Three Plays

by
Luigi Pirandello
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1922

1. Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. Edward Storer, approved by author (from
1921 ed.)
2. Henry IV, trans. Edward Storer, approved by author (from 1922 ed.)
3. Right You Are! (If You Think So), trans. Arthur Livingston (from 1917 ed.)

[and for this online edition we have added:]

 Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author (1925), trans. Eric Bentley

 Sicilian Limes (1910), trans. Isaac Goldberg

 [For a page in Italian with a short biography and links to the original of some plays,
please see http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/p/pirandello/index.htm ]

PREFATORY NOTE
[By Arthur Livingston]

No apology is necessary for offering to American readers a play which critics, with singular
unanimity, have called one of the most original productions seen on the modern stage. In less
than a year's time, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" has won a distinguished place in the
dramatic literature of the Western world, attracting audiences and engaging intellects far removed
from the particular influences which made of it a season's sensation in Italy.

Yet the word "original" is not enough, unless we embrace under that characterization qualities far
richer than those normally credited to the "trick" play. The "Six Characters" is something more
than an unusually ingenious variation of the "play within a play." It is something more than a new
twist given to the "dream character" made familiar by the contemporary Italian grotesques. It is a
dramatization of the artistic process itself, in relation to the problem of reality and unreality
which has engaged Pirandello in one way or another for more than twenty years.
I venture to insist upon this point as against those observers who have tried to see in the "Six
Characters" an ironical satire of the commercial drama, as we know it today, mixed, more or less
artificially, with a rather obvious philosophy of neo-idealism. No such mixture exists. The blend
is organic. The object of Pirandello's hitter irony is not the stage-manager, nor the theatrical
producer, nor even the dramatic critic: it is the dramatist; it is the artist; it is, in the end, life itself.
I suppose the human soul presents no mysteries to those who have been thoroughly grounded in
the science of Freud. But in spite of psycho-analysis a few Hamlets still survive. Pirandello is one
of them.

What are people really like? In the business of everyday life, nothing is commoner than the
categorical judgment sweeping and assured in its affirmatives. But as we cut a little deeply into
the living matter of the spirit, the problem becomes more complicated. Do we ever understand the
whole motivation of an action -- not in others only but even in ourselves?

Oh, yes, there are people who know. . . . The State knows, with its laws and its procedures. And
society knows, with its conventions. And individuals know, with their formulas for conduct often
cannily applied with reference to interest. -- The ironical element, as everyone has noted, is
fundamental in Pirandello!

Apart from works in his earlier manner (realistic pictures from Southern Italian life, including
such gems as "Sicilian Limes"), Pirandello's most distinctive productions have dealt with this
general theme. No one of them, indeed, exhausts it. And how could this be otherwise? Pirandello,
approaching the sixties, to be sure, is nevertheless in spirit a man of the younger Italian
generation, which, trained by Croce and Gentile, has "learned how to think." But however great
his delight in playing with "actual idealism," he knows the difference between a drama and a
philosophical dissertation. His plays are situations embodying conclusions, simple, or indeed
"obvious" in their convincingness. They must he taken as a whole -- if one would look for a full
statement of Pirandello's "thought."

A "thought," moreover, which may or may not invite us to profound reflection. Enough for the
lover of the theatre is the fact that Pirandello derives the most interesting dramatic possibilities
from it. Sometimes it is the "reality" which society sees brought into contrast with the reality
which action proves (Il piacere dell'onestà) . Again, it is the "reality" which a man sees in himself
thwarted by the reality which actually controls ("Ma non è una cosa seria"). In "Right You Are"
(Così è, se vi pare) we have a general satire of the "cocksure," who, placed in the presence of
reality and unreality, are unable to distinguish one from the other.

In the "Six Characters" it is the turn of the artist. Can art -- creative art, where the spirit would
seem most autonomous -- itself determine reality? No, because once "a character is born, he
acquires such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody in
situations where the author never dreamed of placing him, and so acquires a meaning which the
author never thought of giving him." In this lies the great originality of this very original play --
the discovery (so Italian, when one thinks of it, and so novel, as one compares it with the
traditional rôle of the "artist" in the European play) that the laborious effort of artistic creation is
itself a dramatic theme -- so unruly, so assertive, is this thing called "life" ever rising to harass
and defeat anyone who would interpret, crystallize, devitalize it.
And beyond the drama lies the poetry, a poetry of mysterious symbolism made up of terror, and
rebellion, and pity, and human kindliness. Let us not miss the latter, especially, in the complex
mood of all Pirandello's theatre.

***

The three plays of Pirandello, here offered in translations that do not hope to be adequate, are
famous specimens of the theatre in Italy. The term "new" is much contested, not only in Italy but
abroad. In using the word here it is not necessary to claim that this young, impulsive,
fascinatingly boisterous after-the-war Italy is doing things that no one else ever thought of doing.
We remain on safe ground if we assert that Pirandello and his associates have broken the bounds
set to the old fashioned "sentimental" Latin play.

The motivations of the "old" theatre were largely ethical in character, developing spiritual crises
from the conflict of impulses with a rigid framework of law and convention. Dramatic art was, so
to speak, a department of geometry, dealing with this or that projection or modification of the
triangle. Husbands tearing their hair as wives proved unfaithful; disappointed lovers pining in
eternal fidelity to mates beyond their social sphere; cuckolds heroically sheathing the stiletto in
deference to a higher law of respectability; widows sending second-hand aspirants to suicide that
the sacrament of marriage might remain inviolate: -- such were the themes.

And there is no doubt, besides, that this "old" theatre produced works of great beauty and
intenseness; since the will in conflict with impulse and triumphing over impulse always presents
a subject entrancing in human interest and noble in moral implications.

But the potentialities of drama are more numerous than the permutations of three. The "new"
theatre in Italy is "new" in this discovery at least.

***

"Henry IV.," an equally strong and original variation of the insanity motive, is the first of two
plays by Pirandello dealing with a special aspect of the problem of reality and unreality. The
second, not yet given to the public, is Vestire gli ingnudi (", . . And ye clothed me!"). In the
former Pirandello studies a situation where an individual finds a world of unreality thrust upon
him, voluntarily reassuming it later on, when tragedy springs from the deeper reality. In "And ye
clothed me!" we have a girl who, to fill an empty life of no importance, creates a fiction for
herself, only to find it torn violently from her and to be left in a naked reality that is, after all, so
unreal.

These two plays indicate the present tendency of Pirandello's rapid production -- a tendency that
promises even richer results as this interesting author delves more extensively into the mysteries
of individual psychology.

"Henry IV.," meanwhile, is before us. It can speak for itself.

***
All of Pirandello's plays are built for acting, and only incidentally for reading. We make this
observation with "Right You Are" especially in mind, since that play, above all, is a test for the
actor. It is typical of Pirandello for its rapidity, its harshness and its violence -- the skill with
which the tense tableau is drawn out of pure dialectic, pure "conversation." Moreover, it states a
fundamental preoccupation of Pirandello in peculiarly lucid and striking fashion. Perhaps a better
rendering of the title Così è (se vi pare) will occur to many. Ludwig Lewisohn (happily, I
thought) suggested "As You Like It," no less. A possibility, quite in the spirit of Pirandello's title
in general, would have been another Shakespearean reminiscence: ". . . and Thinking Makes It
So." We have kept something approximating the literal, which would be: "So it is (if you think
so)."

The text of the "Six Characters" is that of the translation designated by the author and which was
used in the sensational productions of the play given in London and New York.

A.L.

[Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Arthur Livingston
(1883-1944) was professor of Italian at Columbia University]