Comic disjunctions in Goldoni's Il teatro comico

This thesis offers a close reading of the comic mechanisms in Il teatro comico (1750) by the eighteen-century Venetian playwright Carlo Emilio Goldoni. I argue that Goldoni’s rules about theater reform are not just articulated through the meta form of Il teatro comico, but that Goldoni’s ideas also seem to manifest themselves in the wordplays, stylistics and other comic elements on another level of the text itself. Consulting the Lacanian inspired philosopher Alenka Zupančič and her critical theory about disjunctions and subversive comedy, I show how Goldoni’s play has a playfulness to it, which adds a poetic quality that earlier critics said was missing; and that this playfulness is subversive in its form and makes Il teatro comico truly comic in Zupančič’s radical understanding of the term.