Goldoni in Paris: la gloire et le malentendu by Jessica Goodman (review)

In the current field of Goldoni studies, the relevance of Jessica Goodman's monograph appears twofold: first, it provides a study in English that references a variety of sources in other languages, notably Italian and French; second, and more significantly, it casts a different light on the long-debated issue of Carlo Goldoni's success in Paris by taking into consideration both economic and symbolic concerns. At fifty-five, after a stellar career in Venice, Goldoni readily accepted in 1762 the offer of a salaried position with the Parisian Comédie-Italienne, expecting further to bolster his status as dramatist. The outcome is uneasily interpreted, as moments of apparent triumph alternated with recurring frustrations and setbacks until he died destitute in 1793. Goodman immediately sets aside the standard explanation, the teoria del malinteso — that Goldoni misunderstood the reasons why he was invited to work for the Comédie-Italienne (a mere two-year stint) — and examines all of the playwright's thirty years in Paris. As a result, much of the book is devoted to providing a nuanced analysis of the Parisian dramatic scene in the second half of the eighteenth century, and notably of the complex dynamics of competition between four venues: the three 'privileged' troupes, the Académie royale de musique (the Opera), the Comédie-Française, and the Comédie-Italienne, and the fairground theatres. Goodman's justification in brushing such a wide swathe is that a particular author's work, even those who did not provide plays to all four venues, can only be evaluated in a global context. In order to qualify Goldoni's position, she compares him to six contemporary playwrights whose profiles differ in obvious or subtle ways, which demonstrates that people writing for the stage had considerably varied motives and expectations, and that one cannot gauge success or failure from a single set of criteria. Goodman's method rests on a distinction between symbolic capital — a notion explicitly borrowed from Bourdieu — and economic capital. In early eighteenth-century France, a playwright's greatest ambition might not be to have his work performed to public acclaim and earn comfortable royalties; instead, he (much more rarely she) might strive to have his plays given at court and appreciated by a small coterie, allowing him to enter rarefied circles, gain a seat at the Académie française, and obtain a royal pension. Goodman pays scant attention to Goldoni's plays, concentrating instead on his thwarted efforts to navigate an unfamiliar system and reconcile a yearning for gloire — a lasting, long-term reputation more desirable than immediate succès — and a need for financial stability. Goldoni's indisputable talent for penning comedies finally appears as a minor component in his relative failure to establish himself as a truly great author in his own time, and this book reminds us by contrast that literary scholarship alone is ill equipped to provide an estimation of a dramatist's work and standing in their proper context. Goodman's study thus serves as an extremely useful complement and counterpoint to those that focus on the textual corpus and Goldoni's own account of his career.