The Servant of Two Masters E-Book

Carlo Goldoni

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 172

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Over two hundred and fifty years since it was written, The Servant of Two Masters, a classic of Italian comedy, remains blisteringly hilarious and relevant. Disguising herself as her dead brother, Beatrice travels to Venice to find Florindo, the man responsible for his death. However her servant, Truffaldino, enters into the pay of Florindo and struggles to keep his two lives and masters separate.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THE SERVANT OFTWO MASTERS

byCarlo Goldoni

translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Goldoni: Key Dates

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Pronunciation Guide

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793)

Carlo Goldoni was born in Venice on 25 February 1707. His father was a physician of sorts, wealthy enough to send his son to be educated at Perugia, and later Rimini, with a career as a lawyer in mind. At Rimini, however, the young Goldoni, already besotted by theatre, attached himself to a touring company of actors and returned to Venice, where his enraged father promptly enrolled his teenage son in the Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia, to study law under a strict, almost monastic regime. Goldoni, however, spent much of his time there reading the works of Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes, and contrived to get himself expelled by writing a satire on the local young ladies. In 1727, at his father’s insistence, he was sent to Modena, to continue his legal training. Goldoni then worked for a time as a clerk in Chioggia, a small fishing village near Venice, and eventually completed his law degree in Padua in 1731, the year of his father’s death.

Goldoni practised successfully as a lawyer in a number of positions, including the diplomatic service, but he remained devoted to the theatre, although his first serious effort, a tragedy entitled Amalasunta, was rejected by the Milan Opera. Tragedy was scarcely Goldoni’s forte; nor was the popular form of tragicomedy, despite several attempts, and his earliest triumphs were in the field of intermezzi, short playlets with music, sung and danced during the intervals of full-length operatic works. Goldoni wrote a vast number of these and in his own day was arguably best known as a librettist, supplying texts for the composer Galuppi, but also Paisiello and Vivaldi. One such, Il mondo della luna (The World of the Moon), was later set by Haydn and performed in London, Vienna and St Petersburg. Mozart, Cimarosa and Salieri are also known to have made use of Goldoni’s work.

In 1734, Goldoni joined a touring company led by Giuseppe Imer, and moved with them into Venice. His marriage to Nicoletta Connio, daughter of a Genoese attorney, took place not long after, in August 1736. In marked contrast to other Italian cities, whose theatres were generally private and exclusive, catering to an aristocratic elite, Venice had seven public theatres, and Goldoni found employment at two, the Teatro San Samuele, and later the San Giovanni Crisostomo.

Imer’s company was a Commedia dell’Arte troupe, professional actors skilled in improvisation based on stereotyped masked characters with a stock of well-seasoned plots and routines. Goldoni was hired to expand and refresh the company’s repertoire, but his contribution was secondary to that of the actors, whose ‘script’ was essentially the canevaccio – a scenario pinned up backstage, containing a sketchy outline of the action and characters, which left the actors free to introduce their own material, in the form of ready-made speeches or physical routines and sight-gags, often in dubious taste, known as lazzi. Goldoni, although filled with admiration for performers like the celebrated Antonio Sacchi, soon came to share Shakespeare’s jaundiced view of clowns ‘that will themselves laugh, to set on some barren quantity of spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered…’

In general, though, Goldoni complied with his duties, and framed his scenarios to take advantage of the particular talents of the actors. Sacchi, who specialised in Arlecchino roles, joined Imer’s company in 1738, and Goldoni’s first successful comedy, L’uomo di mondo (The Man of the World), was written that same year. The actor’s departure in 1743 may have been a factor in Goldoni’s decision to move to Pisa, and resume his law practice. During his sojourn in Pisa, however, Goldoni continued to write for the theatre, notably La donna di garbo (The Clever Woman) in 1743, and Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters), commissioned by Sacchi in 1745. In 1748, he returned to Venice to sign a five-year contract with the leading impresario Girolamo Medebach at the Teatro Sant’Angelo, which bore fruit with several of his best comedies, including La vedova scaltra (The Crafty Widow), Il teatro comico (The Comic Theatre), La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn), and Pamela, adapted from Samuel Richardson’s popular novel. Goldoni was reputedly able to write a comedy in four days, but his contract with Medebach put even him under intense pressure, and the play which brought the curtain down on season 1750–51, I pettegolezzi (Women’s Gossip), was the sixteenth he had written that year! Medebach assuredly got his money’s worth, and showed his gratitude by trying to claim all the royalties due on publication of Goldoni’s scripts, which compelled the latter to make a deal independently with a Florentine printer, Paperini, for a ten-volume edition of his works.

In the spring of 1753, Goldoni entered the service of the brothers Vendramin, who owned the Teatro San Luca in Venice, and although its much larger stage, and actors unfamiliar with his methods presented difficulties for his first effort, Il geloso avaro (The Jealous Miser), he enjoyed a notable success with La sposa persiana (The Persian Bride), a verse tragicomedy in the then fashionably exotic mode. During Goldoni’s time at the San Luca, he moved further away from the Commedia dell’Arte tradition, abandoning the use of masks in 1754, and appealing to the tastes of more sophisticated patrons. His best comedies of this period, however, are firmly rooted in the daily life of Venice, e.g., Il campiello (The Square), set in one of its bustling little squares, I rusteghi (The Boors), and La casa nova (The New House). In his final season at the San Luca, Goldoni also staged Le baruffe chiozzotte (The Chioggian Brawls), drawing on his experience of life in the fishing village of Chioggia, and Una delle ultime sere di Carnevale (One of the Last Evenings of Carnival).

Goldoni left Venice in 1762, no doubt with considerable regret, but for over a decade, despite, or perhaps because of his success, he had been the target of persistent and ill-natured criticism, notably from Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), who particularly objected to Goldoni’s reform of what Gozzi regarded as the only authentic Italian theatre, that of the Commedia dell’Arte. Gozzi was committed to improvisation by masked actors in stereotyped roles, elaborated from a basic scenario, whereas Goldoni’s insistence on fully-scripted dialogues called for subtleties of expression that were impossible to achieve wearing a mask. Unlike Goldoni’s other critics, among them Pietro Chiari (1711–1778), whose rivalry took the form of pale imitation, Gozzi was a worthy adversary, and his Fiabe (Fables), scenarios fleshed out with an engaging element of fantasy and spectacle, were extremely popular, both in and beyond his own day. Indeed, Gozzi is seen by some authorities as a precursor of Romanticism, and his work survives in Puccini’s Turandot, and also Prokofiev’s setting of his L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges), which contains an alleged sideswipe at Goldoni, in the character of the Magician.

At any rate, Goldoni had already decided to move to Paris, where he had been invited to take over the running of the Comédie-Italienne. Essentially a Commedia dell’Arte troupe, the Italians had been based in Paris from 1661 until 1697, when they were expelled for an alleged slight on Louis XIV’s mistress, Mme de Maintenon. Following the death of the King in 1715, they were permitted to return, and Goldoni had every reason to expect a cordial reception in France, where his work was well known. His comedy Il figlio d’Arlecchino perduto e ritrovato (Harlequin’s Son Lost and Found) had been a success in Paris in 1758, and I pettegolezzi (Women’s Gossip) had been staged in a French version, Les caquets, in July 1761. Unfortunately, when Goldoni arrived in Paris in August of the following year, he found a company in decline, to the extent that they had been forced to merge with the Opéra Comique. Parisian audiences had little patience with plays in Italian, and while Goldoni’s new charges had adapted to their demands, employing French actors and commissioning works in French, they had retained those features of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte tradition which Goldoni had striven so hard, over two decades, to reform.

Goldoni thus found himself once again trying to persuade actors to learn lines, play what he had written for them, even eventually in French, instead of relying on their well-thumbed zibaldone – the gag-book specific to each of the traditional masks, the Arlecchino, Pantalone, Brighella, etc. Goldoni had contracted to spend two years in Paris, and eventually return to Venice, presumably in triumph. In fact, the bulk of his creative output at the Comédie-Italienne took the form of scenarios, some two dozen of them, not all of which had been performed by the time he left the company.

In December 1762 he had marked his arrival in Paris with a comedy entitled L’amor paterno (Paternal Love). However, a French adaptation of the play had already failed at the Comédie-Française in 1759, and despite a synopsis in French being handed out at the door it fared no better at the Comédie-Italienne, or indeed at Goldoni’s former stamping ground, the Teatro San Luca in Venice. Given the circumstances of his Parisian exile, it is no surprise that Goldoni continued to send plays to Venice, including a three-act comedy, Il matrimonio per concorso (Marriage by Competition) set in Paris, which was a solid success at the San Luca. Meanwhile, early in 1763, Goldoni staged The Servant of Two Masters, in scenario form, with some success, but he was becoming ever more disheartened at the sheer laziness of his charges at the Comédie-Italienne, who found even the scenario of Il ventaglio (The Fan) too ‘complicated’, although the full version was later well received in Venice, and it is still highly regarded for its masterly construction. In September 1763, Les amours d’Arlequin et de Camille was a rare triumph, which encouraged Goldoni to develop a trilogy around the same characters, with La jalousie d’Arlequin, and Les inquiétudes de Camille, before the end of that year.

By 1765, however, disillusioned, and increasingly troubled by failing sight, Goldoni gratefully accepted the post of Italian tutor to the daughter of Louis XV, the Princess Adelaide, a position which came with an apartment at Versailles, and a plethora of irksome duties. Goldoni was a long-standing admirer of the great Voltaire, who was familiar with his work and indeed had described him, in 1760, as having ‘delivered Italy from the Goths’, so there is a certain irony in the notion of an egalitarian and solidly bourgeois Goldoni having to play the courtier. During his time in France, Goldoni also made the acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, fellow travellers in the Enlightenment, whose radical ideas would very soon consign the monarchy to oblivion, but although his influence was widely acknowledged, he failed to make a personal impact in the all-important salons, where the approaching revolution was incubated. Meanwhile, in January 1769, His Majesty Louis XVI was pleased to approve the granting of a pension to Goldoni of four thousand livres.

Although his creative output had considerably diminished, Goldoni was able to write to Voltaire in March 1771 to the effect that he had completed a three-act comedy, in French, titled Le bourru bienfaisant (The Beneficent Bear), for which he had high hopes. The play shows the influence of Molière’s Le misanthrope, and its central figure, the boorish and irascible Géronte, is said to have been based on the character of Rousseau. Successful, in the sense that Goldoni proved he could write a classic French comedy of manners, and achieve a decent run at the Comédie-Française, it is not ranked among his finest works. Nor is his last comedy, L’avare fastueux (The Ostentatious Miser), offered again to the Comédie-Française in 1772, and accepted for production, but not performed until November 1776, at Fontainebleau, where it was received without enthusiasm.

Goldoni spent much of his final decade writing his memoirs, in French, published in 1787 and dedicated to the King, Louis XVI, who had scant time to read them before the fall of the Bastille, two years later. Of the three volumes, the first records his life up to his return from Pisa to Venice in 1748; the second, bulked out with synopses of his plays, covers his most creative period, until his departure for Paris in 1762; the final volume deals with the disappointments there, and life at Court, perhaps less truthfully than he admits. And after the Revolution, Goldoni could perhaps count himself fortunate to lose only his royal pension, when so many others were to lose their heads. Reduced to poverty, Goldoni dragged out the remainder of his existence, attended by his beloved Nicoletta, until his death on 6 February 1793. Ironically, the very next day, in response to an appeal by Marie-Joseph Chénier, brother of the poet André Chénier, the Convention voted to reinstate his pension. On learning that Goldoni was dead, they further decreed a memorial performance of Le bourru bienfaisant, the proceeds of which went to his widow.

In terms of quantity alone, Goldoni’s achievement, in every conceivable dramatic medium of his day – tragedy, tragicomedy, comedy, libretti for both opera seria and opera buffa – is unparalleled. And while the quality of his work is inevitably uneven, at his artistic peak, in the comedies written during his sojourn in Venice between 1748 and 1762, Goldoni demonstrates not only creativity and skill of a very high order, but also commitment to a personal agenda of reform, which changed the direction of the medium itself, and remains a potent influence still.

The Servant of Two Masters: What Happens in the Play

The play opens in the Venetian house of Pantalone, whose daughter Clarice is about to be betrothed to Silvio, the son of Doctor Lombardi. Brighella, a local innkeeper and friend of Pantalone, is present to witness the joyous occasion, which is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of the servant Truffaldino, to announce that his master, Federigo Rasponi, is waiting downstairs to pay his respects to Pantalone. This news is received with some astonishment, since Federigo, who had previously been contracted to marry Clarice, was reported dead, killed in a duel in Turin by a certain Florindo. Truffaldino is bewildered, but when he eventually introduces his master, the supposed Federigo, alive and well, the young lovers are in despair. Pantalone feels honour-bound to respect the original contract, and insists that Clarice is to marry Federigo, despite the Doctor’s objections. Brighella, however, knows Turin well, and quickly spots that the stranger is not in fact Federigo, but his sister Beatrice, disguised as a man. Beatrice draws Brighella aside and, swearing him to silence, explains that she has come to Venice in search of her lover Florindo, now a fugitive from justice in Turin, and to claim her late brother’s dowry in support of Florindo’s cause. Pantalone is persuaded to accept Beatrice’s proofs of identity, and they agree to meet later at Brighella’s inn, where Beatrice is to lodge. Truffaldino, meanwhile, has taken a fancy to Pantalone’s maidservant Smeraldina.

The scene changes to the street outside Brighella’s inn. Truffaldino, waiting for his ‘master’ Beatrice, has a chance encounter with another stranger, freshly arrived in Venice, who offers to take him into his service. Truffaldino’s new master is none other than the fugitive Florindo, and his first task is to pay a call at the Turin Post Office, to collect his master’s mail. When Beatrice appears, however, she too asks Truffaldino to collect any letters addressed to either Federigo or Beatrice Rasponi. Truffaldino’s two masters are now lodged in Brighella’s inn, unaware of either’s identity, and Truffaldino adds to the confusion when Silvio, in a jealous rage at the loss of his beloved Clarice, comes in search of Beatrice/Federigo, and is directed to the wrong master, i.e., Florindo. This initiates a series of mix-ups, firstly with the letters, when Truffaldino, who is unable to read, hands one intended for Beatrice to Florindo by mistake, and invents a fictitious servant called Pasquale, on whom to blame the confusion. A similar mix-up arises when Pantalone gives Truffaldino money to pass on to his ‘master’, meaning Beatrice, but which is again handed over to the wrong one, Florindo.

Meanwhile, in Pantalone’s house, a tearful Clarice continues to defy her father and voice her loathing for Federigo, until Beatrice privately confesses her deception to her, and binds her to secrecy. The two women swear eternal friendship, which Pantalone mistakenly takes to mean that Clarice is reconciled to her future husband.

Act Two begins in the courtyard outside Pantalone’s house, where the Doctor and his son confront Pantalone over the broken contract of marriage. Insults are exchanged, and Silvio finally draws his sword, threatening to attack Pantalone. At this point, Beatrice rushes to the latter’s defence, manages to disarm Silvio and is about to kill him, when she is stopped by Clarice, pleading for his life. Silvio, still raging, then threatens to kill Clarice, and is prevented only by the intervention of Smeraldina.

Some time later, at Brighella’s inn, Truffaldino, more by accident than design, gives Pantalone’s money to its intended recipient, and Beatrice entrusts him with a bill of exchange, before going in to dinner. Truffaldino, however, contrives to tear it up, in demonstrating to Brighella exactly how the various dishes should be served. His dual role of servant to both Beatrice and Florindo, still unaware of either’s presence, then finds him attempting to wait table simultaneously in two different dining rooms, a virtuoso performance which he brings off with extraordinary skill.

Later, Smeraldina arrives outside the inn, to deliver a letter from Clarice to Federigo Rasponi, alias Beatrice, warning her of Silvio’s murderous jealousy. She gives it to Truffaldino to pass on to his master, and after some characteristic tomfoolery, he declares his love for Smeraldina. He also opens the letter, but since neither he nor Smeraldina can read, they are no wiser about its contents. When Beatrice reads it, however, she decides to reveal her secret, for Clarice’s sake, and in the meantime administers a sound thrashing to Truffaldino for his impertinence. Florindo catches sight of this from his window, and promptly gives Truffaldino another beating, for permitting such an affront to his master’s dignity.

Act Three opens in Brighella’s inn, where Truffaldino is at work on his masters’ trunks, taking out clothes to air them. Unfortunately, he has no idea which trunk belongs to whom, and gets them hopelessly mixed up; thus when Florindo finds a portrait of himself, which he had given to Beatrice, in the pocket of his own coat, Truffaldino is forced to invent a tragic tale to the effect that his former master, i.e., Beatrice, had died and bequeathed it to him. As a grieving Florindo retreats to his room, Beatrice arrives with Pantalone, and a further mix-up ensues when Beatrice asks for her account book and Truffaldino gives her Florindo’s by mistake. Inside it are letters she had written to Florindo, and Truffaldino concocts yet another tragic tale, this time the untimely death by drowning of Florindo. Beatrice, heartbroken, openly laments the death of her lover, at which point the astonished Pantalone and Truffaldino realise that Beatrice is not in fact Federigo, but his sister. Pantalone immediately goes home to inform Clarice that she is now free to marry Silvio.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken lovers, Florindo and Beatrice, in a last desperate act, each believing that the other is dead, attempt to commit suicide, barely restrained by Brighella and his staff. In the course of the struggle, they find themselves suddenly face to face, and recognition is instant and joyous. Beatrice and Florindo then direct their attention to the culpability of their respective servants, i.e., Truffaldino, which came so near to having a fatal outcome. This calls for another virtuoso performance from Truffaldino, who, under cross-questioning, succeeds not only in laying all the blame on his ‘imaginary friend’ Pasquale, but also in ensuring that neither of his masters will so much as mention Pasquale’s name to the other. Beatrice then leaves the inn to make her way to Pantalone’s house. Florindo is to follow soon after, and in the interim, before they set out, Truffaldino asks Florindo to speak for him, in support of his wish to marry Smeraldina.