all evidence. Encouraged by Laudisi, who is amused by the others’ insistence on one truth when he knows there may be several, the townspeople confront the veiled Signora Ponza herself, who reveals that she is both Signor Ponza’s second wife and Signora Frola’s daughter. The reply satisfies no one but Laudisi, but it is, as Signora Ponza understands, the only solution that compassion will allow.

In his monograph on Modernism in Modern Drama (1966), Joseph Wood Krutch speaks of Pirandello as making the most crucial denial of all: the denial of the existence of a continuous, identifiable self. The play, however, is less a modern skeptic’s dramatization of the dissolution of self than it is a forceful suggestion that truth is not an external, objective fact but an internal, psychological reality. In demonstrating dramatically that Signora Ponza is both women, depending on what her perceiver chooses her to be, Right You Are (If You Think So) sets the stage for Pirandello’s subsequent, more complex inquiries into the nature of reality and illusion.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

The first of a trilogy of stage plays that includes Each in His Own Way and Tonight We Improvise, Six Characters in Search of an Author is a spectacularly theatrical play that leaves its audience as confused as the Stage Manager and Actors whom a family of Characters interrupts, hoping that they will dramatize its story. Those Characters—the Father, his estranged wife, his son, and three stepchildren—claim to have been created by an author who, having given them life, has abandoned them. Driven by the need for self-actualization, the Father insists on enacting—or living—the family’s story onstage, which the Characters do in increasingly provocative episodes that culminate in the drowning of one child and the suicide of another.

Some years earlier, when the couple had only one child, the Father recognized the attraction his wife had for an employee, so he sent the two of them off to live in a common-law relationship that resulted in three children. A number of years later, the Father visits Madame Pace’s brothel, where the Stepdaughter has been forced, by poverty, to work, and he then becomes her client. The Father insists that the Mother’s interruption of the encounter and the discovery of the young woman’s identity prevented a consummation, but the Stepdaughter’s bitterness hints otherwise.

The family’s intensely emotional story constitutes the dramatic center of the play, but the play’s greatest interest rests in the interplay among the dimensions of reality and fiction it presents. Although the Characters insist that they are living, not reenacting, their story, the Stage Manager believes otherwise. His attempt to cast the Actors as the Characters, however, results in a patently false performance, lending curious authenticity to the presumably fictive Characters. For the Characters, the script, though unfinished, is their destiny, compelling them to define themselves through what their author has created and constantly to live their story and their suffering.

As drama, Six Characters in Search of an Author is exceptionally self-conscious, dramatizing not only the relationship between reality and illusion in a philosophical sense but also the process of character creation. The play boldly presents character in the making, from the author’s conception through the independent, seemingly autonomous transformations that each character undergoes before achieving full realization. When the Actors play the Characters, it becomes evident that their interpretation of character does not coincide with that of the author, thus making the actor a participant in the creation as well. Still, the Father, who feels confident that he knows his own essential nature, argues that the fictive character’s life is fixed and identifiable, unlike the human life, which changes daily.

In his preface to the play, Pirandello speaks of how the Characters surfaced in his imagination one day, but how, finding no special meaning in them, he decided to abandon them. The Characters, though, remained, virtually demanding that they live and making Pirandello realize it was no longer in his power to deny them life. Thereafter, they chose their own time to reappear in his imagination, each time enticing him to give them a story, until Pirandello found himself obsessed with them. It was then that he had the idea of dramatizing this peculiar, but artistically typical, situation itself, to present the autonomy of these dramatic characters. The result, he remarks, was a combination of “tragic and comic, fantastic and realistic” that finally suggested the conflict between an ever-changing life and a fixed, immutable form.

Pirandello’s manipulative powers are at their best in this play, which ends with the Actors, as well as the audience, questioning whether the deaths of the children are real, and hence a onetime occurrence, or fictive, and hence performable night after night. The unsettling ending is a fitting climax to the ongoing dialectic between reality and illusion and life and art that the Characters’ invasion of the Actors’ stage has caused.

Henry IV

A play as provocative dramatically and philosophically as Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV introduces an unnamed protagonist who, some twenty years earlier, suffered a fall during a masquerade party. Dressed as Henry IV at the time, he has since lived his life as though he were the eleventh century German king, with a host of retainers who support the pretense. The protagonist repeatedly replays one particular incident in the life of the historical king, Henry’s penitent journey to Canossa, where he knelt before Pope Gregory VII. At the masquerade, the woman whom the protagonist loved, Donna Matilda, was dressed as Matilda of Canossa, and she has remained that figure in the mind of the madman.

Early in the play, Donna Matilda, along with four others—Carlo Di Nolli, the protagonist’s nephew; Frida, Donna Matilda’s daughter and Carlo’s fiancée; Belcredi, the rival for Donna Matilda’s affection; and Dionysius Genoni, a physician—visit the throne room, intending to administer a treatment that they hope will restore the protagonist’s memory. Through dressing the young woman as her mother in masquerade twenty years earlier, then presenting her along with the older woman, who has aged, they hope to telescope time and shock the protagonist into sanity. The group does not know, however, that the protagonist recovered his memory after twelve years and has for the past eight years only pretended to be Henry IV.

The plan proceeds and backfires. When the protagonist sees the young woman looking exactly as her mother did twenty years earlier, he loses his sense of certainty in his sanity; thinking the younger woman to be Donna Matilda, he becomes obsessed with her, as he had been years before with her mother. As with the earlier play, the ending leaves the visitors and the audience questioning whether the final event occurs in the realm of reality or illusion, whether Henry IV is sane or insane when, in an act of revenge, he slays Belcredi. Either way, the protagonist must now remain in an “eternal masquerade,” permanently fixed in the identity of Henry IV. The love triangle is central to Henry IV, just as the family’s story was to Six Characters in Search of an Author, but as with the earlier drama, the play’s contribution to dramatic innovation rests in the philosophical and artistic questions that it raises.

Henry IV is perhaps the richest of Pirandello’s plays in its treatment of the complexity of identity, for each of its characters possesses at least two distinct selves. In the case of Donna Matilda, the character moves among several identities as the action shifts from the distant past to the recent past to the present. Which of these several selves she is at any given moment depends on the director of the play-within-the-play, Henry IV. If the protagonist is playing the penitent, Donna Matilda must assume the role within that scenario. So also might Donna Matilda be the young woman of twenty years earlier, whom the masquerading protagonist loved, or the middle-aged woman of the present, depending on the protagonist’s perception of her. The protagonist is well aware of his manipulative powers and of the superiority that his position grants him. When the protagonist pretends to be mad, he is fully conscious that his role is an illusion, but he sustains the role to amuse and protect himself. Even when he is actually mad, though, he is curiously superior to the others, for then he is so totally committed to his one, fixed identity as Henry IV that for him no distinction exists between the mask and the face.

Henry IV’s madness and sanity also serve to suggest the division between life and art that so fascinated Pirandello. As the playwright remarks in his 1908 essay, L’umorismo (revised 1920; partial translation On Humor, 1966; complete translation, 1974), we are constantly trying to stop the continuous flow of life and to fix it in determinate forms. In Henry IV, the protagonist, unlike the others in the play, succeeds through his self-created fiction, which, in its immunity to time, belies his own graying hair. Yet in his success, the protagonist has sacrificed the spontaneity that only the “continuous flow” of which Pirandello speaks can offer. The ongoing dialectic between motion and form that characterizes life is exemplified in the play’s final moments, when Frida steps out of the picture frame where she posed as the youthful Donna Matilda and the protagonist embraces her, in a ground swell of emotion that has been suppressed for twenty years. Within moments, however, the protagonist loses the possibility of embracing the pure life that Frida symbolizes, for in slaying Belcredi, he must reclaim and perpetuate his fictive role.

Each in His Own Way

Though less often performed in the United States than the three plays discussed above, Each in His Own Way exemplifies the theatrical innovation on which Pirandello’s fame rests. In this play, the audience itself is involved in the action, informing the already complex dialectic between the fictive and the real with yet another dimension. The play being performed is presumably based on the recent scandal involving Amelia Moreno, an actress who betrayed her sculptor fiancé, Giacomo La Vela, by running off with Baron Nuti, leading the distraught sculptor to suicide. Onstage, two men attempt to blame the dramatic counterparts of the three involved in the love triangle. As with Right You Are (If You Think So), the audience vacillates between believing first one person and then another, but here the playwright has added reversals that leave the audience uncertain as to whether the young woman, Amelia Moreno, is to be blamed. At the moment when she has been vindicated, she appears to take full responsibility and to apologize. The first-act curtain falls in a seeming intermission, but before the audience can parade out into the lobby, the “intermission” begins to take form onstage, which is now set as a theater with audience members and critics discussing the Pirandello play. In a wonderful invasion of this already unusual performance, a woman who is apparently Amelia Moreno rushes onstage to protest this intrusion of her privacy.

Act 2 begins with Amelia and the man for whom she left her artist fiancé arguing, embracing, then going off together as the guilty pair. Again, the curtain falls and is raised on the intermission set, and Amelia Moreno rushes onstage to protest. This time, however, the audience witnesses a presumably real-life scene among the characters on whom the drama is based. In a clever reversal, Pirandello has set up a situation in which life imitates art rather than the other way around. The annoyed actors refuse to perform the third act, and the play ends, presumably incomplete but having perfectly achieved Pirandello’s goal.