Theatre and the Rise of the Italian Novel: Venice 1753–84

Abstract

The essay discusses the rich and complex relationship that was played out publicly in eighteenth-century Venice between a well-established theatre and a newly emerging indigenous novel. Two of the key figures, Pietro Chiari and Antonio Piazza, had a foot in both camps; their ‘theatre novels’, far from having story lines purloined from plays, were thinly disguised or undisguised narratives about the off-stage rivalries and relationships between the actors and actresses, playwrights and impresarios that made up the leading theatre companies. These were, themselves, in rivalry with each other. Chiari and Piazza were journalists as well as novelists and playwrights and, at different moments, editors of the local paper Gazzetta veneta. The potential to draw the dominant cultural practice of the day into a circuit of gossip, scandal, and celebrity was considerable. But one finds also in Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, whose careers do not follow the same route, a similar heightened awareness of the divergent demands being made on them by different sectors of the reading and theatre-going public.