Table Of ContentA.
NAKED MASKS
LIOLA
IT IS SO! (IF YOU THINK SO)
HENRY IV
SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR
EACH IN HIS OWN WAY
■Y
Edited by Eric Bentley
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NAKED MASKS
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NAKED MASKS
FIVE PLAYS
By
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Edited by Eric Bentley
A Dutton Paperback
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
Introduction by Eric Bentley, Lioli and
Premise and this compilation Copyright 1952
by E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc.
Henry IV Copyright 1922, renewed in the
names of Stefano, Fausto and Lietta Piran¬
dello in 1950.
It Is So! (If You Think So) originally
entitled Right You Are! (If You Think So)
Copyright 1922, renewed in the names of
Stefano, Fausto and Lietta Pirandello in 1950.
Six Characters in Search of An Author Copy¬
right 1922, renewed in the names of Stefano,
Fausto and Lietta Pirandello in 1950.
Each In His Own Way Copyright 1923, re¬
newed in the names of Stefano, Fausto and
Lietta Pirandello in 1951.
All rights reserved
Printed in the U. S. A.
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission in writing
ftom the publisher except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in con¬
nection with a review written for inclusion in
a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction.vii
LIOLA. 1
IT IS SO! (IF YOU THINK SO).61
HENRY IV.139
Premise.209
SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR . 211
EACH IN HIS OWN WAY.277
Appendix I. Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author 363
Appendix II. Biographical and Historical.377
Appendix III. Theatrical and Bibliographical .... 382
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was bom in Gir-
genti, Sicily. He attended the University of Rome
and took a doctorate in philology at Bonn Univer¬
sity in 1891. Pirandello began his literary career as
a poet, but he soon turned to fiction and in 1904
published his first widely recognized novel, The
Late Mattia Pascal. With the appearance of It Is
So! in 1917 Pirandello proved himself to be one
of the most original and powerful dramatists of
the 20th century, a claim well substantiated by his
two greatest plays. Six Characters in Search of an
Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922). Pirandello
opened his own Art Theatre in Rome in 1925, and
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934.
Naked Masks was first published in 1952.
INTRODUCTION
I
A generation ago there was, notoriously, a literature
of ideas. Most of it, like most literature of all movements,
was bad; and fashion, which elevates the bad to the level
of the good, subsequently turns its back on bad and good
alike. Only if there is a body of readers interested in
merit as such can anything like justice be done.
Such readers will rescue the better literature of ideas
from beneath the fashionable ideas about it. Even au¬
thors like Ibsen and Shaw, who are by no means unread,
need rescuing from ideas about their ideas. How much
the more so Pirandello, who is suffering fashionable
rejection without ever having had—outside Italy—wide¬
spread fashionable acceptance. I have met persons who
rejected him because of his “tiresome ideas” without be¬
ing able to give me even their own version of what these
ideas are. Pirandello needs rescuing from the very lack
of ideas about his ideas.
It is true that all too much of Pirandello, and Piran¬
dello criticism, remains untranslated. The untranslated
essay L’Umorismo (“Humor”) contains all his principal
ideas (especially its Second Part). The untranslated later
plays are especially full of theory. The untranslated essays
of Adriano Tilgher (especially “II Teatro di Luigi Piran¬
dello” in Studi sul Teatro Contemporaneo) are the stand¬
ard exposition from the point of view of the famous ideas.
However, I submit that the ideas offer no real difficulty.
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
They are old ideas—good old ideas—some of which
would take us back to Pirandello’s fellow-countrymen
Empedocles and Gorgias. It was Pascal, not Pirandello,
who first said: “there is no man who differs more from
another than he does from himself at another time.”
Illusion and reality—the “mix-up” of illusion and reality
—is so far from being a peculiarly Pirandellian theme
as to be perhaps the main theme of literature in general.
“No,” says the more knowledgeable reader, “it is not
that we can’t understand the ideas. It’s that we can’t see
why they troubled and obsessed Pirandello to such an
extent. Always the same ideas! “Oh, Dio mio, ma questo
girar sempre sullo stesso pernio!”—as he himself has his
critics say. “This always harping on the same string!”
More important: we can’t see why these ideas should
trouble and obsess us.”
Obviously this reader can’t mean that Pirandello—in
his essay on humor, say—doesn’t make a strong enough
case for his ideas, in the sense that a lawyer or a logician
makes a case. An artist, and no one was more aware of
it than Pirandello, makes his ideas matter by rendering
them artistically active, that is, by giving them the life
of his chosen form in his chosen medium. The question
for us here then is whether Pirandello’s ideas become
active in the dramatic form.
In reconsidering Pirandello today, fifteen years after
his death, the first play to read is Liolci. It loses more
than other plays in translation, but enough of the origi¬
nal comes through (I hope) to remove the anti-Pirandello
prejudice. It is a play that lives by an evident loveliness.
Sicily is a land of golden light, scarcely of this world, and
Agrigento, with its Greek temples, its proud position
above Porto Empedocle and the Mediterranean, and its
isolation both from the merchants of Palermo and the
tourists of Taormina, is perhaps the most charming spot
on the island. Without any scene painting whatsoever,
