by the legs from below the scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, statuesque, with the drapery of their cloaks thrown over their shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick black hair; old women, all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with hooded cloaks of coarse brown; then boys—and boys. They all enjoy the spectacle with approval, and take the drama au grand sérieux, uttering none of the gibes which sometimes attend efforts to please in our own country. Even when the hat, or other instrument of extortion, is passed round, and they give nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of fury and disappointment, calls out, “Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to you!” and closes the theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, fioi de cani means no great reproach in Venetian parlance; and parents of the lower classes caressingly address their children in these terms. Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest insult which can be put into words.
In the commedia a braccio, before mentioned as the inheritance of the Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline of the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must have been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till the middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris he furnished his Italian players with the commedia a braccio. I have heard some very passable gags at the Marionette, but the real commedia a braccio no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable characters perform written plays.
Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of dramatis personae, and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is always, like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands. He is a dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of black knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black coat, and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in all his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins the heart. To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he has no part and I have learned to think a certain trick of his—lifting his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying, “Capisse la?” or “Sa la?” (You understand? You know?)—one of the finest things in the world.
In nearly all of Goldoni’s Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa,—Arlecchino, il Dottore. Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni’s witty management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete commedia a braccio, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son, figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley—a gibe at the poverty of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in Italy.
The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are much shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace, however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce, as you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes for any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed to have been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the Sleeping King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna, with Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated several nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can fancy people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying it with the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward realizing to yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will also suppose great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own part, I find few things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their irresistible touches of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the relenting parent (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while Arlecchino, as the large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of the erring son when the prodigal was about to be cast into the street, looked on and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and the conventional delight in benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed the base terrors of Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the keen spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of Sebastopol. Not many passages of real life have affected me as deeply as the atrocious behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when he responds to the expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,—a puppet of shaky and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:
“Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she is thy brother’s wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the sacred name of virtue.” (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and gesticulations toward the pit.)
To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh, “Honor?—I know it not! Virtue?—I detest it!” and attempting to pass the knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of rags and pasteboard, and topples against him.
Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous. You discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and reading his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets when they cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly noises in the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the dark corners of the room, and to look under the bed. When at last the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible.
The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is extremely funny. The prima ballerina has all the difficult grace and far-fetched arts of the prima ballerina of flesh and blood; and when the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike empressement. I have no doubt the corps de ballet have their private jealousies and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and legs. The puppets are great in pirouette and pas seul; but I think the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of Carthage, is their strong point.
The people who witness their performances are of all ages and conditions—I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some German countesses in the pit—but the greater number of spectators are young men of the middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and their wives and children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place for lovers in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama going on between the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of the Venetian populace take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter at the bottom of the Canal of the Giudecca, to which watery resting-place some recreant, addressed as “Caro Antonio,” had consigned it; and from this letter I came to know certainly of at least one love affair at the Marionette. “Caro Antonio” was humbly besought, “if his heart still felt the force of love,” to meet the writer (who softly reproached him with neglect) at the Marionette the night of date, at six o’clock; and I would not like to believe he could resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell out so. I fished up through the lucent water this despairing little epistle,—it was full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling,—and dried away its briny
