Italian Dramatists

Playwrights of Italy, from the eighteenth century Venetian master of comedy who reformed the commedia dell'arte and wrote for the Venice stage to the twentieth century satirist, actor and director who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and made political farce a popular art. Their plays belong to a long Italian tradition of comedy, masks and the improvised stage. The group shows how Italian comedy, with its quick plots, masks and social satire, passed from the stage of the Republic of Venice to the political theatre of the twentieth century.