Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays

Summary

This volume, published in New York in 1922 as Three Plays, brought Pirandello's theatre to English readers. It contains Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), both translated by Edward Storer, and Right You Are! (If You Think So) (1917), translated by Arthur Livingston, who also wrote the prefatory note. In Six Characters, a theatre company is rehearsing one of Pirandello's own plays, Mixing it Up, when six figures in mourning walk onto the stage: the Father, the Mother, the Step-Daughter, the Son, a silent Boy and a silent little Child. They say they are characters whose author conceived them and then abandoned them, and they demand that the Manager stage their drama. Their story comes out in quarrelling fragments. The Father sent the Mother away to live with his secretary, by whom she had three children; after that man's death the family fell into poverty, and the Step-Daughter came to work for Madame Pace, a dressmaker whose shop was a front for assignations. There the Father, not recognizing her, nearly became her client before the Mother burst in. The Manager has his actors rehearse the scene; the characters protest that their versions are false. The Father argues that a person is many selves and that it is unjust to judge a man by one moment, and that a character's fixed reality is more real than an actor's changing one. In the last act, set in a garden, the Child drowns in the fountain and the Boy shoots himself. The actors cry that it is only pretence; the Father cries that it is reality; the exasperated Manager ends the rehearsal. In Henry IV, a nobleman who played the German emperor Henry IV in a historical cavalcade some twenty years earlier was thrown from his horse and woke believing himself the emperor of 1077, the year of Canossa. His family keeps him in a villa fitted as an imperial court, with young men hired as privy counsellors. The woman he loved, Matilda Spina, her lover Baron Belcredi, her daughter Frida, his nephew Di Nolli and the psychiatrist Dr. Genoni arrive with a plan to shock him back to the present by setting Frida, dressed as her mother once was, in the frame of Matilda's portrait. Henry reveals to his counsellors that he recovered years ago and chose to keep his mask, and that Belcredi pricked his horse on the day of the fall. When the visitors learn this, Henry stabs Belcredi and, to escape the consequence, must remain the madman for ever. In Right You Are!, the gossips of a provincial capital cannot rest until they learn why the new secretary Ponza keeps his wife from her mother, Signora Frola. Each of the two says the other is mad, and records were lost in an earthquake. The veiled Signora Ponza at last declares that she is both what each believes and, for herself, no one, while the skeptic Laudisi laughs.

Plot or Argument

• Six Characters, Act I: The intrusion

  During a rehearsal the six characters arrive; the Father explains that they were born as characters and abandoned; the Step-Daughter and Father begin to tell, in conflict, the story of the family and of Madame Pace's shop.

• Six Characters, Act II: The scene at Madame Pace's

  Madame Pace appears as if summoned by the setting; the characters play the meeting of the Father and Step-Daughter, the actors attempt it, and the Step-Daughter mocks the actors' polish while the Father argues about the many selves in one person.

• Six Characters, Act III: The garden

  The Father contrasts the characters' fixed reality with the actors' shifting one; the Son reluctantly recounts the garden; the Child drowns in the fountain and the Boy shoots himself, leaving actors and Manager unsure whether it was pretence or reality.

• Henry IV, Act I: The court in the villa

  The counsellors coach a new recruit in the year 1077; the visitors arrive in costume; Belcredi and Matilda recall the cavalcade and the fall; Henry receives them as the penitent emperor before Canossa.

• Henry IV, Act II: The doctor's plan

  Dr. Genoni proposes to break the illusion with the living image of the portrait; Henry, alone with his counsellors, reveals that he is sane and has been acting the part.

• Henry IV, Act III: The mask fixed

  Frida steps from the frame; Henry confronts his visitors with his recovery, Belcredi's prick of the horse and the lost twenty years, then stabs Belcredi and gathers his counsellors around him for ever.

• Right You Are!, Act I: The puzzle

  Agazzi's household and their friends complain of Ponza's treatment of his mother-in-law; Signora Frola and then Ponza each visit and give opposite explanations, each describing the other as kindly deluded.

• Right You Are!, Act II: The search for documents

  The town looks for proof from the earthquake-ruined village; a staged meeting of Ponza and Signora Frola only deepens the doubt; Laudisi speaks to his own reflection about how others see him.

• Right You Are!, Act III: The veiled wife

  The Prefect summons Signora Ponza, who appears veiled, says she is both the daughter of one and the second wife of the other, and for herself whoever they choose to have her be.

Characters

• The Father, Six Characters

  Articulate head of the abandoned family, who argues that a person is many selves.

• The Step-Daughter, Six Characters

  Mocking, wounded young woman who insists on staging the scene at Madame Pace's.

• The Mother, Six Characters

  Silent sufferer in black who lives only in her grief.

• The Son, Six Characters

  Disdainful legitimate son who refuses to take part in the drama.

• The Manager, Six Characters

  Practical theatre director who tries to turn the characters' story into a play.

• Henry IV, Henry IV

  Nameless nobleman living, first in madness and then by choice, as the eleventh-century emperor.

• Matilda Spina, Henry IV

  The woman Henry loved, who played Matilda of Tuscany in the cavalcade.

• Baron Tito Belcredi, Henry IV

  Matilda's ironic companion and Henry's rival, whom Henry stabs.

• Dr. Dionysius Genoni, Henry IV

  Alienist whose theatrical shock cure precipitates the catastrophe.

• Signora Frola, Right You Are!

  Mother-in-law who speaks to her daughter only by notes in a basket.

• Ponza, Right You Are!

  Provincial secretary who says his mother-in-law is deluded about his wife.

• Lamberto Laudisi, Right You Are!

  Skeptical onlooker who mocks the town's hunt for the truth.

Lessons

• The character who will not be rewritten

  The six characters insist that their story is fixed and true, while the actors, who are real people, can only imitate it. Pirandello turns the usual relation of art and life upside down to ask which is more real, the changing person or the finished character.

  • Why do the characters object when the actors play their scene?
  • What does the Father mean when he says a character can laugh even at death?
  • Is a story's truth different from a historical fact's truth?

• Judged by one act

  The Father protests that it is unjust to sum up a person by a single shameful moment, since each of us is many selves to many people. The Step-Daughter answers that the moment happened. The play holds both claims in tension rather than resolving them.

  • Which act does the Father fear will define him, and why does the Step-Daughter insist on it?
  • Is the Father's argument a defence or an excuse?
  • How should a just person weigh one act against a whole life?

• Masks chosen and masks imposed

  Henry IV first wears a mask by accident and then by choice, preferring a fixed historical role to a world that moved on without him. His final crime makes the mask permanent. Pirandello presents the visitors' social roles as masks too.

  • Why does Henry keep pretending after he recovers?
  • What does he mean in saying the others live their madness without knowing it?
  • When does wearing a role protect a person and when does it trap him?

• Curiosity and charity

  In Right You Are!, the townspeople's hunger to know the truth about Ponza and Signora Frola tramples on two people who have arranged their lives to spare each other pain. Laudisi's laughter and Signora Ponza's veil leave the question unanswered.

  • Why do Agazzi's household and friends care so much about the Ponzas?
  • What arrangement have Ponza and Signora Frola made, whatever the truth is?
  • Is there a duty not to know some things about one's neighbours?

Context

Pirandello wrote these plays in the years around the First World War, when Italian theatre was dominated by well-made bourgeois dramas and by the so-called grotesque playwrights who mocked them. His own experience of a family fortune lost in the flooding of a sulphur mine and of his wife's long mental illness has often been connected with his preoccupation with madness and with the different selves others see in us. His theatre questioned the conventions of the stage itself and influenced later dramatists across Europe.

Composition

Così è (se vi pare) was first performed in Milan in 1917. Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore opened at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 9 May 1921 amid uproar, then triumphed in Milan; Pirandello revised it in 1925 with a preface. Enrico IV followed in 1922. Storer's translation of Six Characters, according to Livingston's note, was the version designated by the author and used for the London and New York productions of 1922; the volume was published by E. P. Dutton in New York in 1922.

Reception

Six Characters became one of the most performed and discussed plays of the century and made Pirandello's name an adjective for drama about drama and shifting identity. The Nobel Prize of 1934 cited his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art. Critics have read Henry IV alongside Hamlet and later existentialist theatre, and Right You Are! remains a favourite with companies for its sharp ensemble comedy.

Comparisons

• hamlet

  Hamlet's antic disposition and play within a play are the great precedents for Henry IV's chosen madness and for Six Characters' theatre that comments on itself.

• don-quixote

  Cervantes's knight lives inside a role drawn from books, as Henry lives inside the year 1077; the Father in Six Characters names Sancho Panza as a character who lives for ever.

• sartre-no-exit-and-three-other-plays

  Sartre's dead souls, like Pirandello's characters, are fixed in what they have done and judged by others' eyes.

• beckett-waiting-for-godot

  Both dramatists strip the stage of its illusions and leave audiences uncertain of what has happened, Pirandello through argument and Beckett through waiting.

• a-dolls-house-and-other-plays

  Ibsen's well-built domestic dramas represent the theatre of hidden pasts that Pirandello inherits and then breaks open by letting the characters argue with the play.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening stage directions of Six Characters, which ask that the characters look different in kind from the actors.
• Each time the Manager tries to turn the characters' story into a usable script, and what they object to.
• The two portraits on the wall in Henry IV and how the doctor plans to use one of them.
• Henry's speech to his counsellors at the end of Act II, when he drops the pretence.
• The basket of notes in Right You Are! and the moment the veiled wife finally speaks.

Key terms and names

Play within a play

A drama staged inside another drama; Six Characters begins as a rehearsal of Pirandello's own Mixing it Up and is taken over by the characters' story.

Madame Pace

The dressmaker whose shop is a front for assignations, who appears as if conjured when the scene is set.

Canossa

The castle where in 1077 Emperor Henry IV did penance before Pope Gregory VII; the year in which the madman lives.

Cavalcade

The costumed historical pageant on horseback twenty years earlier in which the fall took place.

Mask

Pirandello's image for the role a person plays before others, whether chosen or imposed.

Laudisi

The skeptic of Right You Are! whose laughter closes each act and whose talk with his mirror questions how others see him.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Who are the six characters, and what do they ask of the Manager?
2. Comprehension How did the man in Henry IV come to believe he was the emperor, and when did he recover?
3. Comprehension What are the two explanations given by Signora Frola and Ponza in Right You Are!?
4. Interpretation Why does the Step-Daughter laugh at the actors' version of her scene?
5. Interpretation At the end of Henry IV, why must Henry remain mad for ever?
6. Interpretation What does Signora Ponza's veil add to the meaning of her answer?
7. Big Question Is a person one self or many, and who has the right to say which self is real?
8. Big Question Is there any truth about a person that does not depend on who is looking?

Faith Connections

• 1 Corinthians 13:12 (Scripture)

  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: then shall I know even as also I am known. Pirandello's characters are known only partially by others; Paul places full knowledge of the self in God.

• James 4:11-12 (Scripture)

  James warns believers against speaking evil of a neighbour and asks who they are to judge another. Agazzi's household and friends make themselves judges of the Ponza family on the strength of rumour and a basket of notes.

• Augustine, Confessions X (Church Fathers)

  Augustine finds himself a great question to himself and searches the vast halls of memory, a Christian exploration of the divided self that Pirandello's Father describes.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If each person appears differently to every other person and even to himself, then no single act or account captures who someone is. Yet art fixes a character in one unchanging form. Therefore the character on the stage may be more stable, and in that sense more real, than the living person who plays him, and every attempt to settle the truth about a human being by outward evidence will fail.

Rhetorical device: metatheatre. In Six Characters the stage is a stage, the play is a rehearsal, and the climax ends in the actors arguing whether the Boy's death was pretence or reality.

Debate: Resolved: that the townspeople in Right You Are! have a right to know the truth about the Ponza household.

Memory Work

We believe this conscience to be a single thing, but it is many-sided.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Compare the Father in Six Characters and Henry in Henry IV as men who want to escape being judged by one moment of their lives. Does Pirandello sympathize with them?

Comparison with Hamlet: Hamlet puts on an antic disposition and Henry IV keeps up a feigned madness. Compare why each chooses madness as a mask and what it costs him.

Medical Lens

Two of the three plays turn on the diagnosis of madness. Henry IV presents a delusion that follows a head injury from a fall, a recovery hidden behind continued performance, and an alienist, Dr. Genoni, whose shock cure stages the past as a living tableau; the play is often discussed in relation to feigned madness, institutional care by families of means, and the theatricality of psychiatric treatment in the period. Right You Are! sets two mutually exclusive accounts of a delusion side by side, each party calling the other mad and kindly humouring him or her, with Livingston's note recording that the Italian speaks of the young wife being secretly placed in a nursing home on doctors' advice. Six Characters, with its claim that personality is many-sided, has been linked to late 19th-century French studies of multiple personality, such as Alfred Binet's Les altérations de la personnalité (1892), which Pirandello is known to have read and discussed; that link is a matter of scholarly reading. Pirandello's wife, Antonietta Portulano, suffered a long mental illness and was placed in a sanatorium in 1919, a biographical fact often cited, though the plays should not be read simply as autobiography.

• Henry IV, Act I

  Belcredi and Matilda recall the cavalcade, the rearing horse and the blow to the head after which the young man believed himself the emperor.

  Madness Psychosis
• Henry IV, Act II

  Dr. Genoni explains his plan to shock the patient back into time by means of the portrait.

  Physicians Doctors
• Henry IV, Act III

  Henry recounts waking after about twelve years, choosing to keep the role, and describes madness as a condition others live without knowing it.

  Madness Psychosis Psychology Unconscious
• Right You Are!, Act I

  Signora Frola and Ponza each explain the household arrangement by attributing a fixed delusion to the other.

  Obsession Monomania Asylum Institution
• Six Characters in Search of an Author, Act III

  The Child's drowning in the garden fountain and the Boy's death by a revolver shot.

  Suicide Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Rehearse the Madame Pace scene in two versions, the characters' and the actors', and discuss what each version loses or adds.

• Fiction

  Write a scene in which a minor character from a book you know walks into your classroom and demands a better author.

• Essay

  Henry IV says he is cured because he can act the madman perfectly. Is he sane, and what does the play suggest sanity is?

Further Reading

• The Late Mattia Pascal, Luigi Pirandello

• One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, Luigi Pirandello

• The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin

  Treats Pirandello among the forerunners of postwar drama.

• The Theatre of Revolt, Robert Brustein

  Includes a chapter on Pirandello.