Goldoni's smash hit play - I'm only one man but I got two guvnors

Some of you out there, who understand your commedia dell’arte, those with a liberal education, your hummus eaters, will know that this play is based on Carol Goldoni’s two hundred-year-old Italian comedy A Servant of Two Masters and you will now be saying to yourselves “if the Harlequin, that’s me, has now eaten, what will be his motivation in the second act”.  Has anyone here said that?  Perhaps in an attempt to impress a date.  No.  Good.  Nice to know we don’t have any dicks in tonight.  My character, Francis, has to find a new base motivation to drive his actions in the second half.  Your job is to try and work out what that might be.

This is said by a relaxed, well-fed Francis in Act II, Scene 2 of One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean’s hit 2011 adaptation of – see above for details.  Bean moves the setting to 1960s Brighton and makes the characters idiot British gangsters, giving him a port, slang, and violence, everything he needs to keep his farce cooking.

Bean pins Goldoni down pretty well here.  His is the literature of base motivations.  This one, by the way, appears instantly:  Enter DOLLY, miniskirt, boobs etc.

The story of The Servant of Two Masters is that a clownish, hungry servant finds himself in the service of two masters.  He has to run around doing errands for both without letting the other know, which is comic.  There’s also some nonsense with disguises and who’ll marry whom.  In the center of the play is a long, crazy scene where Francis / Truffaldino / Harlequin is simultaneously serving lunch to both of his guvnors, again, unknown to each other, while he steals scraps, or entire dishes.  Lots of racing around and slamming doors.

Not too long ago I saw a college production of Servant that put a lot of obstacles in front of its actors, but as they moved into that waiter scene, the awkwardness vanished.  The whole thing just took off.  What a scene.  Bean is obligated to escalate the action, and does he ever.  This must be almost painful to watch in the theater.  Laughter, the pain would be from laughter.  When it is over:

What I suggest we do is take a fifteen minute interval here.  You can have a drink.  We’re going to fill out some Health and Safety forms.  (Act I, Sc. 4)

I am tempted to just quote more jokes, but I suppose they lose something without the surrounding patter.  It’s a funny play.  I’m laughing now; too bad you can’t see me.  As I leaf through the actual Goldoni play, the Edward J. Dent translation found in The Servant of Two Masters and Other Italian Classics (ed. Eric Bentley), I cannot help but find it a little thin read right up against the super-charged One Man, Two Guvnors.  So don’t read them in that order is my advice.

With all the power of his imagination - Carlo Goldoni reforms Italian comedy

Don’t forget that it is not too late to join in on next week’s Pinocchio fun.  I hope it is not too late, since I just started the book tonight.  It is a commonplace to note that the book is “dark” compared to the Disney version.  “Cruel” is more accurate.

But that is next week.  This will be 18th century Italian theater week, the works of Carlo Goldoni and Vittorio Alfieri,  an event demanded by no one about books loved by few, with one exception.

The exception is The Servant of Two Masters (1745), which I want to save for tomorrow.  I have read five other Goldonis:

The Coffee Shop (1750)
The Holiday Trilogy – Off to the Country, Adventures in the Country, and Back from the Country (all 1761)
The Fan (1765)

And although Servant is easily the funniest, and also best, some of these other plays give a better idea of what Goldoni accomplished.  He was a lawyer with a gift for comedy who reformed, or perhaps invented, the modern Italian theater.  His innovation was to take the old commedia dell’arte characters and methods and inject a dose of local detail.  His characters were still types, but recognizably Venetian types, the setting the usual square but now a definably Venetian square.

As if I know much about the commedia dell’arte.  What I really have in mind are the light, elegant, almost abstract French comedies of Pierre de Marivaux, like The Game of Love and Chance, perfect in their way but detached, floating in the clouds.  Was it possible to pull Marivaux back to earth?  That is what Goldoni did.  If he had thought to do this in prose fiction, he would have been among the inventors of the modern novel rather than an ancestor of the sitcom.

Since I also know nothing about daily life in 18th century Venice, I am just taking the word of others that Goldoni is in fact representing daily life etc.  How would I know.

A trivial example, maybe.  The cast of Adventures in the Country has gone to a coffee shop:

GIACINTA.  Coffee.
LEONARDO.  A glass of cold water.
ROSINA.  An iced lime drink.
TOGNINO.  A cup of hot chocolate.
VITTORIA.  Coffee with no sugar.
COSTANZA.  Lemonade.
FILIPPO.  Water with lime juice.
FERDINANDO.  A glass of rosolio cordial.
SABINA.  And bring me a fruit sherbet.  (Act II, Sc. 3, tr. Anthony Oldcorn)

Characters snap at each other, the waiter mixes up all of the orders, poor Filippo gets to indulge the running gag in which he is served last, always last.

The Holiday Trilogy is almost too much like a novel, first in length when I read the three plays together, but also with its well-to-do characters putting themselves in predicaments that demand an ending less definite than what is available on stage.  This is harder to do in a novel, though:

GIACINTA.  Ladies and gentleman, at this point the author, with all the power of his imagination, had prepared a long speech of despair, a regular conflict of emotions, a mixture of heroism and pathos.  I thought it best to omit it, to avoid boring you further.  (Adventures, Act III, Sc. 4)

I will take Giacinta’s advice until tomorrow.

one man unworthy of his cowardly age - Alfieri, Goldoni, and Foscolo - 700 words and I can only cover three writers

What is Italian literature?  I ignored the question; it is an important one for this literature.  These judgments are always retrospective: Italian literature is what people interested in the subject treat as Italian literature.  But I am not only working with a conventional contemporary idea, but a central question going back to Dante, at the least.  What is the Italian language?  What is Italy?

Yesterday I glanced at some of the highlights of almost three hundred years of arguing about these questions, the extraordinary run from Dante Alighieri to the visionary poet Tommaso Campanella, who gets us into the 17th century.  Something happens to the literature then; the life sputters out of it.  My glib explanation is the Counter-Reformation.  But around 1609, Claudio Monteverdi perfected and popularized the form of musical theater we for some reason call opera, and if anything the cultural prestige of Italian music only increased.  There was no obvious lack of, to use a dubious metaphor, cultural energy in northern Italian kingdoms and cities.

I don’t know what happened to Italian literature.  Spanish literature caught the same flu about fifty years later and took two hundred years to recover.

My next Italian landmark is the Venetian comic playwright Carlo Goldoni in the mid-18th century, author of The Servant of Two Masters (1743) and dozens of other comedies.  I read a couple over the weekend, including the recent adaptation by Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) that was such a big hit in London.  That is one funny play.  I’ll write about these soon.

Then there is the proto-Romantic Count Vittorio Alfieri, founder of Italian tragedy, possibly the only Italian tragedian of consequence.  He is a giant in Italian but not in English, and I can guess why – first, English barely has room for its own tragedies, and second, Alfieri’s almost singular dramatic theme was the overthrow of tyrants, which may have more juice in Italy and France than in England or the United States.

I’ve read his best known  play, Saul (1782), about the overthrow of a tyrant, and am now reading his posthumous (1806) Autobiography, about the triumph of a tyrant.  I have gotten to some good stuff, but not to the good stuff, e.g.:

… claiming to be a democrat because he never struck his servants with anything but his open hand, yet stretching out his valet with a bronze candlestick because the valet pulled his hair slightly while combing it…  and then sleeping – or claiming to sleep – with his bedroom door always open so that the valet might come in and, in revenge, murder him in his sleep.  (Ford Madox Ford on p. 655 of The March of Literature, first ellipses mine, second his)

A big personality.  It might make similar sense to read a couple more autobiographies contemporary with Alfieri, the Memoirs of Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte or more temptingly the massive Story of My Life of Giacomo Casanova, but I doubt that will happen.

Finally, the 19th century.  I plan to revisit to major figures from Italian Romanticism.  One is Ugo Foscolo, a genuine revolutionary and  fine poet although with a lyrical gift that has perhaps defeated his translators.  I remember many years ago running across a website with some lovely versions of Foscolo’s Graces (1803-1822) but I cannot find it now.  Foscolo also wrote The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802), a novella that is a conceptual politicized Italianization of The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I hope to revisit it and see if it is as clever as I remember.  Or impassioned, or propagandistic, or whatever it is.

And then there is Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi.  The title quotation is again from Leopardi, from the same poem I used yesterday (p. 39), and is a description of Alfieri.

                                           He was the first to go
down into the ring alone, and no one followed,
for idleness and brutal silence now own us most of all.

The idea that Leopardi can be described as idle or silent is hilarious.  But look how long I have gone on.  I will start with Leopardi tomorrow.  I gotta pick up the pace.  At this rate – well, pretty soon I’ll get to books I haven’t read.  My ignorance should constrain the babble.