvio. She had been betrothed to Rasponi, who appears to have returned from the dead to claim her. But the Rasponi who appears is actually Beatrice, Rasponi's sister who is in disguise as her brother and has come to Venice to find her suitor, Florinda. Complications arise when a servant greedily seeks employment with both the disguised Beatrice and Florinda and spends the rest of the play trying to serve two masters while keeping the two unaware...
Goldoni's eighteenth-century masterpiece is an enduring story of love, passion, and mistaken identity. Young Venetian Clarice can't marry her lover, S...