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MASKS AND MUMMERIES IN ENRICO 117 AND CALIGULA To PROPOSE Pirandello's Henry IV and Camus' Caligula as representative of the conventional and traditional theater is, admittedly, unconventional . Critics continue to categorize both plays as dramas of the Absurd, while popular taste, accustomed to a slice-of-Iife realism in the modem theater, hesitates to look upon the theater of Pirandel10 and Camus as anything other than an avant-garde freak, interesting and provocative perhaps, but little more. The inability of both critic and popular audiences to accept Henry IV and Caligula as traditional theater arises, perhaps, from the utilization in both plays of currently unfamiliar theatrical devices , devices which are artificial and stylized rather than realistic. I refer specifically to the play-within-the-play and the assumption of a role within the play. Furthermore, that Pirandello and Camus utilize these age-old artifices of the theater as the main agents in revealing thesis, character, and action in their plays additionally hinders modem audiences from fully understanding Henry IV and Caligula. For, under the influence of nineteenth and twentieth century realism, we have forgotten that the essential nature of the traditional stage is basically artificial and stylized. In choosing the title of Masks and Mummeries, I wish to direct attention in this discussion to the artificial or unrealistic elements in the theater of Pirandello and Camus. Concurrently, I wish to divert attention from the modem theater's more familiar but less traditional role as a representation of a realistic slice of life. I have chosen Pirandello's Henry IV and Camus' Caligula because they seem uniquely suited as vehicles to demonstrate the theatrical approach of these two playwrights. I contend that this approach adopts as its cardinal technique a divorcement from reality rather than the more accepted and familiar representation of reality. First, in both plays, Pirandello and Camus have chosen emperors as heroes, a notoriously obvious divorcement from present-day reality. Secondly, as Francis Jeanson has pointed out,l Pirandello's Henry is a make-believe emperor acting like one, and Camus' Caligula is a 1 Francis ]eanson, "Pirandello et Camus a travers Henri IV et Caligula," Les Temps Modemes, No. 61 (Nov. 1950), 944. 397 398 MODERN DRAMA February real emperor who does not act like one. Thus, both protagonists assume roles within the play, a second divorcement from reality, this time, the reality of the stage itself. Thirdly, each in the course of the action assumes a role in a play-within-a-play, and each engineers a play-within-the-play in which he assumes the role of the audience. Admittedly, in the above tabulation of similarities, these two plays seem to be taking on the characteristics of two identical Chinese boxes; hence, both playwrights may be open to Pirandello's criticism (in Six Characters in Search of an Author) of stereotyping. The comparison , however, emphasizes the fact that both Pirandello and Camus have recognized that the play and the devices of the physical stage are not anachronisms to be cast off in preference to pure realism. By employing the techniques of traditional stagecraft, they have turned our attention from the banalities of everyday existence (such as the waterworks or foreign policy) and invited us to contemplate the deepest recesses of human existence. In this they are similar. The final product, however, is very different, and again the techniques of the two. different playwrights must be analyzed in order to illustrate this point: that Henry IV is the visual manifesto, the architectural design, so to speak, of the avant-garde theater, while Caligula is the artful and polished development of Pirandello's basic plan. To tum first to Henry IV, at the very beginning of the play we are told almost blatantly that this is all a masquerade. This is further. emphasized by the fact that one of the hired lackeys (the "counsellors " of Henry's court) refuses to play his eleventh century role; he has prepared himself for the sixteenth century court of King Henry IV of France only to discover that he must serve the eleventh century Emperor Henry IV of Germany. The fact that the characters are performing a masquerade is further...

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