Giacinto Gallina

Giacinto Gallina by Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell’s “Giacinto Gallina” is an essay on the Venetian dramatist that uses his work to examine the domestic, local, and linguistic world from which Italian comedy draws its force. Meynell begins by noting that English readers, on Gallina’s death, were given a convenient but shallow comparison: he was called a later Goldoni with a warmer heart. The comparison is partly useful because Gallina, like Goldoni, built his drama from Venetian home life, especially the middle-class interiors of Italy. Yet Meynell suggests that such a formula cannot communicate what makes his work hard for foreigners to know: its dependence on dialect, local manners, and the intimate codes of Italian domestic speech. The essay is less a conventional biography than a cultural interpretation of Gallina’s theatrical world. Meynell describes the Italian professional and middle classes as intensely domestic, but not in the English sense of private withdrawal. Their homes are social, ceremonial, hospitable, and alive with rank, custom, rivalry, gossip, and feeling. Dialect is the heart of this life. It is not merely incorrect Italian or local color; it is the language of intimacy, confidence, scolding, laughter, childhood memory, and household authority. It creates a shared refuge from the abstract public world and makes the stage action both vivid and difficult to translate. Meynell argues that this world explains the enduring theatrical appeal of domestic quarrels and small household struggles in both Goldoni and Gallina. Italian audiences accept, and even relish, plots centered on matters that an English public might consider too trivial: disputes between mother and wife, servants, meals, visits, family loyalties, and the rituals of everyday companionship. In Gallina’s case, these ordinary conflicts are not insignificant; they are the living substance of a society whose emotional truth lies indoors. The essay therefore presents Gallina as an inheritor of Goldoni, but also as a dramatist rooted in a later Venetian life still shaped by the same domestic intensity. His art depends on exact observation, warmth, local speech, and the seriousness of seemingly narrow things. Meynell’s central claim is that Gallina’s plays cannot be fully understood apart from the Venetian dialect and the Italian household culture it preserves. His drama belongs to a world where locality is not a limitation but a source of truth, comedy, and human feeling.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Biographical Essay, Theatre Criticism · 1,591 words

First lines

When Giacinto Gallina died at the end of the nineteenth century, at the moment of the high tide of his work for the Venetian stage, English people were put into possession of some idea of his drama in the readiest way at hand. Gallina was said to be, more or less, a later Goldoni with a warmer heart. This was a brief description-or rather a mere sign-of an author whom few strangers would ever seek to know better. He is, indeed, so barred out of the knowledge of English readers by his frequent use of dialect that some such phrase was necessary as a first and final _mémoire_. It gave the news of his death with a first mention of his name and a compendious definition of his career, in one sentence.

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literary criticism · biography · Italian literature · Venetian drama · theatre · playwrights · 19th century · realism · dialect literature · Venice · comedy · character study

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