Late 19th and Early 20th Century Italy and Europe
At the time Pirandello was born, Italy was a primarily agricultural society (Clark 15). It was also becoming a unified country in itself. For most of the 19th century different regions were coming together that had until this time only been parts of a peninsula to form a unified nation (Mack Smith 1). This new unified nation lead to the new citizens of Italy striving to create a national identity for themselves from the disparate backgrounds they all came from.
Sicily, an island off the southwestern tip of Italy and Pirandello's home, was a region founded on tradition and inheritance (Gainor et al. 529, Clark 15). This all rapidly changed with the industrial revolution of the early twentieth century. With this industrialization came a new economy. It was now much cheaper to grow crops because of the new technology and this in turn affected the prices of agricultural products. This same transition from agricultural to industrial was occurring all around the world (Clark 23). After Pirandello began his family in the early 20th century he met Benito Mussolini and began his support of Fascism, a growing party in Italy that took hold in this period. The transformation of Italy under Mussolini had a great impact on the freedom of the people and Pirandello’s support of this movement only grew as it became more violent. This dichotomy of violence leading from talking to action is a common theme in this early twentieth century as Europe entered World War I and Italy became a unified nation and began to build it’s national identity.
Photo of Benito Mussolini, the leader of Fascism in Italy and someone that Pirandello vocally supported
Theater of the Time
Pirandello was certainly a product of his time. He explored the many theatrical aesthetics in practice in the late 19th and early 20th century and found a way to challenge them and use them to reflect the difficult realities of life that he found many others were ignoring. Some of Pirandello’s contemporaries were George Bernard Shaw and Maurice Maeterlinck (Gainor et al. 529). In the late 19th century the prevalent movements in theater were realism and naturalism. Realism focused on a sense of reflected life as it is and achieving an ideal life. It said that what people thought and felt mattered and that how you live your life could have an effect on your quality of life. Naturalism in a similar vein strove to reflect life truthfully on stage but it was ingrained in the belief that everything was pre-determined and that humans had no agency over their own lives.
From this prevalent, mimetic practice came reaction in the form of a new type of drama, which slowly emerged as we entered the 20th century. This new theater explored the physical life of characters and opposed the subtly represented psychology that prevailed in the theater of naturalism. One of these new forms was symbolism, practiced by Maurice Maeterlinck. Symbolism manifests in plays that are about more than physical action. It aims at what is beyond appearances and attempts to create a subjective experience for each audience member. There was also a move away from the actor itself and the vision of actors as puppets by Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon. The final major movement of this time that I will mention is Futurism. Futurist theater is confrontational and aligns with the idea of a manifesto. It is political and in your face. All of these different movements coexisted at the turn of the 20th century and we have since divided them into their respective categories. Pirandello was influenced by all of these movements and used pieces of them to explore in his own work and become known for his specialties: Metatheatrical plays and short stories adapted to the stage.
Pirandello got his start in the dialectic theater of Sicily (Gainor et al. 530). Drawing on commedia dell’arte and its masked, stock type characters, and specifically Carlo Goldoni, an 18th century playwright known for his commedia plays, Pirandello explored the use of masks and the themes of fertility and adultery (Gainor et al. 530).
Another big influence on Pirandello's work was a “clash of forms” in Italy between the rhetorical and realistic in the late 19th century (Vittorini). In this division conservative themes and themes of the past embraced the rhetorical form while modern themes and themes of the future embraced the realistic (Vittorini 6). The world was changing, especially in Italy as it became a unified nation for the first time. Audiences no longer wanted to see life reflected back at them they wanted to explore what and how things were changing and become self-aware of their own world. Opposed to the realism of Shaw and the naturalism of Ibsen, Pirandello explored new, uncharted ground in his metatheatrical plays. He used the dichotomy of desiring beautiful things and being disappointed when we can never reach them to point out the intangibility of our own lives.
All of the new forms born out of this tumultuous time in history coexisted and borrowed from each other to create the modern theater of the 20th century.