The Masons and the Mysteries in 18th Century Drama. Three Masonic Comedies: Pierre Clément, Les Fri-maçons; Carlo Goldoni, Le Donne Curiose; Francesco Griselini, I Liberi Muratori

286 Pages·2019·2.16 MB·English

by  Matthew Leigh

Matthew Leigh
The Masons and the Mysteries in 18th Century Drama
Trends in Classics –
Pathways of Reception
General Editors
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos

Editorial Board
Lorna Hardwick, Craig Kallendorf, Fiona Macintosh,
Miltos Pechlivanos

Associate Editors
Anastasia Bakoianni and Rosanna Lauriola
Volume 2
Matthew Leigh
The Masons and
the Mysteries in
18th Century Drama
Three Masonic Comedies: Pierre Clément,
Les Fri-maçons; Carlo Goldoni, Le Donne Curiose;
Francesco Griselini, I Liberi Muratori
ISBN 978-3-11-067619-8
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-067629-7
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-067635-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953184
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Cover image: Paul Klee, Hauptweg und Nebenwege
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com

For Emily

Preface to Three Masonic Comedies
In this book I have translated three plays inspired by the early and mid-18th cen-
tury spread of freemasonry from the British Isles to continental Europe and be-
yond. To set them in context and to open up their themes I have also included an
extended introductory essay. This is very much the work of a classicist let loose
in the early modern world and this will be apparent from my particular interest
in how the plays interact with cultural and literary models from antiquity. At the
close of the introduction I also show how the relationship between masonic life
and drama can offer an enlightening comparison for some much-debated phe-
nomena in ancient dramas centred on the mysteries.
It has been a delight to get to grips with works in French, German, and Italian
as well in the classical languages with which I am most at home. Yet to make my
ideas accessible to as many anglophone readers as possible, I have translated not
only the plays themselves but all other quotations included in the introduction.
The only exception to this is in the titles of the plays and of the various masonic
books and pamphlets that I cite. For the latter I have devised my own abbrevia-
tions and have included a full list of these at the front of the volume.
The immediate inspiration for this study came from Fiona Macintosh and Ma-
rina Warner, who invited me to contribute a paper on Goldoni to a conference on
Classcial Reception in Italy organised by the Archive for the Performance of Greek
and Roman Drama in Oxford in May 2016. I knew something about ancient com-
edy, curiosity, and Goldoni, and recalled that my colleague at the University of
Trento, Gabriella Moretti, had previously suggested that I read Goldoni’s Le
Donne Curiose. And so it all started.
Of freemasonry I knew next to nothing. What I have learned since then is
down to the wonderful collections of the Weston Library in Oxford and, in partic-
ular, the library and museum of the United Grand Lodge of England in London.
Martin Cherry, Susan Snell, and their team have been unfailingly generous in
their support, and Peter Aitkenhead has offered extraordinarily swift and de-
tailed responses to queries on a range of topics. I have also gained much assis-
tance from the libraries of the Taylorian Institute in Oxford, Wadham College,
Oxford, and the Wellcome Institute in London.
Various friends have guided me along the way. Alice Wright was an early
supporter of this project. Ela Tandello and Andrea Bocchi advised on tricky pas-
sages in Griselini and Richard Cooper on similar problems in Clément. Andrew
Prescott read and corrected my introduction. Robert Parker read a first draft of
my account of ancient mystery cults and suggested much recent scholarship that
otherwise I would have missed. Francesca Romana Berno supplied photocopies
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110676297-202
VIII  Preface to Three Masonic Comedies
of texts I was struggling to run to ground. Catherine Keen was consistently en-
couraging and supportive. Audiences at Oxford, Warwick, UCL, the United Grand
Lodge of England, and the University of Texas at Austin listened tolerantly to dif-
ferent parts of my introduction. My students at St Anne’s College participated in
a read-through of my translation of Le Donne Curiose.
I am particularly grateful to Stephen Harrison, Serena Pirrotta, Anne Hiller,
Katerina Zianna, and the team at De Gruyter for their support for a project that,
by its very nature, is not easy to fit into many academic publishing series.
At the start of this project I had just got to know Dr Emily Hayes, historian of
science and historical geographer, whose intellectual verve and drive both en-
riched my thoughts and fired my enthusiasm. I am now so very proud to be her
husband.
Contents
Preface to Three Masonic Comedies  VII
Abbreviations for Texts and Sources  XI
 The Masons and the Mysteries in 18th Century Thought and
Drama  1
. Introduction  1
. Freemasonry in the Early 18th Century  5
. The Grand Lodge and Anderson’s Constitutions  7
. Freemasonry as an International Network  9
. The Masonic Exposés  15
. Ancient Mystery Cult  20
. The Masons and the Mysteries in the 18th Century
Imagination  29
. Masonic Literature and the Exclusion of Women  40
. Penetrating the Mysteries - Female Curiosity in Anecdote and
Fiction  44
. Women and the Masonic Mysteries on Stage  50
. Drama, Ritual, and the Problem of Metatheatre  69
. Conclusion  77
2 Pierre Clément, Les Fri-Maçons  82
3 Carlo Goldoni, Le Donne Curiose  125
4 Francesco Griselini, I Liberi Muratori  178
Appendix  250
Bibliography  257
Index for Three Masonic Comedies  263