The Dramaturgy of the Spectator: Italian Theatre and the Public Sphere, 1600–1800

Abstract

Tatiana Korneeva gives us a well argued, impressively researched, and theoretically complex volume, one that fills a large void in the study of Italian theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This achievement is all the more impressive given Korneeva's ambitious goal: “This book claims . . . that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian treater not only coincided with and mirrored the transition from the representative to the modern ‘authentic’ public sphere (to borrow Habermas's phrase) but was also both its forerunner and its active agent” (7). For this reviewer, her argument is lucid even as it is multifaceted and subtle, and her conclusions are compellingly proven. In addition, Korneeva's monograph manages to achieve the impressive result of expounding on the topics of developments and results while eschewing a teleological framework: there is nothing inevitable about the path from Giacinto Andrea Cicognini to Vittorio Alfieri, and in fact the word “progress” does not appear a single time. This analytical and critical work is all the more conclusive precisely because it is not teleological.While Korneeva's focus is on Italian playwrights, her historical and theoretical frames of reference are European. She grapples with the definitions of “public sphere” (Jürgen Habermas's), “public opinion” (Reinhart Koselleck's), and the omnipresent “gaze” of the ruler (Michel Foucault's), which emerged from reflecting on sociocultural situations and changes observed north of the Alps. She connects them fruitfully and she refines them as she utilizes them as useful tools for understanding Italian texts. Korneeva is also sensitive to what I would refer to as peninsular specificities, without assuming that “Italian” literature existed in these centuries as a well-defined and cohesive whole. The most obvious example of Korneeva's nonteleological and geographically grounded approach is the attention that she bestows on a writer whose very presence has disappeared from all but the most specialized historical works: “Domenico Luigi Barone, knight of Liveri (1685–1757), official playwright of the Neapolitan court of Charles III of Spain, as well as impresario and director par excellence” (131). Against a critical narrative that assumes that Carlo Goldoni was influenced by plays and writings about theater that he absorbed while in Paris, Korneeva retraces a link between Barone and Denis Diderot, and then between Diderot and Goldoni. This is a much-needed reminder that locations typically neglected in histories of Italian literature or theater, like Naples, have in fact to be considered.The volume proceeds chronologically, starting with Giacinto Andrea Cicognini's prose tragedies, written in and for Florence (16–43); continuing with the impact that Cicognini's and his imitators’ works had on Carlo Goldoni (44–68); moving on to Scipione Maffei's Merope and its display of power on trial (69–90); tackling the two embattled Carlos (Gozzi and Goldoni) in Venice (91–114 and 115–41, respectively); and concluding with Vittorio Alfieri's Roman-history inspired tragedies (142–76). Notably, the author does not limit her purview to prose or poetry dramas, acknowledging that audiences were attuned to the similarities in these plays regarding how they positioned the author/playwright in relation to their intended recipients. In other words, Korneeva abstracts from narrow literary definitions to expand her scope to viewers and their opinions about and reactions to the stagings they took in.If I were to single out an individual example of how Korneeva's volume reframes the critical conversation around these playwrights and their works, it would be the chapter devoted to Carlo Gozzi. Her close reading of his fiaba L'amore delle tre melarance (1760–61) against the ideological and esthetic concerns of his times (in Venice and beyond) convincingly concludes that far from being “a conservative-minded and uncultured playwright” Gozzi ought to be considered as “a progressive intellectual and a most original theorist of theatre” (113). Instead of doubling down on the trite juxtaposition of Gozzi, Goldoni, and the abate Pietro Chiari within a Venetian context, Korneeva gives us a much more nuanced and sophisticated interpretation, born out at the levels of texts, their socio-historical circumstances, and theoretical interpretation.Extending her considerations beyond the chronological scope of her volume, in the epilogue (177–83) Korneeva asserts, “What encouraged and supported the unification movement in Italy . . . was the nineteenth-century melodrama, deliberately infuse with anti-tyrannical and anti-Austrian ideas or with political significance attributed to this newly reimagines form of theatre by audiences even when were operas had not been conceived by composers, librettists, and directors as political works” (183). With public sphere and public opinion in place, though of course limited in gender, socio-economic status, and geographical origin, it was possible for viewers to acclaim Giuseppe Verdi and Temistocle Solera's 1842 Nabucco as a pro- and proto-Risorgimento work. It took two centuries of playwrights reimagining their works and their audiences (and impresarios, directors, and actors to bring them to the stage) for a kernel of il pubblico to form and then to stand out and stand up. Korneeva's volume illuminates these complex processes and in so doing she provides us with a crucial tool to rethink over two centuries of playwriting and staging.