Original scientific paper
World or theatre? On the two comic mothers in Dubrovnik around the year 1800. (Stulli, Bruerović, and their European context)
Lada Čale Feldman
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
Contrary to the thesis that the only two extant autochthonous late 18th-century Dubrovnik comedies – Vlaho Stulli's Kate Kapuralica (Kate the Caporal's wife) and Marko Bruerović's Vjera iznenada (A sudden betrothal) – are dramaturgical antipodes, the first incarnating the “emergence of a world”, while the latter giving more emphasis to “theatre” (S. P. Novak), this contribution will deal with one of their common points which undermines the established polarization: the role of the mother. Up to the 18th century, namely, mothers rarely appear as autonomously motivated and thus dramaturgically prominent figures of the early modern European drama, and even less so in comedy. The Croatian comedic tradition is not an exception, with only Marin Držić's characters of mothers as a counter-example, but even there they never assume the position of the protagonist, so that the only comic relationship between a mother and a daughter can be found in the Dubrovnik adaptation of Molière's Femmes savantes. Even if one could trace in Stulli and Bruerović only some feeble influences of their predecessors in comic treatment of mothers from Menander to Machiavelli and Molière, our playwrights nevertheless partake of quite a particular historical context, the one in which the mother-daughter relationship acquires distinct ideological connotations. Their plays should therefore be interpreted against the background of Enlightenment concerns, shared at the time not only by Carlo Goldoni but primarily by Pierre Marivaux, whose opus must have been known to both Dubrovnik playwrights, the first being a fervent Jacobine and the second a Frenchman by origin.
Keywords
mothers, comedy; the 8th century; Pierre Marivaux Carlo Goldoni; Vlaho Stulli; Marko Bruerović
Hrčak ID:
289426
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2022.
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