626 linda l. carroll
Literature in Venetiana further important component of expressionistic literature was the body
of poetry, letters, and comedies written in the Venetian language mainly
by members of the city’s artisanal classes including alessandro Caravia,
andrea Calmo, antonio Molin (burchiella), and gigio artemio giancarli.
Calmo, Molin, and giancarli even formed an academy to revive the ancient
Venetian language. Previous dialect theater, including the plays of ruzante,
provided inspiration, characters and text; Calmo’s Rhodiana [The Girl from
Rhodes], long attributed to ruzante, for example, was probably based on
a lost original by the Paduan playwright, while giancarli’s Zingana [The
Gypsy] includes a character taken from ruzante’s Piovana.
the plays’ social views covered a broad spectrum, including both comic
and realistic intent. thus they mocked lower-class characters while yet
underlining the injustices and hardships that they suffered. Fishermen
and boatmen faithful to good old traditions, and thus the social and politi-
cal hierarchy dominated by patricians, formed the majority of the charac-
ters. stimulated in part by the plurilinguism of various genres and authors
(Plautus, the novella, the maccheronic, and the buffoon and piazza tradi-
tions), as well as by the presence in Venice of foreigners of many origins,
the comedies also frequently included a range of non-Venetian charac-
ters. bergamasque porters, courtesans, greek merchants, arrogant foreign
mercenaries and other strong men, and slavic charlatans all served as the
butts or agents of humor. Comic effect was enhanced by their speaking in
their native languages or their garbling of Venetian, at times further dis-
torted by the authors.10 some comedies included so many working-class
dialects, argots, and foreign languages that they functioned chiefly as a
kind of linguistic menagerie.
dialect theater germinated features of the incipient Commedia
dell’arte. this was an improvisational theater based on type characters
called “masks” that developed in the latter half of the century as a sub-
stitute for fully written scripts. Letters, such as those of Calmo, began to
serve as repertoires of ideas and speeches for theatrical monologues, a fea-
ture that would be fully developed in Commedia dell’arte. Certain stock
10 Manlio Cortelazzo, “esperienze ed esperimenti plurilinguistici,” in SCV 3.2, pp.
183–213; henry and renée Kahane, “a Case of glossism: greghesco and Lingua Franca in
Venetian Literature,” in Mélanges Skok (Zagreb, 1985), pp. 223–28; Lucia Lazzerini, Il testo
trasgressivo. Testi marginali, provocatori, irregolari dal Medioevo al Cinquecento (Milan,
1988), pp. 209–13.