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THREE PLAY: Six Characters in Search of an Author - Henry IV (Enrico Quarto) - Right You Are! (If You Think So)
THREE PLAY: Six Characters in Search of an Author - Henry IV (Enrico Quarto) - Right You Are! (If You Think So)
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Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original hardcover edition for your reading pleasure. (Worth every penny!)
***
The three plays of Pirandello, here offered in translations that do not hope to be adequate, are famous specimens of the "new" theatre in Italy. The term "new" is much contested, not only in Italy but abroad. In using the word here it is not necessary to claim that this young, impulsive, fascinatingly boisterous after-the-war Italy is doing things that no one else ever thought of doing. We remain on safe ground if we assert that(Pirandello and his associates have broken the bounds set to the old fashioned "sentimental" Latin play?)
The motivations of the "old" theatre were largely ethical in character, developing spiritual crises from the conflict of impulses with a rigid framework of law and convention. Dramatic art was, so to speak, a department of geometry, dealing with this or that projection or modification of the triangle. Husbands tearing their hair as wives proved unfaithful; disappointed lovers pining in eternal fidelity to mates beyond their social sphere; cuckolds heroically sheathing the stiletto in deference to a higher law of respectability; widows sending second-hand aspirants to suicide that the sacrament of marriage might remain inviolate:—such were the themes.
And there is no doubt, besides, that this "old" theatre produced works of great beauty and intenseness; since the will in conflict with impulse and triumphing over impulse always presents a subject entrancing in human interest and noble in moral implications.
But the potentialities of drama are more numerous than the permutations of three. The "new" theatre in Italy is "new" in this discovery at least.
All of Pirandello's plays are built for acting, and only incidentally for reading. We make this observation with "Right You Are" especially in mind, since that play, above all, is a test for the actor. It is typical of Pirandello for its rapidity, its harshness and its violence—the skill with which the tense tableau is drawn out of pure dialectic, pure "conversation." Moreover, it states a fundamental preoccupation of Pirandello in peculiarly lucid and striking fashion. Perhaps a better rendering of the title Cost e (se vi pare) will occur to many. Ludwig Lewisohn (happily, I thought) suggested "As You Like It," no less. A possibility, quite in the spirit of Pirandello's title in general, would have been another Shakespearean reminiscence: ". . . and Thinking Makes It So." We have kept something approximating the literal, which would be: "So it is (if you think so)."
The text of the "Six Characters" is that of the translation designated by the author and which was used in the sensational productions of the play given in London and New York.
***
The three plays of Pirandello, here offered in translations that do not hope to be adequate, are famous specimens of the "new" theatre in Italy. The term "new" is much contested, not only in Italy but abroad. In using the word here it is not necessary to claim that this young, impulsive, fascinatingly boisterous after-the-war Italy is doing things that no one else ever thought of doing. We remain on safe ground if we assert that(Pirandello and his associates have broken the bounds set to the old fashioned "sentimental" Latin play?)
The motivations of the "old" theatre were largely ethical in character, developing spiritual crises from the conflict of impulses with a rigid framework of law and convention. Dramatic art was, so to speak, a department of geometry, dealing with this or that projection or modification of the triangle. Husbands tearing their hair as wives proved unfaithful; disappointed lovers pining in eternal fidelity to mates beyond their social sphere; cuckolds heroically sheathing the stiletto in deference to a higher law of respectability; widows sending second-hand aspirants to suicide that the sacrament of marriage might remain inviolate:—such were the themes.
And there is no doubt, besides, that this "old" theatre produced works of great beauty and intenseness; since the will in conflict with impulse and triumphing over impulse always presents a subject entrancing in human interest and noble in moral implications.
But the potentialities of drama are more numerous than the permutations of three. The "new" theatre in Italy is "new" in this discovery at least.
All of Pirandello's plays are built for acting, and only incidentally for reading. We make this observation with "Right You Are" especially in mind, since that play, above all, is a test for the actor. It is typical of Pirandello for its rapidity, its harshness and its violence—the skill with which the tense tableau is drawn out of pure dialectic, pure "conversation." Moreover, it states a fundamental preoccupation of Pirandello in peculiarly lucid and striking fashion. Perhaps a better rendering of the title Cost e (se vi pare) will occur to many. Ludwig Lewisohn (happily, I thought) suggested "As You Like It," no less. A possibility, quite in the spirit of Pirandello's title in general, would have been another Shakespearean reminiscence: ". . . and Thinking Makes It So." We have kept something approximating the literal, which would be: "So it is (if you think so)."
The text of the "Six Characters" is that of the translation designated by the author and which was used in the sensational productions of the play given in London and New York.
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