In Pirandello's Theatre of Living Masks, Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani offer the first new edition in nearly sixty years of six of his major works.

The Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is undoubtedly one of the most innovative playwrights of the twentieth century and also one of the most complex. While his influence spread throughout modernist and postmodernist works, many first-time audiences and readers are confronted with the difficulty associated with such a radical aesthetic experience. In Living Masks, Umberto Mariani presents a clear and comprehensive introduction of Pirandello's major plays for general readers, students, and scholars new to Pirandello. Functioning as a guide to understanding the fundamental themes of Pirandello's plays, the author also examines the critical, aesthetic, and technical problems associated with these plays. He provides extensive reflection on some of the failings of early and contemporary criticism on Pirandello's works and offers many corrections of interpretative direction that will be significant and helpful to directors and performers. In particular, Mariani presents a deeper understanding and greater appreciation of Pirandello's works as a challenge to the tendency to adapt, and modify them, which drastically deprive the works of their original power and beauty. A concise and accessible introduction to a twentieth-century literary master, Living Masks will be of interest to dramatists, literary scholars, and students and scholars of Italian studies.

This special one-volume edition features five great plays by one of the most celebrated and fascinating dramatists of the twentieth century. Pirandello, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934, was the playwright par excellence of the conflict between illusion and reality. His modern and sensationally original plays dramatize with force and eloquence the isolation of the individual from society and from himself. The editor, Eric Bentley, is an international theater authority. In addition to the Introduction and the biographical and bibliographical material in the Appendices, Mr. Bentley has prepared for this volume the first English translations of the play Liolà and Pirandello’s important “Preface” to Six Characters in Search of an Author. Included Plays: Liolà It Is So! (If You Think So) Henry IV Six Characters in Search of an Author Each in His Own Way

Publisher Description

Pirandello, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a little known to most English readers. Too few of his plays and stories have been translated. This hook, therefore, serves the double purpose of introducing the Italian genius through a summary of all his dramatic work and interpreting his accomplishments fron an artistic viewpoint. As a background for his criticism, the Domenico Vittorini shows first how Pirandello's compassionate pessimism and tragic mockery resulted from his own tortured existence and in what way his art is relates to Italian literary tradition and contemporary thought. Proceeding chronologically, Pirandello's growth is traced from the elementary naturalism of his early writing, through his more reflective plays, to the crowning achievements of later years in which dramatic situations are approached from a highly intellectualized point of view.

A New York newspaper column from 1924 proclaimed: "Everybody's caught in the mazes of Pirandellism. . . . He is the great convention-smasher, and he just naturally leaves you face to face with the eternal query, What is truth?" "Everybody" is still caught in the mazes of Pirandellism. But since the 1940s Eric Bentley has threaded his way through those mazes. The Pirandello Commentaries is the result.

In February 1925, the 58-year-old world-famous playwright Luigi Pirandello met Marta Abba, an unknown, beautiful actress less than half his age, and fell in love with her. She was to become, until his death in December 1936, not only his confidante but also his inspiring muse and artistic collaborator, helping him in his plans to reform Italian theater under the Fascist regime. Pirandello's love for the young actress was neither a literary infatuation nor a form of fatherly affection, but rather an unfulfilled, desperate passion that secretly consumed him during the last decade of his life. Bitterly disillusioned by the conditions of the theatrical world in Italy, Pirandello and Abba shared a dream of going abroad to earn their fortune and returning to Italy with the means to establish a national theater dedicated to high artistic standards. In March 1929, when Marta finally yielded to family pressure and left Pirandello alone in Berlin to revive her Italian stage career and to end rumors over their involvement, he endured a devastating heartbreak and fell into a life-threatening depression--more profound and long-lasting than any of his biographers have yet imagined. The hundreds of letters Pirandello wrote to Abba during these years are the only source that reveals the true story of his relentless torment. Selected, translated, and introduced here for the first time in any language, these powerful and moving documents reward the reader with the unique experience of living in intimacy with a profound poet of human pain. Here Pirandello encourages his beloved in her difficult career as actor/manager, rejoices in her triumphs, and desperately implores her to return to him. The letters are filled with glimpses of this major artistic personality at some of his most distinctive moments--such as the award of the Nobel Prize, his meetings with Mussolini, and Marta's long-dreamed-of success on Broadway--but they remain foremost an authentic confession of a Pirandello, without the mask of his art, telling the story of his real-life tragedy. In 1986, two years before she died, Marta Abba authorized the publication of the present correspondence so that the world might understand how deeply Pirandello had suffered. This English-language volume contains a selection of 164 letters from the complete edition of 552, which Princeton University Press will publish in cooperation with Mondadori, in the original Italian, in 1995. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Essays discuss the texts of Luigi Pirandello, one of the literary giants of this century and present an up-to-date re-evaluations of Pirandello's works, including his poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays, letters, and memoirs.