Heinemann Educational Publishers [Published 1979]. Translated and Adapted by Frederick H. Davies From the Carlo Signorelli Edition of Il Bugiardo. Paper covers, 73 pp. Reprint. [Excerpt from Introduction] INTRODUCTION TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS WHO WILL ACT IN THIS PLAY 'Goldoni - good, gay, sunniest of souls, Glassing half Venice in that verse of thine, . . . Dear King of Comedy, Be honoured! thou that didst love Venice so, Venice, and we who love her, all love thee!' So wrote our English poet Robert Browning - who loved Venice, lived there for many years, and died there in his palazzo on the Grand Canal - when Carlo Goldoni's statue was unveiled. If you wander down the busy Merceria, the 'Regent Street" of Venice, you will come to that statue. There he stands today, the man who wrote this and over a hundred other comedies, smiling quizzically down at the Venetians of the twentieth century. Who was he, this Carlo Goldoni ? He is so little known in our country. And yet to Italians he is what Shakespeare is to Englishmen. He is the Gran Goldoni. And to the children of Venice, as to their fathers and mothers, he is still papa Goldoni. He was born in Venice on 25 February 1707. He died in Paris during the French Revolution, on 6 February 1793, only a few days after Louis XVI was taken to the guillotine. For forty-six of those eighty-six years of his life, Carlo Goldoni was ceaselessly writing plays for the theatres of Italy and France.