Eduardo De Filippo

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Early Works: Range and Versatility

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SOURCE: Mignone, Mario B. “Early Works: Range and Versatility.” In Eduardo De Filippo, pp. 37-66. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Mignone explores the development of de Filippo's major themes as they appeared in his early, often critically neglected plays.]

FROM FARCE TO SATIRE

De Filippo's theatrical works of the first phase, written before World War II and collected under the title Cantata dei giorni pari (Cantata for even days), are usually neglected by critics. In 1945 De Filippo himself characterized them as “plays of the old theater”:

In those plays I wanted to show the world of plot and intrigue and interest: the adulterers, the gambler, the superstitious, the slothful, the fraudulent. All part of a recognizable, definable Neapolitan way of life, but a way of life belonging to the nineteenth century. In those plays I kept alive a Naples which was already dead in part, and in part was covered up and hidden by the “paternalistic” care of the Fascist regime, and which, if it should revive today, would be seen in a different way, under a different aspect.1

But De Filippo's judgment on his work is too severe, for many of these plays have been restaged since 1945 with great success because of their relevancy and their theatricality.

The early works cannot be discarded, not only because they have documentary value, but also because, despite the influence of earlier Neapolitan playwrights, they introduce some of the themes that will become characteristic of him. Focused on the problems of contemporary Neapolitan society, these plays have a satirical bite, a tinge of irony. They reflect “even days” in appearance only; fascism wanted to project Italy as a country with its dreams fulfilled, but even the farces convey the desolate condition of the masses and lower middle class in the 1920s and 1930s.

While apparently simple, though obviously put together by a skilled actor, these first works are not pure experiment, sketches, or “pretexts” for acting. In their preference for jest and movement over words, in the lively action, the comical situation full of surprises and misunderstandings, in the quick lines studied to seem natural and full of the spirit of the spoken language, they echo the pulcinellata2; however, they already manifest a humor which verges on the grotesque, a dramatic tension at times approaching the tragic, a tendency to psychological intimacy, and a moral sensitivity to social conditions. The vivacity of the action is sustained by the many minor characters, at times mere caricatures, who carry with them an inexhaustible mimic potential. Seldom are they solidly fitted into the overall structure; rather, they remain accessories, tending to predictability because they have the fixed, generic characteristics of types. They appear, then just as suddenly disappear, the laughter of the audience trailing after them. The farcical situations do not, however, arise from accident and chance, as in the commedia dell'arte and traditional Neapolitan dialect theater, but from a human condition that is basically dramatic; and the lazzi, or comic business, while they make us laugh, at the same time exteriorize the pain of that state, rendering it sensible, immediate, and visible. At the center of this world is the main character, part of everyday reality, whose vitality stems from the absurdity of humble life observed from a new angle.

The theatrical strength of these characters lies not merely in their mimicry, but also in their language. The dialogue, at times rudimentary, at times abrupt and excited, never becomes monotonous or colorless, but always maintains its spontaneity and the fluidity necessary to remain theatrical. Although the Neapolitan linguistic texture gradually absorbs Italian forms, colored so as to indicate the characters' social levels, De Filippo sustains his artistic preference for dialect even when complying with the prohibition of dialects during the last years of Fascism. And at the base of the farcical situations and the language, there is always Naples itself, with its tragicomic, its humble and desolate reality, its scarcity of sustenance and human resources.

The one-act Farmacia di turno (Pharmacy on duty), the first work in Cantata for Even Days, was written in 1920 for Peppino Villani's company, but never staged. While an actor in the company, De Filippo had begun writing his own monologue. But this play is no product of a tyro's enthusiasm and ebullience. Though only twenty, De Filippo had sixteen years of acting experience behind him, and the play bears the mark of a skilled actor who knows the language of mimicry, movement, pauses, and nuances. Little more than a sketch, it nonetheless contains early versions of later themes: the isolation of the individual, the injustice of the law, the plight of the poor. Moreover, it shows De Filippo's dissatisfaction with the condescension implicit in “picturesque” representation and local caricature. Approaching writing from both his stage experience and his experience in living, he invests familiar comic types with a bitter humanity.

This first work is certainly naive in its use of theatrical conventions and stock types, but the earthiness and spontaneity of the dialogue are arresting. The scenes show no divergence between study and invention, theory and practice. The Neapolitan dialect theater, direct descendant of the commedia dell'arte, acquires a new complexion when filtered through De Filippo's sensibility. The result is a realistic world, with its own characters, and a credible plot which in its comicalness evinces suffering. The work is characteristic of De Filippo's early theater in its focus on characterization. Each character, however sketchy, has some personal story to tell.

The play centers on the pharmacist Don Saverio, a proud man who despite his rational approach to life, is compelled to endure an evil fate. He had approached marriage pragmatically, first making sure that his business was a success. But his wife in the meantime has left him for a richer man, and now he is alone, ridiculed by the neighbors; his inward pain at lacking a family is reflected in his refusal to assent to an annulment on the grounds of childlessness. So, at once resigned and humiliated, he spends his day serving the poor customers of his area, often in the company of his doctor and friend Don Teodoro, who comes in to chat, to take a nap in the cozy armchair, or to ask advice on the best way to get rid of the mice in his house. The play begins realistically, but the plot twists soon recall the pulcinellata. One of the first customers is Carmela, maid to Don Saverio's ex-wife, who comes in to buy some aspirin for her mistress; distracted by the unexpected appearance of her suitor Enrico, she leaves instead with an envelope containing Don Teodoro's rat poison. A wretched couple arrives looking for the doctor. The wife is clearly suffering from malnutrition, but no one would dare diagnose it as such because to do so would reflect on their economic status and deal a severe blow to their pride. Don Teodoro's diagnosis is no different from earlier doctors', and the couple cannot pay for the consultation. Finally, the doorman Gregorio arrives, his face swollen, and Don Saverio is happy to be able to show off his skill in extracting a tooth. But his satisfaction is short-lived: the next visitor is the policeman who has come to arrest him for attempting to poison his ex-wife. Don Saverio is led away with such despatch that the drugstore is locked with the doorman inside. Gregorio's plight, however, is a temporary inconvenience and, coming upon the heels of Don Saverio's arrest, it provides dramatic relief, minimizing the seriousness of the pharmacist's predicament.

Pharmacy on Duty alternates between the bitter reality of poverty borne with pride and the farce of the pulcinellata, over all of which hovers the author's own sense of irony. De Filippo's fatalistic vision of the irony present in everyday life will not allow any of the characters to triumph. Saverio's ex-wife is herself a victim, fatally ill, while Gregorio's temporary imprisonment provides a physical symbol of the common state of the characters, each imprisoned in his private situation and powerless to change it. From his first appearance as an author, without over-insistence, De Filippo shows the moralistic intentions that characterize his most famous plays. Nonetheless, watching this play, one has the impression of being still in the mainstream of the San Carlino theater tradition. The stuff of farce, for example, is the doctor's haste in changing chairs when the pharmacist tells him that his father died sitting in that very chair, Enrico's flirting with Carmela in the presence of Don Saverio, who has no choice but to go along with the love affair, the accidental substitution of rat poison for medicine.

The vis comica is the result not just of unexpected situations, but also of the unexpected and naively witty punchlines, as for example when Vincenzo brings in his young wife Rafilina who has reluctantly consented to be examined by Don Teodoro, the doctor:

TEODORO:
Sit down, please. (Rafilina sits down and starts to take off her shoes.) Wait a minute! … Wait a minute! … Leave your shoes alone! … Just undo your blouse a bit.
RAFILINA:
[To her husband Vincenzo] And you made me change my stockings!
TEODORO:
You thought you were taking her out to buy a pair of shoes?
VINCENZO:
O.K., forget it … When we go home you can put the ones with holes back on.
TEODORO:
Well, now, how do you feel, young woman?
RAFILINA:
How do I feel?! Oh! Nobody knows how I feel!
TEODORO:
But I'm the doctor. I have to know!(3)

Here the whole situation is comical, building to an explosion of laughter as the meaning of the expression “Nobody knows how I feel!” (“‘O saccio sul’ io”), a common Neapolitan exclamation, is transferred from the idiomatic to the literal level. No less comic are Vincenzo and Enrico's gimmicks, which nonetheless at the same time evince their suffering. As soon as the spectator stops laughing, he feels the bitterness of the situation.

Dominated by a crepuscular, Chekhovian atmosphere, the play seems only a moment in a faded, melancholic life. De Filippo's way of making the characters speak and move in chiaroscuro goes back to the Neapolitan playwright Lìbero Bòvio. But as Robert G. Bander writes,

The melancholy strain which Eduardo has introduced into the farcical tradition of Italian dialect theater is a measure of his difference from Ruzzante, Goldoni, and Gallina; his comic inventiveness sharply differentiates him from Di Giàcomo, Bracco, Russo, Mùrolo, and most of the other Neapolitan vernacular dramatists of an earlier period. De Filippo's sense of spiritual unrest, and his ability to dramatize it in a colloquial manner with which his audience can empathize, is his mark of individuality as a playwright.4

Most important, even at this early point in his artistic career, De Filippo had already begun to create a mythic, universal character. At the very outset he struck a rich vein of comedy, a vein that led deep into humanity and could therefore be appreciated and understood by all. Incidents in the life of poor Neapolitans come to represent the comic-pathetic condition of the universal “little man.”

The problems of the “little man” are chiefly economic in the one-act Filosoficamente (Philosophically, 1928). Gaetano Piscopo seems at first to be a stereotypical Neapolitan, believing passionately in the power of dreams to give him winning numbers in the weekly lottery and refusing to take responsibility for his obsession, preferring to blame his dead wife. But beneath the humor is real pain. Gaetano's primary worry is not his gambling, or even his perennial losses, but his two unmarried daughters, Maria and Margherita. The first part of the act shows the family trying to scrape together the money to buy pizzas and fruit for one of the modest parties that are Gaetano's way of introducing his daughters to well-intentioned young men. They are under threat of eviction, and to throw the party they have to go hungry for a few days. Gaetano's efforts to keep up appearances despite his poverty show the superficiality, but also the endurance, of the Neapolitan lower bourgeoisie. The party is a failure. Despite the jokes, the conversation between the old and the young comes to nothing, and even in the young people's conversation there is a certain rancor and envy. The characters are united in a lifeless, pathetic attitude, and everything seems placed on the same plane, portrayed with analytical objectivity.

Evident in these early works is De Filippo's ability to turn traditional farce in whatever direction he wants—toward pathos or toward social criticism. Nonetheless, most are dominated by humor for the pure enjoyment of it. The complicated three-act Uomo e galantuomo (Men and gentlemen, 1922), about the interactions of traveling actors with provincial nobility, shows De Filippo's total assimilation of the comic effects of the Neapolitan popular theater. The influence of the pulcinellata shows in the vivacity, freshness, and wit of the spoken language, the fanciful, exuberant dialogue, and the lazzi pulcinelleschi or comic “bits.” The pompous exuberance comes from the plays of Pasquale Altavilla, while from Scarpetta comes the overall scheme, the types, the inner movement of the action, the comical expedients, and the use of social background. The essential elements of De Filippo's comedy—the traditional chase of love and treachery, the slapstick, the craziness and tricks, mistaken identity and misunderstandings, gossip and buffoonery—as well as his skills at interweaving plots and using dialect realistically are all here in this one play.

Quei figuri di trent'anni fa (The old gang of thirty years ago, 1929) is a comic farce; at the same time, however, it criticizes the Italy of the “golden times” of Fascism, showing the misery beneath its alleged heroic grandeur. In this play De Filippo leaves the familiar lower-middle-class setting and turns to another corner of Neapolitan life, to a clandestine gambling house operated by a certain Gennaro Ferri. Gennaro hires Luigi as a shill in a gambling game; and as Luigi is schooled in the secrets of the trade, he shows comic slowness in understanding just what trade he is learning, what is expected of him, and consequently what will be the outcome of his involvement. Luigi's ingenuousness is the source of all the jokes in this play, so obviously rooted in the pulcinellata of Scarpetta and the commedia. As in Men and Gentlemen, here there is none of the pity and desperation expressed in Pharmacy on Duty and especially in Philosophically. The dialogue and funny situations keep the spectators detached from the stage action, so they can better understand De Filippo's implicit criticism of Fascism. In fact, the intent of the play did not escape the censor, Leopoldo Zurlo, who made De Filippo change the title, originally Le bische (The gambling-house), and forced him to set it thirty years earlier, prior to the coming of Fascism, under the pretense that the regime had abolished such illicit practices. Under Fascism there could be no aberrations, only “even days.”

No such political implications are apparent in Pericolosamente (Dangerously, 1938), a modernized pulcinellata on the theme of the taming of the shrew. In the San Carlino theater, as in the Punch-and-Judy show, Pulcinella, a coward outside the house, always used a stick when teaching wisdom to his wife. The twentieth-century Pulcinella uses a gun loaded with blanks, which, like the cardboard slapstick, makes a lot of noise but does no harm.

In most of De Filippo's early works farce serves to veil the wretchedness of the characters as they resort to precarious stratagems in order to save face or to survive. At times, the grotesque situations become pathetic because of the protagonist's inability to establish communications with the surrounding world. From such a world of misery and loneliness emerges Sik-Sik, De Filippo's first major character, who exhibits a hopeless will to survive even as he sorrowfully resigns himself to the squalor around him—the same squalor that will face the protagonists in many of the postwar plays. Sik-Sik, l'artefice magico (Sik-Sik, the Incomparable Magician, 1929), written for Mario Mangini's Pulcinella principe in sogno and interpreted by the three De Filippos, was the first work in which Eduardo wrote a part for himself; his first big success, it became a hallmark of his style of humor and the first clear sign of his future greatness. The stage directions describe the magician as follows:

Sik-Sik is a man of about 40, with a thick black moustache. He is wearing a light-colored jacket that is none too clean; his black pants belong with the tail-coat he will put on during his performance. He wears a soft hat. In one hand he carries a small suitcase and in the other a cage containing two identical pigeons. He has a cigar stump between his teeth. Sik-Sik is the typical traditional strolling actor: poor, tormented, and … a philosopher. Giorgetta, his wife, follows him. She wears no hat and has a threadbare coat over her shoulders. Her untidy dress clearly shows her to be pregnant. Like her husband, she looks tired and discouraged.

[p. 121]

The protagonist might almost be the author himself as he was at the time of his association with the Kokasse company: so thin as to be almost emaciated, sicco sicco in Neapolitan. Sik-Sik and Giorgetta are presented as somewhat lacking in talent, very poor, discouraged to the point of futility, but nonetheless dedicated to their profession. Their magic act reveals their destitution in terms of the magician-actor's belief in his art, in terms of the hunger that forces him to use his pregnant wife in the act, even down to locking her in a trunk, and in terms of the stage on which what amounts to a real contest takes place between him and the audience.

Arriving late one evening Sik-Sik misses his regular assistant Nicola. After scolding his wife, he desperately latches onto Rafele, a “shabby and wretched man” who asks him for a light and whom he asks to be his partner in the act. There follows a dialogue reminiscent of Abbott and Costello's “Who's on first?”:

SIK-SIK:
I'll do very easy tricks tonight because you are new at the job … O.K.,; the curtain rises. You'll know the minute I'm supposed to come on, because the music will go like this: Pe … pepe, pe … pepe, pe … pepe, pe … pepe. Got it? (The tune Sik-Sik hums is the trumpet motif from Mephistophele.)
RAFELE:
And he makes his entrance.
SIK-SIK:
Who makes his entrance?
RAFELE:
Peppe.
SIK-SIK:
Who's Peppe?
RAFELE:
The fellow you just told me about.
SIK-SIK:
No. Pepe is the trumpet.
RAFELE:
Oh, the trumpeter is called Peppe.
SIK-SIK:
No, no, no, no, no. That's the noise the trumpet makes. Don't confuse the issue. Then, after the blare of the trumpet, I make my entrance. You'll recognize me at once. I'll be wearing a genuine Chinese kimono, you know, so I look more important. When you see me enter, you say: This guy really looks Chinese. The audience will already be impressed because, as you know, the Chinese are past masters of this kind of show. Their skill and patience are endless. You ought to see how patient the Chinese are.

[pp. 123-24]

Robert Corrigan's statement that “Eduardo De Filippo … is unquestionably the fullest contemporary embodiment of the commedia spirit” finds justification especially in plays like this, where commedia elements are easily identifiable in the linguistic devices, line exchanges, and slapstick visual comedy5. Sik-Sik suggests a combination of Pulcinella and Bragadoccio, Giorgetta a combination of Columbina and Speraldina, Rafele the zanni (commedia clowns), but with a twentieth-century twist. Rafele makes the audience laugh, but he also increases Sik-Sik's desperation to an almost tragic intensity as he gives away the secrets of the three basic tricks that make up the show: the water-drinking trick, the trunk escape, and the trick of the disappearing dove.

At the last moment before the performance, Sik-Sik's usual assistant Nicola arrives and wants his part back. Rafele is aware of his own limitations, but he needs the money and, besides, he needs to prove himself superior to the equally foolish Nicola. In the ensuing scuffle Rafele loses the fake padlock used for the trunk escape, as well as his pigeon, which, however, he is able to replace with a chicken. When during the performance Sik-Sik asks for a volunteer from the audience, he is faced with two. Predictably, the three tricks are disasters. But Sik-Sik's resourcefulness is limitless. When each of the partners testifies that the water went down his gullet, Sik-Sik announces that he has materialized half of the glassful for each of them. There is no padlock for either partner to substitute; to free his wife Sik-Sik has to break the good one. When, finally, a chicken comes out of Rafele's hat instead of a pigeon, Sik-Sik concludes triumphantly that not only has he translated the pigeon from the cage to the hat, but also changed it into a chicken. Though the spectator can laugh at the failure of the tricks, nonetheless he cannot laugh at Sik-Sik and his wife, victims of events over which they have no control. Mechanically, the orchestra breaks into a fanfare, ironically emphasizing the failure of Sik-Sik's act; “the curtain, however, is more compassionate, and it falls to end the play.”

Sik-Sik, the Incomparable Magician might seem no more than the dodges of a second-rate magician capable of extraordinary mimicry, juxtaposed with the pulcinellesque improvisations of a very stupid foil. But it is also the drama of a wretched man forced to make ends meet. Sik-Sik is a character on the edges of society, clinging to life by means of his poor tricks; to convince himself of their adequacy, he often repeats to Rafele that when he comes on stage and performs, “it will bring the house down.” His thirst for applause almost equals the hunger of his stomach; and if his illusion, that he can impose himself on the audience by his appearance alone, crumbles bit by bit when he is actually on stage, nonetheless he resists and finds a way to save at least the illusion of not being wholly beaten.

In De Filippo's work tragic humor is defined by the destruction of illusions, the collapse of ideals, the irony of fate, and, sometimes, the ability to bear it all. One notes a foretaste of the attitude of the characters of the mature dramas—Pasquale Lojacono of Those Ghosts!, Calogero Di Spelta of The Big Magic, Pasquale Cimmaruta of The Voices Within—as Sik-Sik tenaciously refuses to recognize his failure in order to preserve the authenticity of his art, as he stubbornly fights to remain “the incomparable magician” by enclosing himself in illusions. In fact, when Defilippian characters cannot otherwise escape the sad reality that traps them, they often flee into dreams or magic. The difference being that, good or deceitful, dreams come from outside, as a supernatural intervention, supplying, let's say, a winning number in the lottery (Philosophically, I Won't Pay You), or revealing a distressing situation (The Voices Within). Magic, on the other hand, is entirely in the hands of man, who must succeed by his own resourcefulness (The Big Magic, The Top Hat). Gennaro Magliulo put it quite well when he observed that in this short drama we find both “the Defilippian intuition of an oppressing human and social condition and also the intuition of the attitude which the homo Neapolitanus is accustomed to assume in facing that condition”6. The knockabout comedy is qualified by a subtle, painful humor, the “sorrowful humor” that Pandolfi observes as the dominant note of De Filippo's mature plays7.

Much of the serious note is conveyed in the stage directions, which, kept to a minimum up to this work, now increase in number and elaborateness. De Filippo describes in great detail not only the scene but the prelude to it, defining an emotional atmosphere that assures identification with the character:

Once again he draws back the curtain, but the trunk remains inexorably closed. What will the audience say? What will they do? But the magician is thinking of his wife Giorgetta, about to become a mother, and locked inside! The trick, the theater, the audience, everything else vanishes from Sik-Sik's mind. He has an idea, the only way he can help her. He goes off into the wings and comes back with a hammer. He slips behind the curtain, and soon we hear muffled desperate strokes of the hammer, with Sik-Sik's panting voice counting aloud above the hammering: “And a one! and a two!”

[p. 136]

Clearly, the author has also assumed a narrative distance from his creation. His stage directions are no longer merely instructions to the actors. Instead, they articulate the vision of a man who wants to go beyond the limits of theatrical language and comment on suffering humanity. Sik-Sik is enmeshed in a situation which an ambiguous Pirandellian humor addresses with laughter though aware of the tragic undertones of the situation. By this direct intervention De Filippo wants to make us feel the complete, inexpressible drama of Sik-Sik in this moment of surprise, strain, discouragement, and dejection, all of which must be interpreted by an actor in a gesture, in intense and prolonged mimicry. The stage directions are thus like musical cadences, hinted at but not fixed in a definite way and therefore capable of later development and new interpretations, according to the ability of the actor and the receptiveness of the audience. Words thus express only one, partial aspect of De Filippo's artistic personality; along with his linguistic ability goes his acting and directing sense. As the years pass, the significance of the stage directions increases, and in the postwar plays they often are concerned with portraying custom and reiterating satirical social criticism.

Though not added to the text until about 1934-35, the first stage direction of the play nonetheless sheds light on De Filippo's growing consciousness of himself as an artist and commentator on his own works:

It is nine-thirty.


The public is gathering in front of the ticket office. In fifteen minutes the show will start. This is the moment when I am most aware of the awesome responsibility facing me: the crowd is anonymous, all strangers; one enormous question mark. Never more than at this moment am I so completely outside the fiction of my role. I'm not yet convinced of the character I shall become in a few minutes, on the stage. I feel that I'm part of the crowd; it's as if I was going to go up to the ticket office and ask for an orchestra seat to see the show too. Not until the moment when the spotlights blind me with their stars of light and the curtain rises on the dark theater pit, can I possibly take up my part in the fiction. The minutes pursue me inexorably. They sweep me on in their rush, they overwhelm me, they push me toward the little stage door, which closes ominously, with a hollow sound, behind me.

[p. 121]

It is clear that here we are in the presence not merely of stage directions, but of a man addressing his own methods of expression. De Filippo wants to maintain not only the “fictitious character of the stage, but also that degree of freedom of the imagination, that unforeseeable suggestion of the stage—the engulfing stage with its blinding lights,” the extraordinary rapport with the audience which he must constantly enliven and renew, and the deep desire to understand, to interpret, to give a significance to every encounter8. The conception of the nature of theater first suggested in Sik-Sik marks the beginning of De Filippo's interest in the theoretical aspects of the theater, an interest which finds its fullest expression in The Art of Comedy and The Top Hat.

De Filippo's first six plays demonstrate his debt to commedia dell'arte and to the Neapolitan theatrical tradition. And, albeit in germinal form, they establish those features that will later come to characterize his theater: the importance of acceptance by the audience, the emphasis on characterization, the mixture of humor and pathos, the development of a recognizably Defilippian protagonist, and the necessity to theorize on human nature, the dramatic situation, and, of course, the role and status of the theater.

INTERIOR VACILLATION AND INTIMATE DRAMA

The combination of pain and humor evident in De Filippo's early works is conveyed less in action, more in mood, in some of the plays that follow. Of significance to De Filippo is what is sensed and fleeting, transmitted indirectly through glances, sighs, and subtle crises: a panoply of feelings, from remorse to hatred. The plays' expressive realism reflects the influence of Neapolitan playwrights like Rocco Galdieri, Libero Bovio, Enzo Mùrolo, and Eduardo Nicolardi, and, from outside Italy, Anton Chekhov, whose plays were very popular in Italy during the late 1920s and the 1930s.

It seems logical and perhaps inevitable that De Filippo should follow this course, for he treats characters who live according to outmoded ideals, once cherished, but potentially destructive in a world that no longer honors them. Some people are so sentimentally attached to their ideals that they become blind to reality and to the needs of those around them, even to the extent of destroying their families. Their happiness proves to be naive; and when it crumbles, it leaves a malancholy sense of loss. All in all, the plays are informed with irony, humor, and the playwright's growing pessimism.

In the two-act Chi è chiù felice 'e me! … (Who is happier than I! … , 1928), the protagonist Vincenzo is a sensible, prudent, discreet man who avoids everything that might disrupt his quiet life. He lives on a small monthly income which is enough to ensure his contentment despite the little sacrifices he must make to afford an occasional luxury: a more expensive pipe tobacco, for instance, means fewer cartridges for his biweekly hunting trips. Happiness means order; there can be no risks, no unknown factors. His day includes at least one meal, an afternoon walk, and a card game with friends; he retires every night at twelve o'clock sharp. With his beautiful young wife, Margherita, and a carefully circumscribed life, Vincenzo thinks himself the happiest man in the world. But one day a local dandy, who has killed in self-defense, takes refuge in Vincenzo's home, as if to warn him that his happiness is precarious and that any external intervention could destroy it. Riccardo, the young man, falls in love with Margherita, who, feeling her femininity reawakening after years of boring “happiness,” accepts his attentions. But the neighbors' gossip cannot disturb Vincenzo's peace or compromise his idealism. Realizing that his wife no longer treats him as she used to, he tries to reaffirm his happiness and prove his wife's fidelity to himself and his neighbors by calling them to witness as she begs Riccardo to leave, declaring that she will never give herself to him. Vincenzo is thrilled at these words, then disheartened when Margherita gives Riccardo a passionate good-bye embrace that shows how much she loves him.

In this play the traditional themes of farce—conjugal misfortune, the betrayed and unaware husband—are invested with a new spirit, to become intimate drama. The strength of the play is in its caricatured types set in the realistic context of Neapolitan customs. The betrayed husband appears both comical and humiliated; and events are treated with a bitter sarcasm. Behind the comedy of character, behind the caricatures, the lively dialogue, the sarcasm and farcical episodes, lies a middle-class psychological drama on the theme of conjugal happiness which will be developed more subtly in Those Ghosts!

Vincenzo is something of a negative character. By being content with what he has, he becomes in fact “a priest of the isolated happiness, stubbornly pursuing it with a faith which leaves no room for even modest uncertainties!”9. He is a deserter in the struggle of life, and from his suffering stems an ambivalent tension between tragedy and comedy. On the other hand, Margherita is the first of many positive women in De Filippo's plays. Though she tries to go along with her husband's kind of forced happiness, she can find no lasting personal satisfaction. She is unable to repress her feeling for Riccardo despite her will to remain faithful and preserve the family honor. She thus unconsciously rebels against those conventional attitudes that often define the housewife's domesticity as merely a form of resignation. In this respect she is the first in a long line of De Filippo's women who take an active role in determining their destinies. As its ironic title indicates, with this play De Filippo begins developing paradoxes of the Pirandellian sort. To the unreflecting illusions of the blinkered optimist, he juxtaposes the vulnerability of human certitude in the face of chance, which so easily dissolves conventional beliefs and promises; what dominates, more or less vainly opposed by laws and moral norms, is the sweeping force of passion and carnal desire. The situations thus are more complex and dramatic than in the previous works.

In his concern for characterization De Filippo does not wholly abandon social criticism. In Vincenzo one may easily see the typical attitude of the middle-class Italian of those years: passive submission to the comfortable socioeconomic ambiance provided by a political system—Fascism—which frees the individual from every responsibility while lulling him into self-satisfied optimistic apathy. Moreover, as Scornavacca notes, one may easily see in the treatment of the minor characters an anticipation of De Filippo's later satire of manners:

The hypocritical maneuvers and the fictitious ingenuousness with which Vincenzo's neighbors and so-called friends proceed to stir up suspicion in his brain, instilling it drop by drop, with minced phrases, treating him with malicious compassion, underline the love for the satire of manners which has remained a characteristic of Eduardo's theater.10

The satire of the earlier plays here is more refined, underlying not merely an action or scene, but the whole play.

In most of the plays to this point the main character has consistent features: a weak will and the inability to separate reality from fantasy. In the plays that follow the protagonists often ruin their lives because they are unable to assert their “selves.” Ironically, they are anti-heroes in the supposedly heroic era of Fascism. They do not transcend themselves, though at least they overcome their immaturity. At this point, the drama functions to criticize Fascism implicitly, the middle class explicitly. Later, with the fall of the regime, this kind of protagonist is criticized in order to emancipate him from the past, its moral codes, its doctrines, its atavistic ways of thinking.

Gennariniello (1932) is another variation on the situation of the characters trapped because one of them is unable to face reality. Gennaro, the head of the family, though his authority is somewhat undermined by the double diminutive on the end of his name, is incapable of a decisive, serious act of will; that is, though he can act decisively, he cannot will seriously. Instead of worrying about his son's stupidity, he worries that he does not pursue girls; instead of worrying about his spinster sister's psychological problems, he worries about marrying her off. He makes his living creating and selling foolish inventions and dreaming of others that will make him rich. Deeply discontented with his modest lot in life, he aspires to a higher social station. An attractive neighbor comes to symbolize for Gennaro a life beyond his reach; but when he makes advances to her, she responds by teasing him in front of everyone, causing serious domestic quarrels and finally exposing him to the silent pity of his family, neighbors, and onlookers. This character exhibits the senile sensuality of the poor man who inevitably must make a bitter, grotesque return to the truth and to his gray and advanced autumn. The play presents a picture, at once pathetic and funny, of Neapolitan life as well as a portrait of a human type very dear to De Filippo: the man who seems generally ignorant of the wretchedness around him, and who aspires to a dignity that because of his very ignorance is unbecoming to him.

As in all the prewar plays with similar situations, De Filippo never shows how the character will deal with the discovery that he has been living a lie. The playwright suggests, however, that in those years of strong Fascist control the masses and the lower middle class, exemplified in Gennariniello, had no chance. Implicit criticism of Fascism may be seen in Gennariniello's gallismo—his boasting of his sexual prowess, typical of the current machismo. Gallismo was encouraged by the Fascist regime as an expression of strength and defiance, and Gennariniello's unconscious acceptance of it shows the Italian inability to rebel against anachronistic ideas. Ranged against the male character's empty illusions is the practical world of the female character, Concetta, who plods through the day working as a housemaid to make a few lire and save the family from starvation. She fills the void left by her husband; and though she whines somewhat when he is off in his dream world, she comes to his defense in moments of crisis. Add to these two characters the only son, an adolescent coddled by his parents, yet ready to give them his affection in their worst moments, and the husband's sentimental spinster sister, in other plays often replaced by a bachelor brother, and we see the pattern for the Neapolitan family of many of De Filippo's later works. From the family life portrayed here flows an intimacy strong to the point of sentimentality, but corrected with the same kind of grotesque twist at which De Filippo aims in Sik-Sik11.

More and more, De Filippo seems attracted to a protagonist who lacks any heroic potential, who drifts wherever he is led by his failure to take life seriously. He is a tragicomic character: whereas heroes insist on the truth, he avoids it, and instead of being the protagonist in a conflict between truth and illusion, he, often unwittingly, exposes the conflict between truth and self-deception. His dreams frequently help him evade the future and regress permanently. All this usually occurs against the backdrop of the family, which the protagonist often needs to idealize despite its actual state of degeneration. Nowhere is this situation more evident than in Natale in casa Cupiello (Christmas at the Cupiellos', 1931), which De Filippo himself has called one of his most significant works. The high point of his first creative phase and, for many reasons, a key work in his artistic development, it still enjoys success with audiences and critics; in 1966 it was produced at the Malyj Theater in Moscow, directed by Leonid Varpokhovsky, and for Russian television in 1973, again under his direction, with the well-known Vladimir Doronin in the lead.

The action swings between farce and drama, between naturalistic realism and spiritual investigation, between comedy and irony, all given a balance exceptional for De Filippo in this period. The opening scene is a normal one in the everyday life of the Neapolitan lower middle class. Concetta, patient, calm, a cup in her hand, tries to wake her husband, the monotony of her voice reflecting her resignation:

CONCETTA:
(With the monotonous tone of someone who knows beforehand that she will have to call many times before being heard) Luca … Luca … Wake up, it's nine o'clock.
Pause. Luca continues to sleep.
(As before, but a little louder) Luca … Luca … Wake up, it's nine o'clock.
Luca grunts under the blankets as he turns over. Pause.
(As before, in the same tone) … Luca … Wake up, it's nine o'clock. Here's your coffee.
LUCA:
(Without understanding, still half asleep) Oh? … The coffee? (Murmuring something incoherent, he sticks his head out, completely swathed in a woolen shawl, then he sits up in bed, stretches out an arm as if he were about to take the cup of coffee, but then slowly lets his arm fall down again; his head sinks back and he falls asleep again. All of this is done with his eyes closed.)

[pp. 221-22]

De Fillippo's scenes and stage directions deserve accurate reconstruction, since he presents his characters not only through dialogue but also suggestive visual details. The opening action really tells us nothing that could not be deduced from the words, but it does emphasize the eternal lethargy of the characters and the fact that they live worlds apart from one another. It presents them visually and therefore more cogently than words can, particularly when words must create the illusion of everyday speech. And it becomes particularly revealing when the protagonist does not speak much. In the scene there is a perfect harmony between the atmosphere created by the stage business and that created by the words and tone of voice; indeed, in this expressive Defilippian language, there is meaning even in the pauses, rich in their interior tonalities.

Luca Cupiello wants to keep alive the joy of earlier years, when the children were small and the family was all united. In a glow of nostalgia he builds the traditional Nativity scene, oblivious to his children's cynicism and his family's struggle against poverty and the threat of dissolution12. Only when the family conflict reaches a climax, at the end of act 2, does Luca peep out from behind his paper toys. Ninuccia, his daughter, is surprised by her husband in the arms of another man. Insults are hurled, the rivals rush outside to fight, mother and daughter are left fainting and hysterical. This is the moment Luca chooses for his entrance as one of the three Wise Men of the Nativity story, a long rug draped over his shoulder, a gold paper crown on his head, a sparkler in one hand and an umbrella in the other as a Christmas present for his wife. With his son and brother behind him, dressed in similar fashion, he kneels before his appalled wife and sings a carol as the curtain falls. Three days later, with the opening of act 3, he lies in bed again, paralyzed by his encounter with reality; and in the end he dies, unable to come to grips with the grown-up world. His eyes are filled with the vision of a vast, world-sized manger in which a giant newborn baby Jesus howls; as he breathes his last, he cries, “What a beautiful crèche!” and, as an added touch of irony, he asks forgiveness for his daughter as he joins her hand with her lover's, mistaking him for her husband.

In the very setting of the first act, the Cupiellos' master bedroom, we are faced with abject poverty. Luca, his wife, and their son Nennillo must all share the one bedroom. The house is obviously unheated: Concetta wears a shawl about her shoulders. Luca's head is wrapped in a woolen scarf, and Nennillo is buried under the bedcovers. A similar setting will be seen in Millionaires' Naples! and Filumena Marturano. The protagonist, despite his advanced age, personifies innate simplicity, purity, and traditional values as he insists on using his Christmas manger to communicate his world to others. Luca is hardly a new character for De Filippo; there were glimpses of him in Vincenzo of Who Is Happier than I!, who pursued happiness, if not as naively as Luca, just as unrealistically. There is, however, a marked difference. More than merely a simple, naive person who does not want to grow, Luca also wants to keep the world around him the way it was. With his manger he pays homage to a very old and not exclusively Neapolitan tradition, motivated by the childlike residue of uncorrupted goodness lying more or less hidden in every man. Convinced of Christ's benevolence, he would like to find that same genuine love among men. But it is a vain desire. He and his manger are rejected by all; and in that rejection is the rejection of the spirit of Christmas—its joy, hope, love, and family unity—and all humanity's rejection of the mystery of love expressed in Christ's incarnation. The manger is on stage for the audience too. More than a way of telling us what is going on in the characters' minds, it forces us to reflect on the contrast between apparent joy and actual misery. In a materialistic world—De Filippo seems to suggest—only innocent and perhaps naive people like Luca are capable of such love.

However, Luca's stubbornness in building the Nativity scene also demonstrates his immaturity and irresponsibility; it is a way of fleeing into a world of illusion. He does not exercise the necessary paternal authority and guidance, either by helping his lazy son make a life for himself or by persuading his libertine daughter to remain faithful to her husband; his family goes to pieces, and he must suffer for his unconscious escapism. Through the attending physician, De Filippo comments bitterly and sadly: “Luca Cupiello has always been a big child who thought of the world as an enormous toy … when he realized that the toy should be played with, not as a child, but as a big man … he couldn't do it. The man in Luca Cupiello is missing.” “Luca dies and must die, even if he arouses pity,” De Filippo told me in an interview. “He is a victim of his own addiction to the game of childish illusions. The manger he builds is a kind of drug which paralyzes his imagination and distracts him from daily living.” In fact, Eduardo concluded that “the manger also symbolizes anything which does not have any relation to the real problems of a man or a class of people, anything which is encouraged by the authorities.” It is a kind of Homeric lotus, a soporific, like soccer, television, or whatever else is used to put the conscience to sleep.

This implicit social criticism, so characteristic of De Filippo's postwar theater, comes through most clearly in the structural elements which will become basic in those later plays. In the majority of the mature works the action centers around a tormented, disillusioned character who suffers from alienation and lack of communication with the surrounding world, particularly the family. On stage, Luca is always shown somewhat isolated from others, often in confrontation with them. But the others do not constitute a solid opposition. They have differing opinions, but, in their own way, they too lack any balanced, realistic approach to life, living their lives in absurd pettiness, busy with concerns important for appearances only. In them one sees the historical condition of Italian society in that period, and one recognizes in particular the spirit of the Neapolitan lower middle class—their desires, resourcefulness, ardor and extravagance, goodness and impulsiveness, misery and will to live—and at the same time their unawareness of their social and political plight. Luca, his neighbors, and their whole class lack the courage to look beyond Fascism's facades and discover the reality; they represent an irresponsible society which, by continuing to play with toys, indirectly indulges the wishes of the political power. In the postwar plays De Filippo tries to show how his characters can deal with a crumbling world by achieving solidarity as a family (witness the Jovine family in Millionaires' Naples!). However, this solidarity is as frequently betrayed within the family as in the society it reflects. This betrayal is developed most poignantly in De Filippo's treatment of World War II, and it is visible in less blatant injustices like the exploitation of the poor and the oppression of the weak through regressive, suffocating social institutions and the indifference of society as a whole.

But even when dealing with such complex themes, De Filippo does not abandon his comic vein. Christmas at the Cupiellos' gets its humanity from its Neapolitan atmosphere and its vivacious comedy from its structure, a series of blunders reminiscent of the pulcinellata. The unsuspecting Luca first delivers to his son-in-law his daughter's confession that she is running away with her lover, then insists that the lover stay for Christmas dinner. But in his Pulcinellesque mistake of uniting the lovers at his deathbed, he imparts a lesson on the importance of love, be it extramarital or not. Like every Pulcinella, he is unaware that he pronounces truths that society would prefer to ignore. And so it is that the farcical elements have a serious side. There are reminiscences of the lazzi of the commedia in the confrontation between the weak father and his stubborn son, in the uncle who is always being robbed and mocked by his nephew, in the boy's persistence in finding the manger ugly. Nennillo and his uncle are still tied to the fixed types of the tradition, but they point toward more individualized characters later on. The one serious character is again a woman. While her husband builds the manger, Concetta must take care of the details of everyday life and even prepare the glue and provide the nails for his project. Like the wife in Gennariniello, she must bear the family responsibility alone and, like her too, she genuinely loves her husband.

TOWARD THE THEATER OF THE GROTESQUE

In an era that Pirandello characterized as grandiose in the worst sense—“Italians all living the life of the senses, intoxicated by sun, light, color, exulting in song, each one playing some easy musical instrument … fanciful men of letters speaking a grandiloquent tongue, magnificient adorners, and evokers of past glories”—De Filippo portrayed the humble and even the degenerated aspects of life. Inherent in his writing is an essentially ethical purpose: to castigate the moral failure of the men of his times and to condemn dissolute or immoral customs, evil masquerading as good, egoism in the guise of charity. Although his ethical position has a social basis, his interest in social issues is less urgent than his concern for moral or existential issues. With moral themes, his sarcasm and irony are accentuated. However, the reduction of men to puppets elicits pity as well. While openly attacking the games of pretense which convention compels people to play, while demolishing the facade of bourgeois respectability, De Filippo nonetheless takes a sympathetic attitude toward the individual victim, showing genuine feelings crumbling under the pressure of an inflexible code of conduct.

De Filippo brings to these themes his own understanding of the popular theater and the theater of the grotesque. Luigi Ferrante remarks that De Filippo's “grotesque is expressed by means of an irony of popular origin which operates in his plays as a means of demystifying hypocrisies and clichés”13. By ironically decomposing reality, De Filippo reveals the factitious nature of what is taken for reality, displaying in his characters the behavior of man in a post-heroic age. Irony also derives from the playwright's awareness that the values of that period, the age of Fascism, have themselves been shown to be fragile and hollow. The result is a drama of emptiness, of people who have no future.

In the two-act Ditegli sempre di sì (Always say yes!, 1932) the hero Michele is the victim of a conflict between an “idiotic” self-effacement and the practical need for self-assertion. The dominant signifiers here are the “fool” and the “wise man” juxtaposed humorously to suggest that wisdom and madness are not always distinguishable. “Foolish,” like “crazy,” is a label other people impose on someone who threatens their conventional, rigidly prescribed view of reality, and Michele earns both qualifiers as he returns from “a long business trip”—actually a period in a mental asylum—and starts naively revealing everyone's secrets. Out of the “madness” of social relationships—so De Filippo paradoxically suggests—arises the protagonist's personal history. His is the kind of madness described by Roland Barthes in a review of Foucault, a madness which no longer demands a substantive definition as a disease, or a functional definition as antisocial behavior, but a structural definition as the discourse of reason about nonsense. The madman's derangement derives from his belief that others perceive the same reality as he does, and from his failure to recognize that each person must find the truth for himself. Michele speaks with the voice of madness as he rebels against conventional roles and behavior. But his madness is no mere comic resolution to a funny situation, as it was in Men and Gentlemen; rather, it is a paradoxical twisting of social reality by a man who takes euphemisms and clichés seriously and thus judges the “wise” speakers insane. His position therefore is not farcical, but grotesque. In renewing the old theme of the “madman” who reveals the craziness of sane people, De Filippo relates himself to Pirandello, Dostoievski, and the literature of Decadence in general, but with a Neapolitan spirit.

In these works written during De Filippo's association with Pirandello, the master's evident influence never distorts the essentially popular nature of De Filippo's theater; the solid realism at their base saves them from the dry intellectualism and abstraction that often plague the grotesque theater. Uno coi capelli bianchi (A fellow with white hair, 1935) fails for a different reason: the dialectic of being and appearance, face and mask, and the relativity of truth, is never adequately connected to the other motifs, in particular the conflict between the older generation and the younger. This conflict was of great contemporary concern, however, because of the Fascist regime's reactionary doctrine and praxis, and the play was well received by the Fascist public despite its faults.

With this three-act play De Filippo sets aside the lower-middle-class milieu for the arrogant, well-to-do upper middle class. His growing polemical tendency manifests itself as he turns the grotesque to the task of denouncing a specific bourgeois type, the man of privilege who thinks he has the right to impose his views on others and judge them with an air of superiority. Thus, he creates his first wholly negative character—one who nevertheless deserves our pity. The title of the play is a phrase used to describe an older person who acts in a manner unbefitting his age. Old Battista Grossi should be disinterested, serene, indulgent, and trustworthy. Instead, he is hypocritical, impulsive, and irresponsible. He feigns modesty, but is deeply self-centered. He pretends support for youth, but would be the first to blame them. Simulating innocence, he is flagrantly culpable of inadequacy as a human being.

Battista is obviously a caricature; and, as Freud observes, caricature is a means of rejecting those who stand for “authority and respect and who are exalted in some sense”14. Nonetheless, De Filippo does not make Battista a pathological case. The character does not act wholly out of malice, but because, after so many years of hard work, he refuses to accept being replaced by his son-in-law as head of the family business. Because everyone respects the wisdom of someone with white hair, Battista can involve himself again in the life around him; but he does so by creating intrigues, suspicion, and discord, perhaps feeling that only in this way can he regain a measure of power and keep up the illusion of youth. Unfortunately, the more he wants to be part of the family and feel important, the more he forces himself on them and the more he is isolated. Through a protagonist like Battista, living an existential drama in a hostile world, the grotesque situation becomes Pirandellian tragicomedy. The protagonist is a victim, his oppressor Time; and, as always, Time wins. What seems at first a private tragedy thus becomes a profoundly human drama of universal importance.

Battista suggests a more deeply explored Luca Cupiello. However, he lacks Luca's poetry, remaining an aged child, one who does not understand the cycle of life. In him there is the hypocrisy of Molière's Tartuffe and the slander of Don Marcio in Goldoni's La bottega del caffè. De Filippo has suggested that Battista is a product of capitalism: his father and grandfather created wealth, but he himself has accomplished little, living on what others have done and envying whoever replaces him in the world of work. But, however well drawn, he cannot guarantee a good play, and this one lacks the theatricality that one expects from De Filippo and the cohesion needed for it to live on stage. The contrast between life and form—obviously Pirandellian—is not given an adequate problematic suspense, and the play ends up confused in tone, satirical and documentary at the same time.

A Pirandello short story that De Filippo and Pirandello dramatized together, “L'abito nuovo” (The new suit, 1936) rewards attention by showing how De Filippo could bring his theatrical and thematic abilities to bear on a structure not his own15. As with other Pirandello short stories, the world of this story is permeated by a bitter sadness that expresses itself in the grotesque deformation of a man's life. The down-at-heel Michele Crispucci has had to suffer the shame of his wife's desertion and now, on top of that, the indignity of the wealth, of suspicious origin, he has inherited at her death. His colleagues, who mocked him as the betrayed husband, envy his newfound wealth. Michele would like nothing more than to give it away to them, but his mother and daughter are opposed to his wish. It is emblematic of his decision to accept the legacy when he comes home wearing a new suit. More than simply a sketch awaiting broader development, the story is perfect in itself, with its own life. In sharp, concentrated language, Pirandello had created a dramatic work which could easily have been expanded as it was and divided into highly effective theatrical scenes.

But when De Filippo transformed it into a play, he did not merely adapt it; the final three-act work is quite different from the original. While the short story concentrates exclusively on the central character and “the difficulty and the pain of lifting his voice out of that abyss of silence in which his soul had been submerged for so long,” the play fuses realistic, grotesque, and absurd elements to develop a wider significance and a new spirit. The themes remain Pirandellian: an honest man succumbs because he cannot bear to continue wearing the mask that society imposes on him, or perhaps because he realizes that he is not the person others see in him. But De Filippo continues to develop his own drama, the drama of the man attached to a fictitious reality which he has made for himself and which he does not want to see destroyed by others, but who nonetheless—like Luca, Battista, or Vincenzo—is finally defeated. The abstractly allusive surrealistic tone of the short story is not to De Filippo's taste; accordingly he fills the play with characters of a Neapolitan cast and color.

The New Suit is a satire on the bourgeois mentality which values only money and appearances. It is a bitter play, intended to convey a certain warning to a world in which men of moral scruples like Crispucci are getting fewer, while people like Concettino and the greedy neighbors multiply, infinitely multiplying offenses to conscience. The characters are thus larger in the play than in the story, especially the ex-wife, who from a modest prostitute becomes a new Aphrodite and a symbol of lust. The strongest effects—dramatic, ironic, harsh, and irritating—come from the theater of the grotesque, the vivacity comes from the popular theater. The protagonist is obviously Pirandellian, but his existential suffering is typically Defilippian, a suffering that will become more pronounced in postwar plays like Those Ghosts! and The Big Magic.

In Non ti pago (I won't pay you, 1940), as in The New Suit, De Filippo casts Neapolitan milieu and elements from the popular theater in a Pirandellian mold. Again, the focus is on the paradoxes of everyday life, expressed in a protagonist whose innate stubbornness recalls Pirandello, but whose characteristic habits are Neapolitan: the ancient passion for the lottery, the superstitious belief in the power of dreams, and the dependence on a palliative religion—all illusory antidotes for an incurable poverty. As Carlo Filosa has pointed out, in I Won't Pay You De Filippo makes perfect use of two essential methods of Pirandello's theater: the initial static one of giving the basic paradox a striking but apparently realistic context; and the second dynamic one of demonstrating the paradox through an insistent and ultimately sophistic dialectic16. However, here the similarity ends, for De Filippo is most interested in the moral implications of the situation, and he reserves his most powerful condemnation for ignorance, superstition, and the unscrupulous clergymen who exploit them.

The play centers on Ferdinando Quagliulo, the manager of a lotto office, and his paradoxical refusal to pay off on a four-million lire jackpot. He contends that the winner, his dependent and his daughter's fiancé Mario Bertolini, accidentally intercepted numbers that Ferdinando's dead father had intended to reveal to Ferdinando himself. Unbeknown to his father, Ferdinando had changed addresses, and Mario instead was on hand to dream the prophetic dream! After many quarrels, Ferdinando finally pays; but he calls on the realm of the dead to burden Mario with a problem for every lira. And, indeed, Mario faces so many troubles that he is in the end compelled to renounce the money to free himself from the curse.

Ferdinando's strange refusal to honor a legitimate winning ticket reflects lower- and middle-class Neapolitans' belief in dreams and their connection to the numbers game of lotto, a belief so strong that the Book of Dreams, which assigns numbers to dream objects and events, becomes almost a new Gospel, and superstition becomes a faith inseparably fused with religion. Mario's actions too are reactions to a reality created wholly out of his credulity. Thus, in a Pirandellian way, illusions, desires, and fact become one indivisible reality. However, unlike Pirandello, De Filippo indirectly shows the social nature of the illusions. In his view, superstition is a bow to the fearful and inexorable power that the poor people unconsciously feel lies behind the misfortunes of life. Behind the comedy is thus a bitter reality which justifies De Filippo's sarcastic tone when Ferdinando confronts the priest, the one wanting to know about the life beyond and the reason for his father's mistake, the other defining everything as a “mystery” because he is comfortable with other people's superstition. But De Filippo anticipates the solutions devised by the protagonists of his mature plays, especially Those Ghosts! and The Big Magic, in making Ferdinando—still victimized, still trapped by superstition—defend himself by a bold, realistic-fantastic stratagem. Thus, as much as certain situations or attitudes may suggest Pirandello, the influence is on again, off again, often external—sometimes a matter of plot only. Don Ferdinando's “proofs” for his contention, which tend toward the absurd and surreal, never detract in the slightest from the joyful involvement of the spectator; they are staged with rare comicalness, rendered with an able, relaxed attention to dialogue, and moved by a spirit of excitement.

I Won't Pay You marks the climax of the first phase of De Filippo's career as a playwright and, in its portrayal of the central character, a major step in his artistic development. In this play his special brand of paradoxical fantasy is at its freshest. His unbreakable attachment to the San Carlino theater—its types, manners, and traditional subjects—is evident in the swift pace of the scenes, constantly governed by a logic which makes fantasy and reality work naturally together, and in the lively speech, its style ironic but glib and easy. Nonetheless, the deep seriousness of his comedy shows unequivocally that he entertains a more profound purpose and draws his motives from feeling. The play thus has the playfulness of a joke, but is enriched by human excitement and satirical jabs. Italian audiences responded heartily to Eduardo's ironic messages, chief of which was that to gain a little one must work hard, but to gain a great deal one need do nothing at all.

In the postwar plays corruption, misery, and existential desperation are clearly connected to their social causes, and De Filippo often gives his central character a subsidiary function as his spokesman in condemning social evils. In the early 1940s such criticism, however peripheral, had to be disguised because of the Fascist censorship. Nonetheless, Io, l'erede (I'm the heir, 1942), the last of the early works, points toward things to come. Through yet another Pirandellian plot, De Filippo shows how philanthropy can at times be destructive to both giver and receiver. Once again he exploits a situation dear to the popular Neapolitan theater: Ludovico, a sly sponger, manages to trick his way into a household and live without working. Characteristically, the old theme acquires a new value as a vehicle for criticizing the middle class for its unscrupulous charities and—recalling Brecht's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny—commenting on the generally negative effect that philanthropy has had on social progress. A great success abroad, especially in London and Russia, it was revived in April 1968 at the Valle theater in Rome under the title The Heir and was more successful than it had been a quarter century earlier.

Through the protagonist, Prospero Ribera, De Filippo expresses his contempt for the hypocritical gestures of wealthy landowners who attempt to consolidate their power under the guise of charity. Ludovico would like to live according to a human code, and he therefore proposes a new article to be added to the Code of Civil Law:

Any person who, in order to sleep in peace at night and to reserve a place for himself in Paradise, commits an abnormal act of kindness against a fellow citizen, thereby removing from circulation and rendering unproductive a portion of our human capital, and who, to justify this same act of egotistical profiteering, attributes it to Christian charity, shall be punished by so many years imprisonment.

[p. 527]

Ludovico is no simple sponger, but, rather, a living reproach to the world which had made his wronged father its dependent; and he submits to it only in order to take his revenge on it. This society cannot take hold of its conscience by itself; he must shake it loose from ingrained customs by exaggerated, absurd behavior. In De Filippo's mature plays the main character develops beyond Ludovico's kind of self-critical reaction against the system; in demonstrating his thesis, Ludovico does not really succeed as a human character, though he does manage to bring a certain dramatic force to a situation initially stagnant.

In these last plays De Filippo presents a main character who attempts to free himself from a suffocating existence. However, he gives such painstaking attention to the comic-grotesque chorus, in order to portray the moral and social misfortunes of the lower classes, that the humor becomes painful, the irony too biting, the dialogue sometimes too stylized and even pedantic. But, notwithstanding these defects, De Filippo shows a new sureness of structure. The scenes are always functional, ending neatly either with a cap line or with a dramatic turn of events that gives the action new development. The main characters, in the early works mere sketches, maintain the vivacity of their theatrical antecedents and receive more attention, have more purpose. The early works depend on clownish gimmicks, slapstick, surprise, misunderstandings, double entendre, and comic lines that indirectly underline the main character's interior drama. In the last works the comedy is a higher comedy which usually stems not from the lines themselves, but from the more studied situations in which the main character is put. The secondary characters are almost free of the limitations of type; often they function to increase the main character's desperation or to create an atmosphere that contrasts with that desperation and lets us feel it more.

Notes

  1. As quoted by R. Iacobbi, “Napoli milionaria!,” Il cosmopolita, 1945; reprinted in English in a pamphlet distributed to the spectator of Millionaires' Naples! at the Aldwych Theatre, London, 1972. De Filippo's collected plays are published in two series: plays from 1920 through 1942 in one volume, entitled Cantata dei giorni pari (Cantata for even days); those produced between 1945 and 1965—with the addition of Non ti pago, which is dated 1940—in three volumes, entitled Cantata dei giorni dispari (Cantata for odd days). The latter group contains his most celebrated successes. Thus stated, however, the order is deceptive, since the first volume to appear was actually the initial volume of the second series, Cantata dei giorni dispari, which came out in 1951 without the indication that it was Volume 1 of a series and without the original dates of the plays. A second edition of the same volume, with play dates ranging from 1945 to 1948, bears the copyright date 1957, by which time the project of publishing his entire works appears to have taken shape. Volume 2 of Cantata dei giorni dispari, containing, in addition to two earlier works, the plays written between 1950 and 1957, came out in 1958. Volume 3, plays produced between 1957 and 1965, did not appear until 1966. The success of the first volumes of Cantata dei giorni dispari led to the publication of the collected early works, in 1959, under the derivative title of Cantata dei giorni pari. The titles—which have been criticized as being not especially descriptive and somewhat pretentious—are in any case ambiguous. The phrase “giorni dispari” can mean either the odd-numbered days of the month or the odd days of the week, considered in Italy to begin on Monday. Perhaps the distinction is unimportant, however, since, in either case, the implication is that the “odd days” are the unlucky ones (cf. our own Friday the 13th). The title Cantata of Odd Days, given in 1951 to the plays dating from the immediate postwar period, referred to the misfortunes of Italy in that time. The “even days” of the title later attributed to the plays of the prewar Fascist period are an ironical adaptation of the former title and presumably should be interpreted to mean “the days when everything seemed to be going well.”

  2. Anton Giulio Bragaglia in Pulcinella (Rome: Casini, 1953) affirms that in the pulcinellata there is a preponderance of jest and movement over word: “it is a theater free of any rigidly schematic form and the major techniques employed were those of repetitions of situations and the use of double meanings attached to situations, words and events.”

  3. Cantata dei giorni pari (Turin, 1967), p. 20. Hereafter page numbers in brackets in the text in this chapter refer to this edition. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

  4. Bander, “Critical Estimate,” p. 9.

  5. Robert W. Corrigan, Masterpieces of the Modern Italian Theatre (New York: Collier Books, 1967), p. 8.

  6. Gennaro Magliulo, Eduardo De Filippo (Bologna, 1959), p. 35.

  7. Vito Pandolfi, I contemporanei, vol. 3 (Milan: Marzorati, 1970), p. 363.

  8. Luigi Ferranti, Teatro italiano grottesco (Bologna: Cappelli, 1964), p. 57.

  9. Sergio Torresani, Il teatro italiano negli ultimi vent'anni (1945-1965) (Cremona, 1969), p. 242.

  10. Simonetta Scornavacca, “La storia della ‘Gente’ attraverso l'opera di Eduardo.” Unpublished thesis written at the University of Rome, 1970, p. 27.

  11. In two other early one-acts—Quinto piano ti saluto (Farewell to the fifth floor, 1934) and Il dono di Natale (The Christmas gift, 1932)—De Filippo shows ability to give this intimate note a semimelodramatic cadence, more fully developed in mature works like Filumena Marturano.

  12. The “presepio” or crèche, an elaborate recreation of the scene of Christ's Nativity, is a feature particularly characteristic of the churches and homes of Naples at Christmas time.

  13. Luigi Ferrante, Teatro italiano grottesco (Bologna: Cappelli, 1964), p. 31.

  14. Sigmund Freud, The Basic Writings (New York: A. A. Brill, 1938), p. 77.

  15. For the Pirandello story in English, see Luigi Pirandello, Short Stories, trans. by Lily Duplaix.

  16. Carlo Filosa, Eduardo De Filippo: Poeta comico del ‘tragico quotidiano’ (Frosinone, 1978), p. 132.

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De Filippo's Inspiration and Creative Process

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