GOETHE’S “WOMEN’S PARTS PLAYED BY MEN IN THE ROMAN THEATER”

The following essay is an eyewitness report by a modern man of letters of one of the last all-male performances that could still be considered the product of an unbroken theatrical tradition. On January 3, 1787, in Rome Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose lifelong interest in the theater both as a dramatist and as a director is well known, saw a performance of Carlo Goldoni’s La Locandiera. Ten years later the invading French armies declared a Roman Republic to succeed the defeated papal states and the laws banishing women from the stage were repealed.