Recenzja książki Jolanty Dygul, Metateatralność w dramaturgii Carla Goldoniego (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego: Warszawa, 1912)

Title variants

EN

Review of Jolanta Dygul's book Metateatralność w dramaturgii Carla Goldoniego (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego: Warszawa, 1912).

Abstracts

EN

Metateatralność w dramaturgii Carla Goldoniego by Jolanta Dygul is a book about the life of touring theatre companies in Italy (with a special emphasis on Venice) in the 18th century and the social mechanisms connected with how they functioned. The metatheatrical plays by Carlo Goldoni, whose corpus—as the author points out—had developed in the Venetian period of his life and work, make up the book’s major subject matter. The book combines the aspects of methodology and history. In the Introduction, the author presents a proposal to categorise self-referential Italian plays of the 17th century in a structural model, borrowed from Georges Forestier’s monograph, where it has been devised for the purposes of studying the French dramaturgy of the same period. Further on, the author assumes, following Sławomir Świontek, that there are three kinds of ways in which metatheatricality manifests itself in theatre, and they correspond with particular ways in which Goldoni utilised self-referential theatrical forms, and thus, in turn, Dygul discusses in separate chapters the “prologues and compliments” commissioned by actors, “occasional pieces composed for the beginnings and ends of theatre seasons,” and the “comedies where he made problems of theatre a subject matter of his characters’ dialogues.” The first chapter describes the context “in which the comedy theatre reformer operated” in order to properly characterise the tasks “before the comedy playwright, a new profession at the time” and to “define the methods of working with actors that Goldoni had developed through his many years’ work at Venetian theatres.” The author devotes a whole chapter to a detailed study of The Comic Theatre which she treats as pivotal for the history of the stage as it concluded and summarised the period in which improvisation had ruled supreme and at the same time initiated a time of self-reflexion and identification of important issues and problems that had been haunting the companies. Thus, The Comic Theatre marked the beginning of a new era of more efficient organisation that also corresponded with an increased influence of the author on what was put on. The chapters about The Comic Theatre and L’Arkadia in Brenta as well as the passages describing how the companies vied for the audiences bring a lot of interesting information that concerns more than just metatheatrical strategy; they make us fully appreciate the fact that it is hard to imagine the early days of the theatre in Europe without the discourse exposing the mechanisms of its operation. In her book, Dygul presents the theatre that acted as a “celebrity” and could therefore spend so much of the performance time drawing attention to itself. The struggle for the viewer between competing companies—a phenomenon that the author lays a stress on—must have been something publicly known, widely commented upon and exciting for the numerous allusions and nuances of it to be easily comprehended and entertaining for the public. Such a strategy was beneficial for the artists because it made the relationship with the audiences more lively and dynamic, sustaining and fuelling popular interest in the theatre and enabling them to broach the important subject of the respectability of their professions, both the actors’ and playwrights’ alike. The influence exerted by the actors on Goldoni’s creative work constitutes the grounds for both the strategy studied by Dygul and for her own line of discourse. Much attention is also given to the study of the author-actor and author-spectator relations as well as to the circumstances in which the profession of the playwright emerged.

Keywords

EN

Goldoni; metatheatre

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Sztuki PAN
• Journal: Pamiętnik Teatralny
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 65
• Issue: 3(259)
• Pages: 199-208

Contributors

reviewer

Hernik-Spalińska Jagoda

• Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk

reviewed work author

Dygul Jolanta

References

• C. Goldoni, Teatr komediowy, Gdańsk 2011.
• Problemy tragedii i tragizmu. Studia i szkice, red. H. Krukowska i J. Ławski, Białystok 2005.