The Carmagnola: Prefazione

Manzoni’s first tragedy, Il Conte di Carmagnola, included a Preface in which he set out the principles of his drama, which drew on the German Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. In his Preface (and to a greater extent also in his Lettre to Chauvet), Manzoni challenges the validity of rules he believed were Aristotelian, according to which the unity of action in drama was based on respecting the unity of time and place of that action. These rules – followed in classicist Italian theatre but disregarded in English, Spanish and German drama – are arbitrary and unreasonable, based as they are on the false premise that the plot of a drama would not come across as verisimilar to the audience if it were enacted in different places and during a greater time span than the “real” place and time of the performance itself, as though the audience were also part of the dramatic action, whereas it contemplates the drama extrinsically, grasping its local and emotional unity independently of shifts in place and time: “The verisimilar must not derive from relations between the action and its way of being, but from the relations among the various parts of the action”. The other novelty stated in the preface is his inclusion of the Choruses, which in part resemble the role they played in the ancient Greek theatre. By including this function in modern drama, Manzoni assigns the poet’s “nook” to the chorus, “where he can speak directly”. Written in the rhyming metrical structures of lyric poetry (six, seven, eight and ten syllables), the lines of the chorus interrupt the action, acting as an “off screen” voice and encouraging readers and viewers to reflect on the historical events and the characters’ sentiments, thereby celebrating in solemn poetic synthesis the drama’s thematic ideals.