Carlos Goldoni (1707 - 1793) is the key playwright between the improvisational masked theater of the commedia dell’arte, which supplied the basis for the plots of most Italian operas, and the modern comedy.
The stock figures of commedia dell’arte are familiar to anyone who has any familiarity with opera.
The jealous woman, the foolish old man, the ingénue, the deluded lover, the conniving servant, the braggart soldier, the quack doctor—all appear in various guises in the operas not only of Mozart but also of Puccini, as well as in the operas of lesser-known composers such as Galuppi, whose operas have recently been revived after centuries of neglect.
In the commedia dell’arte, the actors would play the stock characters, and then improvise the plot based on what these characters would do.
Goldoni transformed these stock figures by giving them deeper psychological profiles and placing them in realistic Venetian settings and giving them lines to say.
He achieved this transformation gradually. In Il Mormolo courtesan (1738), he wrote the lines only of the protagonist and allowed the other actors to improvise their parts. Only in 1743 with La donna di garbo did he write lines for all the actors. Control of the plot shifted from the actors to the playwright.
Stock figures still today appear in movies, but often with the additional psychological depth that began with Goldoni’s transformation of the theater.
La bottega del caffè (The Coffeeshop) is one of his masterpieces.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.