Introduction

In the Italy of the second half of the eighteenth century comedy had prevailed over tragedy, with authors such as Carlo Goldoni, Pietro Chiari and Carlo Gozzi. This was superseded by the tragic drama of Vittorio Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, Ippolito Pindemonte, Ugo Foscolo, Silvio Pellico and Alessandro Manzoni. By the mid-nineteenth century the dearth of original texts for the theatre (the emphasis having shifted to opera) was compensated by the skill of 'great actors' such as Gustavo Modena, Adelaide Ristori, Tommaso Salvini and Ernesto Rossi. This has been referred to as drammaturgia dell'attore, the actor's drama, and it is notable that later, when in the rest of Europe the producer had taken over, in Italy the actor still predominated until at least the 1930s. Indeed, the term regista, 'director', was only coined by the linguist Bruno Migliorini in 1932. Alongside the early nineteenth-century tragedies, in response to the expectations of the emerging bourgeoisie, there was a post-Goldonian vein (as in Augusto Bon, Alberto Nota and others) which took the eighteenth-century dramatist’s realism and regionalism into the following century. Overlapping with this trend, and spreading into the period of verismo, is the first group of playwrights I shall discuss: they belong to the unification period and are representative of teatro a tesi, a theatre primarily concerned with ideas.