By Luigi Pirandello.
Pirandello criticizes those theatrical authors who regard the theatre as an art separate from literature, often reducing it to a mere commercial product. He asserts, instead, that true theatre—like every form of art—is creation and not imitation of reality, and that a drama written with authenticity and artistic awareness is fully a literary work.
Introductory Commentary
Luigi Pirandello’s 1918 essay “Theatre and Literature” (“Teatro e letteratura”) was published in Il Messaggero della Domenica at a moment when the Italian playwright was reshaping modern drama. In this piece, Pirandello confronts a long-standing misconception that separates playwrights from writers: the belief that theatre is not, and should not be, a branch of literature.
With his characteristic irony and philosophical precision, Pirandello argues that true art—whether on the page or the stage—is not imitation of life but creation. He dismantles the naturalist idea that theatre must reproduce everyday reality, insisting instead that art generates its own reality, governed by its inner laws and forms.
The essay also probes the complex relationship between playwright and actor. Once a play is staged, Pirandello observes, it becomes a “translation” of the author’s original vision—inevitably altered by performance. Each actor, through voice and gesture, recreates the work anew, granting it material presence while sacrificing some of its ideal truth.
“Theatre and Literature” thus reveals Pirandello’s enduring concern with the boundaries between art, language, and life—questions that would culminate in Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). It remains a lucid meditation on artistic freedom and on the perpetual tension between the written word and its embodiment on the stage.
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Theatre and Literature
From “Il Messaggero della Domenica”, July 30, 1918.
The distinguished dramatic authors, professionals of the theatre, disdain being considered men of letters, because, they say and insist, that theatre is theatre and not literature.
We do not wish to be so malicious as to believe that the reason for their disdain lies largely in the seriousness of their earnings compared to the paltry trifle of the meagre compensation received by those poor deluded souls who are pure men of letters.
Certainly, they have organized, on their side, the business of the theatre as any commercial enterprise, which must defend itself from other equally commercial institutions, such as those of company managers and the owners and administrators of theatres: rules for ceding their productions to this or that company; assignment of “venues”; percentages on box office receipts fixed in advance — for the first performance, the second, and the subsequent ones — whose collection is entrusted to the Society of Authors of Milan, which, at the end of every quarter, sends its members a statement of earnings which, to tell the truth (no matter how poorly a play or comedy may fare), always far surpass those that any other writer of short stories or novels (not to mention, for heaven’s sake, the poets!) receives from the sale of his books.
There is no doubt that all this has nothing whatsoever to do with literature. We may even grant that their theatre, as they intend it — that is, their more or less abundant production of dramas and comedies launched upon the theatrical market — is indeed not literature. Yet there remains to be seen — since it is not literature — how and under what new category those same dramas and comedies of theirs must be regarded when, from stage scripts, they become books; when, from the prompter’s box, they pass into the window of a bookseller, no longer typewritten but printed by a publisher; when, from the abundant earnings that the voice and gesture of actors procured for them upon the boards of a stage, they descend to beg pitiably the three little lire, the cover price, among those other beggars exposed to public charity, the volumes of short stories and novels by the poor pure men of letters.
But let us leave all this bookkeeping aside once and for all, and come to the point. There is a great misunderstanding to be cleared up here. And the misunderstanding consists precisely in the word literature.
The distinguished dramatic authors, professionals of the theatre, write badly — not only because they do not know or have never cared to write well, but because they conscientiously believe that writing well for the theatre is the task of men of letters, and that one must instead write in that certain spoken manner as they do, which should not have the flavor of literature, since the characters of their dramas and comedies — they say — not being men of letters, cannot speak on stage as such, that is, well; they must speak as people speak, without literature.
In saying this, they do not remotely suspect that they confuse writing well with writing beautifully; or rather, they fail to see that they fall into this error: that to write well means to write beautifully. And they do not think that the beautiful writing of certain false men of letters is, from the aesthetic standpoint, by an opposite excess, the same vice as their bad writing: literature that is not art, that is to say, bad literature — as much that of those who write beautifully as that of those who write badly — and therefore condemnable as such, even if they do not wish to pass as men of letters.
To write well a drama or a comedy does not mean to make the characters speak in a literary form, that is, in a language that is not spoken and literary in itself. That is to write beautifully. One must make the characters speak as, given their character, their qualities and conditions, and in the various moments of the action, they must speak. And this does not mean that the resulting language will be a common or non-literary one. What does “non-literary” mean if the aim is to create a work of art? The language will never be common, because it will be proper to that given character in that given scene, proper to his character, his passion, or his play. And if the characters each speak in their own proper way, and not according to the vulgar carelessness of an imprecise, approximate language — which would denote only the author’s incapacity to find the right expression because he does not know how to write — then the comedy will be well written; and a comedy well written, if also well conceived and well conducted, is a work of literary art like a fine novel, a fine short story, or a fine lyric poem.
The truth is that these distinguished dramatic authors, professionals of the theatre, have all remained fixed in that blessed poetics of naturalism, which confused the physical fact, the psychic fact, and the aesthetic fact in such a graceful manner that to the aesthetic fact it came to assign (at least theoretically, since in practice it was impossible) that character of mechanical necessity and fixity which are proper to the physical fact.
Now it must be clearly borne in mind that art, in whatever form (I speak of literary art, of which dramatic art is one of the many forms), is not imitation or reproduction, but creation.
The question of language — whether and how it should be spoken; the alleged difficulty of finding in Italy a language truly spoken throughout the nation; and the other question of a truly Italian national life that is lacking, to give material and character to a theatre that could be called Italian, as though it were indeed the nature and office of art to reproduce necessarily that life, recognizable by all through its external data and facts; and all those other anxious trifles and vain superstitions of the so-called technique, which should (always in theory, since in practice it is impossible) mirror the action as we see it unfold before our eyes in daily reality — all this is but the torment of voluntary martyrs to an absurd system, to an aberrant poetics, fortunately long since outgrown, but to which, I repeat, these gentlemen, professionals of the theatre, show themselves to have remained attached.
It is not a question of imitating or reproducing life; and this, for the very simple reason that there is no life existing as a reality in itself, to be reproduced with its own proper characteristics. Life is a continuous and indistinct flow and has no form other than that which we, from time to time, give it — infinitely varied and continually changing. Each one of us, in truth, creates his own life; but this creation, unfortunately, is never free — not only because it is subject to all the natural and social necessities that limit things, men, and their actions, deforming and opposing them until they fail and fall miserably; it is also never free because, in the creation of our life, our will tends almost always — not to say always — toward ends of practical utility, the attainment of a social condition, and so on, which induce interested actions and compel us to renunciations or duties, which are naturally limitations of freedom.
Only art, when it is true art, creates freely: that is, it creates a reality that has within itself its own necessities, its own laws, its own end. For in art, the will no longer acts outwardly, to overcome all the obstacles that oppose those ends of practical utility toward which we strive in that other, interested creation — I mean, that creation which we all daily strive to make of our life, as best we can — but acts inwardly, within the life to which we intend to give form; and of this very form, still within us, yet already alive in itself and therefore almost wholly independent of us, it becomes the movement.
And this is the true and only technique: the will understood as the free, spontaneous, and immediate movement of the form, when, that is, we are no longer the ones who will this form thus or thus for our own purpose, but it is the form itself, absolutely free — since it has no end outside itself — that wills itself, that provokes within itself and within us the acts capable of realizing it outwardly in a body: statue, painting, book. And only then is the aesthetic fact accomplished.
Outwardly, in ordinary life, the actions that reveal a character stand out against a background of contingencies without value, of particulars common to all. Vulgar, unforeseen, and sudden obstacles deflect actions, disfigure characters; petty accidental miseries often diminish them. Art frees things, men, and their actions from these valueless contingencies, from these common particulars, from these vulgar obstacles, from these accidental miseries: in a certain sense, it abstracts them; that is, it rejects, without even noticing it, everything that contradicts the artist’s conception and instead gathers together everything that, in accord with it, gives it greater strength and richness.
Thus, it creates a work that is not, like nature, without (at least apparent) order and bristling with contradictions, but rather a small world in which all elements are mutually strained toward and cooperate with one another. In this sense, the artist idealizes — not that he represents types or paints ideas, but he simplifies and concentrates. The idea he has of his characters, the feeling that breathes from them, evokes expressive images, groups them, and combines them. Useless details disappear; everything imposed by the living logic of character is gathered, concentrated in the unity of a being, so to speak, less real yet all the more true.
But here now lies the unavoidable subjection of theatre, in comparison with the work of art that has already found its definitive, unique expression in the pages of the writer. That which is already expression, that which is already form, must become matter — a matter to which the actors, according to their means and abilities, must in turn give form. For the actor, if he does not wish (nor can he wish) that the written words of the drama should issue from his mouth as from a speaking tube or a phonograph, must reconceive, as best he can, the character — must, that is, conceive it anew for himself; the image already expressed must reorganize itself within him and tend to become the movement that realizes it and renders it real upon the stage.
Even for him, then, execution must spring alive from conception, and solely by virtue of it — through movements prompted by the image itself, alive and active, not only within him, but become with him and in him soul and body.
Now, although this image was not born spontaneously within the actor, but was aroused in his spirit by the expression of the writer, can it ever be the same? Can it pass from one spirit to another without altering, without modifying itself? It will never be the same. It will perhaps be an approximate image, more or less similar, but the same, no. That given character on stage will speak the same words of the written drama, but will never be that of the poet, because the actor has recreated him within himself, and his is the expression, even though the words are not his — his the voice, his the body, his the gesture.
The literary work is the drama or the comedy conceived and written by the poet; that which will be seen in the theatre is, and can only be, a scenic translation. As many actors, so many translations — more or less faithful, more or less happy — but, like every translation, always and necessarily inferior to the original.
For, if we think well, the actor must and does of necessity the opposite of what the poet has done. That is, he renders more real and yet less true the character created by the poet; he deprives him of as much of that ideal, superior truth as he gives him of that material, common reality; and he makes him less true also because he translates him into the fictitious and conventional materiality of a stage. The actor, in short, necessarily gives an artificial consistency, in a counterfeit, illusory environment, to persons and actions that have already had an expression of ideal life — that of art — and that live and breathe in a superior reality.
And then? Are the distinguished dramatic authors right, those who see nothing but the theatre, and who say and maintain that the theatre is theatre and not literature?
If by theatre one is to understand that place where evening and matinee performances are given, with actors to whom they supply material and subject matter to be shaped almost on the spot into dramatic or comic scenes, yes. But in that case, as regards their position in relation to art, they must resign themselves to stand on the same level as those facile forgers of verses who lend themselves to composing little poems beneath the vignettes of certain illustrated magazines. They write, not for the text, but for the translation. And truly, then, their theatre has no need at all of literature — mere material for actors, who will give it life and substance on the stage. Something, in short, like the scenarios of the old commedia dell’arte.
But for us, theatre must be something else.
Luigi Pirandello
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