Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) (4 page)

Pirandello does not ask us to choose between Cotrone and Ilse. Cotrone, the freewheeling anarchist and illusionist, is obviously the more attractive figure, especially if we think in terms of sheer spectacle. But his marvels and miracles have a superficial dazzling quality that is in tune with his regressive desire to escape adult responsibility: ‘I’ve told you already to learn from children who first invent a game and then believe in it and live it as true … If we were children once, we can always be children’ (
MG
, p. 179). It is not hard to see the limits of Cotrone’s playpen inventiveness. If Ilse’s high-minded alternative appears no less obviously flawed, this is largely because she herself is so unqualified to serve as a representative of the communicative function of the theatre. She shows no understanding of how art is shaped by the imagination and no readiness to compromise either
with her fellow actors or with her audience. Whereas Cotrone, as Strehler notes, ‘sums up all the possibilities of the theatre’, Ilse has no repertoire other than a single play that happens to be rooted in her own emotional experience and demands to be repeated and rejected over and over again. It is not the least of Pirandello’s paradoxes that Cotrone who cuts himself off from society has the broadest of human sympathies as we see from his treatment of the various misfits who compose his group, whereas Ilse who insists on taking art out amid the world of men is an unbending fanatic who listens to nobody and sacrifices not only herself but two of her troupe.

The play as Pirandello left it breaks off as the thunderous arrival of the Mountain Giants strikes terror into the hearts of Cotrone’s followers and guests. Yet in Stefano Pirandello’s detailed account of his father’s intentions for the unwritten conclusion it is not the Giants themselves (who never appear on stage) but their brutal workforce, coarsened by heavy manual labour, who are responsible for the riot that leads to Ilse’s death. This may reflect Pirandello’s reluctance to mount anything that might seem like a direct attack on a Fascist regime that still accorded him a fair measure of official respect. It is also, however, an indication that his real concern is not with any particular form of government, whether authoritarian or democratic, but with the whole of modern industrial society which has left art without a social function. The Giants, after all, behave as well as one can expect from rulers who ‘are intent on vast projects to possess the powers and riches of the earth’ (
MG
, p. 183): they subsidize the theatre as an entertainment for their workforce and are ready to pay compensation when things turn out badly. Despite Ilse’s terrible fate, there is no suggestion that the creative activity of Cotrone’s villa will be in any way disturbed, and though the Count may proclaim that poetry has died with his wife, this is pure hyperbole. Poetry will surely continue to exist, as Auden puts it, ‘in the valley of its making where executives | Would never want to tamper’. The tragedy is not that art is in danger of extinction, but that marginalization and irrelevance will be the price it pays for survival.

The evolution of the theatre from nineteenth-century naturalism to the diversity of its modern modes is essentially the work of two dramatists: one is Strindberg, the other is Pirandello. In both cases the extraordinarily pervasive influence is based on a few plays which amount to a very small sample of their massive output, and in both
cases much of the abundant non-dramatic work remains unfamiliar or unavailable to those who cannot read the original language. An effective summing-up of Pirandello’s work would, therefore, need to take into account the difference between his achievement as it appears in its Italian context and as it appears to the world at large. Our conclusion can do no more than point to some salient aspects of the latter.

The most obvious feature of Pirandello’s influence is to be found in the extensive use of metatheatrical devices by authors as diverse as Brecht, Genet, and Tom Stoppard. It is no accident that in his critical essays and especially in the Preface to
Six Characters
Pirandello uses the term ‘representation’ (
rappresentazione
) for a far wider variety of activities than is normal in English usage—as a synonym for description, narration, symbolic substitution, artistic realization, and theatrical performance. What this suggests is that Pirandello’s metatheatre, unlike Brecht’s didactic distancing effect, is deeply rooted in his conviction that we have no sure access to reality. To think of the theatre as represention is to reject the Aristotelian idea of
mimesis
on the grounds that we cannot copy what we cannot know. To the same scepticism we can also attribute Pirandello’s role as a forerunner of Beckett, Ionesco, and to some degree Harold Pinter in the presentation of situations where actions are repetitive, developments illusory, and endings arbitrary since they can only leave us where we started out. Signora Ponza will continue to be both a first and second wife; the Six Characters are left still looking for an author; Henry IV remains locked in his imperial role. Action is no longer meaningful. The theatre of the absurd begins with Paleari’s puppet theatre that has a hole in the sky.

One might deduce from all this that Pirandello is responsible for everything that is most bleak about the modern stage. How then do we account for the strange sense of exhilaration that his plays so often convey? Perhaps the secret lies in that very lack of conclusion, in the uncertainty of identity, in the fact that so many of his characters live in their own fictions rather than in truths. The absurdity of the world grants man the freedom to fill the void with his own inventions. The villa in
The Mountain Giants
may be labelled as unlucky (
La Scalogna
), but it contains ‘a wealth beyond counting, a ferment of dreams’ (
MG
, p. 153). And this, as Cotrone goes on to explain, is because ‘The things around us speak and make sense only in those arbitrary forms that we chance to give them in our despair’.

T
HESE
translations are based on the four-volume edition of the plays,
Maschere nude
(1986–2007) edited by Alessandro D’Amico for the Complete Works of Pirandello (
Opere di Luigi Pirandello
) under the general editorship of Giovanni Macchia.
Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore
and
Enrico IV
are in volume ii and
I giganti della montagna
in volume iv.

The aim of this book is to provide an accurate, readable, and eventually actable translation of three plays by Pirandello. It is not an adaptation or what is commonly called ‘an acting version’. The settings have not been updated to the twenty-first century and the idiom chosen is not so contemporary as to let us forget that Pirandello was a contemporary of Bernard Shaw. The extensive stage directions, sometimes abridged in previous translations, are here given in full because they frequently assume a narrative function, commenting on the action or providing insight into the psychology of the characters. We are reminded that for Pirandello a play is not only a performance for spectators but also a text for readers.

Act divisions are indicated only for
Henry IV
. That the intervals in
Six Characters
do not amount to act divisions is expressly stated by Pirandello himself. As for the unfinished
Mountain Giants
, the whole situation is confused by the fact that we have three numbered sections plus an account by Stefano Pirandello of a fourth ‘moment’ that would have constituted the third act. Under the circumstances, most editors have rightly been reluctant to label the completed sections as acts.

An asterisk in the text indicates an explanatory note at the end of the book.

For the titles ‘Marchese’ and ‘Marchesa’ in
Henry IV
I have preferred to keep the Italian terms rather than using the French-sounding ‘Marquis’ and ‘Marquise’. For the historical figure of Matilda of Tuscany, however, I have used ‘Countess’ which is how she appears in most English and Italian histories of the period.

Punctuation is the one area where I have felt obliged to take some considerable liberties with the original text. The problem lies in Pirandello’s repeated use of dashes, dots of suspension, and, above all, exclamation marks where there seems little to indicate a particularly
agitated or emphatic utterance. One finds the same practice in Strindberg and in the German expressionists, but to reproduce it consistently in English would surely be counter-productive.

My thanks go to Simona Cain Polli, Jennifer Lorch, and Marco Sabbatini for their help and encouragement and to my editor Judith Luna for the scrupulous attention she has given to this volume. I am also grateful to Pedro Carol for keeping my files in order and to the unfailingly courteous librarians of the Bibliothèque universitaire de Genève for their assistance with inter-library loans. My greatest debt is to John C. Barnes whose meticulous and sensitive scrutiny of this translation has made it more accurate and more readable than it would otherwise have been: he has, however, always left the final decision to me and is in no way responsible for the remaining infelicities.

I
N
keeping with the general policy of Oxford World’s Classics, this bibliography is restricted to works in English. These, fortunately, offer an abundance of perceptive comment on Pirandello and especially on the plays. Previous translations of the plays are too numerous to be listed here, but there is no complete English edition of Pirandello’s theatre. The four-volume set of
Collected Plays
edited by Robert Rietti for Calder (1987–95) is the most substantial compilation to date, but omitted much of the later work for copyright reasons: it is now being re-edited and completed for Alma Classics. Pirandello’s abundant production of short stories is still under-represented in translation.

Giudice, Gaspare,
Pirandello: A Biography
, trans. [and abridged] Alistair Hamilton (London, 1975).

Pirandello’s Love Letters to Marta Abba
, trans. and ed. Benito Ortolani (Princeton, 1994).

One, No One, One Hundred Thousand
, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1990).

The Late Mattia Pascal
, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1964).

The Old and the Young
, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London, 1928).

Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator
, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York, 1927).

Short Stories
, trans. Frederick May (London, 1965).

On Humor
, trans. Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa (Chapel Hill, NC, 1974).

‘The New Theatre and the Old’, trans. Herbert Goldstone, and ‘Theatre and Literature’, trans. A. M. Webb, in Haskell M. Blok and Herman Salinger (eds.),
The Creative Vision: Modern European Writers on Their Art
(London, 1960).

Barnes, John C., ‘
Umorismo
is No Laughing Matter’,
Pirandello Studies
, 29 (2009), 14–20.

—— ‘Four Characters in Search of an Order: Some Thoughts about the Main
Dramatis Personae
of
Enrico IV’, Pirandello Studies
, 31 (2011), 43–61.

Bassanese, Fiora A.,
Understanding Luigi Pirandello
(Columbia, SC, 1997).

Bassnet-McGuire, Susan,
Luigi Pirandello
(London, 1983).

Bentley, Eric R.,
The Pirandello Commentaries
(Evanston, Ill., 1991).

Bini, Daniela, ‘Pirandello’s Philosophy and Philosophers’, in DiGaetani (ed.),
A Companion to Pirandello Studies
, 17–46.

Brustein, Robert,
The Theater of Revolt
(Boston, 1964).

Büdel, Oscar,
Pirandello
(London, 1966).

Caesar, Ann Hallamore,
Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello
(Oxford, 1999).

Cambon, Glauco (ed.),
Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967).

DiGaetani, John L. (ed.),
A Companion to Pirandello Studies
(Westport, Conn., 1990).

Esslin, Martin,
Reflections: Essays on Modern Theater
(New York, 1969).

Fergusson, Francis,
The Idea of a Theater
(Princeton, 1949).

Giudice, Gaspare, ‘Ambiguity in
Six Characters in Search of an Author
’, in DiGaetani (ed.),
A Companion to Pirandello Studies
, 167–84.

Lorch, Jennifer,
Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author; Plays in Production
(Cambridge, 2005).

MacClintock, Lander,
The Age of Pirandello
(Bloomington, Ind., 1951).

Mariani, Umberto,
Living Masks: The Achievement of Pirandello
(Toronto, 2008).

Matthaei, Renate,
Luigi Pirandello
(New York, 1973).

Mazzaro, Jerome,
Mind Plays: Essays on Luigi Pirandello’s Theatre
(Bloomington, Ind., 2001).

Oliver, Roger W.,
Dreams of Passion: The Theater of Luigi Pirandello
(New York, 1979).

Ragusa, Olga,
Pirandello: An Approach to His Theatre
(Edinburgh, 1980).

Starkie, Walter,
Luigi Pirandello
(rev. edn., Berkeley, 1965).

Strehler, Giorgio, ‘The Giants of the Mountain’,
World Theatre
, 16/3 (1967), 263–9.

Styan, J. L.,
The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy
(Cambridge, 1968).

Tilgher, Adriano, ‘Life versus Form’, in Cambon (ed.),
Luigi Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays
, 19–34.

Vittorini, Domenico,
The Drama of Luigi Pirandello
(New York, 1969).

Williams, Raymond,
Modern Tragedy
(London, 1966).

Modern Drama
, special Pirandello issues 6/4 (1964), 20/4 (1977), 30/3 (1987).

Pirandellian Studies
(University of Nebraska).

Pirandello Studies
(Journal of the Society for Pirandello Studies).

PSA
(Annual publication of the Pirandello Society of America).

Chekhov, Anton,
Five Plays
, trans. and ed. Ronald Hingley.

Ibsen, Henrik,
Four Major Plays
, trans. James McFarlane and Jens Arup, ed. James McFarlane.

Strindberg, August,
Miss Julie and Other Plays
, trans. and ed. Michael Robinson.

Synge, J. M.,
The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays
, ed. Ann Saddlemyer.