Eduardo De Filippo

Start Free Trial

De Filippo's Inspiration and Creative Process

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: Mignone, Mario B. “De Filippo's Inspiration and Creative Process.” In Eduardo De Filippo, pp. 20-36. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Mignone examines the role of the city of Naples in shaping de Filippo's art.]

NAPLES: DE FILIPPO'S MAJOR INSPIRATION

Eric Bentley has put well the need for examining De Filippo's art in the context of his city: “It is sometimes debated how far we need to know an author's background in order to judge his work. I should think we need to know it whenever we would otherwise be in danger of taking something as his personal contribution when it is a representative product of his time and place. Thus some of Eduardo's attitudes … may seem forced when we take them as an assertion of his will, whereas as an expression of a social tradition we might let them pass”1. To the mind of a foreign spectator, the attitude of Gennaro in Millionaires' Naples!—the husband who disapproves of, yet cooperates in his wife's illegal business—may appear inconsistent. However, his actions, like those of other De Filippo characters, are consistent with the world view of the people of Naples. To Eduardo's people, the state is the enemy. The Fascist suppression of Neapolitan regionalism was only the most recent episode in their long history of oppression. When Matteo Generoso, the protagonist of Fear Number One, says, “If twelve wars broke out one after the other, they'd make no impression on me,” this is not some absurd idea of the author's, but rather an expression of a fundamental Neapolitan attitude. Getting on with the business of day-to-day living, regardless of what happens in the newspapers, is the people's concern.

Naples is a city of paradoxes: poor in industries, rich in the sun, suffering, and song. It is a city that venerates the innocent charm of children and a city where children lose their innocence very early. Naples reflects the practice of dolce far niente (“sweet idleness”) and hums day and night with the kinetic energy of human beings working, selling, arguing, singing, cursing. Neapolitans can cry and laugh at the same time. They are gay, ruthless, life-loving, cynical, superstitious, kindly, and extremely patient. For them life is lived from day to day; luck in the next lottery may be just across the piazza.

De Filippo's Naples is not the stereotyped tourist panorama of Vesuvius and the bay, as it is idealized on postcards, but a complex, volcanic city, full of contradictions, absurdities, and extravagance, reflecting the full spectrum of the human condition. It is the Naples that Thornton Wilder characterized as an “anthill of vitality—cynical yet religious—religious yet superstitious—shadowed by the volcano and the thought of death—always aboil with one passion or another, yet abounding in courtesy and charm. Above all, profoundly knit by the ties of the family, parent and child”2. De Filippo's attention is focused above all on the masses and lower middle class of Naples, on that part of the population for whom the tests of life are harder but not necessarily more tragic than for those “better off,” because they have an innate flair for life. In lower-class Naples the duality of social relations is very evident. People are close to one another, aware of one another, ready to defend one another; but this same closeness provides opportunities for exploitation as well as protection and aid. In short, as Bentley notes, “the lower depths of Naples form as fantastic a society of adventurers and desperadoes as can well be imagined. Living by the skin of their teeth, a dreary past behind and a blank future ahead, they accept the present with peculiar vehemence. Familiar with death, they do not take life too seriously. They are willing to see it as a joke, a paradox, a fantasy, a show, a game”3. Neapolitans of the lower classes run the gamut of human life:

It is because of their capacity for community and individuality at once that the Neapolitan situation is tragic and not merely pathetic. For they are a people who have perfected the art of communitas while at the same time celebrating the human personality for the riches it contains. Could they fashion a utopia of their own, I am certain it would be anti-platonic—a social organization for diversity and maximal self-expression. Just as Plato would have cast out actors and playwrights as subversives, the Neapolitans would give these a central role, for they represent the full range of human feelings and catch all the rays that shine from the prism that is man.4

For De Filippo, Naples is not just a city or his city, but a magnifying glass through which he contemplates humanity in its myriad manifestations.

Even the less keen and sensitive observers are struck by the pulsation of life in this city. And life is an event to be celebrated because existence is a movable, continuing feast. Its living soul is as Belmonte observes:

… resolute and passionate, but it is also unconscious, and insensate to the prod of awareness and reason. As such it can emerge, or it becomes hypnotic. The movement in Naples—the traffic jams, the pushy, shoving crowds, the absence of lines forming for anything, the endless barrage of shouts falling like arrows on ears, the simultaneous clash of a million destinations and petty opposed intentions—combine into a devastating assault on the senses. Or else the entire scene retreats, slowing and settling finally into a brilliantly colored frieze depicting a grand, if raucous, commedia.5

In Naples, behavior is charged with a meaning that may either reveal the truth or mask it, and spontaneity and artifice blend into one another like the tints of a watercolor. Much of Neapolitan life, especially its more passionate side, has a basic and undeniable theatricality. It is not accidental that one of the greatest moments in Naples's theater history is its improvisational commedia dell'arte, with its emphasis on spontaneity, immediacy, and broad physical actions. Anyone who watches Neapolitans in conversation soon realizes that the hands, and indeed the entire body, often communicate as much as the accompanying words. The outsider can easily mistake a simple conversation for a heated argument, since many Neapolitans converse with a commitment and excitement that is often not commensurate with the importance of the subject matter under discussion. This gesticulation and the spirit it expresses are theatrical, if not operatic, suggesting a performance even when none is intended.

Indeed, in the poor quarters of Naples even the most banal events can be elevated to the level of drama. Action is a vehicle of communication, and “in the language of symbolic action, a rage might be a plea, a kiss an economic stratagem.” The tonalities are theatrical. In the poor quarters of Naples every person becomes a playwright and an actor, seeking to determine and organize the reactions of an audience—but a critic too, more than ready to demolish the transparent devices and weaker props of his fellows. In the words of Thomas Belmonte, “if drama was originally invented as a metaphor for life, in Naples the metaphor has overwhelmed the referent, and society presents itself as a series of plays within plays.”6

To love and understand De Filippo's theater one has to love and understand the theater performed on the vast stage of Naples. Because he could capture it in its fullness, De Filippo achieved a high degree of drama and theatricality even in dealing with seemingly cerebral themes. For example, the philosophy of the absurd, very evident in his plays, is not so much the subject matter of his characters' discussions as the Neapolitan way of living. As Bentley says, “There is a philosophy of the absurd, after all, in plebeian humor in general: your life is hopeless but you laugh, you are cheerful and morally positive, against all reason”7. But Neapolitans are believers. In spite of their cynicism about most aspects of life, they give themselves to religion with unconditional fervor. They preserve a facade of Catholic ritual, but prefer their Madonna-goddesses to Christ and maintain an active belief in a myriad local house-spirits, reminiscent of the pre-Christian epoch. Similarly, De Filippo's characters are Christian-pagans for whom God, Christ, the Madonna, and all the saints are little more than agencies on hand for the purpose of healing and punishing, as they are, for example, in I Won't Pay You, Filumena Marturano, and many other plays.

Among the manifold components of this Neapolitan life, De Filippo focuses his attention very often on the family. Pushing aside the mythology of sentimental “familism” that pervades Italian culture, he shows the contradictions of family life, the violent clash of motives, and the tangled web of longings, jealousies, and long-nurtured resentments that form the substrata of so much family interaction. He commonly notes that the individual behaves differently within the family circle than in other social arenas. The home is not a stage for presenting hypocritical spectacles to others. Whatever a person may appear to be elsewhere, the family knows better. The secret weaknesses of the individual, the shame of sins long hidden from the world, the family assimilates and keeps to itself. If the honesty of the family is often cruel, it may also be redemptive and sometimes therapeutic, as in Millionaires' Naples! and My Family! The Neapolitan family remains at the core of De Filippo's art, and he is a keen observer of its minute particularities. Indeed, it is extraordinary what subtle variations he can play on this perennial theme—in Christmas at the Cupiello's, Filumena Marturano, My Love and My Heart, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and many others.

In portraying Naples, De Filippo writes of the very society from which Pulcinella grew and to which Pulcinella has most meaning. Like him, De Filippo's characters move rather hopelessly around the fringe of life; like him, they possess an indomitable will to live in spite of everything8. However, in contrast to the Pulcinella of the commedia dell'arte, De Filippo's protagonist possesses an activated social conscience. As Mario Stefanile has said:

De Filippo's Pulcinella is made up of Molière and Goldoni, a bit of Shakespeare and a lot of Viviani, almost all of Scarpetta, and most of Petrolini, and even certain formulas of the mature Jouvet. This is because, through Pulcinella, what is expressed is the morality of Naples, the desire typical of the Parthenopean, to correct the social aspects of life in his own favor and to reduce everything to his own image and likeness—splendor and misery, nobility and indignity, racketeers and honest men, the rich and the poor, men and women.9

De Filippo's characters are neither heroes nor clowns. They are men—more often than not part hero and part clown, each one having his own personality, his own nature, and stamped with the character of the land in which he was born and lives. They live in a world that man still values. In it they can continue to live, struggle, hope; they continue to cheat and love each other, to despise and pity one another. And, above all, in spite of everything, they continue to delude themselves in the search for truth. Theirs is not a confused search for abstract truth, but a search based on total suspicion and mistrust—yet tempered with a constant, naive hope for something better, with the same hope that animates the lower-middle-class Neapolitans to live and survive day by day. Illusion and reality are fused, as if man needed to create an unreal world which is all his own, while at the same time keeping close watch on reality. Perhaps some day things will change, but meanwhile life has to go on: “Eventually the night has to pass …,” says the protagonist in the closing line of Millionaires' Naples!

In the plays De Filippo wrote during and immediately after World War II, Naples represents both the human and the economic destruction of a particular city and the fate of the many countries that had experienced the same devastation, the same anguish and existential boredom that dominated the life of those years. In the plays written in the 1960s and 1970s Naples is a city at the mercy of the selfishness, hypocrisy, corruption, and violence of the materialistic society which evolved in those years. Eduardo's attachment to Naples, then, is not merely sentimental. Although his suppositions seem to be those of an earlier breed of popular Neapolitan playwrights with old-fashioned notions, it must not be supposed that Eduardo is a producer of locally acceptable social drama, on a different wavelength from the avant-garde and from modern European comedy in general. On the contrary, while nourishing himself on the rich humus of Neapolitan life and theater, he shows himself perfectly familiar with the comedy of European intellectuals, for the most part born of mistrust, its ethos repeatedly one of meaninglessness and isolation in an absurd world, in which language has ceased to convey meaning and the structures of society are mocked. Yet De Filippo only partially accepts this legacy of Pirandello, Jarry, and their successors, with its special kind of liberating irony which allows the spectator to dismiss, for the duration of a play, the demands of everyday life. The world of these playwrights—socially hollow, reeling, having no center of traditional bourgeois gravity, where one has to be off-center if he is to escape the void, where the heroes are individualists, nonconformists, eccentric, and way-out—De Filippo can accept only for the crisis it presents, not for its nihilistic content.

For De Filippo the world is not hollow. Life has a meaning; when things go wrong it matters; and that meaning and matter may be adequately conveyed by language. However, elements of relativistic and existentialist thinking as well as the idea of a disintegrating world are recurring themes in his plays, explicitly so in Millionaires' Naples!, Those Ghosts, My Family!, The Voices Within, and The Local Authority. These plays are the products not only of a postwar setting but also of a relativistic age, of a world falling apart both physically and metaphysically. The children in My Family! strive for existential freedom no less than the characters of Sartre, and the dialogue echoes, more intimately, less portentously, the same dilemmas faced by the French philosopher. The Cimmaruta family in The Voices Within is fragmented by conflicting versions of nonexistent truth; truth is chimerical in Those Ghosts! and The Big Magic. De Filippo's sophistication extends to a canny understanding of voguish attitudes, and he finds the voguish attitudes wanting.

DE FILIPPO'S ENCOUNTER WITH PIRANDELLO

Many critics have long assumed that Luigi Pirandello served as a key literary influence on Eduardo De Filippo. Eduardo was very young and still unknown when he began to experience the fascination of Pirandello's art and thought. The Pirandellian quality of some plays of De Filippo could be, therefore, a consequence of a youthful infatuation.

De Filippo first saw Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1921. Two years later he had read everything Pirandello had written, and he remained very impressed with his art. In 1933, when De Filippo had reached a certain degree of popularity, he met the older playwright who asked him to produce Liolà10. After twenty-five rehearsals, all of which Pirandello attended, Liolà opened at the Teatro Odeon in Milan, with Peppino De Filippo in the title role. The performance received twenty-two curtain calls. Sometime later they met again in Naples, and Pirandello asked De Filippo about the possibility of adapting his short story L'abito nuovo (The new suit) for the stage, overwhelming him with the suggestion that they write the play together. For fifteen days during December 1935, from 5 to 8 P.M., the two playwrights worked together in Rome, where De Filippo's company was performing. Pirandello wrote a prose outline of ideas and action. From time to time he would hand sheets of paper to De Filippo, seated at a desk next to him, who would write the dialogue. During one of the last evenings Pirandello asked De Filippo to adapt his Cap and Bells. Only a month later this play opened in Naples at the Fiorentini Theater, with Eduardo in the leading role, and played twenty-two sold-out performances.

While performing this comedy in Milan, De Filippo received a telegram from Pirandello asking him to produce The New Suit. He answered that the production of Cap and Bells had exhausted him and that he would prefer to wait a year before staging the work. Pirandello was hurt and did not reply. About four months later Eduardo saw Pirandello during an intermission of Cap and Bells, which he was performing at the Quirino Theater in Rome. To Eduardo, the old and famous playwright resembled a young author eager for his first production, and Eduardo told him so. Pirandello replied, “But you, my dear Eduardo, can afford to wait; I cannot!” A month later, rehearsals started, but Pirandello was dead of pneumonia before the play opened.

This very close contact with Pirandello and his theater inevitably left an imprint on De Filippo which is evident in his view of life and the way he gives it theatrical expression. Corrado Alvaro points out the influence in negative terms: “Eduardo De Filippo, believing himself to be far removed from modern life and the life common to all, tries to exceed his limits by attempting the style of Pirandello, the form least suited to Eduardo and which Pirandello himself finally dropped uneasily”11. But Eduardo has been less ready to admit that he has been significantly influenced by Pirandello. When asked about it, he replied:

When I began to write my plays, I did not know of Pirandello. In 1928 I wrote Chi è chiù felice 'e me! [Who is happier than I!] and made my debut with this play in 1931. Thus I began to write before I began to associate with him. … The conclusions about life which I have come to are not, in fact, Pirandello-like conclusions. We are close in our mentality: Neapolitans are sophisticated in the same way Sicilians are. The characters of Non ti pago [I won't pay you] win out at all costs and actually conquer by their will power, by their stubbornness which is similar to that of the Sicilians.12

Eric Bentley has also maintained that, except in The Big Magic, Pirandello's influence on De Filippo is only superficial. Certainly, many affinities with Pirandello's theater can be found: in the way De Filippo celebrates maternal love, in his metaphysical speculation on the nature of reality and illusion, in his emphasis on the drama of fear and compassion. However, as Bentley points out, while Pirandello deals with abstract concepts, never revealing the truth on any given matter because truth is relative and definite judgment is impossible, De Filippo concerns himself with specific personal traumas. In many plays he deals with the Pirandellian theme that illusions are needed because life is more than we can stand; in some cases the conclusions of the plays recall those of the great master in that the intrusion of reality, which had threatened to shatter the illusion, instead ironically reinforces it and makes it permanent. At times, too, their characters show similarities. It is difficult to establish to what degree these affinities are due to influence because, as De Filippo himself has said, at the base of their art there is a common denominator: the Southern Italian outlook on life. Long traditions bind together the mainland and the island Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Unable to live freely under centuries of Spanish domination, the people of Sicily and those of Naples learned to cope in the same manner, by meditating and philosophizing. But for the dialectical Sicilian fury of Pirandello, De Filippo substitutes Neapolitan cynicism. Even the pessimism of De Filippo's characters, which makes one think of the nihilism of Pirandello's, is a mocking negativism which, while it has the flavor of paradox, has its origin in the traditional popular attitude of “goldbricking.”

Moreover, alike as their plays might appear, they differ greatly in tone. Pirandello's bleak, pessimistic outlook becomes less dreary with De Filippo. No matter how much De Filippo's characters suffer in the play, the endings are often resolved happily. Furthermore, the truth is discoverable to those who wish to find it. Illusions are never allowed to remain ambiguous; if one man has an illusion, others recognize it as such.

De Filippo's plays are not drama in the Pirandellian sense, nor comedies in the sense that English-speaking audiences—and especially the Broadway audience—understand the term. As Bentley observes:

Naples is a different place, and Neapolitan folk drama is a different art; one enjoys it not least for its difference. … One enjoys, above all, the fine blend of comedy and drama, the naive pathos, the almost noble seriousness of what might easily become ludicrous. Some non-Italians are surprised, even displeased, by this last feature. “Why don't they play comedy as comedy?” Fully to answer the question would be to explain and justify a simpler, but also more delicate, realism than our own stage at present has to show.13

There is a wide spectrum of humor in a De Filippo play. The laughter he elicits ranges from chuckles to belly laughs. But there is also a central fiber, a sense of the tragedy of life. For his propensity for the tragicomic, De Filippo could be called the Italian Gogol. This blend of comedy and pathos also recalls some moments in Chaplin's works.

It is the blend of comedy and pathos that lends the work of De Filippo its special tone. His plays may be both realistic and fantastic, both comic and moralistic, both sentimental and grotesque. It is a blend that De Filippo achieves through his examination of the bittersweet plebeian life of Naples.

THE PLAYWRIGHT IN HIS CREATIVE PROCESS

De Filippo has occasionally spoken about the content and form of his art. In a 1956 interview he said: “The theater is neither a book nor a literary work: it must always be lively, and thus for one-and-a-half to two hours it must always have elements of surprise. That's why the public comes to see my plays, because it enjoys itself and takes something home as well”14. In December 1972, upon receiving the Feltrinelli International Prize for the Theater, he pointed out the elements that contribute to the creation of his plays. Except for a few works written in his youth, at the base of his art “lies always the conflict between individual and society.”

In general, if an idea does not have social meaning or social application, I'm not interested in developing it. It's clear that I'm aware that what is true for me might not be true for others, but I'm here to speak to you about myself, and since pity, indignation, love, and emotions in general, are felt in the heart, this much I can affirm—that ideas spring first from my heart and then from my brain.15

De Filippo points out that it is easy for him to have an idea, difficult, on the other hand, to give it form and communicate it. He has been successful mainly because, as he says, “I was able to absorb avidly and with pity the life of so many people, and I have been able to create a language which, although theatrically elaborate, becomes the means of expression of the various characters and not of their author”16. He explains:

In most cases, the creative process is long. The germinal idea undergoes the seasoning of time to test the degree of its validity: after having had the idea and given it a sketchy form, there begins the long and laborious period during which, for months and more often for years, I keep the idea enclosed in me. … If an idea is not valid, little by little it fades away, disappears, and does not obsess the mind any longer; but if it is valid, with time it ripens and improves and consequently the comedy develops both as text and as theater, as a complete show, staged and acted down to the smallest detail, exactly the way I wanted it seen and felt. In a way this is unfortunate, as I will never feel it again once it has become a theatrical reality.17

Then the play staged in his mind and carried with him for so long is fixed in the pages of the script: “Only when the beginning and the end of the ‘action’ are clear to me and I know to perfection the life, death and miracles of every character, even the secondary ones, do I begin to write”18. He writes the play, staging it in his mind's eye as he goes along. True, this is the practice of every playwright; but De Filippo does it by fusing the writing process to the acting and directing experiences. Such fusion is evident not only in the fluidity, spontaneity, and naturalness of the dialogue, but also in the numerous and often detailed stage directions.

Early in his artistic career De Filippo made a statement that has remained true up to the present:

Our purpose in coming forward on the stage has never been to hold conferences, to conduct discussions about grave problems, or to teach courses in philosophy. We are truly people of the theater, free from every bond and bias, and we are theater people in the sense of being both actors and audience; that is why we concern ourselves with reproducing in our plays life as people see it and feel it, with its elements of comedy and sentiment, poetry and the grotesque, with its contrasts of suffering and buffoonery, and nothing more. To sum up, every day we are more strongly convinced that this is exactly what the public seeks from us, and for this they applaud us generously as actors and as authors.19

De Filippo writes a play basing it not on the presentation of lofty philosophical abstractions, but as a part of life, to make it live in its own right as a work of drama. Every character, like every life, however minor, always has something to say, comic or serious, emotionally or intellectually, and De Filippo aims to create characters who reflect in varying degrees sentiments and ideas possessed of a certain universality.

When the curtain rises on an Eduardo De Filippo play, the audience is not apt to receive a scenic surprise. For over fifty years, the settings of his comedies have been remarkably consistent. One sees the interior of a lower-middle-class apartment. Seldom does Eduardo write a play which, like De Pretore Vincenzo or Tommaso D'Amalfi, moves out into the streets and alleys of Naples. The playwright's choice of the interior setting shows his interest in exploring the motives, values, and plight of the poor and the struggling. Although the strain of naturalism in De Filippo is not of Strind-bergian intensity, it is strong enough in this essentially realistic playwright to cause him to examine people in the environment where they are most likely to be themselves. For Eduardo is committed to exposing the hypocrisy of human beings, and their financial, physical, or spiritual destitution:

Except for a few works I wrote when I was young, … at the base of my theater there is always the conflict between the individual and society. I mean to say that everything always starts from an emotive stimulus: reaction to an injustice, scorn for hypocrisy, mine and others', solidarity with and human sympathy for a person or a group of people, rebellion against outdated and anachronistic laws, fear in the face of events, such as wars, which disrupt the life of the people.20

De Filippo finds drama particularly in the life and language of those living in poverty and suffering social injustice. From the early works—light farces, yet already sensitive to human value—to the great neorealist plays of the immediate postwar period, which explore the drama of humanity ravaged by war, to the most recent works cast in the form of “parables” and some strongly critical of our present-day society. De Filippo shows a continuous effort to reach his audience with his commitment to mitigating the absurdities and incongruities of life through the correction of social ills. By his own admission, he writes in reaction to the injustices perpetrated against the weak in society: the illegitimate, the unhappily married, the poor, the oppressed. From his passionate identification with the socially deprived arises the plays' moral protest, which attempts to produce awareness of the human predicament and to compel reflection. Yet his theater is not political propaganda. De Filippo himself rejected this label: “I am not Brecht, and for that matter I would not like to be him. I do not approve of political speeches in the theater. However, I certainly am in favor of pointing out [social] wounds”21.

Neither can his theater be labeled “social theater,” since it does not, for instance, concern itself so much with the class struggle or with the social and economic condition of the deprived classes, as with moral failure and its social consequences. He focuses his attention on such themes as hypocrisy, evil masquerading as good, egoism disguised as charity, the alienating influence on the individual of a demoralized society, the oppressive condition arising from lack of tolerance and respect for human dignity, the arbitrariness of society, the absurdities and inadequacies of the judicial system. Only a very few plays fail because of De Filippo's commitment to social betterment. Usually, this very commitment accounts for the depth of inspiration, the thematic richness, the authenticity in character and dialogue, the balance of irony and humor, and thus the sense of perspective in his dramatization of social issues. He writes play after play exposing one wrong after another, spurred on by the conviction that the only way to remedy the ills of society is to prompt public reaction to them. He is not always successful in arousing this reaction and often overstates his point, but he is always faithful to his vision of the playwright as society's moral guide. Over the years he has maintained this interest and has increasingly confirmed the importance that he attaches to the involvement of the public, for it is this public that must fulfill the moral function of his work.

LANGUAGE

Part of De Filippo's artistic achievement is undoubtedly due to his successful working solution to the problems of finding, or inventing, a form of spoken Italian suitable for use on the stage. This is an accomplishment because literary Italian, and above all stage Italian, is essentially an artificial language. While standard English, standard French, or standard American is spoken, if not by the whole population at least by important sections of it, standard Italian only exists on paper. In ordinary life even the most educated Italians have their clearly defined regional accent and vocabulary. It is therefore far more difficult in Italian to write dramatic dialogue which sounds like real speech, yet free from local overtones and the limitations on intelligibility imposed by the use of a dialect. Only during the 1960s, for a variety of reasons—mass communications, the urbanization of large numbers of former agricultural workers and their families, geographical migration, travel for pleasure—did a generalized form of spoken Italian start to assert itself on a wider scale. Theater has mostly used the Italian literary language, an abstraction usually bombastic or stilted, incomprehensible to the majority of Italians, and therefore necessarily restricted both socially and in its range of expressive possibilities. As Pier Paolo Pasolini commented, “traditional theater has accepted … an Italian which does not exist. Upon such a convention—that is, upon nothing, upon what is nonexistent, dead—it has based the conventionality of diction. The result is repugnant”22. Side by side with literary theater exists a tradition of regional theater, richer in expressiveness, but very limited, by reason of the mutual incomprehensibility of Italy's many dialects, in its potential for reaching people beyond the local area. De Filippo is the one playwright who has resolved the division between these two kinds of theatrical language. To overcome the linguistic conventionality of bourgeois theater, he invented a new vehicle of oral expression which has the spontaneity and immediacy of popular dialect while still retaining that minimum of conventional abstraction necessary to reach a wide audience.

In his early works De Filippo used almost exclusively a pure Neapolitan dialect, which was not only appropriate for his characters, who had affinities with those of the cabaret theater and the avanspettacolo, but also reflected with almost obsessive rigor the life of the Neapolitan masses and lower middle class. At the beginning of their careers, the use of the dialect was also unavoidable for Eduardo and his brother and sister, since they saw themselves as continuing the tradition inherited from Scarpetta. But as De Filippo's repertory changed, due to his desire to appeal to an audience all over the peninsula, his means of expression changed too. The Neapolitan vernacular went through a process of Italianization, following the lead of the “half-Neapolitan” already spoken by middle-class Neapolitans and becoming more understandable to other Italians. Since the war, De Filippo has developed a dramatic dialogue that comes very close to the everyday spoken vernacular employed throughout southern Italy, but with the particular inflection and cadence characteristic of Naples. It is, moreover, a language which has a “common denominator” with spoken Italian and is readily understood in other regions.

De Filippo's texts reproduce the rhythm and flow of ordinary conversational Italian as faithfully as possible. They are characterized by run-on sentences, with pauses in the form of dots (…) dividing each clause, instead of carefully constructed, grammatically self-contained periodic sentences. Although in the later works dialect expressions appear only rarely, his scripts are colored with expressive idioms, popular slang, and frequent, sometimes outlandish puns. Sometimes the author inserts a few words in Neapolitan dialect at the end of a punchline, to enrich the local “flavor” and maintain the immediacy of geographical setting. However, dialect never serves merely to add charm or mere local color to his characters' speech, or to give an air of “scholarly” authenticity, as an aesthetic device for its own sake. Rather, it serves to heighten either their plight or their overflowing excitement. With most of the characters, De Filippo mingles dialect with Italian, alternating the pungency of the one with the suavity of the other and extracting all the flavor and fun he can from the rich tonality of their utterance.

The result is a collection of plays free of intellectual abstractions, rhetorical figures, and learned metaphors. It is unfailingly expressive, rich in comic elements, and full of the spontaneous, colorful epithets of “street language.” Thornton Wilder made a particular point of admiring Eduardo's language: “To know and love his plays one must have a relish for dialect and regional speech, for that color and immediacy of the language, used for a longtime by a portion of the society little touched by the over-sophisticated and cultivated ‘polite’ world”23. For this same reason Bentley hails Eduardo's theater as “popular”: “It is a popular theater as against an art theater. This means … that it is a dialect theater and not an ‘Italian’ one. It uses a popularly spoken language and not an official, national, bourgeois language—in this respect resembling Synge and O'Casey rather than Pinero and Galsworthy. The lack of a national theatrical repertoire in Italy may be deplorable, but the quality of the defect is—the regional theater”24. Indeed, with De Filippo as with the Irishman John Millington Synge, half of the effect of the play lies in the dialect. The language of The Playboy of the Western World serves to turn a potentially tragic situation into a richly comic one. Similarly, Filumena Marturano's Neapolitan dialect dispels any lugubrious potentialities of the plot—the old story of the prostitute with the heart of gold—and makes her a truly heroic plebeian. Just as a Synge play would lose much of its value if it were rewritten in American English, so do the Neapolitan comedies of De Filippo seem essentially untranslatable25.

Moreover, in addition to the language, his comedies depend for much of their effect upon the gestures used by the characters. Although the Italian stage does not have an Oriental “gesturology,” different regions, and Naples in particular, have virtually a system of gestures with accepted meanings. The side of one's hand repeatedly jabbed at one's ribs indicates hunger; pulling the lower eyelid down with one finger is the nonverbal way to describe shrewdness in another person. One must, indeed, study beforehand the meaning of Neapolitan gestures to derive the full flavor from a De Filippo performance26. With gestures and dialect both lost in foreign performances, Eduardo's plays in translation hardly approximate the original works.

Notes

  1. Eric Bentley, Kenyon Review, p. 119.

  2. Letter from Thornton Wilder to the author dated 9 October 1971.

  3. Eric Bentley, In Search of Theatre (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 289.

  4. Thomas Belmonte, The Broken Fountain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 29.

  5. Ibid., p. 7.

  6. Ibid., p. 30.

  7. Bentley, In Search of Theatre, p. 290.

  8. Robert G. Bander, “A Critical Estimate of Eduardo De Filippo,” Italian Quarterly 11, 43 (1967):44.

  9. Mario Stefanile, Labirinto napoletano (Naples: E.S.I., 1958), p. 115.

  10. De Filippo recounted his encounters with Pirandello in a symbolic letter, “Open letter to Pirandello,” Il dramma, Dec. 1936. It was written just a few days after Pirandello's death (10 December 1936).

  11. Corrado Alvaro, “Eduardo,” Sipario 11 (March 1956):6.

  12. Vito Pandolfi, “Intervista a quatr'occhi con Eduardo De Filippo,” Sipario 11 (March 1956):5.

  13. Eric Bentley, What is Theatre? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), p. 200.

  14. Pandolfi, “Intervista,” p. 5.

  15. “Prefazione,” I capolavori di Eduardo (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), p. vii.

  16. Ibid., p. viii.

  17. Ibid., pp. viii-xi.

  18. Ibid., p. ix.

  19. Cf. Corsi, Chi è di scena, p. 49.

  20. I capolavori di Eduardo, p. vii.

  21. S. Lori, “Intervista con il grande autore-attore napoletano,” Roma, 7 May 1969.

  22. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Manifesto per un nuovo teatro,” Nuovi argomenti 9 (Jan.-March 1968):13.

  23. Thornton Wilder, from the letter cited in Chapter 1, note 1.

  24. Bentley, In Search of Theatre, p. 290.

  25. Indeed, the translation into standard Italian of Filumena Marturano (a dubious enterprise from the start) was not successful and has never been restaged.

  26. Desmond Morris et al., Gestures (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1979) gives an excellent account of Neapolitan gestures.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Encounters with Eduardo de Filippo

Next

Early Works: Range and Versatility

Loading...