Imperial Mythologies: Ethnicity and Rebellion on the Eighteenth-Century Venetian Stage

Imperial Mythologies: Ethnicity and Rebellion on the Eighteenth-Century Venetian Stage FRANCA R. BARRICELLI INTRODUCTION In the carnival season of 1785, a new play by one of the most popular playwrights in Venice provoked a riot outside the grand Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo. Only the intervention of the government's executive Council of Ten, the forced suppression of the play, and the prosecution of the insurgents by the State Inquisitors quelled the violence. The cause of the furor, Giovanni Pindemonte's historical tragedy Icoloni di Candia, ostensibly depicted a fourteenth-century uprising in the capital city of Crete, the largest and longest-held colony in Venice's eastern empire. The play dramatized the restoration of order on that Greek island by Venetian forces, bringing the city's imperial past triumphantly to the stage and celebrating the republic's highest moment of civic satisfaction as a maritime superpower with important Levantine possessions. Still, after the fifth performance violence erupted. Members of the city's Greek minority took to the streets protesting what they perceived to be the insulting representation of their community on stage. Though the Cretan colony itself—like most of Venice's eastern holdings—had long been lost and the issues that triggered its challenge to Venetian dominion in 1363 had 245 246 / BARRICELLI disappeared, Pindemonte's treatment of the Cretan revolt opened a Pandora's box, unleashing the volatile forces of colonial memory, ethnicity, and historical representation in the charged circumstances of Venice's rapid, irreversible decline. From the little we know about the events surrounding the performance, the political function of theatre in Venetian social life in the late eighteenth century emerges relatively clearly. Long a center of spectacle and theatrical innovation, Venice boasted more public playhouses than any other European capital at the time. Since theatres were open to all levels of the paying community, a wide cross-section of the population made the many performances within their walls among the most socially diverse and broadly accessible occasions for sociability in the collective life of the city— particularly in the festive season of Carnival, in which the Coloni di Candia opened. In addition, the celebrated comedie reforms of Carlo Goldoni in the middle decades of the century had raised the stature of Venetian theatre by popularizing the realistic depiction of the city's social classes, rendered all the more colorful by the use of their dialect. Above all, Goldoni and his emulators encouraged middle class Venetian audiences to recognize themselves on stage, a characteristic that extended to exploring the origins of their unique civic culture.1 In this sense, Pindemonte's tragedy fit within a longer theatrical tradition of dramatizing the local past on stage. This time, however, the dramatic treatment of the city's history exposed social tensions of which even the Venetian authorities were unaware. At the heart of the conflict stood the opposition between historical fact and fictional artifact. Precisely because "historical" drama, more than any other genre, relies on the explicit pretense of engaging reality, the contested depiction of colonial Crete suggested at minimum a challenge of historical interpretation; at maximum, it called into question the so-called "myth" of Venice, which relied, among other things, on a notion of social stability born of a unique and venerable constitution.2 The myth also presupposed the satisfied conciliation of all people, subjects and citizens alike, to the idea of the benevolent protection of the "Most Serene" Republic. Colonial resistance and ethnic hostility belied this image, however, posing a threat to the very tranquility the Republic imagined it enjoyed. Indeed, the public's response to the Coloni di Candia brings into relief another aspect of the Venetian myth that has yet to be acknowledged by many scholars. The multi-ethnic composition of Venice's empire, reflected in the communities of non-Venetians residing in the dominant city, had for centuries formed part of Venice's landscape and contributed to its cosmopolitan character. Resident minorities of Greeks, Slavs, Dalmatians, Imperial Mythologies / 247 Armenians and other "Levantines" had long made the lagoon their home, particularly after Turkish conquests of Venetian possessions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made the influx of non-Italian groups to the...