To propose Pirandello’s Henry 1V 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-life realism in the modern theater, hesitates to look upon the theater of Pirandello 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 modern 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, Pirandello’s Henry is a make-believe emperor acting like one, and Camus’ Caligula is a 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 1V 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 turn 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 emphasized in the setting, which is a throne room resembling the throne room of Henry the Holy Roman Emperor in every detail save one: in the niches on each side of the throne are two modern oil portraits, one representing the youthful Henry, the other Henry’s paramour the Marchioness Mathilda Spina masquerading as Mathilda, Marchioness of Tuscany. We are told later that these portraits were painted to commemorate the pageant and masquerade held twenty years earlier. At that time, the protagonist (his real name is never revealed) had fallen from his horse and suffered a brain injury. This injury manifested itself in a delusion in which he believed himself to be the Emperor Henry IV, a delusion to which he still apparently clings.

By now, Pirandello’s device of separation from reality in setting and characters as well as plot has become apparent, perhaps almost painfully so. In effect, he has produced a series of mutations of reality. The first, of course, is the dramatic form, or the stage itself; the eleventh century throne room and its retainers is a second; the oil paintings (a different art form from the dramatic art, and a contradiction to the “reality” of the eleventh century) are a third; fourthly, individuals of twenty years ago masquerade as eleventh century nobility; finally, a fifth divorcement from reality may be noted in the very fact that the paintings themselves are only representations of a mummery.

Throughout the play, Pirandello constantly reminds us of this aim of divorcement from reality. The characters put on and take off costumes on stage; Donna Mathilda dyes her hair; Henry has fashioned his whole head into a garish mask: “The hair on the back of his head is already gray; over the temples and forehead it appears blond owing to its having been tinted in an evident and puerile fashion. On his cheek bones he has two small, doll-like dabs of color that stand out prominently against the rest of his tragic pallor.... His eyes have a fixed look which is dreadful to see.” Finally, the masquerade culminates in a grotesque dumb show, the substitution of real people in the niches where the paintings were, this little play being engineered by a psychiatrist named Dionysius, ironically, the originator and patron of all masks and mummeries

Admittedly, Pirandello is employing poster technique to get his point across. But might it be granted that the theater of 1922 needed a radical jolt to draw audience attention back to the metaphorical nature of the stage? Berthold Brecht employed much more recently the devices of placards and lighted marquees to emphasize the fact that a live spectacle was being presented, not life itself.

Camus, evidently, has not considered it necessary to continue in Pirandello’s poster tactics. As stated earlier, Caligula is constructed upon the same architectural plan as Henry IV, but from the technical (as distinguished from ideological) point of view the devices are for the most part shaded and subdued. That is, Camus has, so to speak, internalized Pirandello’s devices in order to externalize the inner character of an individual, the young emperor Caligula. In Henry IV, Pirandello has no reason to externalize his hero because the Emperor Henry IV as we see him is not actually a real person: rather, he is an identity, a role, which was forced upon the hero twenty years previously. This role, however, has so engulfed the hero that he can no longer escape it. Nor does he wish to escape. As he says, “I pre­pared to remain mad—since I found everything ready and at my disposal for this new exquisite fantasy. I would live it—this madness of mine. I determined to deck it out with all the colors and splendours of that far-off day of ......... I am cured, gentlemen, because I can act the madman to perfection, here; and I do it very quietly. I’m only sorry for you that have to live your madness so agitatedly, with­out knowing it or seeing it.” (Act III)

Now Caligula, too, assumes a madness, but it is that second madness of which Henry speaks, the agitated make-believe of reality, not an exquisite fantasy akin to Henry’s eleventh century court. More­over, Caligula is no more convinced than Henry is of the validity of this reality; but because the Roman politicians, like Henry’s an­tagonists, continue to cling blindly to their own delusions of what reality is, Caligula activates and externalizes their beliefs by imperial fiat. In other words, Caligula assumes the active madness of reality, while Henry maintains his passive fantasy. Only once for a brief moment in Henry IV does Pirandello allow his protagonist to depart from this passivity, and this one instance (the stabbing of Tito Belcredi) is the result of a reality forced upon Henry by the psy­chiatrist’s plot in causing the portraits to come alive. Since, then, his identity as the Emperor Henry IV and his one excursion into reality have both been forced upon him by the supposedly real people around him, Henry himself has no part in revealing his own character.

Caligula, on the other hand, seems to have as his prime objective the understanding of his inner self and the understanding of that inner self by those around him. Thus, after Caesonia has graphically described to Scipio the death of his father at the hands of Caligula, she ends with the intense plea, “Try to understand him.” Hence, the plays-within-the-play which Caligula engineers (the mountebank booth which displays Caligula in the garb of the goddess Venus, the shadow play (in which Caligula dances in the costume of a ballerina and the recitation of the poets), have as their purpose the gradual revelation of Caligula’s true nature. That is, these histrionic displays, though they mean very little in terms of concrete reality during their performance, act as the main agents in revealing Caligula’s inner being by their after-effects upon Caligula himself. Thus, after the mountebank show, Caligula says that he worships as his only god, though “false and craven,” the human heart. After the shadow play when Cassius is dragged screaming to his execution, Caligula’s only serious comment is, “Life, my friend, is something to be cherished.”

Finally, after the recitations of the poets, he is softened into ad­mitting the truth of Scipio’s definition of Death: " Pursuit of happiness that purifies the heart, Skies rippling with light, O wild, sweet, festal joys, frenzy without hope!" The allusions in this description to the bacchic dance as well as the danse macabre are obvious. The apparent contradiction, that the bacchic dance represents the pursuit of life and that the danse macabre represents the pursuit of death, is just as obvious. The im­portance of the contradiction, however, lies in the application to Camus’ purpose of gradual revelation of Caligula’s inner self. For if Scipio in describing death as “wild, sweet, festal joys, frenzy with­out hope” also describes life, does not Caligula, though he pursues death, also pursue life? It should be noted at this point that the phrase, “frenzy without hope,” does not necessarily mean “frenzy without meaning.” “Hopelessness” and “meaninglessness” (or, to leap into the lion’s mouth and substitute the term “absurdity”) are not synonymous. In this respect, both Henry IV and Caligula have been dealt a great injustice in being catagorized as dramas depicting the absurd in life. Rather, Caligula’s statement about the drama and dramatic art must be taken quite seriously. After the mountebank show in which Caligula appears as the goddess Venus, he says to Scipio the poet: “The great mistake you people make is not to take the drama seriously enough. If you did, you’d know that any man can play lead in the divine comedy and become a god.”

Pirandello and Camus do take the drama very seriously. Also, just as Caligula in his statement refers to the grotesque mummery he has just been a part of, so do Pirandello and Camus in these two plays, Henry IV and Caligula, demonstrate the continuing high significance of the actor and of the play as a form. Both playwrights utilize this form and the players who activate the form to reveal the difference between internal and external reality. The conflict, of course, arises because such characters as the psychiatrist or the politicians insist that conventional, external realism represents the truth. Their mis­conception brings on the unassumed, or real, madness of the heroes and eventually the tragedy. On the other hand, the play (artificial, stylized and traditional) reveals an inner, more significant reality.