IVY

Annesa, one of Grazia Deledda’s most enigmatic and dramatic characters, battles with a guilt she suffers when her own strength tempts her to a crime that will save others who won’t save themselves. Annesa has tragically attached herself to the tree of the Decherchi family, once noble but now dry-rotting on hard times. Her lover, Paulu Decherchi, compares her to a suffocating ivy clinging to the dead trunk.

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Translated by Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt

HENRY IV: FOLLOWED BY "THE LICENSE"

Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV opened to general acclaim at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan on February 24, 1922, less than a year after his revolutionary theatrical achievement, Six Characters in Search of an Author. The title of the later play suggests a historical drama, recalling Shakespeare’s great history plays. Yet Henry IV is instead anti-historical in that it “plays with” history, presenting historical events not as sequential and true, but as simultaneous and as an imaginary refuge. Henry IV (whose real name is not given) lives in a fake medieval castle where everyone must wear the costume of a historical figure. He is a twentieth-century Italian aristocrat whose madness traps him in the role of the Holy Roman Emperor, the German Henry IV, who reigned from 1056 until 1105.