Naked Masks PDF
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A. NAKED MASKS LIOLA IT IS SO! (IF YOU THINK SO) HENRY IV SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR EACH IN HIS OWN WAY ■Y Edited by Eric Bentley D6 A DUTTON PAPERBACK $1.85 $2.20 in Canada NAKED MASKS Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/nakedmasks0000unse NAKED MASKS FIVE PLAYS By LUIGI PIRANDELLO Edited by Eric Bentley A Dutton Paperback NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC. Introduction by Eric Bentley, Lioli and Premise and this compilation Copyright 1952 by E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc. Henry IV Copyright 1922, renewed in the names of Stefano, Fausto and Lietta Piran¬ dello in 1950. It Is So! (If You Think So) originally entitled Right You Are! (If You Think So) Copyright 1922, renewed in the names of Stefano, Fausto and Lietta Pirandello in 1950. Six Characters in Search of An Author Copy¬ right 1922, renewed in the names of Stefano, Fausto and Lietta Pirandello in 1950. Each In His Own Way Copyright 1923, re¬ newed in the names of Stefano, Fausto and Lietta Pirandello in 1951. All rights reserved Printed in the U. S. A. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing ftom the publisher except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in con¬ nection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction.vii LIOLA. 1 IT IS SO! (IF YOU THINK SO).61 HENRY IV.139 Premise.209 SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR . 211 EACH IN HIS OWN WAY.277 Appendix I. Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author 363 Appendix II. Biographical and Historical.377 Appendix III. Theatrical and Bibliographical .... 382 Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was bom in Gir- genti, Sicily. He attended the University of Rome and took a doctorate in philology at Bonn Univer¬ sity in 1891. Pirandello began his literary career as a poet, but he soon turned to fiction and in 1904 published his first widely recognized novel, The Late Mattia Pascal. With the appearance of It Is So! in 1917 Pirandello proved himself to be one of the most original and powerful dramatists of the 20th century, a claim well substantiated by his two greatest plays. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922). Pirandello opened his own Art Theatre in Rome in 1925, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934. Naked Masks was first published in 1952. INTRODUCTION I A generation ago there was, notoriously, a literature of ideas. Most of it, like most literature of all movements, was bad; and fashion, which elevates the bad to the level of the good, subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike. Only if there is a body of readers interested in merit as such can anything like justice be done. Such readers will rescue the better literature of ideas from beneath the fashionable ideas about it. Even au¬ thors like Ibsen and Shaw, who are by no means unread, need rescuing from ideas about their ideas. How much the more so Pirandello, who is suffering fashionable rejection without ever having had—outside Italy—wide¬ spread fashionable acceptance. I have met persons who rejected him because of his “tiresome ideas” without be¬ ing able to give me even their own version of what these ideas are. Pirandello needs rescuing from the very lack of ideas about his ideas. It is true that all too much of Pirandello, and Piran¬ dello criticism, remains untranslated. The untranslated essay L’Umorismo (“Humor”) contains all his principal ideas (especially its Second Part). The untranslated later plays are especially full of theory. The untranslated essays of Adriano Tilgher (especially “II Teatro di Luigi Piran¬ dello” in Studi sul Teatro Contemporaneo) are the stand¬ ard exposition from the point of view of the famous ideas. However, I submit that the ideas offer no real difficulty. vii viii INTRODUCTION They are old ideas—good old ideas—some of which would take us back to Pirandello’s fellow-countrymen Empedocles and Gorgias. It was Pascal, not Pirandello, who first said: “there is no man who differs more from another than he does from himself at another time.” Illusion and reality—the “mix-up” of illusion and reality —is so far from being a peculiarly Pirandellian theme as to be perhaps the main theme of literature in general. “No,” says the more knowledgeable reader, “it is not that we can’t understand the ideas. It’s that we can’t see why they troubled and obsessed Pirandello to such an extent. Always the same ideas! “Oh, Dio mio, ma questo girar sempre sullo stesso pernio!”—as he himself has his critics say. “This always harping on the same string!” More important: we can’t see why these ideas should trouble and obsess us.” Obviously this reader can’t mean that Pirandello—in his essay on humor, say—doesn’t make a strong enough case for his ideas, in the sense that a lawyer or a logician makes a case. An artist, and no one was more aware of it than Pirandello, makes his ideas matter by rendering them artistically active, that is, by giving them the life of his chosen form in his chosen medium. The question for us here then is whether Pirandello’s ideas become active in the dramatic form. In reconsidering Pirandello today, fifteen years after his death, the first play to read is Liolci. It loses more than other plays in translation, but enough of the origi¬ nal comes through (I hope) to remove the anti-Pirandello prejudice. It is a play that lives by an evident loveliness. Sicily is a land of golden light, scarcely of this world, and Agrigento, with its Greek temples, its proud position above Porto Empedocle and the Mediterranean, and its isolation both from the merchants of Palermo and the tourists of Taormina, is perhaps the most charming spot on the island. Without any scene painting whatsoever,
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