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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Henry IV, Act II

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

• 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.

• Right You Are!, Act I

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

• 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.