The Venetian stage had long been in possession of Goldoni, a dramatic
poet, who, by introducing bustle and show into his pieces, and writing
principally to the level of the gondoliers, arrived to the first degree
of popularity in Venice. He had a rival in Pietro Chiari, whom the best
critics thought even inferior to Goldoni; but such an epidemic frenzy
seized the Venetians in favour of these two authors, that it quickly
spread to almost all parts of Italy, to the detriment of better authors,
and the derangement of the public taste. This _dramatic mania_ was
arrested by Carlo Gozzi, a younger brother of a noble family, who
attacked Goldoni and Chiari, and others soon followed him. On this
occasion the two bards suspended their mutual animosity, and joined to
oppose their adversaries. Chiari was a great _prose scribbler_, as well
as a _comedy-monger_, so that a warm paper war was soon commenced, which
grew hotter and hotter rapidly.
It happened one day that Gozzi met with Goldoni in a bookseller’s shop.
They exchanged sharp words, and in the heat of altercation Goldoni told
Gozzi, “that though it was an easy task to find fault with a play, it
was very difficult to write one.” Gozzi acknowledged “that to find fault
with a play was really very easy, but that it was still easier to write
such plays as would please so thoughtless a nation as the Venetians;”
adding, with a tone of contempt, “that he had a good mind to make all
Venice run to see the tale of the Three Oranges formed into a comedy.”
Goldoni, with some of his partisans in the shop, challenged Gozzi to do
it; and the critic, thus piqued, engaged to produce such a comedy within
a few weeks.
To this trifling and casual dispute Italy owed the greatest dramatic
writer it ever had. Gozzi quickly wrote a comedy in five acts, entitled
“I Tre Aranci,” or “The Three Oranges;” formed out of an old woman’s
story with which the Venetian children are entertained by their nurses.
The comedy was acted, and three beautiful princesses, born of three
enchanted oranges, made all Venice crowd to the theatre of St. Angelo.
In this play Goldoni and Chiari were not spared. Gozzi introduced in it
many of their theatrical absurdities. The Venetian audiences, like the
rest of the world, do not much relish the labour of finding out the
truth; but once point it out, and they will instantly seize it. This
was remarkable on the first night that the comedy of the “Three
Oranges” was acted. The fickle Venetians, forgetting the loud
acclamations with which they had received Goldoni’s and Chiari’s plays,
laughed obstreperously at them and their comedies, and bestowed frantic
applause on Gozzi and the “Three Oranges.”
This success encouraged Gozzi to write more; and in a little time his
plays so entirely changed the Venetian taste, that in about two seasons
Goldoni was stripped of his theatrical honours, and poor Chiari
annihilated. Goldoni quitted Italy, and went to France, where Voltaire’s
interest procured him the place of Italian master to one of the
princesses at Versailles; and Chiari retired to a country house in the
neighbourhood of Brescia.
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