Excerpt from IL Ventaglio (the Fan) A Comedy in Three Acts
In the year 1907 Italy celebrated with genuine enthusiasm the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of her most famous dramatist, Carlo Goldoni. Great as was his fame during his lifetime, it has since increased. His plays, published in countless editions, still hold their place on the Italian stage. Books and articles concerning the man and his work have appeared by the hundred. Comparatively few of his plays, however, have been translated into foreign languages, or are known outside Italy. The Yale Dramatic Association is, therefore, performing a real service to literature and to dramatic art in producing one of his representative comedies before American audiences.
Not only did Goldoni enrich dramatic literature with some two hundred plays of various kinds, but also, finding the drama in Italy in a deplorable condition, he reformed it, still keeping it thoroughly Italian, and laid foundations for future development. Like Shakespeare and Molicrc, he was a theatrical director, and wrote his plays for immediate production on the stage. An amiable spectator of the life around him, a keen observer of the weaknesses of human nature, he gives us a vivid picture of his age-the eighteenth century on the eve of the Revolution. In calling him a reformer we do not mean that he had any literary pretension, any purpose of preaching morality or of improving social conditions, any interest in the contemporary intellectual movements. Whatever moral effect might come from his good-natured satire was incidental. On the other hand, he devoted himself to reforming the theatre for its own sake.
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