Pirandello's Henry IV
By Luigi Pirandello and Tom Stoppard
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About this ebook
The Italian playwright’s masterful comedy interrogating the meaning of madness is reimagined in this translation by the author of Leopoldstadt.
In this meeting of two of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights, Tom Stoppard has reinvigorated Luigi Pirandello’s masterpiece exploring the nature of madness and the limits of sanity.
After a fall from his horse, an Italian aristocrat believes he is the obscure medieval German emperor Henry IV. After twenty years of living this royal illusion, his beloved appears with a noted psychiatrist to shock the madman back to sanity. Their efforts expose that for the past twelve years the nobleman has in fact been sane.
With his mask of madness unveiled, the aristocrat launches an offensive to deflect their unwanted attention. While Pirandello’s characters verbally spar in Stoppardian flourishes, battling for the upper hand—and the greatest laughs—one question emerges: What constitutes sanity?
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was an Italian playwright, novelist, and poet. Born to a wealthy Sicilian family in the village of Cobh, Pirandello was raised in a household dedicated to the Garibaldian cause of Risorgimento. Educated at home as a child, he wrote his first tragedy at twelve before entering high school in Palermo, where he excelled in his studies and read the poets of nineteenth century Italy. After a tumultuous period at the University of Rome, Pirandello transferred to Bonn, where he immersed himself in the works of the German romantics. He began publishing his poems, plays, novels, and stories in earnest, appearing in some of Italy’s leading literary magazines and having his works staged in Rome. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), an experimental absurdist drama, was viciously opposed by an outraged audience on its opening night, but has since been recognized as an essential text of Italian modernist literature. During this time, Pirandello was struggling to care for his wife Antonietta, whose deteriorating mental health forced him to place her in an asylum by 1919. In 1924, Pirandello joined the National Fascist Party, and was soon aided by Mussolini in becoming the owner and director of the Teatro d’Arte di Roma. Although his identity as a Fascist was always tenuous, he never outright abandoned the party. Despite this, he maintained the admiration of readers and critics worldwide, and was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Pirandello's Henry IV - Luigi Pirandello
ACT ONE
The throne room. There are two full-length, life-size modern portraits of a young man and a young woman dressed as Henry IV and Matilda, Countess of Tuscany. HAROLD, LANDOLF, ORDULF, and BERTOLD—wearing the costumes of eleventh-century German knights—enter.
LANDOLF Next—the throne room!
HAROLD The throne room of the Emperor’s Palace at Goslar!
ORDULF Or could be Hartzburg . . .
HAROLD . . . or Worms, depending.
LANDOLF Depending on where we are in the story—he keeps us on the hop.
ORDULF Saxony . . .
HAROLD Lombardy . . .
LANDOLF The Rhine . . .
ORDULF Keep your voice down.
LANDOLF He’s asleep.
BERTOLD Hang about. I’m confused. I thought we were doing Henry IV.
LANDOLF So?
BERTOLD Well, this place, these getups—it’s not him.
ORDULF Who?
BERTOLD The King of France, Henry IV.
LANDOLF Whoops.
ORDULF He thought it was the French one.
LANDOLF Wrong country, mate, wrong century, wrong Henry.
HAROLD It’s the German Henry IV, Salian Dynasty.
ORDULF The Holy Roman Emperor.
LANDOLF The Canossa one—walked to Canossa to get absolution from the Pope. Church v. State, that’s the game round here, day in, day out.
ORDULF Emperor at home to Pope—
HAROLD Pope away to Anti-Pope—
LANDOLF King away to Anti-King—
ORDULF Like war with Saxony—
HAROLD Plus with revolting barons—
LANDOLF His own kids . . .
BERTOLD Now I know why I’ve been feeling wrong in these clothes; these are not your French 1580s.
HAROLD Forget the 1580s.
ORDULF Think the ten hundreds.
LANDOLF Work it out; if Canossa was January 1077 . . .
BERTOLD I’m fucked.
ORDULF Royally.
BERTOLD I’ve been reading up the wrong . . .
LANDOLF Sad. We’re four hundred years behind you. Ahead of you. You’re not even a twinkle in our eye.
BERTOLD (angered) You got any idea how much stuff I read in the last two weeks about Henry IV of France?
HAROLD Didn’t you know Tony was our Adalbert, Bishop of Bremen?
BERTOLD What Adalbert?—no one told me anything!
LANDOLF Well, when Tony died, at first the young Count . . .
BERTOLD The Count Di Nolli? He’s the one who gave me the job. Why didn’t he . . . ?
ORDULF He must have thought you knew.
LANDOLF . . . first he thought the three of us would do. Then Himself started moaning—They’ve driven out Adalbert!
—he didn’t realise Adalbert
had died on us, he thought the bishops of Cologne and Mainz had booted him out, Tony I mean—all clear so far?
BERTOLD Wait. Bishop Tony of what?
ORDULF You’re fucked.
HAROLD Forget the bishops. The bishops are not the problem, the problem is we don’t know who you are.
BERTOLD So what am I playing?
ORDULF Um, Bertold.
BERTOLD Bertold who? Why Bertold?
LANDOLF Himself kept yelling, They’ve driven out Adalbert, so get me Bertold! I want Bertold!
HAROLD We eyeballed each other—who dat?
LANDOLF Never heard of him.
ORDULF And here you are.
LANDOLF You’ll be great.
BERTOLD No, I won’t, which way’s out?
HAROLD No, no, relax.
LANDOLF This’ll cheer you up—we don’t know who we are either. He’s Harold, he’s Ordulf, I’m Landolf, that’s what he calls us so that’s who we are, you get used to it, but it’s a puppet show. Who are we really? . . . Just names of the period. Same with you, I suppose, Bertold. Tony was the only one with a proper character, the Bishop of Bremen. He was a good bishop, too, God rest him.
HAROLD Always reading himself up.
LANDOLF And he bossed Himself about, not himself, Himself, His Majesty; he was like his teacher. With us, we’re his Privy Counsellors but we’re only here to take up space. It’s in the books—the barons had it in for Henry for surrounding himself with young bloods not quite premier league, so that’s us. Royal hangers-on, do anything for him, like a drink, a few laughs . . .
BERTOLD Laughs?
HAROLD Just do what we do.
ORDULF It’s not as easy as it looks.
LANDOLF Bit of a waste really. We’ve got the scenery, we’ve got the costumes, we could put on proper shows, history’s always popular, and there’s enough stuff in Henry IV for several tragedies. But us four—we’re stranded, nobody gives us our moves, nothing to act, it’s that old form-without-content. We’re worse off than the real ones. They were given sod-all to play, true, but they didn’t know that, so they just did what they did because that’s what they did. Life. Which means, look after number one. They sold titles and stuff. And here we are, great outfits, handsome surroundings, shame about the puppets.
HAROLD No, fair do’s, you have to be ready to come out with the right answer or you’re in trouble.
LANDOLF Yeah, that’s