Two Playwrights in Search of an Answer: The Mystery of Artistic Creation

The mystery of creation is pulling one’s hair in front of a tauntingly empty computer screen, the wee hour endeavors by melting candlelight and quill, and the agony of bringing into the world something that did not previously exist. In his introduction to Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello writes that the “mystery of artistic creation is the mystery of birth itself.” Artistic creation fills the blank page, enlivens the empty stage, colors the white canvas, and brings form from a shapeless stone. Yet, an artist is part of a society with a history of creation, rules governing that creation, and set patterns dictating the form of creation.

What can one do when it has all been done before and the only paths to creativity are blocked by conventions? The question Emile Zola poses in “Naturalism in the Theatre” frames this creative brick wall. He asks, “Are we trapped in today’s dramatic art, which is so confining, like a cave that lacks air or light?” The saving graces of art and the answers to these questions are imagination and courage.

Modern drama is a response to and a recapitulation of the work that came before, but with a new twist. Anti-theatrical movements have both attacked and revived the theater, yet this anti-theatrical impulse is not limited to modern times. As Luigi Pirandello explores and pushes the limits of the stage in Six Characters in Search of an Author, Francis Beaumont exhibits a similar anti-theatrical direction three centuries earlier in The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

When twenty two year old Francis Beaumont wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle in the early years of the 17th century, drama was ruled by the mighty quills of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. These two playwrights had done it all. They had twisted every conceivable notion of Jacobean life into plays of outstanding ingenuity, poetry, and popularity. What room was left for up-and-coming young writers such as Beaumont? In a figurative sense, the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe had gobbled up all the air in the cramped room of Elizabethan Drama, leaving little oxygen to fan the flames of new creative endeavors.

Akin to Zola’s lamenting metaphor for modern drama, Beaumont found himself in “a cave that lacks air or light.” In response, he let loose his imagination to turn the theater on its head. He created a play that ignored the conventional boundaries of drama. By confusing the distinctions between reality and illusion, he violated the most important distinction of all: the line between the audience and the play.

The clever design of The Knight of the Burning Pestle rested on the composition of the audience at the private Blackfriars Theater, where it was first played. Private theaters such as Blackfriars attracted an audience of higher social standing because the cost of attending was higher than their public counterparts. The arrangement of the theater allowed spectators to sit onstage. It also had galleries divided into boxes that were “within arm’s reach of the stage and much on level with it.” Audiences of higher standing sat in locations not necessarily with the best view of the play, but in areas that afforded the best view of themselves to the other spectators.

The close proximity of the spectators to the actors allowed a great deal of interference. Audience members “bantered with the actors, blocked the view with their hats, jeered or left during plays they did not like, surreptitiously wrote down the best lines in their “Table-bookes,” cracked jokes and nuts, flirted, or went to sleep during the performance.” In this way, the audience made itself a part of the spectacle of the play, and this is the exact hinge upon which Beaumont framed The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

The opening stage directions describe the Blackfriars Theater on an afternoon in 1607 in which “the seats in the pit are filled by a select and critical audience” and seats along the stage itself are filled with “gallants” who “sit about on stools or loll on the rushes strewn over the floor, elegantly taking tobacco and superciliously criticizing their less conspicuous neighbors in the seats below.” The play to be performed is entitled The London Merchant, a typical Jacobean comedy about the monetary fascination of the merchant class and the objections to marriages that straddle the social boundaries of the time. However, The London Merchant is not allowed to be staged smoothly due to the objections of two unseasoned audience members, the Citizen, a well-to-do grocer, and his Wife.

Leaping from the galleries during the first lines of the prologue, the Citizen denounces The London Merchant. He proclaims it to “have no good meaning,” and says it is based on a tired plot enjoyed only by the noble class. He then demands something, “in honor of the commons of the city.” He wants to warp the play into his own drama. He suggests a drama about a grocer-Knight with his apprentice, Rafe, playing the lead role. The boy reciting the prologue gives in and thus is born the chivalrous sub-play, The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Throughout the rest of the play, the Citizen and his Wife interrupt the action of the merchant plot to call for the appearance of their apprentice and his romantic tale.

In their continual commentary and interference with the play, the Citizen and his Wife constantly blur the distinctions of the drama, sometimes by destroying the illusions of the play and sometimes by forgetting that it is a play. When the greedy and proud merchant Venturewell comes onstage with Humphrey, the bungling suitor to this daughter Luce, the Wife interrupts their conversation. She remarks, “Didst thou ever see a prettier child? How it behaves itself, I warrant ye, and speaks and looks, and perts up the head!” With these words, she reminds everyone in the theater that they are not watching something real, but rather a play acted by children. She destroys the illusion the children are trying to establish by commending their skill at creating that illusion.

However, later in the play, she is fooled by the action and gets caught up in the play to the point that she trembles. She says, “By the faith o’ my body, ‘a has put me into such a fright, that I tremble (as they say) as ’twere an aspen-leaf.” In a more humorous moment, she rushes onstage to assuage the wounds of Humphrey when his rival, Jasper, steals the fair Luce away. Yet, in the next moment, she forgets her fright and recognizes the play as something that she can control by demanding that Rafe come onstage and save the fair damsel.

In this constant interplay between believing the illusion of the play and directing it, the Citizen and his Wife illustrate a unique way in which the audience participates in this drama. Beaumont uses this device to spread his satire across all levels of society and to turn the play on the audience. In the third scene, Rafe absurdly sets up the language of his knightly order, saying that one should call a woman, “right beauteous damsel,” instead of “damned bitch.” The Wife capitalizes on this speech to criticize the gentlemen in the audience, saying that the latter term is what they often call her. With a scornful glance at the gentlemen, she says, “They have called me so an hundred times about a scurvy pipe of tobacco.”

In this way, the Knight becomes her crusader against the rude gentlemen of the audience. Later, she involves the audience once again by claiming that they could be witnesses in indicting Jasper for stealing his mother’s treasure filled trunk. Here she treats the events as a real crime committed by a gentleman, Jasper, and witnessed by the members of the audience. They are no longer mere spectators, but now hold weight in the balance of justice. The Citizen and his Wife constantly gall the audience by stopping the play, arguing with the actors, and being generally disruptive, just as theater goers at the time were said to have been. They are the representations of the audience to the audience, and they are not flattering. Beaumont portrays the Citizen and his Wife as crass bourgeoisie who show a complete lack of taste by adoring the romantic Knight plot that was going out of style at the time.

Indeed, along with almost every other facet of English society, tales of chivalry are satirized unmercifully in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Even the title mocks knighthood, for although it refers to a flaming implement of the grocer’s trade, it also can be seen as an obscene reference to syphilis, which is constantly brought up through the play. Stretching the comparison further shows how the old trappings and customs of the chivalric times now serve as a hindrance, even a disease, slowly eating away at the foundations of the theater and artistic creation.

More innocently and for comic relief, Rafe, improvising as the Knight, goes bungling in and out of The London Merchant plot, not really accomplishing anything but looking like a buffoon. Beaumont was a contemporary of Cervantes, and one is reminded of Don Quixote as Rafe is confronted throughout the play by the indifference of other characters to his status as a Knight. In one scene, Jasper thoroughly routs Rafe by snatching the pestle away and beating him over the head with it. In another scene, Rafe tries to leave a lodging without paying, assuming that he has been the honored guest.

But the innkeeper does not participate in the old codes of chivalry and demands money until the Citizen finally steps in to pay it. In this play, Beaumont unleashes his creative powers, forming a dense, multi-layer plot that attacks everything. Thus, the audience is left nowhere, without any sound satisfaction. Upon its opening in 1607, The Knight of the Burning Pestle flopped. The audience did not know what to do with its strange staging and biting satire.

As Jacobean audiences did not know how to react when Beaumont bended the rules, Pirandello’s nearly liquid shaped plays left modern theater goers with an uneasy suspicion that they had not completely understood what they had seen. Due to his poor monetary returns, Pirandello felt that he was “too original for the box office.” Indeed, his Italian audiences did not know what to do with his creative wake-up call. He attempted to involve them in the play and with the actors.

He tried to fill the audience with doubt about what was reality and what was illusion, and to make the auditorium part of the stage. Like Beaumont, he explored the lines between illusion and realty in drama to such a twisting and complicated degree that he left audiences wondering. In creating works to express his suffering and the universal agonies of humanity, Pirandello formed his own answer to the dramatic conventions that push drama into “the cave that lacks air or light.”

He turned his plays against the theater. In this anti-theatrical pursuit he attempted, as Barish says, “to blast the theater loose from its specious theatricality, from its complacent reliance on mimicry, from its slavish clinging to spectacle.” Pirandello wanted to remove the trappings of conventionality to set the theater free from the cave and to go wherever it may please.

In Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello does not achieve his lofty goal of theatrical enlightenment without poking fun at others along the way. In the first few lines, he lays out a stereotypical portrayal of the actors as pompous, self-involved divas, and the producer as the ambitious, driven man behind them all. Until the six characters arrive, the play is a comical farce about the theater. It ridicules the act of rehearsing, the strange demands and objections of the actors, and the notorious impatience of the director.

When the characters arrive, they have these two-dimensional foils to play against. Pirandello furthers this criticism of the art of drama itself when the Father says, “What we bring you is a grievous and painful drama.” The Step-Daughter chimes in with, “We could make your fortune!” In the Father, he presents the nobility of purpose in drama, to solemnly display pain. However, with the Step-Daughter’s retort, Pirandello illustrates the greedy undertones and exploitative sense of using pain to generate revenue.

In the scathing satire of these opening lines, Pirandello does not spare even himself from criticism. He has the Director lament, “Can I help it if we can’t get hold of good French plays any more so that now we’re reduced to putting on plays by Pirandello? Nice stuff if you can understand it, but designed it would seem to get up the noses of actorsâÂ?¦and criticsâÂ?¦and audiences!” Here he acknowledges the fact that the strange framing and philosophical bent of his plays often go above the heads of actors, critics, and audiences alike. It is interesting to note the way in which these lines nearly compare Pirandello’s work to a drug, something that alters reality. Another translation of these lines calls Pirandello’s plays places “where nobody understands anything, and where the author plays the fool with us all.” In this way, Pirandello not only mocks himself but also sets up the dubious nature of plays as expressions of reality.

Later in the play, the actors question what is occurring and call the Director “clean off his rocker” for considering to stage the characters. The Leading Actor objects to the characters, saying, “Well, it’s preposterous! If this, my friends is what the theatre’s coming toâÂ?¦” Pirandello continues this satirical bent throughout the play, laughing at the objections of theater, embodied by the stuffy and uptight actors, to the rawness of the characters.

Six Characters in Search of an Author does not let even the characters, who comprise the whole impetus of the imaginative plot, off the hook without ridicule. Just as the Knight story in The Knight of the Burning Pestle is denounced as outdated, the melodramatic tale behind the characters is disparaged as “Romantic Fiction” by the Son. In comparison, the syphilis of chivalry eating away at the body of the theater during the Jacobean age is akin to numbing melodrama dragging modern drama into a stale stupor. According to Zola, the Romantic Movement, while freeing drama to move forward, has served its purpose and now acts as a shackle that keeps drama in the cave of decline.

The character’s story, at once complex and desperate is one of such exaggeration that it delves into the world of romanticism or melodrama, and this is the reason the author did not write them a play in the first place. The Step-Daughter suggests that they were discarded out of the author’s “disgust for the ordinary theatre as the public knows it and likes it.” The author had realized that they needed to be abandoned in order for the theater to move on. Thus, Pirandello uses these abandoned characters to galvanize his plot and blur the lines of reality.

The very idea of having living characters come into a theater demanding to be acted requires a blurring of the edges defining what is real and fixed from the fluid world of imagination. Throughout the play, the supposedly real figures, the actors, question the reality of what they are seeing. When the Mother faints, they ask, “Is it real? Has she really fainted?” Even at the end of the play, the actors still have not figured out whether to believe in the actuality of the characters. Upon witnessing the final actions of the characters, the actors break into a fight about what they have seen. The Leading Actress proclaims the boy’s death, but the Leading Actor answers, “He’s pretending! It’s a fake! Don’t you believe it!”

He starts an argument over the reality of the scene. This moment in which a prominent figure declares blatantly that the characters are pretending and admonishes one not to believe the fakers undermines the whole pretense of illusion of the play itself. Indeed, it seems that Pirandello never intends to present the play as a reality, but rather as an illusion containing pieces and discussions of reality. Furthermore, the characters are the only human figures possessing any semblance of authenticity, while the actors are mere stereotypes.

As the Father declares in Act III, the characters live in an “immutable reality” because they have been written and are thus fixed forever. They are forced to act out their scenes over and over while the actors (and the audience) must know that their “reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow” The characters are the ones who achieve Plato’s ideal of changelessness while the actors and audience are left to question their own inconsistent, irrational beings in comparison.

In this manner, Pirandello has set up the human character as what Barish calls, “a mirage with which we have deluded ourselves, a shadowy, impalpable essence, forever in flux, forever fleeing our grasp.” Pirandello, with this drive, follows Nietzsche’s concept that man can never truly perceive himself because he accepts the surface metaphors and illusions that he has made for himself as reality. The Father seems to be summing up Nietzsche’s argument in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” when he says,

But isn’t this the whole trouble! It all comes back to words! We all carry round inside us a world made up of things as we see them; each one of us a whole world of his own! How can we ever hope to understand each other if I put into the words I use the meaning and value that things have for me in my interior world, while the person I’m talking to is bound to receive them with the meaning and value those words have for him, in a world that exists only inside of him? We think we understand each other. In fact we never do.

The Father’s speech underlines Nietzsche’s argument about the metaphors of language and perception. Each person perceives the world through the lens of his unique personality and uses words according to this perception. Thus, not only do people fail to understand each other, they fail even to grasp themselves fully. The metaphor of language that everyone uses is a delusion of reality, a delusion that says one can name what one sees and that this name will mean the same thing for different objects of the same type. This problem leads Nietzsche to ask, “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?”

The same question plagued Pirandello and was one of the driving motivations behind the pain of his characters. He writes in the introduction that the characters suffer from what he himself has struggled against, “the delusion of reciprocal understanding hopelessly based on the abstraction of words.” In Six Characters in Search of an Author, he tests this barrier of language with his artistic endeavor to use language in an attempt to explore and explain realities and the intrinsic elements of illusion and truth in the theater.

Creating art is the torment of calling the world into question, of trying to convey intangible emotions and pains, and of solidifying one’s unique suffering into a universal experience. The artist is a hero who does not accept the world as is, but must journey through its intricacies and bring everyone else along the way. As Pirandello writes, “the birth of a creature of the human imagination is the step across the threshold separating nothingness from eternity.” The artist balances upon this line, staring down conformity, with one foot in emptiness and one foot in eternity. Beaumont and Pirandello reacted to the empty cave in which they found their art. They took the path that few would follow, one that did not lead them to monetary gain, but took them on a flight of imagination.

This imagination allowed them to break and call into question the stifling rules of their current dramatic forms. In an never-ending attempt to recreate the world, these two playwrights broke through old traditions and created a new anti-theatrical form, one that would free drama from the “cave that lacks air or light.” Mankind forgets what it has learned in the past, as seen in the fact that Beaumont’s revolutionary work existed for three hundred years before someone else paralleled the same impulses. The task of the artist is to make mankind remember, to create something unforgettable, to recapitulate and respond to the past with a work that is brilliantly new and moves unabashedly into the future.