“A Hole in the Paper Sky”: Psycho-Scenographic Rifts in Pirandello’s Henry IV

Abstract

Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV has received much critical attention for its complex treatment of madness, illusion, history, memory, and existential angst. Considering Pirandello’s biographical facts related to the psychological decline of his wife Antonietta Portulano, whose paranoid delusions formed an alternative version of her husband’s identity, many have looked to categories of mental illness to understand Henry’s situation. Rudolph Binion sees Henry’s story “as an example of emotional arrest which dates from his traumatic fall”; Eric Bentley reads the protagonist’s behavior as psychopathology; Alan Roland and Gino Rizzo diagnose Henry with “wounded narcissism […] masochism, and deprivation”; Thomas Bishop writes that “Henry’s story reads like a case history of amnesia compounded with schizophrenia”

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