The Theatre of the Mirror: Self-Reflexivity in Luigi Pirandello's Theatre Trilogy

• Main Authors: Li Chih-chen, 李志貞
• Other Authors: Wei-yang Dai
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/29313243327916446552

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 87 === Luigi Pirandello is a Copernican figure in revolutionizing modern theatre. Today he is remembered mostly by his two greatest plays, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV in which he encapsulates the abundance of his aesthetic and philosophical concepts within a meta-dramatic form. Rarely known to the general readers is that his renovation of the theatre form does not stop at Six Characters. In an introduction to a 1933 edition of his oeuvre, Pirandello invites us to see three plays as "a trilogy of the theatre within the theatre"--Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Each in His Own Way (1924), Tonight We Improvise (1929). It is within the trio of theatre plays that he is acclaimed as the first to fully explore a meta-theatrical theater and as one of the forerunners of today's anti-illusionist stage. The whole structure of my thesis is revolved around "the trilogy of the theatre within the theatre" which will be discussed respectively from Chapter II to Chapter IV. In the Introduction I will give a terse explanation both on the self-conscious episteme expressed in modernism and postmodernism as well as on Pirandello's familial, societal and personal temperamental background that contribute to the formation of his self-consciousness. Chapter I aims at a discussion on five broad categories of the "theatre of the mirror" from the perspectives of which I will see the three chief analyzed texts.