Eduardo De Filippo

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The Drama of de Filippo

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SOURCE: Maurino, Ferdinando D. “The Drama of de Filippo.” Modern Drama 3, no. 4 (February 1961): 348-56.

[In the following essay, Maurino presents an overview of de Filippo's plays, focusing on their Neapolitan themes.]

At the end of World War II the plays of Eduardo De Filippo, a Neapolitan writer, began to attract not only the audiences and readers in Italy but also those abroad. Eric Bentley1 and Lander MacClintock2 wrote briefly on him; and a few years ago Thornton Wilder3 stated that De Filippo was his favorite contemporary dramatic author.

Previously De Filippo had been known mainly as a comic actor whose plays were considered as vehicles for his acting. In fact, when in 1955 Theatre Arts devoted an issue to the Italian theater, he was treated chiefly as an actor.4 This is, however, no longer the case. After reading and studying his drama, one may well believe that a new voice and a great playwright has arisen. The maschera of a new Pulcinella has fallen, and the humor has turned to grave considerations of the problems of life, not only in Naples but also in the universe. As Pirandello forsook his Sicilian characterisics in favor of universal concepts, and as Di Giacomo left the Neapolitan environment for a wider world,5 so De Filippo progressed from presentations of local Neapolitan foibles to profound reflections on man's problems.

Like many contemporary writers, he has at times dealt with realistic topics of Naples during the occupation, and he has injected into his work a pathos seldom felt in other contemporary dramatic works. One thinks principally of his Napoli milionaria (Naples Full of Millions), and of some of the poetry from his Il paese di Pulcinella (The Land of Pulcinella). Through these works he made his contribution to post-war realism with a bitter, at times sarcastic, and always pathetic, humor. But what begins as realism becomes towards the end of the play a double reality, an illusion, or an untruth. Thus, a father who inveighs against the disrespectful behavior of today's youths, including his own son, suddenly loses his power of speech; but he only simulates his loss as a hopeless protest against modern society.6 Unlike the realism of Moravia, Vittorini, Marotta, Levi, Pavese, Pratolini, and other contemporary Italian authors known in America, De Filippo's realism is like that of Pirandello's: an excuse to evade realism itself. In fact, the truer De Filippo, both by natural propensity and by training, has always leaned toward the abstract, the illusional, and the metaphysical, as is evident from his short plays before World War II when his mind was being formed in the school of Pirandello in whose troupe he was an actor, and from his recent works in which he has attained a far greater artistic skill.

This revival of Pirandellian influence on the Italian stage is duplicated in other countries, especially in France where the shadow of that modern master can be discerned to the extent that Lerminier recently wrote, “Pirandello est présent partout.”7 His influence has been felt by such writers as Salacrou, Neveux, and even Camus. Among the Spaniards, at least two have imitated him: Alejandro Casona and Victor Iriarte.8

Italian critics have, of course, reminded De Filippo of that influence—an influence the Neapolitan playwright is reluctant to admit.9 When, in the summer of 1958, I told him that I saw Pirandellian traces in certain abstract, fantastic, and illusive situations, he seemed slightly annoyed. With a typical Neapolitan gesture of his hand, he called to my attention that such interpretations of the subjectivity of reality “are as old as Plato.” Thus, he did not deny the similarity of themes or situations, but he denied that he imitates Pirandello. His is the same argument given by Casona10 when Casona was criticized for lack of originality in his plots and style. De Filippo is sincere and, moreover, correct in his assertion, as is Casona; otherwise we would have to accuse Pirandello, too, of having somewhat imitated writers like Sophocles, Cervantes, Calderón, and perhaps (although this may be difficult to see at first) the imaginative Ariosto. With such thoughts in mind I told the affable but pensive De Filippo that I considered that influence and similarity to be principally due to a natural affinity rather than a conscious imitation. He did not answer me, but was visibly pleased.

This Neapolitan writer has, then, treated subjects both of the realistic school and of the school of the subconscious. Realism in his case means what is commonly known to be Neapolitan in language and content. Some critics have even seen in him the traditional Neapolitan school; unfortunately, some of his clichés with farcical expressions and situations are indeed typical of dialectal macchiette and literature, but he is not the successor of Petito, the last of Pulcinellas.11 In De Filippo's Filumena Marturano, Filumena is a prostitute who becomes a real woman because she also becomes a mother. But she is not the fragile Assunta Spina of Di Giacomo, nor an echo of other Neapolitan writers. If she is realistic, she is a realistic heroine in the sense of the French naturalistic or the Italian veristic school. Yet some writers and producers have interpreted the play as mirroring Neapolitan life.12 Without denying the verity of some scenes of local color, one can assert that there is, however, little that is truly traditional or typically Neapolitan in this piece.

The play has been considered to be his masterpiece to date and a well-nigh perfect work. However, Questi fantasmi, Napoli milionaria, and La grande magia exhibit deeper sadness, emotion, and despair respectively. Filumena lacks true passion; she has no tragic or suffering moments. She has experienced hunger, humiliation, and prostitution, but it was all long before the play begins. Now she is bent on avenging her former life. She is entitled to such a revenge, but that fact itself and the fact that she is a strong-minded person, sure of the final outcome, tends to reduce the dramatic action of the play. Weak Amalia of Napoli milionaria is a more tragic, and, consequently, a more dramatic character. Only in Filumena's long speeches,13 resembling soliloquies because she is speaking mainly to herself as she recalls her youth and her later life, does one find a deep and human compassion which truly becomes art despite the sensational scene of the first act. This scene of simulated agony is similar to Gennaro's “death” in Napoli milionaria, and both are reminiscent of some traditional, farcical plays and macchiette. These scenes detract from De Filippo's art.

In Filumena Marturano one sees also, but only to a minor extent, the elusive, the unexpected, the unreal: Filumena's feigned moribund state just mentioned and her disclosure, after many years, that she is the mother of three children and that one of them is the son of Domenico, her lover and later her husband. Which one of the children is the husband's own? The mother refuses to let Domenico know, and the result is that if he is to be sure that he cherishes his own child he must cherish them all. But two out of three times he will be mistaken.

The originality of the plot as a whole must be recognized at this point as equaling the fertile imagination found in Questi fantasmi and Napoli milionaria which are De Filippo's most original plays.14

A true Neapolitan element in De Filippo of course exists, but it does not follow the traditional pattern; it is the every day happenings that he sees in his Naples during and after the war and it bears the unique stamp of the author. Napoli milionaria is a sarcastic title for a tragic plot which ends bitterly. Gennaro has become lost during a bombing raid by American planes and has wandered for a year. When he returns home he discovers that his wife has been unfaithful, his daughter is pregnant, and his son a thief; and all enriched through the black market. Gennaro, realizing that war destroys men and women even after the last shot has been fired, pitifully tells his repentant wife that the war is to blame for everything. Then he forgives all and offers his wife a cup of coffee. What a price to pay for the millions of lire his family had acquired during his absence! Hence, the bitter title: Naples Full of Millions. Gennaro, the real victim, forgives; and herein lies the tragedy, because war remains forever victorious, and humanity remains defeated and in a state of impotent resignation for unexpiated sins.

Many recent Italian writers have dealt remarkably well with war topics, including Moravia in his latest La Ciociara (Two Women); but Napoli milionaria possibly remains the post-war human epic of Italian literature: it is unsurpassed for its poignant and striking pathos which creates an unparalleled mood of powerlessness and human pity as exemplified by the last scene. It must have made many Neapolitans and non-Neapolitans alike weep silently with guilty eyes amidst the many “ruins” of war.

It can be seen that we encounter here a dramatist who for once is devoid of paradoxical, or neurasthenic situations. His Naples is a pitiful city, a Naples which was defeated twice, once by the enemy and once by her own people. Here the Neapolitan playwright shows his love for his city, not with a hyperbolic, melodious Neapolitan song but with ironic and subdued bitterness. He has noticed everything and has wept in the penumbra of a Naples that was: the Napoli nobilissima, the Siren of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Capital of the World of Songs, and the Naples Full of Millions.15

The greater part of De Filippo's theater is given, as has been stated, to mental and abstract themes reminiscent of Pirandello but blended with the author's unmistakable, personal style and more genuine humor. The works in which the author ventures deepest into the abyss of the subconscious and the metaphysical are the plays, Questi fantasmi (These Ghosts), La grande magia (The Magic Performance), Le voci di dentro (The Voices from Within), and the poem Vincenzo De Pretore. All have been written since the end of the war but the war is conspicuously absent.

In La grande magia Calogero finds refuge in an illusion, as it were, in the emergence of his subconscious. A magician makes his wife disappear, and in front of all the people watching the performance he gives the husband a little box which he is told contains his wife. His wife aided by the magician during the act has run away with her lover. Calogero believes or forces himself to believe that she is in that box which, however, he does not dare to open. The alternative to this belief or faith is to realize the truth and to react brutally as did Othello and Don Gutierre.16 One may perish in the anguish that reality brings; for reality must be confronted or changed. Othello, for example, met it; Calogero following the traces of Enrico IV changes it. This is a modern solution.

Actually, illusion and reality do not contradict each other as is commonly believed; rather, they fuse to form that dual reality which saves some people from utter destruction. That is why the box is not really empty: it contains a reality, a faith. If the little box does not, nor could not, contain Calogero's wife, nevertheless it holds his firm hope and a real illusion which destroys the hard facts of life. Like Ponza in Cosi' e' (se vi pare), and like Enrico in Enrico IV, Calogero is not insane; he pretends, as one must pretend and at the same time believe. That box, then, has taken the place of someone, something in his pathological and painful state of mind, and is his summa ratio for forcibly believing.

Don Quijote also believed in an illusion, but when it ceased to be a fantasy and he realized the truth, he died. Enrico IV also realizes at a certain moment his true situation, but unlike Don Quijote he chooses to go back to that variable reality as a lasting though painful escape. Calogero likewise remains steadfast in his illusion as did Enrico IV and also Ponza. With Pirandello and De Filippo, reality venishes into simulation.

The play takes on quite often classical and universal overtones. In it the world of the characters encompasses the illimitable cosmos of the mind, and the author soars on the wings of metaphysics to a battleground where the mind and the heart conflict. The mind must believe what is not true because it fears that otherwise reality will break the heart. If the heart knows, it feels … and dies. Therefore, the mind attempts to deceive the heart which pretends to believe. Naturally, it merely pretends because, as the proverb says, and as the Neapolitans know it most particularly, the heart is never mistaken and cannot be deceived (Il cuore non si inganna mai). The mind, on the other hand, is finally convinced by its own illusion, and is convinced that the heart does not know. Only by following such a course can the mind save itself from total disintegration. The heart and the mind form then a state of semi-consciousness in which the heart secretly and softly weeps while the bombastic mind pitifully boasts.

Thus Calogero in the last scene refuses to recognize his returning, wayward wife; and when she openly admits her betrayal so that he can leave his “mad illusion,” he exclaims: “What have you done?” betraying his “madness” if only for a second. But it is exactly here that we encounter the art which makes the play also human and heartfelt, not mental and evanescent. There is veiled in the background a heart pulsating with reality that makes illusion truly painful because the illusion is based on something true: it is sensitive to a subconscious reality that hurts. The mind becomes a true actor on the stage while the human soul or heart remains backstage. Therefore, the illusion is sincere but not totally beguiling; and pain and sorrow remain somewhat distant and ecstatic as if in a trance, yet ever present in that very unreality. This is De Filippo's art.

La grande magia, the play that reflects Pirandellian influence more than any other of De Filippo's works, also shows the defects found in Pirandello. There is artificiality in some of the situations and in the style itself. The dialogue is forced and lacks spontaneity, but the play remains an impressive work nonetheless.

I consider Questi fantasmi De Filippo's best play and am supported in this conclusion by the author himself. When I asked him point blank which play he considered his greatest work, I had expected some hesitation. But Eduardo, as he is affectionately called in Italy, promptly answered, “Questi fantasmi.17

In this pathetic and, at times, humorous play we have the naïve situation of a man who believes in ghosts. It seems like a medieval legend, but it takes place today in Naples. Like Calogero, Pasquale of Questi fantasmi saves himself from actual tragedy because he can think that his wife's lover is a ghost who haunts his house and benevolently leaves him money. The height of the irony occurs when Pasquale welcomes the ghost into his home and when he accepts the ghost's money in order to be able to buy little things for his wife, Maria, whom he loves.

Pasquale is not as dramatic a personality as Calogero armed with a little, “empty” box is; he is a man who is happy in his own fashion because he is able to delude himself. Neither is he the epic Gennaro who painfully but resignedly accepts dishonor. Pasquale will never know the truth, and his young wife thinking that he ignores her lover for the sake of money considers him to be a coward and detests him all the more.18We know the truth and it is we who suffer. Thus, once again we have a prismatic reality; for if Pasquale does not attain to a metaphysical make-believe, he nevertheless believes, like Calogero, in something that is not. He, too, is surrounded by a world of fiction, or perhaps even of fairytale. In this sense De Filippo solves the problems posed by reality in an innocent and novel way: he enables Pasquale to believe in ghosts. This is an original device totally free of Pirandello's artistry.

Pirandellian influence is discernible only in the scene where Armida, the abandoned wife of Maria's lover, appears with her children who, having been badly taken care of, truly resemble ghosts. Here it is apparent that the source for this scene is Six Characters in Search of an Author; and the language used lends definite credence to this opinion. The scene itself, however, has a different significance with a tenderness and grief not found in the play of the Sicilian writer. The poor and unfortunate Armida is in a nervous frenzy and one of her children has a terrible, ugly tic which his neurotic mother cannot bear. Is any one of them to blame? Interrupting her neurasthenic speech, the mother orders the child to stop, but the child cannot and repeats the automatic action. The mother gives the child a resounding slap in the face. The child staggers … and we with him.

Pasquale is a major creation whose soul is like that of a child. When he talks to his wife he is convinced that what he does is right, and that “he knows his business.” These words acquire a different meaning in the poisoned mind of Maria. The result is a double talk that hurts the reader who knows the truth while she continues to scorn her husband. Pasquale, too, becomes epic and classical like Gennaro and Calogero but in a different sense. He does not even suspect that he might be a hero; he is indeed not that kind of protagonist. He is a person who defies time and does not grow old. He is a poet with an innocent, pure imagination whom Vico would have appreciated. In this drama the double side of reality has taken a holiday (except for the reader).

Finally, in the play none of the characters knows the truth, except towards the very end when the “ghost” alone realizes what has happened and leaves forever. Because of this situation we have a different type of tragic play. Pasquale remains a satisfied, rather happy person. He even hopes the “ghost” will come back at some other time to bring him more money. Maria is not repentant or grief-stricken like Amalia because she continues to believe her husband is a coward; consequently, she still feels she is justified in her betrayal. Thus, the truly tragic element does not exist for the characters: not for a cynical Maria, not for an ignorant Pasquale. Yet the tragedy of the drama does exist; it exists among the spectators in the theater or within the readers in their own rooms. The author has placed all of us in the play, but after the last curtain falls—a most disturbing and poignant role. But we know the truth; and it is not easy for us to pretend, nor can we believe in spirits. Tragedy, then, is transferred to the spectator or to the reader as Pasquale happily ends the play pocketing the ghost's money. Then the playwright himself seems to appear on the stage or in our room with an ambiguous smile to tell us: “Choose now: Calogero or Gennaro?”

Once again then, this is not the characterisic Naples of Viviani, F. Russo, Bovio, Serao, or even of Di Giacomo or Bracco.19 It is not the veristic Naples of the camorristi (gangsters), or the lyrical city of the famous “'O sole mio.” This is an intellectual, fantastic Naples with no local color. It is a city steeped now in universal, tragic, and human concepts; a Naples with artistic, dramatic qualities that joins the new Neapolitan world of Salvatore Di Giacomo with its highly poetical horizon.

De Filippo realizes all this when he states in his poetry20 that what he writes is not comical—an adjective stamped on things Neapolitan since the gliommeri21 and the farse cavaiole of the late Renaissance period. Indeed, with the first poem in Il paese di Pulcinella he introduces his reader to his poetry sullenly remarking that people have not understood him. People laugh when they meet him remembering his “funny” plays; but he asks, “Is it a laughing matter when I portray comical situations arising from everyday life?” Then answering his own question: “I don't think so.” In another poem the poet again takes his reader to task, counseling him not to look at the calendar to tell one's age. Regardless of what the calendar says, life lasts but one year; after that year all that remains is superfluous. “And suddenly it is night” (Ed e' subito sera), as Quasimodo says.

De Filippo's Neapolitan language reflects the mood or tone of the content or plot. It is the true dialect when Naples and its people are the protagonists, becoming soft, mellow, and humorous; it becomes Italian or very close to it when the subject matter calls for a loftier expression, as in the plays dealing with unreality. It is not Olympian or classical as in Pirandello, but warmer and mellower. Very often, it is a fresh, natural, and melodious Italian with Neapolitan constructions and nuances. When I asked De Filippo why he so often employed standard Italian rather than dialect he replied that because of the radio, the movies, and television the Neapolitans are increasingly speaking the standard language. But can it be that the author is conscious of his themes and motives and wants to be sure he will reach the whole Italian people at a higher level?

Thus, De Filippo has left his beautiful Naples which he nevertheless truly loves; his dramatic art involves him now in deeper, wider problems in the realm of the mind and conscience. He is concerned with the problems which have occupied the minds and the hearts of great dramatists who have tried to portray the agonizing souls of characters searching for a solution to alleviate their sorrows—Sophocles was concerned with the agony of immovable Fate; Shakespeare with the grief of man or kings. The solution at times is a world of illusion as in Cervantes who created a poetical mirage as an escape; as in Calderón de la Barca who fused life with dream, or as in Pirandello who interpreted life with a bitter compassion, so painful that it must flee to the realm of the intellect. Man has often felt the vacuum that stark reality produces, and through such writers as the foregoing he has attempted to penetrate the mystery of the mind and of the heart. Such an attempt can fuse, not confuse, dream with reality.

Eduardo De Filippo has joined in his own manner this lofty company, and he is still writing.

Notes

  1. In Search of Theatre (New York, 1953), pp. 281-95.

  2. The Age of Pirandello (Bloomington, 1951), pp. 124-27.

  3. In College English, Vol. XVII (Nov., 1955), 119. See moreover same (Dec., 1955), 164, Wilder's statement concerning the difficulty of translating De Filippo.

  4. (May, 1955).

  5. See my S. Di Giacomo and Neapolitan Dialectal Literature (New York, 1951), p. 133 ff.

  6. Mia famiglia (1955) which was praised by Vito Pandolfi, “Un umorismo doloroso,” in Sipario (March, 1956), 3.

  7. Pensée française (March, 1958), 59-61.

  8. See A. Valbuena Prat, Historia de la literatura española, 4th Edition (Barcelona, 1953), Vol. III, p. 803.

  9. See especially Corrado Alvaro, “Eduardo” in Sipario (March, 1956), 2; and Bentley, In Search of Theatre, p. 288. De Filippo told me personally that he agreed with Bentley's interpretation that such an influence “was simply nourished from the same sources, and interested in the same problems. …”

  10. From his “Nota preliminar” in La barca sin pescador (Buenos Aires, 1951), p. 9. On this same topic see also Anatole France (La Vie littéraire), and more recently Giraudoux on the plot of his Amphitryon.

  11. For the background of this tradition see MacClintock, The Contemporary Drama of Italy (Boston, 1920), pp. 201-05; for a very recent critical comment on the whole Neapolitan theater tradition in De Filippo, see Federico Frascani, La Napoli amara di Eduardo De Filippo (Firenze, 1958), pp. 13, 22-23, and passim. As this study goes to press two new books on De Filippo have appeared in 1959 and 1960 respectively: Gennaro Magliulo's, and G. B. De Sanctis'. This latest information comes from a well-known scholar: Joseph G. Fucilla.

  12. This play has been given all over Europe including Russia, and in South America; it was also given in New York City on October 26, 1956, at Lyceum Theater under the title The Best House in Naples and ended in a complete fiasco after a little more than a week. The actors spoke English with a strong foreign accent and they could not be understood; the translation by F. Hugh Herbert was really a free adaptation. Notice the title; the connection is obscure. For reviews and criticism: New Yorker, Nov. 3, 1956, 73-4; Theatre Arts, Jan., 1957, 20. For De Filippo's own comment see again Frascani, p. 130. The author, moreover, told me in Naples that Herbert's version had nothing of his own work; he approved it through a misunderstanding.

  13. Those found toward the end of Act I and Act II.

  14. As far as I know, no due credit has been given the author for this originality.

  15. This is not the Naples of Neapolitan “popular tradition” to which Bentley, Frascani, and Pandolfi (Il dramma [May, 1948], 8) refer, which in the end becomes literary tradition. These critics perhaps confuse the actor and his Neapolitan mime with the playwright and his genius. This is a new, contemporary Naples.

  16. See El médico de su honra by Calderón, and notice the similarity of its plot with Othello.

  17. Silvio D'Amico had already highly praised both De Filippo and this particular play, and MacClintock (The Age … p. 124) reports that that foremost drama critic considered this play the best in Italy since 1920.

  18. It is to be noted that Pasquale is not Ciampa of Pirandello's Il berretto a sonagli who rebels against his wife's infidelity only when he knows that others too have learned of her conduct. A touch of this behavior can be found elsewhere in De Filippo: in Libero of Le bugie con le gambe lunghe when Graziella suggests that they get married (Act I).

  19. For these writers see F. Flora, “Poeti napoletani,” in Pegaso (Dec., 1929), 339-49; A. Tilgher, La poesia dialettale napoletana (Roma, 1920); or Maurino, pp. 157-72.

  20. See his Il paese di Pulcinella (Naples, 1951). For a rapid, critical view of Neopolitan poets since World War II, including De Filippo's poetry, see my article, “Neapolitan Poetry,” in Books Abroad (Fall, 1955).

  21. Even the great Sannazaro wrote gliommeri in the Neapolitan dialect.

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