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The thirty years Carlo Goldoni spent in Paris hold an ambiguous
place in his career. The preface to his autobiography explicitly
draws attention to France as the site of his authorial glory, but
elsewhere he dismisses his work for the Parisian Comedie-Italienne
as a failure, and this view has come to dominate modern readings of
his French experience. This study sets out to explore this apparent
contradiction. By reading Goldoni's own contemporary and subsequent
accounts through the lens of his context as a dramatic author in
1760s Paris, Jessica Goodman sheds new light on both his experience
and critical reactions to that experience. A key part of this
contextualisation is an examination of contemporary
Comedie-Italienne archives, resulting in the most comprehensive
existing account of this oft-neglected theatre and its authorial
relations in the period. When material and artistic conditions at
the Comedie-Italienne thwarted the self-fashioning strategies
Goldoni had developed in Italy, he turned his attention to other
areas of French life; notably the court and the Comedie-Francaise.
Yet despite relative success in this regard, his career as an
eclectic homme de lettres was lost in translation to posterity. In
his French Memoires, he constructed the claim of Parisian glory
according to an out-dated understanding of what it meant to succeed
in the French literary field, focusing predominantly on the power
of Comedie-Francaise success. Ultimately, this construction was a
failure: in modern France, Goldoni is remembered as a famous
foreigner, not the consecrated French litterateur he believed he
had become.
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