Modern Drama

Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman – with one who shakes the foundations of all you have built up in yourselves, your logic, the logic of all your constructions? … I know that when I was a child, I thought the moon in the pond was real. How many things I thought real! I believed everything I was told – and I was happy! Because it's a terrible thing if you don't hold on to that which seems true to you today – to that which will seem true to you tomorrow, even if it is the opposite of that which seemed true to you yesterday. I would never wish you to think, as I have done, on this horrible thing which really drives one mad: that if you were beside another and looking into his eyes – as I one day looked into somebody's eyes – you might as well be a beggar before a door never to be opened to you; for he who does enter there will never be you, but someone unknown to you with his own different and impenetrable world … [Long pause. Darkness gathers in the room (…)] It's getting dark here …

Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV has received much critical attention for its complex treatment of madness, illusion, history, memory, and existential angst. Considering Pirandello's biographical facts related to the psychological decline of his wife Antonietta Portulano, whose paranoid delusions formed an alternative version of her husband's identity, many have looked to categories of mental illness to understand Henry's situation. Rudolph Binion sees Henry's story "as an example of emotional arrest which dates from his traumatic fall"; Eric Bentley reads the protagonist's behavior as psychopathology; Alan Roland and Gino Rizzo diagnose Henry with "wounded narcissism […] masochism, and deprivation"; Thomas Bishop writes that "Henry's story reads like a case history of amnesia compounded with schizophrenia" (qtd. in Bassanese 88).

While I am generally reserved about the critical usefulness of diagnosing [End Page 55] fictional characters, the desire of so many critics to locate Henry's "crisis of modern consciousness"¹ in actual mental disorders attests to what seems like a striking kinship between suspensions of disbelief on and off the stage. That is not to say that Pirandello fully captured what "it is really like" to be crazy, as Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths was said to capture what it was really like to be a poor bohemian Russian. That may be true as well, but what I mean is that Pirandello's understanding of madness is both the vehicle and real world corollary to his inquiry into the ontology of theatrical illusion. What exists in reality as the troubled encounter between consciousness and the world unfolds on Pirandello's stage as a complex interaction between the psychological realism of acting techniques and the "authentic" detail of scenic illusion.

In that sense, Pirandello is almost the quintessential modernist playwright, though he does not fit cleanly into any of the "-isms" that began to spring up at the end of the nineteenth century. For theatrical modernism, first dominated by realism and then overtaken by the anti-realistic aesthetics of futurism, expressionism, symbolism, dada, and surrealism, scenography became the very fabric where notions of concrete physical space and the individual psyche interacted. Realism tried to stage the nuances of personal struggles in the minutia of scenic detail so as to shed light on the effect of environment on character. Early twentieth-century non-realistic reactions to realism turned that relationship inside out, tending to favor stages that manifested abstract as well as unconscious aspects of the mind or nature more expressively. The anti-realistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century in many ways formed their identities through a conscious and deliberate break with realistic representation in pursuit of the mysteries bound up with perception and representational thought itself.

Pirandello's oeuvre in general, but Henry IV in particular, straddles these two worlds somewhat, employing the illusionistic vestige and yet insistent reality of realism to achieve the ontologically questioning spirit of the avant-garde. Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre likewise straddled abstraction and realism, but with the inverse relationship between method and goal; he used the ontological arrest of the alienation effect and non-illusionistic scenography of scaffolds, treadmills, and banners to ask the same kinds of concrete sociopolitical questions as Ibsen and Shaw. Where most of the rebellious -isms of the turn of the century philosophically annihilated realism from their stages by replacing the basic relationship between real space and theatrical space with abstracted space, and epic theatre stepped back from cohesive fabricated visual reality while still seeking dialectical truths about the real, Pirandello uses realism's own assumptions and materiality to destabilize its truth claim – and thereby also the truth claim of seeing and believing "real" scenes off stage. Pirandello thus creates an inverted realism that connects to the real not only by being "true to life," but, much more threateningly, by showing how life is always so true to theatre. [End Page 56]

"So As To Look Exactly Like The Throne Room of Henry IV"

By the 1922 premiere of Henry IV, Italian and other European audiences (conditioned by almost half a century of realism and "historically accurate" productions of Shakespeare) were already more than familiar with elaborate illusionistic detail in stage design. As the curtains open on a "Salon in the villa, furnished and decorated so as to look exactly like the throne room of Henry IV in the royal residence at Goslar" (139), one can see the opulence and "authenticity" one might expect from a 1920s historical play. The curtains open, however, on two valets decked out in accordance with the set who "jump down, as if surprised, from the stand on which they have been lying, and go and take their positions, as rigid as statues, on either side below the throne with their halberds in their hands" (140). They join the set to complete the illusion. Once in place, the scene looks prepared to greet a monarch with trumpeted fanfare. Instead, four men enter dressed as eleventh-century German knights, introducing Berthold, the most recent hire, to the historical, political, and geographical milieu of Henry IV's court. As the valets relax again to see no emperor, one of them lights a cigarette, introducing a prop whose modernity and casualness undermine the impeccable surrounding illusion. The authentic detail thus reveals itself indeed as an elaborate illusion, only not intended for the audience who paid to see it.

In this thoroughly recreated throne room where the valets spend their workdays literally as part of the set, "as rigid as statues," four other men play secret counselors at Henry's court – a court elaborately created and continued every day for the benefit of "mad" Henry who (everybody thinks) thinks he is the eleventh-century German emperor. The scene opens, the illusion seems complete, and right from the start the valets destabilize the persistence of the illusion's claim to truth. For the valets, caught by the curtain lying on the stand, the room demands certain kinds of behavior when and only when the man walks in who believes that the stage is what it represents. When Henry takes his leave, the throne room looks the same but loses its semiotic density. Certain rules of behavior rigidly apply when Henry's eyes are on the scenery, only to vanish along with his gaze. The play begins by reversing what one expects from illusionistic theatre, engaging the spectator in a sort of reverse transubstantiation: on top of asking spectators to believe what looks like a stage set to be a royal court, Pirandello then asks them to believe what looks like a royal court to be no more than a stage set, an expensive illusion intended for somebody else. Rather than a drama dependent upon the spectators' willing suspension of disbelief in spatial verisimilitude, Pirandello prepares spectators for a play about that very suspension of disbelief, filling up and emptying out a set whose false material detail betrays realism's truth-claim in its suspect completeness. [End Page 57]

Inasmuch as Henry IV betrays realism, it depends on realism's scenic completeness and link between psychology and scenography. Directors like Konstantin Stanislavsky and André Antoine as well as playwrights from Ibsen to Chekhov studied the effects of environment on character, investing the semi-permanent objects and stages of realism with memories and affective socio-economic signification, and lacing characters' actions, thoughts, and feelings into the fabrics of their worlds. As each object, nook, and cranny of a realistic set unfolded into dramatic utility, realistic characters increasingly identified problems of the mind and heart with that material world, whether those problems found themselves in Hedda Gabler's pistols, Jean's tiny servants quarters, Nora's prison-like "doll's" house, or the wardrobe in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. As Bert O. States remarks in Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, naturalistic rooms tended to "inhabit the people who inhabit them" (46).

Pirandello takes that psychic inhabitation along with realism's scenic detail and uses it as the foundation for cracking open philosophical conundrums at the core of identity. Although Pirandello's meta-theatrics and philosophical bent seem to align him more with late modernists like Genet, Peter Handke, and even Beckett, Henry IV's ontological and epistemological investigation into the human mind depends heavily and specifically on the relationship between Henry and this elaborate set created and maintained for his benefit – a dependence that owes its basic framework to realism. I will suggest here that Henry's identity, memory, and relationship to time (both personal and historical) exists in the play as a confrontation with the spatial trappings of realistic detail; or, to put it better, Henry's illusion of a persistent self surfaces and breaks in the breakable surface of Pirandello's persistent scenographic illusion.

"A Hole in the Paper Sky"

If the set constitutes the self, a tear in that illusion is a tear in the fabric of identity. For Pirandello, the rupture in the illusion is a moment wherein modernism has the opportunity to transform dramatic action, to puncture its fated cohesion and stop time with reflection. This idea (and the title of this paper) comes from something Pirandello wrote in his most famous novel, The Late Mattia Pascal:

The tragedy of Orestes in a puppet theater! … Now listen to this crazy notion that just came to me! Let's suppose that at the very climax, when the puppet who represents Orestes is about to take his revenge on Aegisthus and his mother for his father's death, a great hole were suddenly torn in the paper sky of the theater, what would happen? … Orestes would still be bent on revenge, he would still be impatient to bring it about, but his eyes in that instant would be directed up there, to that ripped sky, where all kinds of evil influences would now filter down into the scene and he would feel his arms grow limp. Orestes, in other words, would become [End Page 58] Hamlet. The whole difference, Signor Meis, between ancient and modern tragedy is just that, believe me: a hole in the paper sky.

Orestes would become Hamlet because "he would feel his arms grow limp"; unified, continuous action would fail to suffice, replaced by a thoughtful pause. The world the fictional character had known and defined himself both against and as a part of would sprout a leak. Any space calls for particular kinds of behaviors, certain types of movement; once the fabric of that space rips, the relativity of motion's proximity to location becomes radically apparent, because the fabric that has defined movement proves inconstant, too permeable to offer a static context. As movement becomes impossible, so too does time, frozen in a thoughtful upward glance. Walter Starkie writes that many critics refer to Henry IV as "the Hamlet of the twentieth century" (Starkie 189); Eric Bentley sees the play as Pirandello's Hamlet and identifies Belcredi as its Claudius, Matilda as its Gertrude, and Frida as its Ophelia (Bentley38). But Hamlet's reflections and crisis of action take place within and in relation to language. Shakespeare's stage was an empty space whose neutrality foregrounded linguistic feats. In the thorough illusion that the legacy of realism left Pirandello, the Hamlet of the twentieth century is the Hamlet in dialogue with fabricated visual reality. As modernism began to replace the primacy of the word with the power of the image, modern consciousness depended more and more on its relationship to manufactured appearance and the holes within that fabric.

"In The Midst of All this Respectable Antiquity"

Images of torn illusion emerge in miniature frequently in Henry IV, usually as quite a shock. The first time the audience sees modern dress in Henry's throne room, the contrast of costumes threatens the integrity of the entire illusion (and therefore Henry's delicate sanity), causing quite a row among those employed to preserve its unity:

[(…) the old servant JOHN enters in evening dress.]
JOHN [quickly, anxiously]. Hss! Hss! Frank! Lolo!
HAROLD [turning around]. What is it?
BERTHOLD [marvelling at seeing a man in modern clothes enter the throne room]. Oh! I say, this is a bit too much, this chap here!
LANDOLPH. A man of the XXth century, here! Oh, go away! [THEY run over to him, pretending to menace him and throw him out.]

In this context, "pretending to menace him and throw him out" holds more reality than usual, because pretense is the name of Henry's game; it is a constant mode of living in his artificial world. John betrays the scene when he [End Page 59] shouts, "Stop it, will you? Don't play the fool with me!" (147); it is he, not the secret counselors who pretend to throw him out, who violates the rules of the space.

Even before the intrusion of interlopers, the throne room set of Henry IV already contains a tear from the beginning, a feature that freezes Henry's past into a distilled visual meeting place between character and set. Pirandello's subversion of realism's authenticity depends partially on the completeness of the illusion he presents (if only to subvert), but two apparent anachronisms backdrop the thorough illusion and frame Henry's throne:

Among the antique decorations there are two modern life-size portraits in oil painting. They are placed against the back wall, and mounted in a wooden stand that runs the whole length of the wall. (It is wide and protrudes, so that it is like a large bench.) One of the paintings is on the right; the other on the left of the throne, which is in the middle of the wall and divides the stand.

Prominent in the visual field, the portraits connect specifically to the characters of the drama that unfolds, once again through detailed authenticity: "The two portraits represent a lady and a gentleman, both young, dressed up in carnival costumes: one as 'Henry IV,' the other as the 'Marchioness Matilda of Tuscany'" (140). As Berthold remarks, "the thing seems to me somewhat out of place […] two modern paintings in the midst of all this respectable antiquity!" (145). Although they sit on stage in full visual and tactile reality, Landolph explains that they represent something different to Henry "who never touches them" (145):

BERTHOLD. […] What are they for him?
LANDOLPH. Well, I'm only supposing, you know; but I imagine I'm about right. They're images such as … well – such as a mirror might throw back. Do you understand? That one there represents himself, as he is in this throne room, which is all in the style of the period. What's there to marvel at? If we put you before a mirror, won't you see yourself, alive, but dressed up in ancient costume? Well, it's as if there were two mirrors there, which cast back living images in the midst of a world which, as you well see, when you have lived with us, comes to life too.

In comparing the life that emerges in the throne room, marked by particular words and rituals, to the "living images" in the portraits, Landolph implies a sort of life stuck on a platonic ideal of itself, frozen in time. On the occasion of their painting twenty years hence, "Henry IV" and the "Marchioness Matilda of Tuscany" were posed dressed as those characters for a costumed cavalcade. As the audience soon learns, Henry's horse reared (agitated by his rival for the marchioness' affections), throwing him off. He hit his head and woke up convinced he was the real Henry IV, and his sister, to help him out in his madness, [End Page 60] arranged to surround him with the scenographic accoutrements of his illusion. The portraits, if mirror images, show what they mirror crystallized in a moment out of time. Henry's portrait gives him a view of himself all decked out in the eleventh century but suspended on the last day that he maintained a sane distance from the costumes and set. The image of Marchioness Matilda of Tuscany likewise suspends her youth into a portrait.

But they are not the throne room's portraits; they are anachronistic and distilled images at odds with an otherwise completed illusion; that is, they are not portraits in Henry's world, where modern portrait painting does not yet exist. Together the portraits frame the throne, images of the young Henry and his lost love, positioning that missed connection, the distance between the portraits, as the gap wherein Henry's life finds its repetitive stasis, where a missed love connection two decades old haunts a real illusion eight centuries dead.

When the widow Donna Matilda and her entourage (her daughter Frida, the doctor, her lover Belcredi, and Charles DiNolli, nephew of "mad" Henry) enter the throne room, it is as interlopers from another time and place, but Matilda likewise develops a strong fascination with her image of twenty years before. For while the portrait has remained still, she has changed; she has aged and begotten a daughter (Frida) who now bears an uncanny likeness to the portrait that once looked like her. Frida does not see the resemblance, but for Donna Matilda it is as real as her memories of her own youth:

DONNA MATILDA. […] That is my portrait; and to find my daughter there instead of me fills me with astonishment, an astonishment which, I beg you to believe, is sincere. […] She cannot recognize herself in me as I was at her age; while I, there, can very well recognize myself in her as she is now!
DOCTOR. Quite right! Because a portrait is always there fixed in the twinkling of an eye: for the young lady something far away and without memories, while, for the Marchioness, it can bring back everything: movements, gestures, looks, smiles, a whole heap of things …
DONNA MATILDA. Exactly!

The "whole heap of things" the portrait brings back for the marchioness situates the portrait as something far from dead; in its interaction with the living, it lives, it haunts. It marks time as it passes and confusingly entangles genetics with representation: the image of a person remains static, while the person of which it is an image changes beyond recognition, begets a smaller version of herself, and returns when that smaller version has grown to match the image. Two generations of signifieds slide in and out of a single signifier, twenty years apart. To make matters even more complex, DiNolli, who happens to perfectly resemble the portrait of Henry IV, is engaged to marry Frida. Two signifieds slide out of two signifiers (the portraits) and another two signifieds [End Page 61] slide in and even fill the old empty signifiers with the glow of their young, present love. The portraits contain within them the liminal site of generational time, linking the past and the present in an overdetermined collaboration between a scenic element and the actors' bodies.

The portraits also help enact a dialogue between mediums. Not only does Henry's throne sit in the gap between the former image of himself and the former image of the love he lost; the pretense of his eleventh-century illusion exists simultaneously in theatre and painting, the former ontologically dependent on the passing of time, the latter on committing a single moment to posterity. Theatre, of course, includes not only the temporally bound act of performance but also the sets and costumes; it could, ostensibly, include a couple of portraits. But these portraits are modern, are out of place, existing not within Henry's historical illusion but next to it, in constant juxtaposition against it. Characters present themselves in performance through actions and words; these immobile, silent paintings offer a version of character that could not possibly do anything out of character because they cannot do anything at all. This is character as memory, character as historical reality, affective image – made at once more static and more dynamic by juxtaposition against the liveness of theater: more static because the motion of liveness makes portraiture's stillness conspicuous in contrast, more dynamic because the constantly changing memories and psychological makeups of those live bodies who look at the portraits change what the portraits mean, what feelings they arouse, even, in Frida's and the marchioness' case, what persons they resemble. As Robert Brustein, Eric Bentley, Arthur Livingston, Francis Fergusson, and scores of other Pirandellians have described as Pirandello's overturning of the notion of a consistent and persistent self, performance seems an ideal mode to express the constant inconstancy of identity. Identity changes, and theatre is the art of change. But to create a piece of theatre about that change, it behooves Pirandello to create a controlled variable, an image whose stillness both highlights and interacts with the characters' performative transience.

"More Attention to the Dress than to the Person"

Before the marchioness and the others can see the madman inhabit his illusion, fill the place up with his imperious affectations, they all must match themselves to the scenery, to the illusion's ostentatious airs. In the spirit of sustaining the fiction, all visitors are obliged to pretend that they are historical personalities of the eleventh century. The ensemble responsible for sustaining Henry's fiction is luckily better prepared than a small theatre company:

LANDOLPH. We have got there a whole wardrobe of costumes of the period, copied to perfection from old models. This is my special job. I get them from the best theatrical costumers. They cost lots of money.

In the economy of maintaining such a masquerade, no expense is spared; great detail goes into this mad illusion's "authenticity." And everyday visitations cannot help but occur theatrically, separated from the possibility of genuine exchange by the costumes, which, indeed, Henry seems to pay more attention to than he does to the visitors. As everybody chooses or is assigned parts, Frida of course plays the marchioness (who, in Henry's mind, is frozen at the age of nineteen) and the doctor enacts the inverted theatrical version of the representational drift the marchioness experienced with her portrait; where she watched her portrait move from resembling her to resembling her daughter, he plays the part of someone who had been played on this court-stage before by another visitor:

DOCTOR. – Ah yes … we decided I was to be … the Bishop of Cluny, Hugh of Cluny!
HAROLD. The gentleman means the Abbot. Very good! Hugh of Cluny.
LANDOLPH. – He's often been here before!
DOCTOR [amazed]. – What? Been here before?
LANDOLPH. – Don't be alarmed! I mean that it's an easily prepared disguise …
HAROLD. We've made use of it on other occasions, you see!
DOCTOR. But …
LANDOLPH. Oh, no, there's no risk of his remembering. He pays more attention to the dress than to the person.

Clothes make the man, as they made the madman mad. "I shall never forget that scene," Donna Matilda recalls of the costumed cavalcade twenty years ago, when Henry hit his head, " – all our masked faces hideous and terrified gazing at him, at that terrible mask of his face, which was no longer a mask, but madness, madness personified" (159). Now Henry's mask of madness forces his old acquaintances to don airs once more, to conform to his scenography. That he "pays more attention to the dress than to the person" speaks to his growing suspicion that dress might really be all there is. At least, identity is not easily separable from the costumes and scenery that constantly attend it. What is the connection between the disguise and the disguised?

HENRY IV. Not one of us can lie or pretend. We're all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves. However, Monsignor, while you keep yourself in order, holding on with both your hands to your holy habit, there slips down from your sleeves, there peels off from you like … like a serpent … something you don't notice: life, Monsignor! [Turns to the MARCHIONESS.] Has it never happened to you, my Lady, to find a different self in yourself?

"Of course," she might reply, because the self she is showing is a self she put on explicitly from Landolph's theatrical wardrobe. As Henry enters and philosophizes, [End Page 63] he ironically relativizes the truth of his visitors' disguises – ironically, because as they know, we know, and he knows (but they and we don't know he knows), those particular disguises mean nothing to them. "Monsignor […] holding on with both [his] hands to [his] holy habit" holds a habit that has no holiness except, everybody thinks, in Henry's eyes. The Hugh of Cluny might well have needed to take his conception of self with a greater existential grain of salt, but he is eight centuries dead, absent for Henry's advice – and everybody knows it. Henry relativizes a taken-for-granted truth that nobody actually takes for granted, a truth already doubly relativized by the frames of the throne room and the proscenium arch: Henry's words address Pirandello's actors acting like Pirandello's characters, forced to act like personalities of the eleventh century. His words of wisdom seem penetrating, and indeed resonate and reverberate at every cascading frame, but most immediately address empty masks, masks no one takes for true. Even while talking about the truth of appearances with the intention of relativizing, Pirandello/Henry speaks in an already multiply removed simulacrum devoid of stable referents. To repeat Landolph's observation, "He pays more attention to the dress than to the person."

But Henry speaks ironically, not mistakenly. The endless mask upon mask upon mask, though cleverly crafted in this particular instance, resembles the rule rather than the exception. That is, without masks, and without the scenography of everyday architecture and interior design, identity simply might not exist. Through life a person wears many different masks, and, increasingly as one grows older, the mask she holds onto most tightly is the one swept away by time. For Henry, that image one clings to is true for the fact of one's clinging to it:

HENRY IV. […] we all of us cling tight to our conceptions of ourselves, just as he who is growing old dyes his hair. What does it matter that this dyed hair of mine isn't a reality for you, if it is, to some extent, for me? – you, you, my Lady, certainly don't dye your hair to deceive the others, nor even your-self; but only to cheat your own image a little before the looking-glass. I do it for a joke! You do it seriously! But I assure you that you too, Madam, are in masquerade, though it be in all seriousness; and I am not speaking of the venerable crown on your brows or the ducal mantle. I am speaking only of the memory you wish to fix in your-self of your fair complexion one day when it pleased you – or of your dark complexion, if you were dark: the fading image of your youth!

The marchioness knows as well as Henry the effort of clinging to "the fading image" of her youth. Her image left her for a younger body, the body of her daughter. Here Henry plunges through the layers of artifice and arrives right inside Matilda's head, "not speaking of the venerable crown" or "the ducal mantle" but that inner image she has of herself, and that she sees also on the wall and in her daughter. That image, once it begins to fade from her face, [End Page 64] easily tempts a theatrical manipulation of appearance. For Henry IV, theatrically capturing that fading image for an eternity outside time constitutes his entire universe – both the live, dynamic, space of the decorated villa/stage and the frozen images of the portraits.

"The Portrait, To The Life!"

Through Henry's fixation on the portraits, the doctor devises a "cure," a sort of hole in the paper sky through which Henry might see the thin fabric of his illusion unravel. His idea hinges on the imaginative doublethink he associates with madmen and Henry's complex relationship to his own image:

DOCTOR. We must take into account the peculiar psychology of madmen; which, you must know, enables us to be certain that they observe things and can, for instance, easily detect people who are disguised; can in fact recognize the disguise and yet believe in it; just as children do, for whom disguise is both play and reality. […] But the thing is extremely complicated, inasmuch as he must be perfectly aware of being an image to himself and for himself – that image there, in fact! [Alluding to the portrait in the throne room, and pointing to the left.]

The doctor suggests, since Frida and Charles DiNolli just happen to perfectly resemble the portraits of the marchioness and Henry, that Frida (dressed as the marchioness) and Charles (dressed as Henry) should replace the portraits. Frida's costumed appearance even moves her beyond resemblance into replication; she is, they all say, the flesh-and-bone living version of the image in the portrait.

DONNA MATILDA.One would say it were I! Look! – Why, Frida, look! She's exactly my portrait, alive!
DOCTOR. Yes, yes … Perfect! Perfect! The portrait, to the life.
BELCREDI. Yes, there's no question about it. She is the portrait! Magnificent!

To make those portraits, the scene designer would have to model them on the actors playing Frida and Charles, not Matilda and Henry. So the notion that Frida "is the portrait!" nods to the fact that the portrait is actually based on her own body on the level of theatrical construction. The portrait's slippery relationship to its human objects thus becomes one step more complicated. Whom is the portrait an image of? If I ask that question in the frame of the audience's reality, the answer is that it is literally an image of the actress' body who plays Frida but pretends to be of a younger version of Matilda. If I ask in the frame of Donna Matilda's reality, the portrait has a triple identity: (1) representing Donna Matilda when she was younger, (2) but dressed as, and therefore also representative of, the Marchioness Matilda of Tuscany at the [End Page 65] cavalcade, as well as (3) embracing the "new signified" of Frida. For Henry's level of reality – or what everyone takes for it – the portrait is not even a portrait but a moment out of time.

Out from images whose human object slips strangely between frames of reality, the two, the plan goes, will jump out, animating the still images like the statue of A Winter's Tale, and will thus assign a sense of temporality to the frozen image Henry has of himself and the marchioness. Henry, the doctor figures, will be freed to recover his proper sense of time:

DOCTOR.[…] If we can succeed in rousing him, as I was saying, and in breaking at one go the threads – already slack – which still bind him to this fiction of his, giving him back what he himself asks for – you remember, he said: "one cannot always be twenty-six years old, madam!" if we can give him freedom from this torment, which even he feels is a torment, then if he is able to recover at one bound the sensation of the distance of time …

The doctor's plan, in theory, will puncture the psycho-scenographic matrix of Henry's world by traversing mediums, transforming portraiture into performance, and, thereafter, transforming Henry's performance into "real" life.

There is one hitch. What the doctor, attendants, and audience don't know is that "Henry IV" hasn't believed in this masquerade for several years. In the beginning, the blow to the head really did loose his grip on reality, but after a number of years he came to. Rather than admitting he was cured, however, he continued to pretend thinking he was Henry IV, and continued to carry on as such, every day. As Henry comes clean to his attendants in Act Two, the audience finds the illusion they thought existed for a single pair of eyes, this elaborate and authentic stage decor empty of all semiotic value to everyone but one perceiving subject, is not even a true illusion for him. The illusion still provokes the same rules of behavior when Henry greets visitors, but the scene agreed upon as a throne room exists only insofar as Henry, his attendants, and his visitors pretend to honor it. The scenery is a full illusion turned inside out, simultaneously complete and completely empty. All behavior there is pretense, and in living the pretense as if it were his life, Henry made it his life, he made himself and makes himself into Henry IV.

"To Deck It Out With All the Colors and Splendors of That Far Off Day"

As long as the architectural or scenographic trappings of a world can be manipulated, why not choose one's own reality?

HENRY IV. […] Now, Doctor, the case must be absolutely new in the history of madness; I preferred to remain mad – since I found everything ready and at my [End Page 66] disposal for this new exquisite fantasy. I would live it – this madness of mine – with the most lucid consciousness; and thus revenge myself on the brutality of a stone which had dinted by [sic] head. The solitude – this solitude – squalid and empty as it appeared to me when I opened my eyes again – I determined to deck it out with all the colors and splendors of that far off day of carnival […]

The stone that dinted Henry's head punctured a biological paper sky; recreating the world with his own choice of fabric, behaving as if he believed in it, and ignoring the encroachment of external reality, Henry creates a puppet theatre that he can at once embrace and comprehend.

Not to say that Henry can only ask what illusion can do for him; he is equally concerned about what he can do for illusion. He has a special knack for and pleasure in "setting the scene," as he reveals after telling his assistants the truth about his "madness." His interest in the illusion is not merely experiential, that is, not merely the luxury or protection it offers to him as an inauthentic madman. Henry directs, taking pleasure in the illusion, including his place within it, for its picturesqueness.

HENRY IV. Ah, a little light! Sit there around the table, no, not like that; in an elegant, easy manner! … [To HAROLD.] Yes, you, like that! [Poses him.][Then to BERTHOLD.] You, so! … and I, here! [Sits opposite them.] We could do with a little decorative moonlight. It's very useful for us, the moonlight. I feel a real necessity for it, and pass a lot of time looking up at the moon from my window. Who would think, to look at her that she knows that eight hundred years have passed, and that I, seated at the window, cannot really be Henry IV gazing at the moon like any poor devil? But, look, look! See what a magnificent night scene we have here: the emperor surrounded by his faithful counselors! … How do you like it?

Situating and posing the "magnificent night scene" of "the emperor surrounded by his faithful counselors," Henry has an appreciation for the life of the image qua image. He also meditates on the relativity of identity and truth in relation to the scenic frame. The moon, here, offers Henry a set piece whose comparative remove and repeated (if inconstant) presence trumps smaller and more transitory scenes, whose spatial distance from the illusions of Henry's throne room, the theatre, and the grand masquerades outside the theatre puts those performances into perspective as performances. "But, look, look!" The moon sits in the sky, far outside the theatre. Though the moon's remove calls attention to the fact that all stages, even the earth, have something outside themselves, its presence nevertheless adds to and aesthetically enhances earthly illusions.

The point is not to do away with illusions, but to recognize that one can choose them. That is, at least the powerful can. Missing, somewhat, the uniqueness of the privilege afforded him, Henry counsels his counselors that they should have embraced the illusion and become a part of it: [End Page 67]

HENRY IV. You ought to have known how to create a fantasy for yourselves, not to act it for me, or anyone coming to see me; but naturally, simply, day by day, before nobody, feeling yourselves alive in the history of the eleventh century, here at the court of your emperor, Henry IV! You, Ordulph [Taking him by the arm.], alive in the castle of Goslar, waking up in the morning, getting out of bed, and entering straightway into the dream, clothing yourself in the dream that would be no more a dream, because you would have lived it, felt it alive in you. You would have drunk it in with the air you breathed; yet knowing all the time that it was a dream, so you could better enjoy the privilege afforded you of having to do nothing else but live this dream, this far off and yet actual dream! And to think that at a distance of eight centuries from this remote age of ours, so colored and sepulchral, the men of the twentieth century are torturing themselves in ceaseless anxiety to know how their fates and fortunes will work out! Whereas you are already in history with me …

The difference between Henry's historicized illusion and the great masquerade of life is that his reality subverts life's unknowability, replacing the randomness of modern living with the calm coherence of an historical script:

HENRY IV. All fixed for ever! And you could have admired at your ease how every effect followed obediently its cause with perfect logic, how every event took place precisely and coherently in each minute particular! The pleasure, the pleasure of history, in fact, which is so great, was yours.

Henry's reality still depends on the unfolding of time, but conspicuously repeatable time, the kind of time that knows occasional surprises but will generally follow some preexisting script, the kind of time one feels acting a play. And as he had to authenticate time with real and reproduced eleventh-century relics, his time becomes unusually inseparable from its artifacts. Like a museum whose history emerges from extant objects, garments, and art, Henry's chosen historicized time exists in that spatial, visual field. "You know," Henry remarks, "it is quite easy to get accustomed to it. One walks about as a tragic character, just as if it were nothing … [Imitates the tragic manner.] in a room like this …" (205). The room makes the performance, both in terms of time and character.

"This Masquerade of Theirs […] It Is Identical Withthemselves"

In Act Three, Charles and Frida leap out of the picture frames, and Donna Matilda, Belcredi, and the doctor rush into the room, turning on the hidden electric lights. As everyone surrounds Henry and confronts him about his disingenuous [End Page 68] madness, he points out how masquerading extends far outside his own act, and how it always becomes one with the masquerader:

HENRY IV. […] This dress [Plucking his dress.] which is for me the evident, involuntary caricature of that other continuous, everlasting masquerade, of which we are the involuntary puppets [Indicates BELCREDI.], when, without knowing it, we mask ourselves with that which we appear to be … ah, that dress of theirs, this masquerade of theirs, of course, we must forgive it them, since they do not yet see it is identical with themselves […]

The connection between scenic/costume details and those who move within them always creates a state of madness, a sort of playacting. But "it is identical with themselves" (emphasis added); scenography is the semipermeable membrane of identity itself. That correspondence attains greater visibility in a lunatic's theatricalized reproduction of a long-dead place, but whatever makes the lunatic so crazy in the first place – a certain over-involvement in the willing suspension of disbelief, one might say – ought to apply equally to a sane person's insistent faith in the truth of his home and wardrobe. "I am cured," Henry tells them all, "[…] because I can act the madman to perfection, here; and I do it very quietly, I'm only sorry for you that have to live your madness so agitatedly, without knowing it or seeing it" (205–6). In the process of losing himself in the illusion, recovering, and then pretending not to have recovered, Henry gazes up at a hole in his paper sky. Though he chooses to remain in the charade, he at least realizes for the first time that his sky was made of paper.

The throne room, filled and emptied of semiotic meaning over and over again, stands at the end of the play in full detail but with ambiguous value. Two groups of actors use it to put on a show for one another, neither group believing in it but both pretending to for the other group's sake. Once everybody involved realizes that the pretense has all been in vain, the throne, the garments, the scepter, the swords, and all exist as pure simulacrum, like objects piled haphazardly in a prop storage room. In choosing to continually interact with the simulacrum, Henry chooses a version of himself, a version of the skin he wears. Without a mutually agreed-upon set of behaviors and attitudes among those gathered, however, his props are all just props as props. As if defending himself against an unspoken critique of his falseness to that effect, he ends the play by using a confirmed prop to do something a confirmed prop cannot do. Henry takes Landolph's sword – the sword, no less, of the man who keeps the costumes and props – and uses it to kill Belcredi. Though realistic detail and psychological identity create each other in a phantasmic and virtual exchange, the materiality of that scenography can extend its effects beyond the realm of illusion. Pirandello thus reveals realism's double edge: even as behaviors and attitudes give to scenery, costumes, and props their affective value, the details of fake rooms can effect the ultimate reality of death. [End Page 69]

For the audience, Belcredi's death is still a theatrical one, because Belcredi, like everybody on stage, is a fictional character. The prop sword is still only a prop sword. But the prop sword that the prop sword plays finds a sudden and startling reality as it enters Belcredi's body, plunging through costume, skin, and all, even as the actor's body remains unmolested. And although it presumably does not kill the actor playing Belcredi, it reminds one of the possibility by crossing frames. It tears a hole in the paper sky of Henry's befuddled visitors, even as it delivers Henry from Hamletesque reflection to Oresteian action.

To open up a spectator's eyes to the relationship between appearance and identity, for Henry IV, is to peel back realism's fully realized layers, revealing at once their manifest falseness (the costumes, the portraits, the room) and ever-encroaching reality (the sword, the cigarette, the moon). Realism's basic ontological enigma for Pirandello exists neither in its reality nor in its artifice alone; it exists, rather, interdependently in the constant and constantly changing webs of signification over "real" space and time. Henry's madness may be most usefully described not as the subject of the play, as some Pirandellian critics have taken for granted, so much as a model for Pirandello and his viewing subjects to reimagine their own relationships to reality and its (theatrical) representations. Just as the rupture in Henry's sense of a persistent and consistent self turns his attendants' and subsequently his guests' world inside out via an unstable relationship to the truth of scenography, Henry IV as a play opens onto holes in the larger paper skies of theatrical realism and, thereby, spectators' assumptions about the visible world outside the theatre.