Word: goldoni
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...theme of the constitutional liar, temporarily staving off detection by fresh falsehoods, but in the end hopelessly enmeshed in the network of his deceptions, was handled in masterly fashion more than a century before Goldoni by Corneille in "Le Menteur". In contrast to the French author's dignified verse-comedy, Goldoni's "Il Bugiardo" ("The Liar") is often broadly farcical...
...translation by Grace Lovat Fraser is spiritedly done. To preserve in a measure the flavor of the original, the translator has rendered into an English provincial dialect the parts of three or four of the characters written by Goldoni in the Venetian speech...
...numerous comedies of Goldoni, the "Liar" falls within a group in which the author retains among his personages some of the stock figures--such as Pantaloon, Harlequin and the Doctor--of the popular commedia dellarte, the "comedy of the profession." In this type of comedy the players, instead of having written-out parts, improvised them as they went along, merely keeping to a pre-arranged plot or scenario...
This kind of comedy had been in vogue for about two centuries, and was still popular when Goldoni resolved to attempt to displace it with comedy of a literary type. Examples of the latter had, indeed, existed from the early sixteenth century onward, but had never come into favor with the professional actors or their audiences. Realizing the difficulty of his task, Goldoni, in his earlier comedies, did not deal too drastically with the old favorite stock-characters, and only gradually deprived them of the monopoly of the stage, by relegating them mostly to minor parts. He abolished, however...
...chief merits of Goldoni are an inexhaustible fertility of invention--in one year he announced and executed a program of sixteen comedies--and an unfailing sprightliness in the dialogue...