RIVAL ITALIAN DRAMATISTS.
The Venetian stage had long been in possession of Goldoni, a dramatic poet, who, by introducing bustle and show into his pieces, and writing principally to the level of the gondoliers, arrived to the first degree of popularity in Venice. He had a rival in Pietro Chiari, whom the best critics thought even inferior to Goldoni; but such an epidemic frenzy seized the Venetians in favour of these two authors, that it quickly spread to almost all parts of Italy, to the detriment of better authors, and the derangement of the public taste. This dramatic mania was arrested by Carlo Gozzi, a younger brother of a noble family, who attacked Goldoni and Chiari, and others soon followed him. On this occasion the two bards suspended their mutual animosity, and joined to oppose their adversaries. Chiari was a great prose scribbler, as well as a comedy-monger, so that a warm paper war was soon commenced, which grew hotter and hotter rapidly.
It happened one day that Gozzi met with Goldoni in a bookseller’s shop. They exchanged sharp words, and in the heat of altercation Goldoni told Gozzi, “that though it was an easy task to find fault with a play, it was very difficult to write one.” Gozzi acknowledged “that to find fault with a play was really very easy, but that it was still easier to write such plays as would please so thoughtless a nation as the Venetians;” adding, with a tone of contempt, “that he had a good mind to make all Venice run to see the tale of the Three Oranges formed into a comedy.” Goldoni, with some of his partisans in the shop, challenged Gozzi to do it; and the critic, thus piqued, engaged to produce such a comedy within a few weeks.
To this trifling and casual dispute Italy owed the greatest dramatic writer it ever had. Gozzi quickly wrote a comedy in five acts, entitled “I Tre Aranci,” or “The Three Oranges;” formed out of an old woman’s story with which the Venetian children are entertained by their nurses. The comedy was acted, and three beautiful princesses, born of three enchanted oranges, made all Venice crowd to the theatre of St. Angelo.
In this play Goldoni and Chiari were not spared. Gozzi introduced in it many of their theatrical absurdities. The Venetian audiences, like the rest of the world, do not much relish the labour of finding out the truth; but once point it out, and they will instantly seize it. This was remarkable on the first night that the comedy of the “Three Oranges” was acted. The fickle Venetians, forgetting the loud acclamations with which they had received Goldoni’s and Chiari’s plays, laughed obstreperously at them and their comedies, and bestowed frantic applause on Gozzi and the “Three Oranges.”
This success encouraged Gozzi to write more; and in a little time his plays so entirely changed the Venetian taste, that in about two seasons Goldoni was stripped of his theatrical honours, and poor Chiari annihilated. Goldoni quitted Italy, and went to France, where Voltaire’s interest procured him the place of Italian master to one of the princesses at Versailles; and Chiari retired to a country house in the neighbourhood of Brescia.