Chiari had defied the Granelleschi to produce a comedy. Goldoni had taken up his stand upon the popularity of his own plays. Carlo Gozzi conceived the bold idea of writing a fantastic drama upon the old lines of the Commedia dell' Arte, which should fill the theatre of his adoption and restore Sacchi's company to favour. If he succeeded, both Chiari and Goldoni would be hit with the same stone. This was the real origin of the celebrated Fiabe Teatrali. But before engaging in the attempt, Gozzi looked about for a suitable subject. Nothing, he calculated, would floor his antagonists more thoroughly than the exhibition of a dramatised nursery tale by impromptu actors. Therefore, in the spirit of a burlesque duellist, in the true spirit of Don Quixote, he composed his Amore delle Tre Melarancie.
These facts about the genesis of Gozzi's Fiabe need to be insisted on, since French and German critics have distorted the truth. They regard Gozzi as a romantic playwright, gifted with innate genius for a peculiar species of dramatic art. According to this theory, the Fiabe were produced in order to manifest an ideal existing in their author's brain. Minute attention to Gozzi's Memoirs, his explanatory Essays (Opere, vols. i. and iv.), and the preface appended to each Fiaba, shows, on the contrary, that he began to write the Fiabe with the simple object of answering a certain challenge in the most humorous way he could devise. He continued them with a didactic purpose. His keen sagacity and profound knowledge of the Venetian public led him possibly to anticipate success. Yet he knew that the attempt was perilous; and he made it, without obeying preconceived principles, without yielding to any imperative instinct, but solely with the view of giving Chiari and Goldoni a sound thrashing.
If it is worth while studying Gozzi and the Fiabe at all, this point has so much importance that I may be permitted to resume the history of his literary conflict with the two poets. Gozzi opened fire with the Tartana in 1756. Goldoni retorted that he had only made himself ridiculous; unless he proved both his assumption and his argument, he was nothing better than a dog barking at the moon. Gozzi then declared that he was already engaged in the production of a commentary. This circulated in MS. under the form of a satire called the Teatro Comico. Meanwhile Goldoni parried all attacks by pointing to his popularity, and Chiari openly defied the Granelleschi to write a comedy, instead of condemning the plays in vogue. Finally Gozzi, who had become intimately acquainted with the actors in Sacchi's company, resolved to write a scenario, which should rehabilitate the Commedia dell' Arte, parody both Chiari and Goldoni, attract the public in crowds, and prove that a mere fairy tale, treated with romantic gusto, was capable of arousing no less interest than the works of professional playwrights following new-fangled models. The Amore delle Tre Melarancie, produced at the end of January in 1761, rather more than four years after the appearance of the Tartana, was the result.
It is mistaken to suppose that Gozzi was animated by the enthusiasm of a literary innovator. The Fiabe, in spite of their fantastic form, were the work of an aristocratical Conservative, bent on striking a shrewd blow for the Commedia dell' Arte, which he considered to be the special glory of the Italian race. In this respect, we might call Gozzi the Venetian Aristophanes.[74] The Fiabe were his "Clouds," and "Birds," and "Wasps." Goldoni and Chiari were his Euripides and Agathon; perverters of the good old comedy by vulgar realism, false pathos, and meretricious rhetoric. Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvetius, the French philosophes, were his Socrates and Sophists. His art was the expression, not of creative instinct evoking a new type of drama merely for its beauty and romance, but of a militant, sarcastic mind, imbued with the ironical literature of the sixteenth century. Gozzi had little in common with Shakespeare. Truffaldino is no twin-brother of King Lear's fool, nor is Brighella cousin to the grave-digger in Hamlet. These personages belong to the family of masks, whose pedigree dates from immemorial antiquity in Italy. The element of fable, as Gozzi repeatedly informs us, was first adopted by him out of sheer bravado to maintain a certain thesis, viz., that whole nations could be made to laugh and cry over puerilities, when handled with the judgment of a master. Gozzi's true ancestors in art were the Florentine burlesque poets, notably Luigi Pulci. The blending of magic, phantasy, broad comedy and serious tragic interest in the Fiabe allies them to the Morgante Maggiore far more closely than to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. In them, therefore, we observe the curious literary phenomenon of what at first sight appears to be spontaneous romantic art, but what is really the result of satirical and didactic intention. The preface to L'Augellino Belverde, in which Gozzi takes leave of the Fiabe, clearly explains the case.[75] "I addressed myself to the task of arousing great popular enthusiasm by a tour de force of fancy; and at the same time I wished to cut short the series of my dramatic pieces, from which I derived no profit, and the burden of producing which was beginning to weigh heavily upon me. Besides, it seemed to me that I had fully achieved the end I had proposed to myself from the outset, in the indulgence of the purest capricious and poetical punctilio." Punctilio was the parent of the Fiabe.
At this point I shall introduce a translation of L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie. There are several reasons for doing so. First, although it only exists For us in the compte rendu of the author, and is therefore a description rather than a literal scenario, a very good idea can be gained from it of the directions given by a poet to extempore actors. Secondly, it shows the four Venetian masks, Pantalone, Tartaglia, Truffaldino, and Brighella, in action, together with the servetta Smeraldina. Thirdly, it is interesting for the light thrown upon Gozzi's controversy with the two poets in the critical observations he has interspersed. These I shall enclose in brackets, so that the scenario of the play may be distinguished from extraneous matter.
V.
A REFLECTIVE ANALYSIS
OF THE FABLE ENTITLED
THE LOVE OF THE THREE ORANGES.
A Dramatic Representation divided into Three Acts.[76]
[The touch of satire in this prologue, directed against poets who were trying to trample down Sacchi's company of improvisatory players, is too obvious, and my intention of supporting the latter by introducing the series of my dramatised nursery-tales upon the theatre is too evident, to call for detailed commentary. In the choice of my first fable, which I took from the commonest among the stories told to children, and in the base alloy of the dialogues, the action, and the characters, which are obviously degraded of set purpose, I wanted to ridicule Il Campiello, Le Massère, Le Baruffe Chiozzotte, and many other plebeian and very trivial pieces by Signor Goldoni.]
FIRST ACT.