Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, the Mountain Giants: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, the Mountain Giants

243 Pages·2014·1.26 MB·English

by  Anthony Robert

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Three Plays
Six Characters in Search of
an Author
Henry IV
The Mountain Giants
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ANTHONY MORTIMER
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THREE PLAYS
LUIGI PIRANDELLO was born near Agrigento in 1867, the son of a Garibaldian
veteran who had grown rich in the sulphur-mining industry. After studying at the
universities of Palermo, Rome, and Bonn, Pirandello lived in Rome and devoted
himself to literature with an abundant production of short stories and novels in
the Sicilian realist tradition. The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) broke this pattern
and announced his dominant modernist themes of absurdity and unstable
identity. In 1894 he married Antonietta Portulano who gave him three children;
but, after the bankruptcy of Pirandello’s father in 1903, she became increasingly
unbalanced and was definitively interned in 1919, an event reflected in
Pirandello’s frequent representations of madness. In 1910 he began a succession
of dialect comedies, followed in 1917 by Right You Are, If You Think You Are,
his first play in standard Italian, influenced by the emerging ‘theatre of the
grotesque’. In 1921 the controversial Six Characters in Search of an Author
established his international reputation as an experimental dramatist, and the
breakthrough was confirmed in the following year by Henry IV. He joined
Mussolini’s Fascist party in 1924 and went on to direct the artistically successful
but short-lived Arts Theatre of Rome (1925–8). The metatheatrical trilogy
initiated by Six Characters was completed by Each in His Own Way (1924) and
Tonight We Improvise (1930). A number of later plays such as Diana and Tuda
(1927), As You Desire Me (1930), Finding Oneself (1932), and When Someone is
Somebody (1932) derive from the dramatist’s own experience and his tormented
passion for the young actress Marta Abba. The New Colony (1928) and Lazarus
(1929) belong to a ‘myth trilogy’ which should have been concluded by the
unfinished Mountain Giants. After 1930 Pirandello spent much of his time in
Germany and travelled widely. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934 and
died in Rome in 1936.
ANTHONY MORTIMER is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the
University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and also taught for many years at the
University of Geneva. In addition to his academic work on English Renaissance
poetry and Anglo-Italian literary relations, he has published verse translations of
Dante (Vita Nuova), Cavalcanti, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Angelus Silesius, and
Villon.
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Luigi Pirandello
SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR
HENRY IV
THE MOUNTAIN GIANTS
Appendix I: Pirandello’s Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author (1925)
Appendix II: The Historical Henry IV
Explanatory Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations are used throughout and refer to the Mondadori
‘Meridiani’ edition of the Opere di Luigi Pirandello under the general editorship
of Giovanni Macchia:
Maschere Nude, ed. Alessandro d’Amico, introd. Giovanni Macchia, 4
MN
vols. (Milan, 1986–2007).
Novelle per un anno, ed. Mario Costanzo, introd. Giovanni Macchia, 3
NA
vols. (Milan, 1986–90).
Tutti i romanzi, ed. Giovanni Macchia and Mario Costanzo, foreword
RO
Giovanni Macchia, 2 vols. (Milan, 1973).
Texts contained in this volume are indicated as follows:
SC Six Characters in Search of an Author
HIV Henry IV
MG Mountain Giants
PSC Preface to Six Characters
The ‘Meridiani’ volume of Saggi e interventi, ed. Ferdinando Taviani (Milan,
2008), gives the 1908 text of Humourism (L’umorismo). Pirandello’s thought,
however, is clearer in the revised text of 1920 which is found in volume vi of the
older Mondadori edition of Pirandello, Saggi, poesie, scritti varii, ed. Manlio Lo
Vecchio-Musti (Milan, 1960), denoted here by the abbreviation SP.
All translations are my own.