When Luigi Pirandello wrote his play Enrico IV (or Henry IV as it is generally translated into English) there must have been some confusion in the audience about which Henry IV the play was portraying.
In fact, there's confusion on stage in the play about which Henry IV is being discussed. English-speaking audiences might immediately think of England's King Henry IV, the subject of multiple plays by William Shakespeare. The character of Berthold in the play, however, at first thinks the monarch in question is Henry IV of France.
How could the characters in the play not know which king it is they're dealing with on stage? As the audience learns in the first scene, the Henry IV in the play is not the real Henry IV, a Holy Roman Emperor who famously feuded with the Pope, but rather a wealthy man who was thrown from his horse while enacting the role of Henry IV in a pageant. Waking up after severe head trauma, he thinks he really is the man he was portraying.
For years now, the man's family and friends have been keeping up the act that he really is Henry IV to appease his madness. He later reveals, however, that he recovered his memory and is well aware that he's not an emperor. In order to appease his family and friends, though, he continues to play the role. Everyone in the play is acting, and is even aware that they are acting, but none of them are able to give up the roles and just be themselves.
All of this is a metaphor for society as a whole, as Pirandello makes clear. Pirandello began his playwriting career as a part of an Italian movement known as the Theatre of the Grotesque in which characters resemble puppets with no control over their own destinies. That certainly sounds like Enrico IV! The movement was known for a number of other tropes as well, such as irresolvable love triangles and unfaithful women. Yup, the play has those, too.
Pirandello went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and today the Pirandello Society of America keeps his memory alive in this country. They also publish PSA, a journal that published my own Pirandello adaptation, Wedding Night, based on one of his short stories. That play, however, doesn't have people pretending to be dead emperors.
