But the open participation in the Garibaldian cause and the strong sense of idealism of those early years were quickly transformed, above all in Caterina, into an angry and Scarica PDF Enrico IV Gratis di Luigi Pirandello bitter disappointment with the new reality created by the unification.
Pirandello would eventually assimilate this sense of betrayal and resentment and express it in several of his poems and in his novel The Old and the Young. It is also probable that this climate of disillusion inculcated in the young Scarica PDF Enrico IV Gratis di Luigi Pirandello Luigi the sense of disproportion between ideals and reality which is recognizable in his essay on humorism L'Umorismo.
Pirandello received his elementary education at home, but was much more fascinated by the fables and legends, somewhere between popular and magic, that his elderly servant Maria Stella used to recount Scarica PDF Enrico IV Gratis di Luigi Pirandello to him than by anything scholastic or academic.
By the age of twelve, he had already written his first tragedy. At the insistence of his father, he was registered at a technical school, but eventually switched to the study of the humanities at the ginnasio, something which had always attracted Scarica PDF Enrico IV Gratis di Luigi Pirandello him. In , the Pirandello family moved to Palermo. It was here, in the capital of Sicily, that Luigi completed his high school education. During this period, the first signs of serious contrast between Luigi and his father began to develop; Luigi had discovered some notes revealing the existence of Stefano's extramarital relations.
As a reaction to the ever-increasing distrust and disharmony that Luigi was developing Scarica PDF Enrico IV Gratis di Luigi Pirandello toward his father, a man of a robust physique and crude manners, his attachment to his mother would continue growing to the point of profound veneration. This later expressed itself, after her death, in the moving pages of the novella Colloqui con i personaggi in Download Free PDF. Gian Balsamo. Download PDF. A short summary of this paper.
The moment Aeschylus' Orestes saw a hole in the sky above his head, argues Mr. Paleari, he would become Hamlet. One may be tempted to expand the hyperbole by saying that the moment Hamlet tore open his "inky cloak" to show the actor behind it, he would become Pirandello's Enrico. Hamlet is a name that occurs frequently in a discussion of Pirandello's Enrico IV.
Walter Starkie writes that every speech uttered by Enrico "contains words of [such] profound wisdom [that many scholars] call him the Hamlet of the 20th century" Poggioli I think that the parallel between Hamlet and Enrico may be misleading unless it is properly qualified. It is true that Enrico and Hamlet share the obsessions of a severely anguished personality-obsessions which manifest themselves in the passionate rhetoric of their monologues and soliloquies-nonetheless it would be a historical aberration to attribute Enrico's tensely existential angst to Hamlet himself.
Passionate rhetoric, the two characters' common denominator, branches into oratorical eloquence in Hamlet's soliloquies and into logical dialectic in Enrico's monologues, a divergence in discursive modes, this, which adumbrates further differences. Enrico is a man of "our own time," as Pirandello's stage directions prescribe His next article, "Kor e a in Hell- W.
In his most erratic lamentations he becomes, paradoxically, a rigorous logician attempting to reconstruct the network of forces at work within his personal tragedy. In his most solipsistic moments he distances himself from his immediate surroundings to plead, paradoxically again, the universality of his human condition.
In my opinion, Enrico IVs genuine indebtedness to William Shakespeare in general and to Hamlet in particular consists not so much of the debatable affinity between the two plays' protagonists as of the motif of the "play within a play," which in Enrico TV, even more than in Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, Pirandello pushed to its logical extreme.
While watching a performance of Enrico IV, the audience is under the impression that a stage, which was to have housed the enactment of some strange play-within-the-play, has magically grown to the size of the actual stage, so that the actors are superimposing roles and mixing dialogues from a variety of scripts whose significance ramifies in multiple directions.
The tiniest marginal detail in Enrico IV comes alive when looked at from this perspective of multiple levels of fictionality. The roles chosen by the play's characters for the pageant on horseback which, twenty years before the events related in the play occur, signs the beginning of Enrico's insanity, can be easily decoded, for instance, as an autonomous subtext.
Baron Tito Belcredi, who will startle Enrico's horse, provoking the fall which imprisons Enrico's deranged mind in the identity of the German Emperor, dresses as Charles of Anjou, the King of Naples and Sicily. Tito's impersonation of Charles of Anjou, the tyrant against whom the revolt remembered as the Sicilian vespers broke out in Palermo in , is bound to assume a strong subtextual relevance to any audience familiar with Sicilian history.
The enthusiastic struggle which saw the Sicilian youth fighting side by side with Garibaldi's Camicie Rosse against the Bourbons in resulted in what the Sicilians felt was a new form of colonial domination Jacobbi Pirandello experienced the radical disillusionment with governmental policy which prevailed among his fellow Sicilians through some of his older relatives who took part in Garibaldi's insurrection, in particular one Rocco Ricci Gramitto who gave him room and board at the time of his college studies in Rome in Giudice Twenty years after the pageant Matilde, her daughter Frida and Tito visit Enrico at his castle to cure his demented masquerade as Henry IV.
Matilde dresses again as Matilda of Tuscany, while Tito dresses as a young Benedictine monk from Cluny. At first Tito's new disguise may seem dictated by mere circumstances. It is the doctor accompanying them to Enrico's castle who suggests at the last minute that Tito should conceal his true identity from Enrico.
Yet at a closer inspection this situation too appears pregnant with historical significance. Enrico, wearing a penitent's habit, prostrates himself in front of the young novice at once, as if for a reenactment of the Canossa meeting between the German Emperor and his enemy the Pope. The Baron's symbolical execution at the end of Act Three reverberates, therefore, with both historical and biographical resonance; it amounts to a collective execution where Enrico gets his revenge over his rival in love, Tito Belcredi, Henry IV witnesses the death of the challenger of his imperial authority, Gregory VII, and Pirandello executes an enemy of the Sicilian people, Charles of Anjou.
Such choice has been predominantly treated as accidental or whimsical by critics, producers and directors alike. One historical personage—they all seem to argue, or, to be more precise, do not even bother to argue for what in their view must be self-evident—would have been worth another in the economy of the play.
It seems to me that this is not the case with Pirandello's Enrico IV. Far from being accidental or whimsical, the choice of Henry IV is one of the essential elements of the play. The Rome of was, like Berlin for the last forty-five years, a divided city. For sixty years after the breach of Porta Pia by the Piedmontese army, there had been virtually no diplomatic communication between the Italian state, governed by the Savoia royal family, and the Vatican state, governed by the Pope.
A metaphorical wall had been erected which split the city in two segments. On either side of the wall alike lived a distressed population which acknowledged the legitimacy of its own government, be it church or state, without being insensitive to the spiritual authority of the rulers on the opposite side.
Pirandello, who made Rome his home town in Giudice , was keenly aware of these fractured sentiments. The scars of the Piedmontese cannonades could still be seen on the walls of Porta Pia. The Romans will have to wait until to see Mussolini and Cardinal Gasparri sign the Lateran Pacts, a concordat which represents a turning point in the dispute between church and state and a formidable relief for the Romans' civic schizophrenia.
To depict a reversal in the state of affairs between two powers within one city as dramatic as the Lateran Pacts, we can simply look at the recent fall of the Berlin Wall and the popular jubilation that accompanied it. To single out an historical antecedent to the forthcoming compromise between temporal and spiritual powers in Rome, ardently demanded by his fellow citizens, an erudito such as Pirandello would have had to go back to the meeting between Henry IV and Gregory VII at Canossa January But why, we may still ask, would Pirandello pick out a historical character at all?
Hayden White 37 has argued that the legacy of Existentialism to our time consists of a strategy of relinquishment of respon- sibility toward the past. If I were to interpret the psychodrama within Enrico's drama as a symptom of the existentialist legacy, I would have to qualify the parallel levels of fictionality in Enrico IV as an imposing architecture of random choices.
Too many indications seem to work against the existentialist interpreta- tion, though. Let us consider again the character of Baron Belcredi and its historical valence. But Belcredi first comes on stage as the impersonation of the corpse of still another historical personage, that of Adalbert, the bishop of Bremen and tutor of Henry IV. The play begins with the appearance at the castle of a "counsellor," the latest acquisition to the staff of servants dressed in historical costumes who are hired by Enrico's relatives to satisfy all his whims.
It is not accidental that this young man's name, Fino, means "subtle" in Italian. He was hired to substitute for Enrico's recently deceased counsellor, Tito, who for years had impersonated Adalbert at Enrico's ridiculous court.
The bishop of Bremen was driven away from the Emperor in by the nobility, which looked unfavorably on his great personal power. The dead counsellor and Enrico's rival, Baron Belcredi, share the same first name, Tito.
This homonymy might be looked at as the result of a whim or a distraction of the part of the playwright, if it were not for the fictitious name attributed by Enrico to his new counsellor Fino. I want Bertoldo! And why Bertoldo? Pirandello handles his historical innuendos and premonitions with amazing virtuosity here.
The name Guibert, translated in Italian as Gilberto, derives from the French Gisilbert, or Gislebert, a compound of gfsil arrow and of berht clear, illustrious Zingarelli That the names Gilberto and Bertoldo share the etymon berth is self-evident. The confrontational tone of the words by which Enrico nominates Bertoldo as Adalberto's successor is therefore justified by the etymological subtext, so to speak, from which we learn that Bertoldo represents in the play none less than Guibert, archbishop of Ravenna, future antipope, whose nomination was followed by Pope Gregory VIPs death.
Therefore, when Enrico appears in front of Tito Belcredi wearing a penitent's habit, like Henry IV in front of Gregory VII at Canossa, he can at one and the same time prostrate himself in front of the impersonation of the Pope and threaten him with imprisonment and death, since his puppet, the antipope Gilberto, is already in office.
You would be foolish to do s o. Would you laugh to see the pope a prisoner? The Emperor's past and the Emperor's future are petrified in the nightmarish present from which Enrico, like his perpetually young picture hanging on the wall of the throne room, cannot free himself.
An analogous volte-face to Henry IV's rebuff of the treaty of Canossa followed the Lateran Pacts between the fascist state and the Vatican.
Immediately after the signing of the concordat, Mussolini claimed in a public speech that now the Church was subordinate to the state. In the three months after the treaty Mussolini had more issues of Catholic newspapers confiscated than in the previous seven years.
We must not forget, after all, that the play is written only a few months before Mussolini takes power in Italy. Mussolini is the actor, the histrionic "dissimulator" Mack Smith whom Pirandello himself defines "a true man of theatre" Giudice and in whose intuition of Italian theatricality Piero Gobetti sees the secret of political success Gobetti Under the demented direction of Benito Mussolini, Italian history is soon to become a masquerade in black shirts. In typical Mussolinian fashion, Enrico holds out an open hand to his guests but turns it into a menacing fist before they have a chance to shake it.
But, he adds, "I resist the temptation. I feel the atmosphere of our times. Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask" These words uttered by Enrico bear a striking resemblance to Mussolini's first speech in front of the Italian Parliament, on November 16, Then he added, "Not for now As long as you'll make it possible, I won't" Lussu And who but Mussolini could manipulate history as successfully as Pirandello's Enrico, by spectacularly expanding and contracting historical time, by collapsing the past and the future of Italian history into a metahistorical duplication of the frantically sought-for martial glories of the present?
Mussolini went so far as experiencing, or pretending he did, a pageant on horseback as glamorous and as faditic as Enrico's: the march on Rome of the fascist legions on October 28, The legend wants him to have led the march on horseback like Caesar across the Rubicon, but the historians tell us that he did not participate in it, since as the black shirts paraded clumsily through the major Italian cities he was already in Rome, receiving his appointment as Prime Minister from Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Italy Mack Smith However, I see the term "negation" as a rather problematic element in Poggioli's definition of Enrico's masquerade.
Negation and forgery of history, in this case, are Mussolini's undertaking, not Pirandello's. I detect in Enrico W'a desperate and tragically self-defeating attempt at assumption of historical responsibility on the part of the playwright. Although it cannot be denied that Pirandello comes from a southern culture which, after the unification of Italy under the Savoia royal family, embraced an open attitude of civic disengage- ment, it would be a gross mistake to interpret this disillusioned attitude as an uncompromising dismissal of the possibility of social and political intervention.
In thefirsttwo decades of the 20th century the two most influential representa- tives of the southern intelligentsia, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, were working in fact toward a redefinition of the notions of history and social change inherited from the 19th century.
And it must not be forgotten that his studies in Rome and in Bonn opened Pirandello to less circumscribed influences. Jean-Paul Sartre has argued that history is at best a gamble on a specific future and at worst a retrospective rationalization of what we have in fact become White Poggioli's criterion of extrapolation of the sense of history embedded in Enrico IV seems to go in a parallel direction to Sartre's argumentation.
On the contrary, I see in Enrico a man paralyzed in an unchanging stance of stony stupefaction, a captive of a historical configuration for whom the past has been forever "determined," forever "settled," and the future has been forever predicted.
He is not gambling on a future which cannot be changed, nor is he rationalizing what he is becoming because his life has already happened and he is not evolving into anything. He vegetates within the frame of a painting which shows him at the age of 27, burdened with the memory of his past misfortunes, oppressed with the premonition of his future predicaments. It is partly to a Benjaminian notion of historical configuration that I am inclined to relate my interpretation of the historicity in Enrico IV.
The tragedy of Enrico is that of a man who cannot act on his future because he does not dare to reinterpret his past. Enrico is aware of his status of captive of history. He has sentenced himself to a perennial reenactment of his past failures which keeps him from grasping "the constellation which his [present] has formed with [his past]" Benjamin He wants to emancipate himself to "live freely and wholly [his] miserable life" In Benjaminian terms, his task would consist of taking cognizance of alternative possibilities of apprehension of the past so that his praxis could blast his own existence out of its predetermined course.
But Enrico is kept prisoner of a fixed historical configuration by the magical powers of his enemies. Ask the pope to do this thing he can so easily do: to take me away from that Pointing to his portrait almost in fear. In its unfolding the metaphor crystallizes the dispersion of hi stories within the plot line into a metahistorical perpetuation of a specific historical formation, that of fascist Italy in Pirandello's time.
From the alternation of resentment and compassion, pity and attraction, which brings Matilde to Enrico's mansion twenty years after the accident that caused his madness, to Enrico's desperate attempt, in the last scene of the play, to kidnap Matilde's young daughter, Frida, the living symbol of the life which has already run by him, the fate impending on both characters is encoded a priori in their choice of costumes.
In the eyes of the audience, the two painted images turn imperceptibly into icons of identity and predestination. Having captured the essential precipitate out of Enrico's life experiences, which consists of his unrequited love for Matilde, a sentiment in need of perennial disguise, they obstruct any possible development. They are what they are, images forever fixed on canvas. Not even Tito's murder can change Enrico's condition as a captive of time past.
Also Enrico's enemy, Tito, is the victim of a fate which amounts to a mere duplication of the past. As we saw above, he appears on stage in the ambivalent role of a triumphant pope who is soon to become the corpse of a deposed pope. Pirandello's stage directions describe Tito as a Janus- like figure: a lover for whom Matilde shows no benevolence or appreciation, whom she does not take seriously, but who has "plenty of reasons" to laugh at her mischievous pretenses.
However, in his participation in Matilde's attempt to restore to Enrico's mind "the sense of time, of the contrast between past and present" Poggioli , he falls prey to the same repetitiousness which haunts Enrico's existence. He comes to the castle confident in his power to discriminate between past, present and future, full of contempt for Enrico's spiritual disorder, and in the end he finds himself sitting as a powerless defendant in front of the hypothetical tribunal of time past, the same tyrannical tribunal which sentenced Enrico, like so many other Pirandellian characters, to the fate of a "living corpse.
The tragedy with Pirandellian time is that it is not pregnant with Benjaminian tensions. We can recognize in its spatial and temporal indicators the coordinates of that "suspension of happening" Benjamin to which social praxis is bound to give a salutary shock, yet the tension of these unstable indicators is imploded in a fraudulent world peopled with masked characters and painted icons.
His irresolution burdens his own struggle against the forces of identity and predestination with all manners of obstructive behavior. But he is quick to turn his faith in the permanence of the past into a merciless sophism of dialectical instability when it comes to torturing Matilde's nostalgia for "the fading image of [her] youth" Matilde, a middle-aged woman, dyes her hair and wears heavy make-up in a pathetic effort to erase the signs of time from her face.
You too, Madam, are in a masquerade, though it be in all seriousness" he accuses Matilde.
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