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.

This is an introduction to the life and literary contributions of a Nobel Prize winner and one of Italy's most distinguished writers, Luigi Pirandello. It evaluates the significance of his influence on 20th century literature.

A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Right You Are! (If You Think You Are)," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

First Published in 1993. Contemporary Theatre Studies is a book series of special interest to everyone involved in theatre. This collection of documents is the first attempt in English to bring together a body of material on Luigi Pirandello as multi-faceted man of the theatre. Because relatively few of his works have been easily available to English language readers, he is thought of most frequently as a playwright, the author of Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV in particular, and his contribution to theatre, both in theory and in practice, has tended to be overlooked. Emphasising his role as a director, the book traces the rise and fall of his own theatre company, the Teatro d’Arte where he struggled to instil new practices and comments on Pirandello’s attempts during the years of Fascism to give Italy a national theatre in a European context.

User's guide - Editor's notes and intro. - Comprehensive bio. - Detailed plot summaries of each play - Extracts from critical essays that examine important aspects of each work - A complete biography of the writer's plays - A list of critical works about the playwright - An index of themes and ideas covered in the plays

A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

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.

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.

Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is one of the preeminent figures of the modern European theater. His masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author, set loose a riot during its first performance in Rome in 1921. This play about six unfortunate characters abandoned by their author in the middle of a tawdry drama, is an unsettling, supremely self-conscious work that is ultimately about theatrical artifice and artistic creation itself. Pirandello and Film examines Pirandello's many efforts-none of them finally successful-to transform Six Characters into a movie. The authors examine Pirandello's views on film and its relation to theater, his varying approaches to creating a film adaptation of Six Characters, and the efforts of directors and film moguls in Germany and Hollywood to fashion a cinematic version of the play. The book also presents an array of important documents, including some that have never before appeared in English: a Prologue (or prose sketch) for a 1926 film; a Scenario (a more detailed prose sketch) prepared by Pirandello and Adolph Lantz in the late 1920s for a German film version of Six Characters; an English-language film sketch written in 1935 by Pirandello and Saul Colin; and a letter from Max Reinhardt and the German emigri Hollywood film director Joseph von Sternberg to Saul Colin regarding the proposed film treatment of the play. These documents, together with the authors' critical text, provide a detailed portrait of Pirandello's developing view of film as an appropriate medium for his revolutionary dramatic innovations. Nina daVinci Nichols, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of Ariadne's Lives, Man, Myth & Monument,and two novels: Moira's Room and Child of the Night. Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni, an associate professor of speech at Baruch College, has published articles in The Luigi Pirandello Companion, Performing Arts Journal, and Modern Drama. Maurice Charney, a professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of All of Shakespeare, Comedy High and Low, and Sexual Fiction.

Luigi Pirandello is best known in the English-speaking world for his radical challenge to traditional Western theatre with plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author. But theatre is just one manifestation of his experiments with language which led to a remarkable collection of novels,short stories, and essays as well as his work for a film industry then in its infancy. This study, which is based on the view that Pirandello's writings are most fruitfully discussed in a European context, takes as its starting-point the author's belief in the primacy of the literary character in acreative process which is necessarily conflictual.The book argues that all Pirandello's characters are engaged in a continual performance which transcends the genre distinction between narrative and dramatic forms. In this performance it is the spoken word in which the characters invest most heavily as they struggle to sustain an identity of theirown, tell their life-stories, and assert themselves before their most prominent antagonist, the author himself.