Read Online Pirandello's Henry IV by Luigi Pirandello, Tom Stoppard - Free Book Online Page A

like that.
    MATILDA    Who’d ever . . .? It’s unthinkable. It was an accident.
    HENRY    They used to say I was cuckoo before I had the accident. (
to Belcredi
) You know that better than anyone—anybody who stuck up for me had you to deal with.
    BELCREDI    Oh, come on, it was all in good heart.
    HENRY    And there’s my hair—look.
    BELCREDI    But mine’s going grey too.
    HENRY    Yes, but there’s a difference. I turned grey in here, as Henry IV. Can you understand what that means? I didn’t realise!—I just noticed it one day, it was something of a shock, because I knew at once it wasn’t just my hair.
I
was going grey, I was rotting away. I was done, I’d missed the feast.
    BELCREDI    You weren’t left abandoned . . .
    HENRY    I know. They longed for me to get better. Even the one who was right behind me and jabbed my horse till the blood ran . . .
    DI NOLLI    What?
    HENRY    . . . jabbed it to make it rear up, till it threw me.
    MATILDA    My God! It’s the first I’ve heard of this!
    HENRY    Was that in good heart, too, do you suppose?
    MATILDA    Who? Who was behind us?
    HENRY    What does it matter? It could as well have been any of those who went on to the banquet and would have saved me their meagre leftovers of sympathy, a few bones of contrition on the edge of their plates. Thank you very much!
    So, Doctor—see if I’m not a first in the annals of lunacy! I decided to stay mad, finding everything I needed here for a completely new form of amusement, to live as a madman of sound mind. Maybe it was to get my own back on the paving stone that cracked my head. What I saw when I came round was desolation, bleak and empty, and I decided to deck it out in all the colours and splendour of that long-gone carnival day when you . . . oh, there you are, my lady . . . when you had your triumph . . . and to make everyone who came here continue—this time for my diversion—that celebrated masquerade which had been—for you if not for me—-just the whim of a day . . . to make it last forever, not as make-believe now but as the real thing, the genuine mad article: the right clothes, the throne room, the four Privy Counsellors—all of them traitors, I gather—(
turning to them
) I’d like to know what you think you’ve gained by it? If I’m cured, you’re out of a job. I must have been mad to confide in you. But now it’s my turn. Guess what? They were thinking we could carry on this charade behind your backs!
    Henry begins to laugh. The others, with the exception of Matilda, laugh too.
    HENRY    (
cont.
) Don’t blame them. (
shaking his clothes
) We are what we wear. Look, this is an obvious, deliberate caricature of that other charade which is the life we live as puppets . . . so you have to forgive them, they don’t realise it’s only their frocks. (
to Belcredi
) You soon enter into thespirit of it. You start behaving as if you’re in some tragedy, like this . . . (
He demonstrates.
) I’m cured, gentlemen, because I’ve woken up to my madness. So I’m calm. Your problem is you haven’t woken up to yours, so you toss and turn your whole lives through.
    BELCREDI    Oh, so in the end, we’re the madmen, are we?
    HENRY    Well, if you weren’t crazy, would you have shown up here with her?
    BELCREDI    I might if I thought you were crazy.
    HENRY    And what about her?
    BELCREDI    Ah, her . . . I don’t know about her. She’s hanging on to your every word, she seems quite entranced by your sane-as-a hatter emergence. (
to Matilda
) Since you’re dressed for the part, Countess, why don’t you join him?
    MATILDA    Damn your insolence!
    HENRY    Take no notice!—he