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Romeo get to marry Juliet?—is neither here nor there. Except, I would add, in determining whether the nature of the genre is comic or tragic: comedy has a resolution, a happy wrapping up, usually signified by a marriage or multiple marriages, where tragedy has none—the death of Macbeth, while doubtless a happy solution for Scotland, settles nothing for Shakespeare. This glad wrapping up of an awful tangle of cross-purposes is improbable and often incredible (as people are wont to complain of some of Shakespeare’s darker comedies), but this only means that the characters’ getting together cannot be taken as a permanent resolution of anything; it is a moment of joy and celebration such as reality also contains and on which the play chooses to stop. The pairing off that signals the finale of Love’s Labour’s Lost (or The Marriage of Figaro ) makes us laugh and clap because, among other things, it is so funny, too Noah’s Ark good to be true.
    It was not, then, that Chiaromonte wished to see the stage draconically purged of such common objects as easy chairs, kitchen sinks, baby carriages, ironing boards (though, given his bias, an ironing board, stage center, in a contemporary play was likely to provoke a defensive reaction, whereas the baby carriage wheeled across stage rear in Act 4 of The Three Sisters entertained him). Nor was it an insistence on ideal types, even if it may be true that, as an Italian, that is a man of the south, he found warty realism of portraiture deeply uncongenial: compare the ugly, grinning peasant bystanders surrounding an Adoration or a Nativity in northern painting with the ideal figures assisting at Italian holy scenes. For him, reality was, above all, sad, even in its humors and extravagances.
    He quotes Pirandello’s definition of humor as the “sentiment of the contrary”—a feeling in which critical recognition of what ought to be mingles with compassion for what is. Pirandello had used as an example Manzoni’s parish priest, Don Abbondio, in I Promessi Sposi , asking: “Who is Don Abbondio? He is what you find in the place of what you would have wanted.” The contrary of your expectations of the ideal figure of the perfect priest. “The down-to-earth, dispirited shadow of cautious Don Abbondio falls across the sacerdotal ideal.” But that definition of humor—or the comic—comes very, close to Chiaromonte’s own definition of the real. Don Abbondio is a little piece of reality, and pity, as with Chekhov, is the agency that allows us to perceive it. “Pitiless realism” was detestable clearly, to Chiaromonte and as remote in his eyes from the real, which would shrink from its touch, as any other form of “graphic” representation that took itself for the truth.
    Chiaromonte, it must be remembered, was a modern, a deep-dyed modern, going tirelessly into battle against the fallacy of representation. That is, he was very much an “engaged” intellectual of his time, having entered the fray in the twenties to do his bit in the vanguard onslaught on the continuum of appearances which the majority still took to be solid and durable, despite the shock of the First War that had demonstrated—as plainly, one would have thought, as an earthquake—the crack or “fault” in the substratum. The demolition work had already been begun by the cubist sappers before the war, but in the theatre Pirandello was the first to expose the fissure, which was why he was the hero of the Jackals. Chiaromonte notes the fragmentation of the Six Characters (1922), as after an explosion.
    For those who came later it is hard to appreciate the passion and valor of the modernist undertaking; we forget its unpopularity. And when we remind ourselves that it had no evident political overtones and yet evidently voiced a protest of some radical, disturbing sort, we are puzzled to determine where that protest, almost a war cry, was coming from. The rejection of old forms—i.e., of old ways of