DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Servant of Two Masters (Il Servitore di Due Padroni)" by Carlo Goldoni. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

THE STORY: A cross between traditional Italian commedia and postmodern vaudeville, this new version of Goldoni's classic pits the madcap servant Truffaldino against masters, mistresses, lovers, lawyers and twenty-seven plates of meatballs. Imagine

Fired from his skiffle band, Francis Henshall becomes minder to Roscoe Crabbe, a small time East End hood, now in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancee's dad. But Roscoe is really his sister Rachel posing as her own dead brother, who's been killed by her boyfriend Stanley Stubbers. Holed up at The Cricketers' Arms, the permanently ravenous Francis spots the chance of an extra meal ticket and takes a second job with one Stanley Stubbers, who is hiding from the police and waiting to be re-united with Rachel. To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his two guvnors apart. Simple. Based on Carlo Goldoni's classic Italian comedy The Servant of Two Masters, in this new English version by prize winning playwright Richard Bean, sex, food and money are high on the agenda.

The renowned French playwright Molière's most masterful and most frequently performed play, skillfully translated into English by Richard Wilbur. This edition includes the original French. The rich bourgeois Orgon has become a bigot and prude. The title character, a wily opportunist and swindler, affects sancity and gains complete ascendancy over Ogron, who not only attemps to turn over his fortune but offers his daughter in marriage to his "spiritual" guide. Translated and with an Introduction by Richard Wilbur.

In this exuberantly satirical novel, the tutor Atzbacher has been summoned by his friend Reger to meet him in a Viennese museum. While Reger gazes at a Tintoretto portrait, Atzbacher—who fears Reger's plans to kill himself—gives us a portrait of the musicologist: his wisdom, his devotion to his wife, and his love-hate relationship with art. With characteristically acerbic wit, Bernhard exposes the pretensions and aspirations of humanity in a novel at once pessimistic and strangely exhilarating. "Bernhard's . . . most enjoyable novel."—Robert Craft, New York Review of Books. "Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction."—George Steiner

Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni uses Giorgio Strehler’s Goldoni productions (and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in particular) as a means to defining his directorial aesthetic. The book provides a framework for examining the director’s career that is expansive rather than restrictive, using Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni as a through-line for Strehler’s fifty-year career at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. This research defines Strehler’s multifaceted style and brings to light interrelationships among his various works, creating a base from which a variety of subsequent critical inquiries can be made. It also establishes Strehler’s identity within the larger scope of the Italian theatre as a whole. Finally, it creates the critical challenge of finding more expansive notions of directorial style and concept that unite diverse ideologies without delimiting our understanding of the director. Crucial to understanding Strehler’s work with Arlecchino servitore di due padroni is his consistent reinterpretation of the play, which received no less than five distinct productions during Strehler’s lengthy career. His repeated reworking of existing productions provides a baseline for examining what elements were maintained and what elements changed or evolved. The four key influences that defined Strehler’s aesthetic in his work with Arlecchino were commedia dell’Arte, Bertolt Brecht, “refractive theatricality” and Jacques Copeau. Through these productions, Strehler created a dialogue with his audience and helped change the reputation of Carlo Goldoni both in his own country and abroad.

The commedia dell'arte, the improvised Italian theatre that dominated the European stage from 1550 to 1750, is arguably the most famous theatre tradition to emerge from Europe in the early modern period. Its celebrated masks have come to symbolize theatre itself and have become part of the European cultural imagination. Over the past twenty years a revolution in commedia dell'arte scholarship has taken place, generated mainly by a number of distinguished Italian scholars. Their work, in which they have radically separated out the myth from the history of the phenomenon remains, however, largely untranslated into English (or any other language). The present volume gathers together these Italian and English-speaking scholars to synthesize for the first time this research for both specialist and non-specialist readers. The book is structured around key topics that span both the early modern period and the twentieth-century reinvention of the commedia dell'arte.