Books in the theatre

by Anna Alberati

Theatrical publishing in Rome in the eighteenth century

In the Rome of the Popes, the passion for theater was strongly felt, especially for the musical one where Pietro Metastasio dominated undisputed. Among the various forms of entertainment, some took place in the streets with tightrope walkers, storytellers, magic lantern shows and the puppet theater staged in Piazza Navona, in Trastevere or in private homes was a great success. Commedia dell’arte, sometimes performed in Roman dialect, was on the decline while great attention was paid to foreign theatre, especially French.
There were many attempts to reform tragic theater by writers, intellectuals, actors and comedians who wrote tragic texts and theoretical treatises on tragedy trying to bring out the characteristics of a national drama new in form and content. But the model of Corneille and Racine was so heartfelt that the texts were in fact imitations and remakes of French theatre.
The distance between theoretical commitment and practical realization can be found in the theater of Pier Jacopo Martello which is partially influenced by French influences but where the presence of Greek and Italian theater of the sixteenth century is strong.
In Rome between 1709 and 1715, Martello had an exclusive relationship with the publisher Gonzaga with whom he printed all his works composed in the Roman period, including the theoretical treatises Del Verso Tragico (1709) and Della Tragedy Ancient and Modern (1719 ).

Despite the popularity and enthusiasm of the public, theatrical performances in Rome had no official protection, were subjected to censorship and barely tolerated. Daniele Concina, a Dominican friar, attacked Scipione Maffei and Lodovico Antonio Muratori in three violent dissertations, arguing the amorality of the theatre, a source of licentiousness and concupiscence.
But the last one, published in 1755 in Rome by the Barbiellini heirs, On ancient and modern theaters contrary to the Christian profession libri duo, had very little following: the eighteenth-century public no longer justified these very backward positions, preferring moderate pamphlets like that of Giovanni Antonio Bianchi On the vices and defects of the modern theater which attempted to reconcile the theater with Christian morality. At the beginning of the century the shows were staged privately, in the palaces of princes and cardinals or in some ecclesiastical colleges. In these, in particular, the religious texts staged were slowly integrated by French texts in Italian translation, from Corneille’s tragedies to Voltaire’s Zaïre.
Following this, the public theaters opened or enlarged the rooms, built almost exclusively in wood, where the nobles and people of rank occupied the boxes while the middle class and the common people crowded the audience.
Successful comedies, musical dramas, tragedies and oratorios were performed in the Teatro della Pace, delle Dame, Coronari, Capranica, Argentina, Tordinona and Valle, accounts of which we can find in Roman periodicals of the time or in diaries. of foreign travelers such as Goethe, who was lucky enough to see Monti’s Aristodemo at the Valle Theater on 14 January 1787.

Goldoni’s comedies had been performed in Rome since 1753, La donna di grarbo and The lucky heiressat the Pallacorda, La famiglia dell’antiquario and La locandiera at Pace (1754), Le donne curiose semper at Pace, L’amante militari at Tordinona, The feudal lord and La Pamela al Valle (1755), The pretended illness, The presumptuous, The feast, La Cantarina al Capranica (1756).

Between 1753 and 1765, no fewer than seventy shows including comedies and musical interludes were performed in Roman theaters.

Goldoni stayed in Rome from December 1758 until 2 July 1759, as can be read in his Memoires where he dedicates four chapters to his stay. Particularly detailed is the description of the failure of the Witty Widow, written in Martellian verse for Venice in 1757 and reduced to prose to be performed at the Tordinona.
The author attributes the fiasco to the Roman habit of assigning female roles to male actors and to the company of Neapolitan comedians accustomed to acting in masks ” On lift the toile: les personages paroissent, et jouent come ils avoient répété. The Public is impatient, on demand Polichinel, and the Piece goes de en pis… ” (C. Goldoni, Memoirs, edited by Guido Mazzoni, Florence, G. Barbera, 1907, v. 2, p. 107).
It should be noted that the comedy was dedicated to the young duchess Giacinta Orsini Boncompagni Ludovisi, known in Arcadia by the name of Euridice Ajadicense, admired for her poetic ability and her beauty. The printed text was published by Fausto Amidei in 1759, shortly before the duchess died in childbirth on 9 July of the same year. In eighteenth century Italy it was practically impossible for a writer to live from his pen, without having family wealth, to exercise an independent profession as a doctor, teacher, clergyman, librarian or without the support of some patron to whom he could dedicate his writings. Furthermore, the phenomenon of uncontrolled printing was widespread, especially in the poetry and theater sectors, where unpublished poetic compositions or comedies performed in theaters but not revised and adequately corrected by the author were published.
The controversy between Goldoni and the impresario Girolamo Medebach who had given the scripts of some comedies to the publisher Giuseppe Bettinelli of Venice for the edition released between 1750 and 1757 is well known. Goldoni was not able to know with certainty how many of his works had been printed in Italy, he only knew twenty editions of them as he stated in the letter to Antonio Zatta, preface to the first volume of the Venice edition of 1788-1795: “ You therefore wish, brave and meritorious Mr. Zatta, to undertake the twentieth edition of my Works. The undertaking is courageous, and appears dangerous at first sight, but the credit of your presses can awaken curiosity in those who have read and reread my comedies, and who retain a grateful and indulgent memory of me. You ask me for permission to put your idea into execution, an urbanity practiced towards me by few publishers… ” (C. Goldoni, Tutti le opere, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, Milan, Mondadori, 1956, v. 14, p. 398).

The close relationship between publishing and the apparatus of ecclesiastical and state censorship placed a further limit on the concept of intellectual property, just think of the controversy between the Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi and the Dominican friar Tommaso Mamachi over the publication in Rome between 1782 and 1797 of the History of Italian Literature.
Tiraboschi proudly opposed the accusations of little Catholic orthodoxy, managing to confine the observations of the Master of the Sacred Palace to notes and duly countered, but the introduction to the first volume is indicative, where the reasons for the reprint and the certainty of finding a Rome an audience capable of appreciating such an erudite and voluminous work” If we consider the number of ten or eleven Tomes, it was to be feared that it would not find the first place to be read. On the other hand, the solid and vast erudition it contains, the purified and healthy criticism by which it is accompanied, everything that the judgment contains is such that it absolutely cannot be ignored by anyone who professes or loves Letters. .” (St. of Italian literature, v. 1, p. V-VI).

Having begun with the zephyr of Arcadia, the century ended shaken by the revolutionary storm that arrived from beyond the Alps. But the air of new ideas, in its obligatory “grand tour“, only made a stop in the sleepy Rome of the Popes without changing its nature and vocation. A bit like all the cultured and respectable young people of Europe in turmoil who visited and admired the Eternal City, creating at most a few commemorative plaques which were, however, largely posthumous. Even the Roman Republic, after all, was experienced by most as an enormous vandalistic graffiti on the monuments of Christianity, which it was thought could soon be erased.