TRUTH MAKING: “REALITY” IN LUIGI PIRANDELLO’S HENRY IV 1

Truth Making: “Reality” in Luigi

Pirandello’s Henry IV
| CHIAMAKA UGWU |

Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV, written in 1921, made a significant contribution to

the canon of modern drama. The modern period encompassed a transformation
of drama beginning in the late nineteenth century, a hunger to represent reality
in counter-point to artificiality. Reality in this case represents the illogical world
we understand mainly through empirical experience, which exists independently
of our comprehension of it. Artificiality, in contrast, involves the ideas that
human beings construct to make our experiences in the world easier to
comprehend and classify. In their ambition to create worlds on stage that
reflected the reality of the twentieth century, many modern playwrights
experimented with dramatic structure as a way to manipulate an audience’s
perspective on the performance event. However avant-garde this
experimentation may have been, it often provided a sense of coherence in its
representation of reality. Arguably, Pirandello’s dramatic writing is geared
towards reflecting the chaos and instability of human life rather than giving it
coherence. In Henry IV, Pirandello paradoxically attempts to reflect the instability
of life by adopting formal structures which deliver order and unity to audiences.

Pirandello’s Henry IV tells the story of Henry, a “mad” man who believes
that he is Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV in an eleventh-century court and the
attempt by the actors who run his court to expose Henry’s life as fiction. As the
actors devise a plan to reveal this delusion to Henry climactically, confusion
arises as to whether or not he is actually mad. Henry expresses his awareness of
his fictional ‘mask’, and he asserts until the play’s tragic end that his fiction is not
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more or less real than their reality, which leaves questions about the nature of
truth and reality unresolved.

The formal play structure Pirandello adopts in Henry IV is rooted in an

early history of playmaking aimed at cultivating an audience’s belief in a
dramatic fiction as if it were, for the duration of a performance, their reality.
Aristotle’s Poetics encourages the unification of time “within a single day and
night” (23) and the events of the action to be “a complete unit […] so plotted that
if any of these elements is moved or removed the whole is altered and upset”
(28). Drawing from Aristotelian precepts, the ‘three unities’ of time, place, and
action were established during the Renaissance, after which “most critics
demanded that a play have a single
plot, take place in 24 hours or less, and
T While Pirandello’s be confined to one place” (Brockett
deployment of the 130). This dramatic model, targeted at
unities in the formal encouraging an audience’s belief in a
play, becomes convoluted in Henry IV
structure of Henry IV as multiple and intersecting worlds of
seems to provide time, place and action are revealed to
an audience despite Pirandello’s
coherence…Pirandello’s preservation of these dramatic unities.
manipulation of these
The worlds inhabited by
unities illuminates Pirandello’s characters and the actors
inconsistency and performing the roles of those
disorder in the play and characters can be divided into three
distinct worlds. First, in the ‘fictional’
in the world world, Pirandello’s characters play
characters within the court of Henry
IV, telling a story that is unmistakably fabricated. Second, the ‘performing
reality’ is the space of character self-consciousness, where Pirandello’s characters
are aware of the distance between their ‘playing-selves’ and their ‘real-selves’.
The final ‘reality’ involves the performance of Henry IV, in which the actors
playing Pirandello’s characters recognize themselves as playing the characters in
Henry IV’s court. That is to say that in the play there is a threefold performance,
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with real-life actors playing characters in the play we see unfolding, who are in
turn are fictional actors playing characters in another fictional world.

The superimposed representation of these worlds of playing and ‘reality’

and the struggle of the characters within them is arguably the most chaotic part
of the play, and it is seemingly contradicted by the organized structure of
Pirandello’s writing. While Pirandello’s deployment of the unities in the formal
structure of Henry IV seems to promise coherence for his audiences, Pirandello’s
manipulation of these unities illuminates inconsistency and disorder in his play
and in the world. This manipulation ultimately undermines confidence in the
separation of “fiction” and “reality,” which makes Henry IV an anomaly in the
longstanding dramatic tradition of counter-posing these two entities.

The unity of time in Henry IV is both upheld and subverted through

Pirandello’s formal structure. With “the early 1920s” revealed as the temporal
setting of the play (i), and the action of Acts 1 through 3 taking place in the same
day, time appears to be unified according to Aristotelian principles. However,
the time that the characters of Pirandello’s play act within the play they’re
putting on takes place in the eleventh century, creating a distortion between the
time period the audience believes that it is viewing and the time period the
characters are inhabiting. In this way, the audience, actors, and characters are
interacting with different time periods throughout the play: the immediate
present in which the audience is watching actors performing Pirandello’s
characters, the ‘performing’ present where the actors are playing characters who
are living in the 1920s, and the “fictionalized” present in which the characters are
playing figures in an eleventh-century German court.

The multilayered temporality of the play is further complicated when the

hired actors speak in the present tense when playing the “fictional” characters of
an eleventh-century court. One example is shown in Landolfo’s exclamation:
“We’re engaged here, day in, day out, in the most frightful war between Church
and State!” (2, emphasis added). In claiming the eleventh-century German court
as his present, Landolfo subverts the “reality” of the 1920s time setting the
audience believes is the present, thus corrupting the unity of time. Just as the
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unity of time is disrupted through the speech of the characters, the characters’
own unstable perception of the time they inhabit further adds to this disunity.

The confusion between their personal past and present for Pirandello’s
characters also dismantles the unity of time in Henry IV. Matilda, Henry’s now
aged lover, expresses confusion about whether Henry IV is speaking about
herself or her daughter when she reflects on a speech about her appearance: “In
fact my hair is brown, doctor, like my daughter’s. That’s why he started talking
about her!” (34). Matilda’s assertion that Henry has merged his memory of her in
the past with the appearance of her daughter in the present complicates the unity
of time within her own “reality.” This in turn introduces the audience to yet
another time period, Matilda’s past, which she superimposes on the present, and
which further muddles the multiple time periods already present. The actors’
and characters’ involvement with more than one time period throughout Henry
IV contradicts the stability of time while maintaining a unity of time, providing
audiences with the illusory comfort of a unified performance event that seems to
take place over a single day (though in different simultaneous years).

The unity of place is also both maintained and confuted in Henry IV. With
the setting given as “a lonely villa in the Umbrian countryside” (i), and each of
the acts taking place in different rooms within the villa, the unity of place seems
to be upheld throughout the play. However, with the furniture and properties of
the stage set “represent[ing] as accurately as possible the throne-room of Henry
IV” (1), complete spatial unity in the “villa” setting is betrayed, creating
incongruities between the represented setting and the setting Pirandello’s
characters play within. Adding to this disunity are the “two life-size modern
portraits in oils” (1, emphasis added), as well as the tailcoat worn by the servant
Giovanni (7), both from their contemporary setting, not the eleventh century in
the Holy Roman Empire.

Another example of this discord within the setting(s) of Henry IV is shown

in the privy councillors’ description of the Canossa court setting: “And this is the
throne room!... Or Worms! ... It depends what scene we’re playing. Like us, it
leaps about from here to there” (1-2). This incongruity of space even within the
already ‘fictional’ world of the court reveals the chaos created through the
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intersection of these multiple settings in one space. Henry IV dismantles any

unification of place within the world it represents, while the introductory
description, as well as the performance of the play on a single stage and viewed
by its audience in one evening, provides audiences with an illusion of spatial
unity.

To complete his attack on the Aristotelian unities, Pirandello both uses and
subverts the unity of action as a tool for endowing a sequence of action with
significance in the dramatic structure of Henry IV. The foremost disunity within
the play’s action is seen in Pirandello’s naming of the characters through their
roles within the “fictional” Canossa court instead of in the contemporary Italian
time frame of the play (i). By giving “real”
characters the names of their “fictional” court
roles, Pirandello ties the identities of the
Luigi Pirandello
characters to the fabricated world of the effectively
Canossa court. This naming coerces a presents plural
relationship between the “fictional” world and
the “performing reality,” in which the action of worlds that teeter
each character affects both worlds at the same on the boundary
time. One example of this is when Henry is
upset at Adalbert of Bremen being “driven […]
between fiction
away” “though the character playing Adalbert and reality
actually died: “But he started yelling ‘They’ve
driven Adalbert away’ […] because he didn’t realise poor old Tito was dead” (3).
The connection between these “realities” sustains a unity of action by allowing
an action in one reality to affect another observably and causally, which, for
Aristotle, creates “a complete unit” (28) of action. But this alleged unity
simultaneously confuses the boundaries between one character and another,
effectively splitting a “unified” character in two.

Ironically, the unity of action in Henry IV is mainly imposed on their

reality by the characters within the play, rather than through structural conceits
imposed by the playwright. With Henry IV’s demands on his court players,
including his transformation of Fino into Bertoldo to make a new member of his
court (4), Henry himself seems to be imposing the unity of action on the chaos of
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life. This desire to grant stable meaning to the action of the “fictional” court
figures is shared by other characters, including Landolfo:

It’s a shame … we’re all just here, with no one to direct us, no one to give us
a scene to act … we’ve got the form, but where’s the content? We’re not
even so well off as Henry IV’s councillors … at least they didn’t know they
were supposed to be acting … It wasn’t a part, I mean, it was their life. (5)

Landolfo’s desire for significance in their “play” of Henry IV’s court shows yet
another demand for unity of action. The structure and content of Henry IV collide
to assert and undermine credence in the unity of action.

In using and subverting the unities of time, place, and action in Henry IV,
Luigi Pirandello effectively presents plural worlds that teeter on the boundary
between fiction and reality. As fiction and reality become blurred, audiences are
able to find solace in the familiar “unified” structure of the play while still being
immersed in the confusion of the play.

Arguably, it is the job of the modern playwright to provoke and challenge

his audience. Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV re-evaluates the project of modern
drama, showing that the hybridization of traditional forms with contemporary
modern concepts and sentiments can create a new drama that maintains its
connection to earlier dramas while representing a precarious, unsettling
contemporary world. It is this desire to bridge old forms and new content that
made modern drama so unique and inspiring for future generations of
playwrights. Pirandello’s explosion of the definitions imposed on the real and
the imaginary, and his reimagining of the connections between past and present,
makes him a highly significant figure in the modern reimagining of the capacities
of the theatre for its creators, performers, and audiences.
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WORKS CITED

Aristotle. Aristotle on the Art of Fiction: “The Poetics.” Trans. L. J. Potts. London:
Cambridge University Press, 1968. Print.

Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1968. Print.

Pirandello, Luigi. Henry IV. Trans. Julian Mitchell. London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1979.
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