A Review of Jolanta Dygul's Book 'Metateatralność w dramaturgii Carla Goldoniego'

Jagoda Hernik Spalińska

Abstract

Metateatralność w dramaturgii Carla Goldoniego (Metatheatricality in Carlo Goldoni's Plays) 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 had developed in the Venetian period of his work, make up the book’s major subject matter. The book combines the aspects of methodology and history. The author presents a proposal to categorize 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 utilized 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.” 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. 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.