"Give o' er the play": Closure in Shakespeare' s Hamlet and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

Abstract

Comparisons between the plays of Pirandello and Shakespeare seem, by now, rather the norm than the exception in critical examinations of either dramatist; more often than not, and for a variety of reasons, Hamlet provides the locus classicus. So it is that the papers which follow demonstrate several kinds of comparisons between Hamlet and two of Pirandello's plays. Three of the essays were first presented, in somewhat briefer versions, to the Pirandello Society at the Modem Language Association meeting in Houston, Texas, on December 29, 1980; Matthew N. Proser's paper was prompted by the discussion at that session. In the two essays presented immediately after this one, Maurice Charney and Jill Levenson, respectively, identify and carefully analyze several particular points of comparison between Hamlet and Pirandello's Six Characters and between Hamlet and Henry IV; then Proser also examines Hamlet and Henry IV; and, finally, Terence Hawkes responds to the work of Charney and Levenson. The intention of the whole group might be to invite additional comparisons between the plays to be made by readers of these essays, thus continuing (in a manner not at all foreign to either Shakespeare or Pirandello) the process of completion in the mind of the "reader/audience." Indeed, Pirandello posited just such a process of completion as essential to the theater's special dynamism when he wrote that, "in the Theater a work of art is no longer the work of the writer (which, after all, can always be preserved in some other way), but an act oflife, realized on the stage from one moment to the next, with the cooperation of an audience that must find satisfaction in it."2 That cooperation is absolutely necessary to the play's "act of life," for it is in the reception by an audience that the play reaches its final form. With this idea as context, then, this first essay may serve to introduce the rest by suggesting some general similarities in the ways both writers involve, and subsequently discomfit, their audiences in search of the final form of the play.