Carlo Goldoni And Eighteenth Century Theatre

Papers in this volume examines the work of Carlo Goldoni in relation to the output of other theatre writers across Europe in the Age of Enlightenment, and also reconsiders Goldoni's work in the light of new questions raised by recent critical discussions.

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 provides an introduction to Goldoni and his performance tradition for directors, actors, and designers, revealing the masterful construction of Goldoni’s plays, while an afterword by Cesare de Michelis carefully reconstructs the playwright’s life and times.

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) is widely recognized as one of Italy's finest playwrights, but his production for the operatic theatre is much less well known. While musicologists have established the importance of Goldoni's innovations in the form of the comic libretto, literary scholars have tended to see the drammi giocosi as at best a pale reflection of the plays, and at worst a distortion of the «real» Goldoni. In Goldoni as Librettist, Emery traces the complex web of relationships between plays and libretti, illustrating the ways in which the author used his operas to prepare for the comedies, or to experiment with themes to which the plays were closed. This reading of Goldoni's operatic texts not only confirms their status as a form of literary activity, but also allows us to more fully understand Goldoni's development as a playwright.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Servant of Two Masters (Il Servitore di Due Padroni)" by Carlo Goldoni. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The Dramaturgy of the Spectator explores how Italian theatre consciously adjusted to the emergence of a new kind of spectator who became central to society, politics, and culture in the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author argues that while a focus on spectatorship in isolation has value, if we are to understand the broader stakes of the relationship between the power structures and the public sphere as it was then emerging, we must trace step-by-step how spectatorship as a practice was rooted in the social and cultural politics of Italy at the time. By delineating the evolution of the Italian theatre public, as well as the dramatic innovations and communicative techniques developed in an attempt to manipulate the relationship between spectator and performance, this book pioneers a shift in our understanding of audience as both theoretical concept and historical phenomenon.

Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) is best-known for his plays that have been adapted into opera librettos. Puccini's final opera, Turandot, was based on a play by Gozzi. Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges is based on a Gozzi play. Richard Wagner's first opera, Die Feen, is based on Gozzi's La Donna Serpente. Mozart's The Magic Flute contains many elements that are similar to Gozzi's plays. This is a biography of Carlo Gozzi. He is well-known for reviving commedia dell'arte, an ancient form of Italian improvisational theatre that had fallen out of favour before his time.