The Once and Future King?

In Enrico IV, Pirandello created his finest character and his finest play. He had found a way to embody his ideas in a brilliant theatrical metaphor. In Henry’s character, the playwright’s reflections on the conflict between life and form, on the elusiveness of identity, and on man’s revolt against time, achieve their consummation in a powerfully eerie manner. In trying to fix his changing life in significant form, Henry emerges as Actor, Artist, and Madman, and, besides this, possesses an extraordinary intellect, reflecting on all three.

The structure of the play, a structure that became basic to Pirandello’s work, consists of an “historical” story within a “philosophical” framework. The historical line is this: Henry IV (as he is called throughout the play) is an Italian nobleman on whom life has played a cruel trick. Twenty years before, indulging his taste for playacting, he had appeared in a pageant, costumed as the medieval Holy Roman Emperor who had been excommunicated by Gregory VII and forced to walk barefoot to Canossa to do penance. His horse had stumbled – pricked from behind, as we later learn, by his rival, Tito Belcredi – and Henry had fallen, hitting his head on a rock. Henry awoke with the delusion that he actually was Henry IV; the pageant had become his reality. When this delirium persisted, Henry’s nephew, Charles di Nolli, hired men to play his retainers and counselors. For the next twenty years, they performed their supporting roles in a drama which Henry, the chief actor, had unwittingly substituted for his life.

For only twelve of those twenty years, however, was Henry really mad; after that, his consciousness returned. But he regained his sanity with the terrible realization that he had been cheated of his youth. He had slept away his life in a long dream, and now he had awakened, gray inside and out, “hungry as a wolf, at a banquet which was already over.” His hunger persisting, unappeased, he determined to revenge himself on time by refusing to return to time. He would play his role again, maintain his mask, and live his madness “in a state of lucid consciousness.” This consciousness is likened to a mirror which he always keeps before him, invisible to everybody else. The actor had turned madman; now the madman would turn actor, in revolt against existence itself.

Henry managed to escape from time by entering history, which is frozen time. He followed the outlines of a plot already written, foreordained, predetermined, seek- ing a corridor into the world of eternity. By remaining Henry IV at the age of twenty-six, “everything determined, everything settled,” Henry never suffers the horrors of age. He is held as firmly in an eternal moment as that youthful puppet of himself in costume, which hangs in the throne room beside a puppet of the young Donna Matilda. And now, as he enacts a masquerade, yet remains outside the masquerade – possessing the weird clarity of his lucid madness – Henry moves through life with the supreme confidence of one who knows what came before – and what comes after. Chance, accident, happenstance, the tricks of time, afflict him no more. Freely suspending his freedom of action, he has moved from time into timelessness, into that still point where the dance proceeds.

Henry’s narrative is woven skillfully in the play, and its threads are unraveled through the plucking and pulling of a group of typical Pirandellian busybodies: Donna Matilda, his old mistress; Tito Belcredi, her present lover; Charles di Nolli, Henry’s nephew; Frida, Matilda’s beautiful daughter; and a psychiatrist named Doctor Dionysius Genoni. These characters are subjected to Henry’s, and Pirandello’s, scorn, but the psychiatrist is a special object of satire. A “learned crank” with total confidence in his curative powers, Genoni is a jargon-ridden quack – a caricature of a professional man – il dottore from the commedia dell’arte. To him, Henry is merely a case, a conceptual object rather than a complex human being.

Having so labeled Henry, Genoni suggests that he and the others enter his madness for the purpose of observing him more closely. Since Henry “pays more attention to the dress than to the person,” they put on period costumes, assuming a madness of clothes. But Henry confuses the interlopers by shifting skillfully from one self to another, and speaking ambiguously about real and imagined conspiracies. He turns the mirror back on them: “What clowns, what clowns!” he spits, contemptuously. “You can play any tune on them!” Thus, Pirandello reverses accepted notions of sanity and madness with a paradox taken from the heart of his philosophy. To live in a world where nothing is stable and man grows old is lunacy itself, while Henry’s “conscious madness” is the highest form of wisdom: “This is my life!” cried Henry. “Quite a different thing from your life, in which you have grown old…”

When the busybodies attempt to bring Henry back into their world from his refuge in history, their meddling, as usual, issues in painful consequences. The Doctor, comparing Henry to a watch that has stopped at a certain hour, prepares to get the mechanism going again through a “violent trick.” He will dress up Frida, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her mother as a young woman, in the costume of the puppet, and place her moving, speaking figure in the frame. Belcredi warns that the shock of pulling Henry across an abyss of eight hundred years might prove so strong that “You’ll have to pick up the pieces in a basket!” But Genoni, his implacable confidence unruffled, proceeds with his dangerous plan.

At the beginning of the last act, the throne room has been darkened, and the actors are in place: the living figures of Frida and Charles di Nolli have been substituted for the puppets of Matilda and Henry. When Henry enters the room, and Frida calls to him softly in the darkness, the shock is so great that Henry almost faints. In Frida he finds his old love, Matilda, still young and fresh. Time has destroyed, but time, too, has miraculously resurrected what it destroyed. His passion returning, he finds all the treacheries and betrayals of the last twenty years have vanished in an instant. The violent trick proves violent indeed, and the conclusion is melodramatic. Belcredi intervenes, shouting that Henry is not mad, and Henry runs him through the body with a sword. Forced back into the role of madman by this act, he is locked in it now. The mask has obliterated the face. The mantle of Henry IV has become a shirt of Nessus. Drawing his Valets around him for protection, he realizes that history has become his prison, and he is now lost for all eternity in its cunning passages: “Here together, all of us together … and for all time!”

Enrico IV is unquestionably Pirandello’s masterpiece, a complex artwork in which the themes arise naturally from the action – neither discursive nor superfluous, yet, at the same time, eloquently and coherently stated. In Henry, Pirandello dramatized the dreadful loneliness of human beings, encased in shells of steel, never able to know or communicate with another. Pirandello’s Henry, like Brecht’s Shlink in In the Jungle of Cities, watches the hungry generations stare coldly into each others eyes. This “misery which is not only his, but everybody’s,” as the author describes it in a stage direction, is Pirandello’s finest expression of his rage against existence, the source both of his philosophy and his drama. And in Enrico IV, Pirandello finally achieved his goal – to convert intellect into genuine passion – making his existential rebellion the occasion for a rewarding and absorbing play.

Robert Brustein is A.R.T.’s Artistic Director. This essay is excerpted from his book The Theatre of Revolt (1964).