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Three Playsby

Luigi Pirandello

New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1922

1. Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. Edward Storer, approved by author (from 1921 ed.)2. Henry IV, trans. Edward Storer, approved by author (from 1922 ed.)3. Right You Are! (If You Think So), trans. Arthur Livingston (from 1917 ed.)

[and for this online edition we have added:]

Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author (1925), trans. Eric BentleySicilian Limes (1910), trans. Isaac Goldberg

[For a page in Italian with a short biography and links to the original of some plays, please seehttp://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/p/pirandello/index.htm ]

PREFATORY NOTE

[By Arthur Livingston]

No apology is necessary for offering to American readers a play which critics, with singularunanimity, have called one of the most original productions seen on the modern stage. In less thana year's time, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" has won a distinguished place in thedramatic literature of the Western world, attracting audiences and engaging intellects far removedfrom the particular influences which made of it a season's sensation in Italy.

Yet the word "original" is not enough, unless we embrace under that characterization qualities farricher than those normally credited to the "trick" play. The "Six Characters" is something more thanan unusually ingenious variation of the "play within a play." It is something more than a new twistgiven to the "dream character" made familiar by the contemporary Italian grotesques. It is adramatization of the artistic process itself, in relation to the problem of reality and unreality whichhas engaged Pirandello in one way or another for more than twenty years.

I venture to insist upon this point as against those observers who have tried to see in the "SixCharacters" an ironical satire of the commercial drama, as we know it today, mixed, more or lessartificially, with a rather obvious philosophy of neo-idealism. No such mixture exists. The blend isorganic. The object of Pirandello's hitter irony is not the stage-manager, nor the theatrical producer,nor even the dramatic critic: it is the dramatist; it is the artist; it is, in the end, life itself. I supposethe human soul presents no mysteries to those who have been thoroughly grounded in the scienceof Freud. But in spite of psycho-analysis a few Hamlets still survive. Pirandello is one of them.

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What are people really like? In the business of everyday life, nothing is commoner than thecategorical judgment sweeping and assured in its affirmatives. But as we cut a little deeply into theliving matter of the spirit, the problem becomes more complicated. Do we ever understand thewhole motivation of an action -- not in others only but even in ourselves?

Oh, yes, there are people who know. . . . The State knows, with its laws and its procedures. Andsociety knows, with its conventions. And individuals know, with their formulas for conduct oftencannily applied with reference to interest. -- The ironical element, as everyone has noted, isfundamental in Pirandello!

Apart from works in his earlier manner (realistic pictures from Southern Italian life, including suchgems as "Sicilian Limes"), Pirandello's most distinctive productions have dealt with this generaltheme. No one of them, indeed, exhausts it. And how could this be otherwise? Pirandello,approaching the sixties, to be sure, is nevertheless in spirit a man of the younger Italian generation,which, trained by Croce and Gentile, has "learned how to think." But however great his delight inplaying with "actual idealism," he knows the difference between a drama and a philosophicaldissertation. His plays are situations embodying conclusions, simple, or indeed "obvious" in theirconvincingness. They must he taken as a whole -- if one would look for a full statement ofPirandello's "thought."

A "thought," moreover, which may or may not invite us to profound reflection. Enough for the loverof the theatre is the fact that Pirandello derives the most interesting dramatic possibilities from it.Sometimes it is the "reality" which society sees brought into contrast with the reality which action

proves (Il piacere dell'onestà) . Again, it is the "reality" which a man sees in himself thwarted bythe reality which actually controls ("Ma non è una cosa seria"). In "Right You Are" (Così è, se vi

pare) we have a general satire of the "cocksure," who, placed in the presence of reality andunreality, are unable to distinguish one from the other.

In the "Six Characters" it is the turn of the artist. Can art -- creative art, where the spirit would seemmost autonomous -- itself determine reality? No, because once "a character is born, he acquiressuch an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody in situationswhere the author never dreamed of placing him, and so acquires a meaning which the author neverthought of giving him." In this lies the great originality of this very original play -- the discovery (soItalian, when one thinks of it, and so novel, as one compares it with the traditional rôle of the "artist"in the European play) that the laborious effort of artistic creation is itself a dramatic theme -- sounruly, so assertive, is this thing called "life" ever rising to harass and defeat anyone who wouldinterpret, crystallize, devitalize it.

And beyond the drama lies the poetry, a poetry of mysterious symbolism made up of terror, andrebellion, and pity, and human kindliness. Let us not miss the latter, especially, in the complexmood of all Pirandello's theatre.

* * *

The three plays of Pirandello, here offered in translations that do not hope to be adequate, arefamous specimens of the theatre in Italy. The term "new" is much contested, not only in Italy butabroad. In using the word here it is not necessary to claim that this young, impulsive, fascinatinglyboisterous after-the-war Italy is doing things that no one else ever thought of doing. We remain onsafe ground if we assert that Pirandello and his associates have broken the bounds set to the old

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fashioned "sentimental" Latin play.

The motivations of the "old" theatre were largely ethical in character, developing spiritual crisesfrom the conflict of impulses with a rigid framework of law and convention. Dramatic art was, so tospeak, a department of geometry, dealing with this or that projection or modification of the triangle.Husbands tearing their hair as wives proved unfaithful; disappointed lovers pining in eternal fidelityto mates beyond their social sphere; cuckolds heroically sheathing the stiletto in deference to ahigher law of respectability; widows sending second-hand aspirants to suicide that the sacramentof marriage might remain inviolate: -- such were the themes.

And there is no doubt, besides, that this "old" theatre produced works of great beauty andintenseness; since the will in conflict with impulse and triumphing over impulse always presents asubject entrancing in human interest and noble in moral implications.

But the potentialities of drama are more numerous than the permutations of three. The "new"theatre in Italy is "new" in this discovery at least.

* * *

"Henry IV.," an equally strong and original variation of the insanity motive, is the first of two plays byPirandello dealing with a special aspect of the problem of reality and unreality. The second, not yetgiven to the public, is Vestire gli ingnudi (", . . And ye clothed me!"). In the former Pirandellostudies a situation where an individual finds a world of unreality thrust upon him, voluntarilyreassuming it later on, when tragedy springs from the deeper reality. In "And ye clothed me!" wehave a girl who, to fill an empty life of no importance, creates a fiction for herself, only to find it tornviolently from her and to be left in a naked reality that is, after all, so unreal.

These two plays indicate the present tendency of Pirandello's rapid production -- a tendency thatpromises even richer results as this interesting author delves more extensively into the mysteries ofindividual psychology.

"Henry IV.," meanwhile, is before us. It can speak for itself.

* * *

All of Pirandello's plays are built for acting, and only incidentally for reading. We make thisobservation with "Right You Are" especially in mind, since that play, above all, is a test for theactor. It is typical of Pirandello for its rapidity, its harshness and its violence -- the skill with whichthe tense tableau is drawn out of pure dialectic, pure "conversation." Moreover, it states afundamental preoccupation of Pirandello in peculiarly lucid and striking fashion. Perhaps a better

rendering of the title Così è (se vi pare) will occur to many. Ludwig Lewisohn (happily, I thought)suggested "As You Like It," no less. A possibility, quite in the spirit of Pirandello's title in general,would have been another Shakespearean reminiscence: ". . . and Thinking Makes It So." We havekept something approximating the literal, which would be: "So it is (if you think so)."

The text of the "Six Characters" is that of the translation designated by the author and which wasused in the sensational productions of the play given in London and New York.

A.L.

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[Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Arthur Livingston

(1883-1944) was professor of Italian at Columbia University]