In a letter he wrote from France, Goldoni announced a new play called Carnival in Venice. No trace of it remains today, but we can hardly complain. Goldoni has been more than generous with us on the matter of the Venetian Carnival. There are the masked games of impersonation and seduction in the Vedova Scaltra where the shrewd window of the title, on the lookout for a husband, embroils, and is embroiled by, her foreign suitors in a frenzy which eventually takes hold of everybody.
In the Goldoni plays, it is as if desires that have been lulled for a while suddenly spring to life. The results is real competition, and no class is left out. There are the upper classes who organize and squander the few riches that remain to them, organizing the Festino, there are the young serving wenches, the Massere, who can not resist throwing themselves into the melée, to forget in the general hilarity and in one all too brief night, the grim hardness of their day to day lives.
In all of this however, there is one rule to be respected, and that is anonymity. That is what the mask means and pity help anyone who reveals his own identity! Donna Lucrezia, the protagonist of Le Donne Gelose (The Jealous Women) actually says this to a more than usually bumpkin Arlecchino. Carnival keeps rude awakenings in store for those who cannot resist the curiosity of waiting to know who their mysterious woman-friend is. Among the Morbinose (The Good-Humored Ladies) there can also be old woman looking for fun...
There is room for everybody in the theatrical world of Goldoni, including those Venetians who, with their over-strict morality, try to deny themselves and others the smallest chance to enjoy themselves, and all in the name of a decrepit morality every bit as deplorable as the libertine behavior which is its opposite. In the Rusteghi, Goldoni punishes these "rustics" whose home is their castle, by introducing on air of carnivalesque hilarity that converts their strongholds of stiff morality into castles in the air.
Carnival then, according to Goldoni, is to be taken with a pinch of good sense and moderation, and, why not after all, with stile.
"LA MASCHERA VENEZIANA"
DANILO REATO
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