SHAW AND PIRANDELLO
603
into life and the theater which it realizes. Hence the natural though
unjustified tendency to think of the playas a brilliant plot idea, a
piece of theatrical trickery only, and so miss its deep and serious
content. The complete dependence of the play upon its plot-idea
constitutes a limitation; but it points to the fundamental problem of
the modern theater, which no individual can solve alone.
Pirandello was quite right to think of his characters as being
like Dante's Francesca. They too are caught and confined in the
timeless moment of realizing their individual nature and destiny, and
so imprisoned, damned, as she is. This vision has great authority. It
develops naturally out of several diverse versions of the modern
theater which I have mentioned, those of Ibsen, Wagner, and Shaw.
At the same time it is deeply rooted in the Italian temperament and
natural theatricality; and it revives crucial elements in the great
theater of the Baroque. It is close to the author's place and to his
times, which we share; yet one must remember that it takes as all–
inclusive, as the whole story of human nature and destiny, a mode
of action and understanding which Dante thought of as maimed,
and which he presented in the realm of those who have lost, not the
intellect, but the
good
of the intellect:
il ben dell'intelletto.
The most fertile property of Pirandello's dramaturgy is his use
of the stage itself. By so boldly accepting it for what
it
is, he freed
it from the demand which modern realism had made of it, that it
be a literal copy of scenes offstage, and also from the exorbitant
Wagnerian demand, that it be an absolutely obedient instrument of
hypnosis in the power of the artist. Thus he brought to light once
more the wonderful property which the stage
does
have: of defining
the primitive and subtle medium of the dramatic art. "After Piran–
dello"-to take him symbolically rather than chronologically-the
way was open for Yeats and Lorca, Cocteau and Eliot. The search
could start once more for a modern poetry of the theater, and even
perhaps for an Idea of the Theater comparable to that of the Greeks
yet tenable in the modem world. I shall explain how qualified the
success of these authors has been; yet they have tried in various ways
to tap the ancient sources, in myth, ritual, folk traditions, and thea–
trical forms outside the narrow scheme of modern rationalism. And
they have all used the stage which Pirandello freed for the uses of
the poetic imagination.
