1. Luigi Pirandello

2. His life

3. Pirandello was born at Agrigento on June 28, 1867. His family was a well off one, so he had the possibility to study both in Italy and abroad and to devote to writing. After studying letters in Rome and after getting his degree in Bonn, Pirandello moves from Sicily to Rome, where he lives together with his wife devoting himself to writing. In 1903 because of the flooding of his father’s mine, Pirandello ‘s family financial conditions hurled down. He couldn’t get anymore his father’s check that permitted him to devote only to writing neglecting his work. … he will have to start working. After some years the 1st World War burst out and one of his sons has to fight for his homeland…. These events will lead his wife to become mad in 1919. A difficult period will bring him to a tragic view of the world. A tragic nature from which only writing could save one.

4. In 1924 he becomes a member of the Fascist party, from which he obtains support and money for the “Company of the Art Theatre”that, during Pirandello’s direction, takes Pirandello’s theatre around the world for three years,until 1928. His most important actress is Marta Abba, to whom Pirandello was sentimentally linked. In 1929 he’ll receive the qualification of “State Academic”…

5. In 1934, Pirandello will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature…

6. World View and Poetics … “Our Spirit consists of fragments … of separate elements that can break up and recompose … so that you may have a new personality …” The only way, according to Pirandello, to recover one’s identity is MADNESS.

7. For the poet there is a contrast between Life and “Forms” that man imposes to himself to get to know himself and the others… Society is “ a machine of “puppets” that blocks and traps man : the only remedy to this is hiding either in the IRRATIONAL or in MADNESS. In Pirandello’s stories there is often a character that “has understood the game” and that isolates in order to look at other men closed in the “trap” with a humoristic attitude.

8. Man was born free but he has a “role” to follow during his life….. Man can have relations with himself, with other people, but he’ll never understand either himself or the others… All of us wear a mask behind which hide several personalities... We are all Masks, and this is shown in the novel, One, no one and one hundred thousand”: 1 Individual … 100 000 personalities… So no one…

9. But if everyone has his own personality, how can there be a univocal communication? This is cause of loneliness and social exclusion…

10. Men can react to the masks that they wear in three ways: Accepting it and living unhappily, unable to react to the role given to them… Undertaking one’s role in an IRONIC and HUMORISTIC way, not resigning and always trying to obtain some advantages from the mask…. Trying to take it off and behaving therefore with DESPAIR: the result is madness that often leads to the loss of life …

11. Humorism Pirandello writes an essay about humorism and he distinguishes it from the comical. THE COMICAL is defined as “a warning of the contrary”: it immediadely fosters LAUGHTER because it shows a situation contrary to the reality… HUMOURISM derives from a Reflection: it doesn’t judge immediately but it fosters a SMILE almost of pity for his own and other people’s weaknesses. The art of Humourism applied to the theatre is called GROTESQUE

12. Teatro Pirandello’s production consists of 44 Comedies (or Dramas) and it is divided into four phases. The first phase is the dialect and verist one (1910-1916) The second one is the one of the Theatre of the Grotesque (1916-1936), In which he considers the daily life. A third phase is that of “the theatre in the theatre”(1921-1930): Here he develops the theme of the lack of communication because of the different personalities … he points out the fact that art can’t represent life since it is a mask The fourth phase is that of the Theatre of Myths These works have fantastic plots and they are set in a primitive and fantastic world.

13. “ We all have inside a world of things: each one has his own world of things! How can we understand each other, if in the words that I say I put the meaning and the value of the things that are inside me; those who hear them, necessarily take them with the meaning and value that have for them, according to their inside world? We think to understand each other, but we’ll never do it! (Six Characters looking for an author)

14. HENRY IV “Henry IV” belongs to the cycle of the theatre within the theatre that is different from the grotesque for the setting as a tragedy. In this work the author resumes the typical features of the IX century tragedy, but he devepols themes that are dear to him that is the falsehood that imprisons men in their daily life. The only escape is represented by madness, in which the protagonist finds refuge. This way the hero can cut himself off from life and look from above the misery of the wordly comedy.

15. …the PLOT… A young man,that represents the Emperor, Henry IV, during a masked party, falls from a horse, hurts his head and becomes mad. For 12 years with his family ‘s compliance he believes to be the Emperor, he lives in his villa as if he were in a castle, surrounded by characters that imitate the XI century life.. When the protagonist recovers his health, he finds out that Matilde Spina, the woman he loved, had become Tito Belcredi’s lover. He was the person that had caused his fall from the horse. Therefore he decides to continue pretending to be mad for other eight years thus avoiding to face the troubled reality.

16. ENRICO IV… Now the drama starts. Twenty years had passed since the accident, when Belcredi, Matilde and their daughter Frida, together with a psychiatrist, go to visit the pseudo Henry IV in his villa. The imaginary Henry IV will fall into madness again or he will continue to pretend to be mad and will live forever in his villa-castle, surrounded by a group of false courtiers. Their attempt to make the protagonist recover his reason fails so the balance between madness and falsehood breaks. As if time had stopped twenty years ago. The pseudo Henry IV mistakes Frida for Matilde. But when he tries to kiss the girl, Belcredi attacks him and Henry overwhelmed by revenge, kills him.