At the beginning of the play this situation has lasted about eight years, but two recent events suggest that it is under threat: Henry’s sister has died and he has also lost his favourite privy counsellor. Belcredi, Matilda, her daughter Frida, Henry’s nephew Di Nolli, and the psychiatrist Dr Genoni arrive at the villa with a plot, devised by the doctor, to shock Henry out of his delusion by suddenly presenting him with Frida dressed exactly as her mother had been at the cavalcade twenty years earlier. The double vision of Matilda, as she is now and as she once was, will, the doctor believes, restore Henry to real time like a stopped watch that is shaken to make it start again. In the final scene, enraged by the brutality and insensitivity of this device, Henry seizes on Frida and kills Belcredi, thus confirming the others in their belief that he is indeed insane and condemning himself to live out the rest of his life as Henry IV.

Henry IV was written in a matter of months immediately after the first performance of Six Characters. If, on the one hand, it develops typically Pirandellian themes and continues to explore the possibilities of metatheatre, on the other hand it seems designed to reconcile the dramatist with the audience he had just bewildered and infuriated. Instead of the amorphous ‘play in the making’ and the sense of experimental groping, we are offered the comfortingly recognizable genre of a ‘tragedy in three acts’ and the solidity of the well-made play with its exposition, complication, catastrophe, and denouement. Whereas in Six Characters, as the Director explains, ‘We can’t have one character … upstaging everybody else and taking over the whole scene’ (SC, p. 44), in Henry IV that is precisely what happens, with a protagonist whose dominant presence, anguished self-questioning, and feigned madness recall the most celebrated tragic hero in the history of drama.

The Hamlet echoes may well have influenced the way in which the play has traditionally been interpreted, with ‘Henry’ (we never learn his real name) as a sensitive victim who attracts admiration for the way he uses his corrosive intellect not only to expose the shortcomings of society but also to pose existential questions that humanity in general would prefer to ignore. We need, however, to see that if Hamlet is relevant to Henry IV, it is primarily as an ironic counterpoint. The besetting sin of Henry’s society is not so much deep-rooted corruption as sheer triviality—not murder, incest, and dynastic mayhem, but Belcredi leafing through German magazines that he cannot read, Matilda getting a fit of the giggles every time anyone looks at her with genuine sentiment, and history reduced to a fashionable masquerade. Whatever Hamlet’s perplexities, he still acts on a stage where there is no hole in the ceiling and where tragic action is ultimately possible: Henry’s noted seriousness traps him in a charade where he can only mime the tragedy of someone else. The result is that even his most terrible and lucid moments teeter on the edge of tantrums, the rage of the child who is losing patience with his own game. He is, moreover, less than clear-sighted about his own condition, as in the following passage where he addresses his privy counsellors after revealing that he is now sane:

do you know what it means to find yourself face to face with a madman? Face to face with someone who shakes the very foundations of everything you have built up in and around yourself—the very logic of all your constructions. Ah, what do you expect? Madmen construct without logic, lucky them! Or with a logic of their own which floats around like a feather. Changing, ever-changing! Like this today, and tomorrow who knows how? You stand firm, and they no longer stand at all. (HIV, p. 110)

How does this apply to his own experience? Surely, in his role as Henry IV, far from being ‘changing, ever-changing’, he had been the one who stood firm and therefore could not qualify as a madman. In which case, he can hardly claim the fact that he now steps out of his role as proof of his sanity. Henry IV links Pirandello’s obsession with masks and role-playing with the question of what it means to define madness in a world that is now recognized as absurd; but this does not make Henry simply the sane madman who reveals the madness of the sane. That straightforward inversion would deny the flux that Pirandello regards as inherent in life. Like the polarities that govern Six Characters, madness and sanity keep changing sides until the terms become almost emptied of substance.

To understand the limits of Henry, whether as victim or critic of society, we need to look more closely at his antagonist Belcredi who is not quite the fop that he first appears to be. Pirandello’s stage directions warn us that we should not underestimate the real power that lies behind the languid exterior. Nobody takes him seriously, ‘or so it seems’; he can afford to laugh at the Marchesa Matilda’s sallies against him because ‘What Tito Belcredi means to her only he knows’; shrouded by the ‘sleepy Arabian idleness’ is ‘the supple agility that makes him a formidable swordsman’ (HIV, p. 71). He alone has the intelligence to see through the pseudo-scientific jargon of the Polonius-like Dr Genoni and the prescience to foresee the disastrous results of the plot; he alone shows some genuine understanding of how Henry’s mind works; and in the final scene he alone comes to Frida’s defence. The drama of Henry’s madness is framed by Belcredi who begins it with a prick to his rival’s horse and ends it by getting stabbed himself. In the intervening twenty years he has presumably possessed Matilda despite the shadowy existence of a husband somewhere along the line. Belcredi, in short, has all the fitness for life and the sexual potency that is lacking in Henry. Matilda tells us that Henry only chose the part of the emperor so that he could lie at her feet, ‘like Henry IV at Canossa’ (HIV, p. 77), a self-abasement that foreshadows some of the more embarrassing aspects of Pirandello’s own relationship with the actress Marta Abba.