In the novel The Old and the Young, as well in many of his short stories, Pirandello, like Nietzsche, aims at undermining humankind’s faith in history. Life and world events are ruled by chance, according to Pirandello; since history is a fictional creation dependent on the ideology and feelings of the historian, writing it makes no sense. This is why one character in the short story “Interviews with Characters” tells the writer to concentrate instead on what really counts, the joy and suffering of even one real individual with whom readers can identify. This approach can be seen in the stories written with World War I as their backdrop: In one, for instance, Pirandello’s own anguish about his sons going off to fight is mirrored in the story of Marco Leccio, who must witness his sons’ departure for a conflict he thinks should be fought by the fathers as the completion of Italian unification because it was for his generation, not his sons’, that Austrians were enemies. Perhaps this skepticism about history’s ability to teach us anything was what made Pirandello deaf to the dangers of Fascism.

This chapter explores Pirandello’s idiosyncratic relationship with fame by attempting to separate the artist and the man. Pirandello’s alleged unpretentious behavior and apparent dismissiveness often clashed with his fervent desire to be appreciated and recognized for his exceptional talent. Beginning with Pirandello’s relationship with the press and the political powers ruling Italy at that time, this chapter discusses the artist’s apprehension about the lure of fame and its corrosive effect on his true self. Likewise, in his fictional works Pirandello dramatized his own concerns about creating an artistic persona while attempting to tame the creative compulsion that often jarred his preoccupation with greatness. If at one point his celebrity status seemed to have become a burden and not even exile proved to be the cure to his resentment, Pirandello took refuge in his art, the only ambivalent space where his thirst for recognition could coexist with his awareness of the drawbacks of being famous.

The chapter focuses on a controversial element of Pirandello’s life and career, namely, his relationship to Italian Fascism and its head of government, Benito Mussolini. Taking Pirandello’s outspoken and loyal adhesion to the Fascist government as a matter of historical fact and arguing that true “faith” in its ethos and professional opportunism on Pirandello’s part were not mutually exclusive, the essay focuses on the personal, cultural, and professional reasons for Pirandello’s membership in the party and then moves on to discuss how contemporaries viewed the author’s work in relation to Fascism’s ideological precepts. Because he was so famous, regime intellectuals were keen to claim Pirandello as their own, but whether they read his work as compatible with their world view had much to do with its philosophical bent, as interpreted through the formulations of Adriano Tilgher. If they perceived Pirandello as nihilistic, they tended to doubt his Fascism, but if they read his work as celebrating the victory of life over form, they judged it as representative of the spirit of the so-called new era.

This essay examines Pirandello’s tortuous relationship with the United States as it emerges in his personal experiences and in his literary works. In spite of the triumphal welcome Pirandello received on his visits to the United States in 1923 and 1935, his attitude toward the country was fraught with skepticism and ambivalence. Unsettled by the threat of US neo-colonization of lands and cultures, and associating American civilization with blind enthusiasm for technology unaccompanied by a concomitant moral growth, Pirandello expressed his scarce admiration for a country and a people whose favor and financial support he nonetheless hoped to gain. In Pirandello’s fiction, America is a place whose opportunities come at the price of loneliness, exploitation, and difficult compromises. The essay also delves into Pirandello’s reception in the New World in the 1930s, a time that required him to articulate his position on Fascism before an American audience.

This chapter discusses the critical foundations of Pirandello studies, covering Pirandello’s own literary criticism and theorizations of his work, his contemporaries’ assessments, and the central ideas in Pirandello studies put forth by a variety of specialists in Italian literature and theatre studies. Special attention is given to the pioneering critic Giacomo Debenedetti and his conception of the author’s output as a perpetual work-in-progress. Other key figures mentioned include Peter Szondi, Leonardo Sciascia, Giancarlo Mazzacurati, and Giovanni Macchia, as well as Claudio Vicentini, Robert Brustein, and Eric Bentley.

Luigi Pirandello is not often linked to George Bernard Shaw, although they did communicate through notes on one occasion, with Shaw expressing himself in a mélange of operatic French, German, and Italian, the last of which gave Pirandello much entertainment. Both playwrights admired and liked one another; Shaw praised Six Characters as the most original play he had encountered, while Pirandello greatly admired Saint Joan and wanted Marta Abba to perform the part. The New York Times invited Pirandello to write an essay on Shaw’s play, which Pirandello concluded with the assertion that Saint Joan was “a work of poetry from beginning to end.” Further consideration of how Shaw’s plays related to Pirandello’s reveals that, in spite of Pirandello’s despairing view of the human condition, which Pirandello constantly mocked as futile, one can discover moments of humor that often resemble Shaw’s comedic style.

An innovator in art, a revolutionary in his philosophical ideas and his conception of narrative and drama, the 1934 Nobel Prize-winner in literature was in life a conservative from Sicily – a place with a dichotomic perception of women, who were either worshipped as Mother-Madonnas or feared as erotic females. Pirandello was, moreover, the product of the old Western tradition that since the time of Plato and Aristotle juxtaposed male spirit to female matter, viewing reason and speculation as belonging to men and instinct and procreation to women. At the same time, Pirandello was aware that a male culture created the condition of women as victims. Thus in his works we see a combination of these ideas: Sexual phobias are exorcised in short stories about the awakening of sexual feelings (especially in girls), and women are depicted as closer to life and thus artistic creation than men. In his plays, he viewed the theatre as a place of renewal and thus women become capable of breaking taboos and social norms there and of asserting their own autonomy.

This chapter uses Pirandello’s collaboration with Italian modernist composer Gian Francesco Malipiero on the opera The Changeling as a way into discussing Pirandello’s relationship to and understanding of music more broadly. Several of the author’s short stories, including such works as “Old Music,” “Farewell, Leonora!” – both written in 1910 – and “Zuccarello the Distinguished Melodist,” dating to 1914, make note of shifts in Italian musical taste in that period and therefore suggest a certain attention to music on the author’s part. But Pirandello’s interest in musical vanguardism is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that he collaborated with Malipiero, a musician so experimental that he was dubbed the “Pirandello of the music scene.” The essay recounts their collaboration as a window onto the two men’s personalities, experimental performance at the time, and the complications for artists and intellectuals who collaborated with the Mussolini regime.

Definitions such as art theatres, exceptional theatres, little theatres, or independent theatres between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries refer to non-commercial experiments, especially in the European theatre. In Italy, their season was short-lived: The first was Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Teatro degli Indipendenti, while the most famous was Pirandello’s Teatro degli Odescalchi. Often small, organized as private clubs to avoid censorship, they all had economic difficulties and generally brief lifespans. In Europe, however, they marked a significant phenomenon, privileging a repertoire that was often not only intellectually but also “politically” engaging: plays that spoke of new ways of being men and women, of new relationships between human beings. They corresponded with demands for change that were not only theatrical. In Italy, however, this chapter argues, the rise of the little theaters took place during the years of Fascism, so their innovations were cultural rather than political and lacked the extra-theatrical values that had been fundamental to other European art theatres.

The introduction of Pirandello’s works to Latin America started in earnest after the controversial Italian success of Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), which was then staged by Dario Niccodemi’s company in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro. When Pirandello’s newly established Teatro d’Arte found itself in serious financial trouble in 1927, it welcomed the proposal by the Teatro Odeón in Buenos Aires for a tour that promised to cover the deficit. On his first trip to South America the author sparked a fervor that made him the tour’s protagonist while dispelling the perception of his theatre as simply a conduit for Fascist propaganda. Pirandello’s second trip to Argentina in 1933 saw the author directing the successful world premiere of When One Is Somebody, which had not yet found an Italian production due to its autobiographical content and heavy technical requirements. An important connection between Pirandello and the Buenos Aires professional theatre scene was actor Luis Arata, whose company systematically offered his plays between the 1930s and 1940s. Over time, Pirandellian productions gradually spread across the official, commercial, and independent circuits, and Pirandellian tropes have continued to influence Argentine playwriting to this day.

The chapter uses a discussion of Pirandello’s theoretical essay On Humor to place his idea on comic literature in the broader contexts of his career, of international comic literary traditions, and of thought on humor in relation to contemporary developments in psychology, philosophy, and literature studies. The essay approaches On Humor as both a declaration of a personal poetics and a sort of manifesto, describing its structure, content, and the way Pirandello uses it to position his own work within – and sometimes opposed to – literary traditions in Italy and, in particular, the rest of Europe. A central point that emerges from the essay is how deeply attuned Pirandello was to international advances in various fields, responding to such figures as Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, even as he was particularly wedded to his Italian forebears.

The chapter makes a case for Pirandello as the head of an Italian school of fantastic literature that came into being at the end of the nineteenth century. It recounts Pirandello’s use of the fantastic – characteristically without the supernatural – as a tool for distancing himself from the naturalism of the period and as a literary strategy that shared much with the humorism that was likewise dear to Pirandello. Both the fantastic and the humoristic relied on the perception of life’s contrasts to slowly overturn an understanding of the laws of the universe. Focusing on the Stories for a Year, the chapter traces the sometimes uneasy coexistence of the fantastic and humoristic, chronicles Pirandello’s original recreation of fantastic situations and environments in a wholly Sicilian imaginary, and reflects on how the fantastic itself becomes a metaphor for literary creation.

The chapter locates Pirandello’s characters against the backdrop of modernist culture. Beginning with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche’s reflections on the multiple nature of the “I,” Pirandello’s construction of his characters proves fully in tune with contemporary developments in European thinking. When dealing with such fictional characters as Mattia Pascal and Vitangelo Moscarda, Pirandello goes for an anti-heroic approach to their relationship with history as opposed to nineteenth-century Romantic heroism. Theatre characters, on the other hand, escape definitions and roles to the extent that they become Nobody, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Binet, and Blondel’s reflections on psychology and freedom.

The chapter considers Pirandello’s unsuccessful attempts to establish a national theatre in Italy. Influenced by examples of national theatres in other countries such as the Comédie Française in France and disappointed with the lack of financial resources to sustain his own very successful Teatro d’Arte, Pirandello tried to use Mussolini’s influence and the rise of Fascism to create a national theatre run by himself with full state sponsorship. He developed elaborate plans for a national theatre that would operate in three major cities and house ensemble casts, some of whose members would travel between the cities to facilitate touring productions. The plans would have involved considerable expenditure, including the costs of establishing the technical infrastructure for the three theatres as well as of maintaining three ensembles of actors. Despite initial encouragement and support from Mussolini, Pirandello encountered competition from other entrepreneurs and artists and political opposition, and eventually failed to achieve his goal.

Although Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is often taken as an exercise in “metatheatre,” the play in fact imagines theatre defined as a specific technological apparatus: a fully electrified house, actors expected to play “in character,” and an audience spatially and conceptually separated from the artistic performance. That is, Pirandello’s skeptical critique of theatre and theatricality is undertaken through a specific instrument, the apparatus of the modern, darkened proscenium house. This chapter explores Pirandello’s work in the context of a specific kind of technological apparatus, one in which the thematics of critique are specifically managed by the ideological disposition of modern theatre design and signaled most effectively by its tools, notably by the rhetorical assertion of the proscenium as a “fourth wall” and by the ways lighting articulates its function in the making of dramatic performance.

The preface highlights the extent to which Luigi Pirandello, most famous for his play Six Characters in Search of an Author, was a multifaceted writer successful in various genres. In addition to introducing the main themes of the volume, it places some of the key questions in Pirandellian studies – philosophical relativism, metatheatre, the author’s purported cerebralism, and his relationship with the Fascist regime – in the context of the period’s theatre history, literary developments, and Pirandello’s life and career experiences. It finally shows why Pirandello’s influence was so transversal in his century and continues to be into our own and discusses recent advances in Pirandello studies.

This essay considers religion in Pirandello’s oeuvre from a historical point of view, that is to say, as firmly anchored in a post-Copernican modernity in which, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead,” and relativity came to be understood as scientific fact in the wake of Albert Einstein’s investigations. The essay asks whether a consistent meditation on religion can be found in Pirandello’s oeuvre and therefore considers several works, among them, The Late Mattia Pascal; Shoot!; Lazarus; and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Particular focus is given to the ways in which these writings demonstrate Pirandello’s interest in mysticism, a non-dogmatic Catholic Modernism, and his rejection of any transcendent God, a belief which corresponded to his humoristic view of life more generally, tied as they both were to his uneasiness over life’s lack of certainty.

In his essay On Humor, Pirandello effectively places himself in the tradition of Cervantes, who engaged modern problematic subjectivity, not with the tragic relativism of his contemporary Hamlet but with a nimble comic irony that learns to live within the condition. Some three centuries later, growing dissatisfied with the realist tradition Cervantes had helped to found, a number of early twentieth-century European writers, largely influenced by Nietzsche, including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann, turned to myth not only as a literary form but also as a form of life. In their work, the poetic imagination seeks to become mythopoeic and thereby affirm the mythic basis of human culture. In three late plays – Lazarus, The New Colony, and the unfinished The Mountain Giants – Pirandello also turned to mythic motifs, but these works are not attempts at mythopoeic creation so much as they are political and moral allegories using mythic themes.

“Metatheatre,” the term coined by Lionel Abel, flourished in the baroque (roughly 1550–1650) and modernist (or neobaroque, twentieth century) in Europe and the United States. Rather than representing the illusion of reality, it represents the reality of illusion. Pirandello’s Henry IV may be read as a modernist rendering of Hamlet. More radically than Hamlet, “Henry” perceives the impossibility of grasping truth beneath appearances and chooses to live in theatrical play forever. This chapter compares Six Characters in Search of an Author to an untitled play by the baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Both feature characters angry at their author and discussion of a play to be made. In each, the “fourth wall” is removed to reveal theatre-in-process. Instead of portraying theatre as an imitation of life, metatheatre reveals life’s inherent theatricality.

Already known thanks to the translation of some novels and The Late Mattia Pascal, Pirandello began his involvement in French theatre with the 1923 performance of Six Characters in Search of an Author, which was directed by Georges Pitoëff. This chapter recounts Pirandello’s fortunes in France and explores their mediation by translator Benjamin Crémieux, who helped bring the writer’s works to French readers and theatregoers. However, Pirandello’s success began a downward arc in the late 1920s due to several factors, including overexposure and French critics’ accusations of excessive cerebralism. Although Pirandello’s plays continued to be performed, they received progressively less favorable responses. The 1934 Nobel Prize, however, brought the playwright back into the limelight, and he was celebrated and applauded in January 1935 at the staging of Tonight We Improvise by the Pitoëff Company.