Comic and Tragic Performers: Identity Definition in "Sua Maestà" and "L'imbecille"

‘Sua Maestà’ (1904) and ‘L’imbecille’ (1912) are both set in the fictional town of Costanova, and can be seen as the two complementary parts of a diptych – not by chance, Pirandello paired them together in the collection La rallegrata, and established an explicit connection between the two by labelling the former story as a ‘farsa’, and the latter as a ‘tragedia’. In addition to the setting, these two novelle also share a particular emphasis on the performative aspect of communal life. In ‘L’imbecille’, both Fazio and Paroni play a part written for them by somebody else; in ‘Sua Maestà’, the two protagonists (Decenzio Cappadona and Amilcare Zegretti) use the town as a stage for their impersonations of Vittorio Emanuele II. From this perspective, the Costanova diptych does stand out as a two-fold parable on the ubiquitous links between identity and role-playing, and on the paradoxes entailed by the very notion of authenticity.
This paper focuses on Pirandello’s representation of human behaviour as a mimetic and performative phenomenon, as reflected by both stories; particular attention will be given to the author’s unexplored dialogue with two nineteenth-century sources (Maupassant in ‘Sua Maestà’, Dostoevsky in ‘L’imbecille’), as well as to his peculiar position within international modernism.