You must ask the audience why and wherefore this scene afforded exquisite amusement.
Pantalone entered scolding, woke up Truffaldino; said that the King was in a fury; soup, boiled meat, and liver had been eaten, but the roast had not appeared at table. [All honour to a poet's daring! This outdid the lowness of Goldoni's squabbles about a brace of pumpkins in his Chiozzotte.] Truffaldino told the strange occurrence with the dove. Pantalone dismissed it as an idle story. But the dove at this point reappeared and repeated her ominous speech. Truffaldino was on the point of going off into a doze when Pantalone roused him, and they both gave chase to the dove, which flew fluttering about the kitchen.
The attempts to catch the dove, made by these facetious personages, amused the audience above measure. At last they caught it, placed it on a table, and began to stroke its feathers. Then they detected the enchanted pin stuck into a knot upon its head. Truffaldino drew the pin forth, and behold the bird was transformed into the Princess Ninetta!
A scene of stupors and astonishments. His Majesty the King of Diamonds arrived; pompously, with sceptre in hand, he rebuked Truffaldino for the non-appearance of the roast-meat at his royal table, whereby he had been put to shame before illustrious guests. The Prince followed, and recognised his lost Ninetta. Joy bereft him of his wits. Ninetta related what had befallen her; the King remained lost in amazement. Then the Moor and the rest of the Court came crowding into the kitchen, to find their monarch. He, with an air of haughty dignity, bade the princely couple retire into the scullery. He chose the hearth for his throne, and took his seat there with majestic sternness. The courtiers assembled round him; and as it happens in the story-book, the King now performed his part of ultimate adjudicator. What, he inquired, would be proper punishments for the several parties incriminated in these occurrences? Various opinions were offered. Then the King in his fury condemned Smeraldina to the flames. Celio appeared. He unmasked the hidden culpability of Clarice, Leandro, and Brighella. They were sentenced to cruel banishment. The two Princes were finally summoned from the scullery, and universal gladness crowned the termination of this high act of justice.
Celio warned Truffaldino that it was his most solemn duty to keep Martellian verses, those inventions of the devil, out of all dishes served up at the royal table. His function was to make his sovereigns laugh.
The play wound up with that marriage festival which all children know by heart—the banquet of preserved radishes, skinned mice, stewed cats, and so forth. And inasmuch as the journalists were wont in those days to blow their trumpets of applause over every new work which appeared from Signor Goldoni's pen, we concluded with an epilogue, in which the spectators were besought to use all their influence with these journalists, in order that a crumb of eulogy might be bestowed upon our rigmarole of mystical absurdities.
It was not my fault that a courteous public called for the repetition of this fantastic parody on many successive evenings. The theatre was crowded, and Sacchi's company began to breathe again after their long discouragement.
VI.
Such is Gozzi's own account of his first acted fable.
The public had been invited to sit as umpires in the controversy between him and their two favourite playwrights. They had been requested to suspend their judgment before finally pronouncing sentence against the Commedia dell' Arte. The result of the experiment was a decided triumph for the author of the Three Oranges, for Sacchi's company, and for the Granelleschi. But, what was more important, Gozzi, at the commencement of his forty-first year, now discovered himself to be possessed of dramatic ability in no common degree, and of a peculiar kind. The success of the Three Oranges suggested the notion that use might be made of fairy tales, not only for maintaining the impromptu style of Italian Comedy, and amusing the public with piquant novelties, but also for conveying moral lessons under the form of allegory, and mingling tragic pathos with the humours of the masks. Accordingly Gozzi composed a succession of similar pieces, gradually suppressing the burlesque elements, enlarging the sphere of didactic satire, pathos, and dramatic action, relying less upon the mechanical attractions of transformation scenes and lazzi, writing the principal parts in full, and versifying a considerable portion of the dialogue.