Goldoni

Undergraduate / Graduate

This class is a close reading (in context) of some selected works by Carlo Goldoni, Italy's most prominent playwright of the eighteenth century. It includes discussion of Goldoni's so-called "reform" of Italian theater, whereby elements of Renaissance and Baroque comedy where refashioned to serve a prototypical bourgeois theater; and Goldoni's antagonism with Carlo Gozzi, promoter of a more exotic yet old-fashioned type of comedy. In the latter part of the course we will focus on the Goldoni-Renaissance in the twentieth century, spearheaded by renowned stage director Giorgio Strehler (1921-1997).