Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness by Anthony Caputi (review)

Reviews371 Elizabeth and who was the champion of the Protestant cause against the Catholics? This remains problematical, although Limon makes the strongest possible case. In support of his thesis, we do know that Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels and censor of plays, found Drue's seemingly innocuous play "full of dangerous matter" and demanded that it be "much reformed" (p. 40). The first chapter on Jonson's masque Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion, related to the return of Prince Charles from Spain without marrying the Infanta, is of less interest than die chapters on Drue and Massinger. The patriotic acclaim for Charles is a political matter that is hardly problematic. The final chapter on Thomas Middleton 's A Game at Chesse, which promises to be the most exciting because it is so directly concerned with public events, is strangely peripheral. Limon does not seem to be happy in dealing with a popular, scandalous, and highly successful play; he is more persuasive when arguing about politics at two removes. This chapter has a wealth of non-dramatic citation, some of it wild and zany, about the Spanish Antichrist. This looms larger than Middleton's bold and enormously popular attack on Spain in A Game at Chesse—a play that could only have been licensed for performance if anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish sentiment were extremely strong even in court circles. Limon's book is intriguing if not entirely persuasive. From a nonEnglish perspective, he alerts us to political implications we would not ordinarily be aware of. The topical argument is conducted with admirable modesty, although it makes claims far in excess of reasonable expectations . It is really an open guess how audiences or readers would have reacted to the crucial political issues of 1623/24. We need not necessarily have seen the topical and allegorical significances in plays that Limon attributes to them. One must not end this review without applauding the pun in the Acknowledgments: "And special thanks to Judith Landry, who devoted her precious time to polish my English." Polish my perfect English indeed! MAURICE CHARNEY Rutgers University Anthony Caputi. Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Pp. ? + 174. $19.95. Luigi Pirandello is Italy's great twentieth-century dramatist and master of short fiction (the novella). In Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness, Anthony Caputi treats these achievements against concepts of consciousness, self-consciousness, and umorismo defined by turn-ofthe -century writers and by Pirandello himself. For William James, consciousness and self-consciousness already included the notions of John Locke and Pierre Janet that "changes of memory bring changes of personality " so that, if consciousness is "the human need to create oneself continuously, to define and redefine oneself, one's situation, and the value of what one does" and self-consciousness is that creation "of disjunctive time [that] causes the consciousness to focus on itself again and again," 372Comparative Drama insults or shocks to memory—that mental process of understanding and binding impressions—become central to explorations of both. Pirandello is careful, for instance, to link the disruptions of consciousness in Right You Are (If You Think You Are) (1917; Cost è [se vi pare]) to a real earthquake that occurred in the Abruzzi region of Italy in 1915, altering the emphasis of his novella, "La Signora Frôla e il Signor Ponza, suo genero," on which the play is based, from selves defined by interpersonal relations to breakdowns in memory and their effects on character caused by environmental shocks to memory. Similarly, in As You Desire Me (1930; Come tu mi vuoi), Pirandello blends newspaper accounts of actual court trials involving the legal identity of a Giulio Canella or Mario Bruneri (1928-29) with treatments of Gianni Schicchi by Dante and Puccini to bring modern moral and philosophical dimensions to bear on memory breakdowns and their effects. Caputi bases Pirandello's handling of these shocks and breakdowns not on Théodule Ribot's classic Diseases of Memory (1882), in which Ribot describes consciousness as unifying about centers or nodes and explains memory loss as the recircuiting of impressions to secondary or different organizing centers, so much...