The Strange Case of Carlo Goldoni

This chapter studies how Goldoni created himself as an author and glorious ‘phénomène’, and reinforced this image through his personal and autobiographical writings. It locates the inception of his authorial persona in his early work in Italy, and explores the pragmatic realities behind his heroic narrative of a theatrical vocation, before applying a similarly pragmatic approach to readings of his 1762 invitation to Paris. It suggests that Goldoni’s experience at the Comédie-Italienne, and subsequent dismissals of it by the author himself and modern critics, are most productively understood by considering this two-year period within the context of the parallel real and recounted careers he had been constructing, and by examining the relationship between Goldoni’s self-fashioning and the expectations and reactions of those around him.