Goldoni in Paris

Jessica Goodman sheds new light on Carlo Goldoni's experience as a dramatic author in 1760s Paris, and on his critical reactions to that experience. She draws on contemporary Comédie-Italienne archives to offer the most comprehensive existing account of this oft-neglected theatre and its authorial relations.

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The thirty years Carlo Goldoni spent in Paris hold an ambiguous place in his career. The preface to his autobiography explicitly draws attention to France as the site of his authorial glory, but elsewhere he dismisses his work for the Parisian Comédie-Italienne as a failure, and this view has come to dominate modern readings of his French experience. This study sets out to explore this apparent contradiction. By reading Goldoni's own contemporary and subsequent accounts through the lens of his context as a dramatic author in 1760s Paris, Jessica Goodman sheds new light on both his experience and critical reactions to that experience. A key part of this contextualisation is an examination of contemporary Comédie-Italienne archives, resulting in the most comprehensive existing account of this oft-neglected theatre and its authorial relations in the period. When material and artistic conditions at the Comédie-Italienne thwarted the self-fashioning strategies Goldoni had developed in Italy, he turned his attention to other areas of French life; notably the court and the Comédie-Française. Yet despite relative success in this regard, his career as an eclectic homme de lettres was lost in translation to posterity. In his French Mémoires, he constructed the claim of Parisian glory according to an out-dated understanding of what it meant to succeed in the French literary field, focusing predominantly on the power of Comédie-Française success. Ultimately, this construction was a failure: in modern France, Goldoni is remembered as a famous foreigner, not the consecrated French littérateur he believed he had become.