Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. Goldoni is considered by the Italians as the author who carried dramatic art in Italy to its highest point of perfection, and he possessed no common powers.
Background
Was born in Venice, Feb. 25, 1707. From early childhood he was much attracted to the theater, and at the age of eight he wrote his first play. Years passed during which he devoted himself to the study of medicine and the study and practice of law. A consulship at Genoa further limited his dramatic activities, but in 1748 he definitely adopted playwriting as a profession, and until 1762 he frequently and regularly furnished plays for the Sant'Angelo and San Luca theaters of his native city. By this time his enemies, headed by Carlo Gozzi, had become so powerful that he found it advisable to settle down in Paris as the playwright of the ThéâtreTheatre des Italiens. By the time he produced his Mémoires,Memoires, he was 80 and living in Versailles on a pension provided by Louis XVI. The Revolution cut off this income, and he died in poverty at Versailles on Feb. 6, 1793.
Education
His father placed him under the care of the philosopher Caldini at Rimini but the youth soon ran away with a company of strolling players and returned to Venice.
Career
Goldoni's dramatic repertoire is immense. He wrote more than 260 dramatic pieces of all types--tragedies, tragicomedies, comedies (written and improvised), operas, operatic interludes, opérasoperas bouffes, melodramas, romantic and poetic dramas. Most of the plays are in prose; about 20 are in the verse form popularized by Pier Jacopo Martelli (1665-1727), and a few in blank hendecasyllables. Many are wholly in Italian, about a dozen wholly in the Venetian dialect, and many others in mixed Italian and Venetian. In general it may be said that Goldoni's early plays, up to the year 1748, and the plays that he composed in France almost a quarter of a century later are comedies of intrigue, possessing relatively small artistic merit. In contrast, in his middle or Venetian period (1748-1762) he produced a considerable number of excellent character plays, and it is upon these that his reputation chiefly rests. Among the masterpieces that appeared at this time were La Famiglia dell' antiquario, La Bottega del caffè,caffe, La Locandiera, I Rusteghi, La Casa nova, and Le Baruffe chiozzotte. Goldoni based many of his plays upon the pattern of the commedia dell'arte then dominating the Italian stage. Though not always consistently, he gradually transformed this pattern by discarding its essential features--improvision, masks, and conventionalized characters. From the reforms he achieved emerged a new comedy of manners, and to this accomplishment he owes his epithet, the "Father of Italian Comedy."
Realizing that the world was full of faults, Goldoni felt impelled to correct those, at least, that could not be overlooked. In view of the age in which he lived, and the abundance of work, the high moral tone of his plays is remarkable and easily distinguishes him from most of his contemporaries. No less striking is his humor, which invests his observations with an unquenchable gaiety of spirit.