Pirandello and Film by Nina Davinci Nichols and Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni

Abstract

286Comparative Drama speare's two tetralogies. Frequently, Berlin claims, such associations may have worked at the level of O'Neill's unconscious rather than as intentional borrowings. But rather than weaken the critic's case, this speculative approach allows Berlin to broaden his inquiry beyond mere source-hunting. According to the author, it is in O'Neill's last and greatest plays that Shakespeare's influence becomes most dominant, with Hamlet providing the most interesting and pervasive echoes. Berlin presents the case that James Tyrone, Jr. (who appears in both Long Day's Journey and A Moon for the Misbegotten) reanimates the distinctive suffering of Shakespeare's tortured prince, as do the central male protagonists of The Iceman Cometh. For critics unsympathetic to Freud's topography, this analytical tour will meet resistance. However, all scholars will welcome the discussion of Shakespearean references in Long Day's Journey into Night, which provides a model of intertextual commentary. To see how Jamie processes his parent's marriage through the narrative of Othello adds a dimension to his intellect and indicates O'Neill's own subtle reading; while to see how closely Jamie's immature emotions mimic Hamlet's convinces us of Shakespeare's reach to deeper levels of O'Neill's awareness. Ultimately, this engrossing book delivers more than its title promises . Berlin concludes that "O'Neill contains Shakespeare," that Shakespeare is part of his "lifeblood" (p. 254). Father-figure, anxietyprovoker , godlike artist, source: Shakespeare, as Berlin would have it, haunts the playwright's stage. Like the Ghost in Hamlet, he beckons O'Neill to the parapets, whispering, "Remember me." MICHAEL HINDEN University of Wisconsin-Madison Nina Davinci Nichols and Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni. Pirandello and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. xxviii + 248. $49.50. For much of his life, Luigi Pirandello was concerned with the creative process, both those events, images, and figures which inspire artists and those moments in which created life and characters take on lives of their own, independent of the contexts that brought them into being and of the authors who created them. In Right You Are (If You Think So) (1917; Cosi è [se vi pare]), for example, Pirandello relates the work's having sprung from a dream in which he was lodged in either the depths of a well or a deep courtyard with no exit. The image figures into the drama's account of the courtyard where Mrs. Frola tries to communicate with Mrs. Ponza. Earlier the image had generated the story "La signora Frola e il signor Ponza, suo genero" (1915) from which the drama Reviews287 evolved. Similarly Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921; Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) appears to have arisen out of a scene involving either a young woman under a lamp post or a young woman and older man being discovered in a brothel by a horrified older woman. In exploring the significances of these inspiring images and scenes, as Pirandello explains in L'umorismo (1908; On Humor), the figures take on at times a fullness that lets one imagine them in situations which their creator never considered and assume on their own meanings that he never dreamt of lending them. As examples, Pirandello mentions Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Abbondio, and Sancho Panza, but he might have named Falstaff, whose exploits in Shakespeare's Henry IV purportedly led to Queen Elizabeth's asking to see him in love and Shakespeare 's writing The Merry Wives of Windsor. Or one might cite the stock figures of commedia dell' arte who involve themselves in diverse plots dressed ever in the same costumes or, more recently, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp and his recurrent hallmark derby hat, tight frock coat, baggy trousers, out-sized shoes, moustache, and cane. This concern with creative process in retrospect seems generational and may simply have been a response to the religious controversies and technological inventiveness of the day, which, on one hand, promised a better life and, on the other, threatened to dehumanize and despiritualize mankind. One sees the concern in Matthew Arnold's views on mankind's increasing reliance on art in the collapse of religious certainty ; in Friedrich Nietzsche...