The Mask of Collectivity: Compositional Practices at the Comédie-Italienne

In order to understand the phenomenon of anonymity, we must consider the concept with respect to which it is traditionally defined: that of authorship, the named relationship between individuals and texts. In using the word "author," we tend to imply both the technical, practical sense of one who writes or creates a text, and the more symbolic sense of an individual who takes creative responsibility for a work.¹ When we use the shorthand formula "anonymous text," we are usually referring to the unknown identity of the text's originator: unknown whether through a lack of information, or through a deliberate choice made in order to avoid censorship, to create a buzz of curiosity, or out of convention.² This article approaches anonymity from a different angle. The case it presents does not fit easily into any of these categories: it concerns an object that is not purely textual; an object that has several "authors," or perhaps none at all; an object that is ephemeral, in that any traces it leaves bear no resemblance to the original.³ The relationship between this object and the named "author" linked to it raises a series of questions that are troubling both for our understanding of this specific author and for our conception of the notion of anonymity more generally.

The dramatist in question is Carlo Goldoni, the Italian playwright who transformed comedy in his native Venice, before moving to Paris to work for the Comédie-Italienne.⁴ The first four decades of his working life in Italy were spent establishing himself as an "author" in the dual, practical and symbolic, sense described above.⁵ In the practical sense he was a writer of comedy texts and libretti; furthermore he established the centrality of the writer in a commedia dell'arte theatrical tradition previously lacking such a figure. However he was also much more than that. One of his great preoccupations was the acquisition of symbolic value as a genius creator: the cultural capital that would raise him above the level of a mere scribbler or lowly "writer" to eternal greatness as a canonized author. His main weapon in this battle, which continued throughout his life, was the published word. By carefully controlling the publication of his plays, through the creation of the 1760-70s Pasquali edition of his works, in which the plays were framed by autobiographical extracts, and, later still, by the publication in French of his Mémoires (1787), Goldoni crafted his own authorial identity, taking creative responsibility for his works and his image both on stage and in print. Leaving identifiable written traces and turning "Goldoni" into a name to be lauded by posterity were crucial to him. Anything further from anonymity is hard to imagine.

Enter the Comédie-Italienne, and its troupe of commedia dell'arte trained actors. Returning from two decades of banishment in 1716, the troupe had rapidly expanded its previously limited repertoire to include scripted French plays, and later opéras-comiques. Dramatists including Marivaux had made their name at the Hotêl de Bourgogne in the early eighteenth century, combining French verbal agility with the Italians' physical wit. However, a significant proportion of the troupe's output remained in the traditional Italian style: largely improvised scenario or canevas plays, in Italian, based on the characters of Pantalone, Arlecchino, the servetta, the Dottore and the amorosi. This was Italian theater as the French public expected it to be, and it is this Italian mode for which Goldoni found himself writing in 1762.⁶

This canevas production is the elusive, ephemeral object described in the introduction: an object created by a whole series of "author-creators" (the composer, designer and actors all play a creative role alongside the writer), yet claimed by none. An object, too, that leaves little or no written trace. Elements of the following argument clearly apply to theatrical productions more generally: all theater is ephemeral and to some extent collaborative, and the published version of a play as attributed to a particular dramatist is necessarily a "perfected" and purely textual...