Michel de Ghelderode can be compared to those novelists who have concentrated on the creation of a fictional world of their own. Like William Faulkner with his Yoknapatawpha County, Charles Dickens with his nineteenth century London, or James Joyce with his Dublin, Ghelderode has created a microcosm which reflects and comments upon our larger world. Ghelderode's medieval Flanders is savagely grotesque. His sadistic caricatures are shot through with a ribald scatological humor which reminds one of the pictures of his countrymen, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel. So close is this relationship, indeed, that Ghelderode has specifically set some of his plays in a fictitious “Breughellande” where the painter's creations come to life. In all of his plays, with the exception of those written on specifically Biblical themes and set in the Holy Land, there is this quality of the frozen grimace on the canvas suddenly animated.

With the intransigence of an innovator who feels himself inspired, Antonin Artaud, by an imperious gesture of the pen, by an imperious gesture of the mind, wrote off about two thousand three hundred years of theatre.

Of Western theatre.

We are in the early thirties. This was the period when Louis Jouvet successfully produced the masterpieces of Jean Giraudoux: the period of Electra and her half-god, half-prophet Beggar, just before the Trojan War would not take place, and a little longer before Ondine would glisten in the first rays of another world. This was the period when Charles Dullin created the terrifying protagonist of Richard III, the saraband of ‘Tis a Pity She's a Whore, tragedies as frenzied as tragedies can be, in which howling, cursing, death-bed laments alternate with love songs and sweet tenderness. This was the period when George Pitoëff preserved from mere fashionable success Chekhov's Sea Gull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, Ostrovsky's Storm, and an extraordinary Hamlet like Romeo.

Although the idea of publishing the letters Michel de Ghelderode wrote to me during a correspondence lasting some years is very attractive, it is an idea I strongly resist. The time I would need to translate and annotate the letters could be made available, but the pressing claims of tact and modesty would still prevail. Publication must wait until the years have afforded a perspective that no amount of present-day explanation can provide. Nevertheless, it seems to me that some of Ghelderode's comments in these letters would be of interest to those who are aware of his plays and stories, and I have assembled a small selection of such statements which I feel are not liable to misinterpretation when removed from their contexts.

It is not an easy job to write about something which may not exist. Theatre? Does it still exist? And Italian theatre? Has it ever existed? Many people doubt it. Italian opera existed once, but what about Italian comedy and Italian drama? As far as I know, people have always spoken of them as being in crisis.

At times I try to find comfort in the thought that when something is in crisis, it probably exists. If I remember correctly, St. Anselm tried to prove the existence of God with a rather similar demonstration—but he succeeded only in proving that men desire God. So we might say that Italian theatre has been living for many centuries in mente italicorum, which does not mean that it has found its own reality in a living body of images, characters, stories, and styles. When we talk about it with foreigners, the conversation slides immediately to commedia dell'arte, to opera, and to neo-realistic movies.

On his four-hundredth anniversary, as at all other moments of critical judgment, it is Marlowe's peculiar destiny to be reconsidered in a Shakespearean context. His strongest claim is bound to be the fact that he did so much more than anyone else to bring that context into existence. This was the high point of A. C. Swinburne's eulogy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature.” Yet even Swinburne qualified his superlatives: “The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate.” The implicit qualification is underlined by our realization that the Victorian poet was far from being a historical critic. Marlowe must abide the question of history, which Shakespeare has all but outflown.

When Tamburlaine was first published in 1590, it was described on its title page as “Deuided into two Tragicall Discourses”—a curious reminiscence of George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, which in 1578 was similarly described as “Deuided into two Comicall Discourses”—and each part of Tamburlaine was divided into five acts. The publication of 1590, however, does not command our full confidence, for Richard Jones, the printer, admitted in his prefatory address “To the Gentlemen Readers” that he had excised passages that he found “far vnmeet for the matter” which the play as a whole presented. Even so, there is a prima facie case for accepting the division into two parts, each with its characteristic Marlowe prologue, and into five acts for each part, as having authorial warrant.

The Piccolo Teatro of the city of Milan, now entering its seventeenth year, represents both the result of a historical movement for the renewal of the Italian theatre and an entirely new phenomenon whose methods and orientations have served as a model for many similar organizations. Historical precedents can be found in the sustained efforts of persons like Eduardo Boutet, Eleonora Duse, Luigi Pirandello, and Silvio D'Amico; it was they who encouraged the Italian theatre to organize in permanent companies and to improve its technical and aesthetic levels, thus putting it on a par with the theatres of leading foreign countries.

When the Piccolo Teatro began in 1947, the Italian theatre was characterized by two traditions: the star, and the traveling company. Throughout Europe the day of the great director (Stanislavski, Reinhardt, Copeau, etc.) had ended; but in Italy it had not yet begun.

The masks Ghelderode wore for the world were in many ways unfortunate because they alienated him from his contemporaries. His weird poses frightened many admirers away, denying them the happiness of knowing Ghelderode personally. That Ghelderode's art has a secure place in modern dramatic literature is almost universally agreed. That he was an affectionate, exemplary friend, a lovable man, that he possessed a droll sense of humor, incarnated hard work and literary discipline à la Voltaire and Balzac without being spoiled by worldly success, and that he was a pauper most of his life—all this is known only to a small group of friends. They include several Belgians, a few Frenchmen, one or two Englishmen, and a couple of Americans. I, one of the Americans, had the privilege of knowing Ghelderode during 1959 and 1960 when I spent a year in Brussels expressly to study his life and drama.