Unit-1 General Topic : Rejection of Realism in Drama Six Characters in Search of an Author Luigi Pirandello's Contents 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Rejection of Realism in Drama 1.3 Luigi Pirandello: Life and Works 1.4 Plot Summary of the play Six Characters in Search of an Author 1.5 Major and Minor Characters in Six Characters in Search of an Author 1.6 Critical Analysis of Six Characters in Search of an Author 1.7 Themes of the Play 1.8 Summary 1.9 Check Your Progress 1.10 Terms to Remember 1.11 Answers to Check Your Progress 1.12 Exercises 1.13 Further Readings 147 1.0 Objectives: After completing the study of this unit, you will • know about rejection of realism in drama • know about the life and works of Luigi Pirandello • know about the plot summary of the Six Characters in Search of an Author • learn the major and minor characters in Six Characters in Search of an Author • learn the themes and other aspects in Six Characters in Search of an Author • be able to answer the questions on General Topic and the play Six Characters in Search of an Author 1.1 Introduction: This unit discusses the general topic ‘Rejection of Realism in Drama’ as well as Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author . It also presents the detailed summary of his famous play Six Characters in Search of an Author , the analysis of the Major and Minor characters in the play and the critical commentary on the issues handled in the play. 1.2 Rejection of Realism in Drama Pirandello's influence on modern theatre resulted from his experimentation with the concept of realism that dominated drama from the time of Ibsen and Strindberg. He questioned all thought of norms by bringing the very idea of reality under philosophical scrutiny. His questioning helped playwrights to open themselves up with new approaches to theatre in the early part of the 20th century. Pirandello was one of the first and the best experimentalist. Henry IV is one of Pirandello's most significant works, and it had a profound impact on the development of twentieth- century theatre. Pirandello brought modernist themes and methods into the theatre, including a rejection of linear, realistic storytelling, a deconstruction of concepts of identity and perception, and exploration of the isolation inherent in the human experience. This style would be the foundation for avant-garde playwrights and later for the Theatre of the Absurd playwrights in the middle of the twentieth century. 148 1.3 Luigi Pirandello: Life and Works: A brilliant playwright who practiced what is regarded as a precursor of Absurdism, Luigi Pirandello was born in Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily in 1867 to a wealthy family of sulfur miners. During the 1880s, he attended the University of Rome and then the University of Bonn, earning his doctorate in Roman philology in 1891. In 1894 he married Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a sulfur merchant, in what appears to have been a business deal between their respective families. From 1904 onward, Portulano suffered severe bouts of hysteria and other mental illness that weighed heavily on their household, Pirandello ultimately institutionalizing her in 1919 upon the capture of both their sons in a World War I military campaign. Pirandello began writing while at university and returned to Rome in the late 1890s to pursue a career as an author. After a flood ruined his family sulfur mines, Pirandello began to support himself by teaching rhetoric and then Italian Literature at various local colleges. During this time, he translated Goethe's Roman Elegies , wrote his Elegie Renae , two books of poetry, and a volume of short stories entitled Amore Senz' Amore (1894). Pirandello's first novel, L'esclusa , appeared in 1901; Il Fu Matta Pascal , his first major success, followed in 1904. Though Pirandello had begun writing plays in the 1880s, he initially considered drama an impoverished medium in comparison with the novel. He would only come to the theatre in 1915, ferociously producing sixteen plays in six years. Pirandello became so prominent on the Italian dramatic scene that he would later win Mussolini's support to lead an ultimately failed campaign to establish a National Art Theatre in Rome. Much to the dismay of his present readers, Pirandello was an ardent fascist who joined the party in 1923. Though he harbored a somewhat idiosyncratic and not entirely uncritical relationship to the government, Pirandello remains remembered for his blunt declarations of allegiance to the party and his extravagant displays of support, most famously, "I am a Fascist because I am an Italian." The most oft-cited example of the latter is the donation of his personal gold, including his 1934 Nobel Prize medal, for the Italian campaign into Ethiopia. Eric Bentley, perhaps Pirandello's most canonical critic in Anglo-American dramatic studies, divides the playwright's career into three major phases: the early period of Sicilian folk comedies, Pirandello's philosophical works, and that of the mythic plays written under fascist rule. It is for the works of the second period, those 149 often considered progenitors of the absurdist theater, that Pirandello is remembered today. Apart from the famous Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), notable examples include Right You Are If You Think You Are (1917), a tale of a mysterious woman who could be either one of two different people, and Henry IV (1922), the story of a madman who believes he is a German Emperor from the eleventh-century. To accommodate his madness, his sister keeps him in a medieval castle surrounded by actors playing the role of his courtiers. Performing to great controversy in Rome, Six Characters in Search of an Author recounts the fate of a family of characters left unrealized by their author. Desperate to come to life, the characters interrupt the rehearsal of another Pirandello play and demand that the director and cast stage their story. Pirandello retrospectively grouped this surreal tale in a trilogy of "the theatre in the theatre," along with Each His Own Way (1924) and Tonight We Improvise (1930). Taking the theatre itself as its setting and subject, this trilogy drew upon the relations between all the major players of the dramatic spectacle—directors, actors, characters, spectators, and critics—to present every possible conflict. As such a deeply self- referential or meta-theatrical work, Six Characters is also a key exercise in what Pirandello termed il teatro dello specchio or the mirror theatre, a play that turns a mirror onto the theatre itself. As critic Anne Paolucci notes, the result then is not a reflection but a shattering, Pirandello generating his works through the fracturing of the dramatic spectacle itself. 1.4 Plot Summary of the Play Six Characters in Search of an Author : Act I The audience faces a stage as it usually is in the daytime: empty, half dark, and with curtain raised. The company enters from the back and readies for a rehearsal of Pirandello's the Prompter awaits the Manager with the book in arm. The Manager enters and calls for the second act. All except three actors move to the wings. The Manager points to the principle exit and instructs the Property Man on set design. The Leading Man asks if he must absolutely wear a cook's cap. The Manager jumps up in rage; the book demands a cap. The Leading Man should understand that he is not on the ordinary stage. He represents the shell of the eggs he is beating. The actors erupt in laughter. The Manager calls for silence and continues his explanation. Here 150 the Leading Man stands for reason and his wife is instinct. The parts will be mixed up, because the man who acts his own part becomes the puppet of himself. The Door-Keeper enters from the stage door and approaches the Manager. Simultaneously the Six Characters enter from the rear. Even when the light disappears, they remain almost suspended in their dream lightness but this does not detract from the essential reality of their forms and expressions. The Door-Keeper timidly announces their arrival. With embarrassment, the Father explains to the angry Manager that they are in search of an author. The Step-Daughter vivaciously declares that they bring them their new piece. When the Manager replies that he has no time for mad people, Father rejoins mellifluously that he knows life is full of infinite absurdities. Which are not needed to present properly unless they as true. To reverse this process is madness (having no sense and consistancy) and the Manager defends his art. If today's playwrights give them stupid comedies and puppet characters, they remain proud of having given life to immortal works. Father interrupts furiously and says that the Manager is exactly right. The Manager and Actors explode in laughter. Father remarks that they know the Characters carry a drama with them. Their incredulity shocks him. The Step- Daughter coquettishly insists that they are interesting as characters. Father explains that their author no longer wished to put them into a work. The Manager asks if the characters want to live for eternity. Father replies that they only want a moment in them. The Manager asks for the book; Father responds that the drama is in them and that their inner passion drives them forward. The Step-Daughter declares her inner passion for Father and pretends to embrace him. Father rebukes her and the Step-Daughter then brazenly performs. She invites them to stage their drama, luring them with the moment when God will take the little Child and imbecile Boy from their Mother.