Ugo Betti

• Born: February 4, 1892
• Birthplace: Camerino, Italy
• Died: June 9, 1953
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

Other Literary Forms

The majority of Ugo Betti’s published works were written for the theater, and all but a few, including three posthumous plays, were produced during his lifetime, yet his distinctive stylistic peculiarity of juxtaposing lyric forms to stark realism in his dramas can be traced to his poetic and narrative writings.

A translation of Catullus’s poem 64 as Le nozze di Teti e Peleo (1912; the marriage of Thetis and Peleus) was the first work Betti published. Three collections of poems followed at long intervals, witness to his lifelong interest in poetry: Il re pensieroso (1922; the pensive king), Canzonette: La morte (1932; popular songs: death), and Uomo e donna (1937; man and woman). Of Betti’s three collections of short stories, the first two, Caino (1928; Cain) and Le case (1933; houses), were published within five years of each other, while the last one, Una strana serata (1948; a strange evening), as well as his only novel, La pietra alta (1948; the high mountain), appeared fifteen years later.

The playwright emerged naturally out of Betti’s poetic and fictional activities. It was as if each of his modes of translating his artistic intuition into language provided an essential element to arrive at a dramatic synthesis of his aesthetic vision. As Betti himself stated in an essay on the theater, he did not believe that “those high walls which some find it convenient to imagine between poetry, narrative, and theatre, and perhaps even the movies, really exist.”

Some of Betti’s plays were adapted for the screen, and, after winning a competition in 1939 to write for the cinema, he was able to contribute from 1941 to 1946 to several film scenarios. From 1931 to 1952, Betti also contributed a column entitled “Taccuino” (notebook) to the newspaper La gazzetta del popolo (the people’s gazette).

Achievements

Although Ugo Betti’s unusual stylistic technique was common to all the literary genres in which he engaged, his reputation rests on his plays. As a playwright he was best able to express his basically pessimistic vision of life, a vision he was increasingly able to define in his lifelong double role as a jurist and as a writer. In some of his notes, as well as in his final plays, he justified and illustrated his vision. His is a Christian pessimism, a logical precondition for that “final stage setting, for the resurrection of the soul and its reunion with its Creator.” To arrive at that teleological culmination, Betti had to cross many thresholds as he progressed, codifying his aesthetics of antinomy both in life and in art. An extraordinary fusion of harsh cruelty and childlike innocence, naturalistic plot and literary language, pessimism and hope, Betti’s dramas were subject to frequent critical misunderstanding.

When Betti’s first play, La padrona (the mistress of the house) was selected for the prize awarded by the theatrical review Le scimmie e lo specchio (the monkeys and the mirror), some of the judges were astonished to learn that the author was the same man who four years earlier had published Il re pensieroso. It is precisely the odd combination of realistic poetic images and lyric symbolism that distinguishes Betti’s finest plays.

A combative and uncompromising man, Betti himself contributed to the controversy surrounding his work. He would openly express his contempt for what he considered to be dishonest and biased criticism, and was especially sensitive to critical comparisons with other contemporary writers for whom he had little esteem.

Despite such controversy, Betti has won increasing recognition as one of the greatest Italian playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century. With such recognition, Betti has grown in stature as an interpreter of the spiritual climate of his times, and his linguistic peculiarities have also been reappraised as expressing modern human beings’ utter torment. Landslide, a play of universal dimensions, is often regarded as a pivotal drama not only in the playwright’s artistic evolution but also in the history of modern drama.

Given the philosophical thrust of his work, it is not surprising that Betti’s plays were appreciated in France, where they were viewed in connection with existentialism. Corruption in the Palace of Justice, his masterpiece, as well as other important dramas of his maturity, was first acclaimed in Paris, then in Germany and in other European countries, as well as in South America.

In 1941, Betti received the Academy of Italy’s prestigious award for the theater; in 1949, he was selected for the IDI Award of the Italian Drama Institute; and in 1950, he received the Rome Award for Corruption in the Palace of Justice. Betti’s most significant tribute, however, is that paid to him by a new generation of dramatists, headed by Diego Fabbri, who have followed in his footsteps.

Biography

Ugo Betti devoted himself to the activities of a literary man while engaging full-time in his profession as a judge. This combination of roles might seem discordant at first, but in fact it holds the key to his unusual gifts as a dramatist. A native of Camerino in the Marches, a region of central Italy, Betti spent his early life, and pursued his studies, in Parma, where his father, Tullio, a country doctor, had moved his family in 1900 to become the head of the municipal hospital. Displaying from early childhood an affinity for sports, Betti first played soccer but later converted to tennis, a sport in which he engaged for the rest of his life. His inclination for poetry inspired him to compose poems from a very young age and to translate Catullus’s poem 64 when he was eighteen.

Although he would have liked to pursue literary studies in Bologna, young Betti was convinced by his father that a law career would give him more security. Completing his studies in jurisprudence at the University of Parma in 1914, Betti earned his law degree, in partial fulfillment of which he wrote the thesis “Il diritto e la rivoluzione” (law and revolution). Betti’s thesis revealed that, like many young people of his generation, he was not immune to the anarchical ideologies of Georges Sorel, Max Stirner, and the Italian Futurists nor to the philosophical influences of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Betti’s acceptance of the necessary evils of warfare was soon to be tempered, however, by the events of World War I. Having been in favor of Italy’s intervention in the war, he volunteered and participated in it as an artillery officer. He won a medal before being captured by the Germans in October, 1917, during the disastrous Italian retreat of Caporetto, and remained imprisoned until the armistice.

It was in the trenches and then as a prisoner of war that Betti engaged in serious reading and was encouraged to pursue a literary career by two fellow prisoners, Carlo Emilio Gadda and Bonaventura Tecchi, both of whom became writers of note. The poems for Il re pensieroso were mostly written while Betti was in prison camp; they are in the mode of the crepuscolari, or decadents. From the Italian crepuscolari, as well as from the French Symbolists, Betti assimilated a rather precious manner. His first book of poems depicts a dreamworld; its tone is deliberately childlike and naïve. Nevertheless, these early poems already reflect his innate pessimism, pointing to the vanity of earthly life and to the ever-present mystery of death.

After the war, Betti returned to Parma, where, competing for a position as a lawyer for the National Railroads, he wrote a legal work, “Considerazioni sulla forza maggiore come limite di responsabilità del vettore ferroviario” (an act of God as a railroad carrier’s limit of responsibility). Meanwhile, he was also preparing for a competition, which he won, in order to enter the legislature of the city of Parma. In 1921, he became a magistrate in the nearby town of Bedonia, and was later promoted to judge in Parma.

In 1930, Betti married Andreina Frosini and was transferred to Rome. At that time, he was already gaining attention in the world of letters, both as a poet and as a playwright. His first two plays were staged by prestigious theater companies, La padrona in 1926, and La casa sull’acqua (the house on the water) in 1929, while L’isola meravigliosa (wonderful island) won the Governor of Rome Prize in 1930 and was staged later that year.

After World War II, Betti became head librarian of the Ministry of Grace and Justice, so that he could devote more time to his literary activities. In 1950, he was promoted to judge of the appellate court, and served as a member of the Press Bureau of the President’s Council. In the last years of his life, having returned to the fold of Catholicism, Betti found renewed strength and inspiration in his faith; his last dramas are a testimony to God’s existence. At the age of sixty-one, Betti was suddenly stricken with cancer of the throat, and about three months later he died in Rome, on June 9, 1953.

Analysis

Ugo Betti’s theater is relentlessly preoccupied with humanity’s penchant for evil. With a mixture of anguish and clinical detachment, Betti observes the human condition from the vantage point of a judge’s bench, reflecting on a bitter paradox: While seeking happiness, humankind acts to destroy it.

Following Luigi Pirandello’s metapsychological lead, European theater had turned a decisive corner in its treatment of the motivation of character. Modern dramatists, while drawing on naturalistic psychology, emphasized the contradictory and irrational, forces at work in human experience, forces hardly comprehended by the Darwinistic, materialistic worldview of naturalism. The question Betti poses is quite clearly stated in his notes, which he painstakingly accumulated before each play, attempting to formulate the psychological nature of his characters. If human beings want to escape anguish and sorrow, why do they cultivate vices, why do they commit crimes? Why do people so often act against their own interests?

Betti pondered on this paradox and continued to test various explanations for it throughout his life, refining, as he progressed, a metaphor he had drawn in his early notes: People, he suggested, are incapable of attaching importance to their existence as long as they look on it as “an apple ready to fall,” deprived of “dignity and duration,” ugly because it is transient and “soon to rot.” Many of Betti’s characters reflect this secret bitterness at the nature of life.

As a man and as an artist, Betti set out early in his life on a long search for God, but was able to find him in his true essence only toward the end of his journey—as a God of mercy. All his plays revolve around a single message, proclaimed in an anguished voice: Human values need revising and must be rebuilt so that humankind can rise above its destiny and freely pursue the road to justice and redemption.

La padrona

Betti’s basic themes are present in embryo in La padrona, his first play, in which the vibrancy of life is embodied in Marina, while her stepdaughter Anna, afflicted by consumption, symbolizes death. In spite of the shabby existence that is all that he can offer Marina, Pietro hopes that the child she is carrying will cement their union. It is Anna who shatters her father’s dreams of building a happy life with his young and seductive second wife, revealing to him that the unborn child is not his. Cynically destroying Pietro’s dream, Anna takes revenge against the stepmother she hates for her exuberance, and pushes Pietro to the brink of killing Marina. Only Anna’s sudden death prevents her father from committing the crime.

Written in 1926, and still relying heavily on the tenets of naturalism, La padrona depicts the bleakness of the dilapidated surroundings in which the characters move, as well their inner misery. As is true for the majority of Betti’s plays, the plot of this drama is rather commonplace, merely a backdrop against which the playwright can observe and analyze motives of his characters.

What was to be innovative in Betti’s theater is partly previewed by the author himself in the introduction to La padrona. His intention, Betti explains, is to force the reader to think of those things that dismay and horrify human beings most—above all, death—to determine how humankind can be worthy of carrying that “crown of thorns” which is its conscience.

Unlike her stepmother, who is bound by her sensuality, Anna, whose life is eluding her, seeks happiness in the simple beauty of each sweet sunny day, in the garden, in the hope that fortune will lead to her path human beings who can share her joys. Yet Anna dies young, having hardly begun to fulfill her plans for living. Her father, Pietro, too, is left with his unfulfilled dream of a lasting domestic joy, which had been so close at hand. He accepts what must be, for evil, as well as good, must have its reason. Pietro repeatedly says that he “would like to know . . . who orders us about, who keeps us bound.” While Pietro thus voices Betti’s concept of the limitations of human liberty, it is Marina who embodies humankind’s propensity to self-destruction. Her unbridled sensuality binds her and ultimately destroys her.

To deal with the universal themes of his dramas, Betti’s images are both lyric and harsh in tone. In La padrona there are ample illustrations. The antinomy of good and evil, for example, is expressed in the metaphors of the “leafy branches shining up there,” and “in the roots suffering deep down in the earth.” Betti also employed unnamed characters to universalize the action in his plays. In La padrona, “the lame,” “the neighbor,” and “the relative” are commentators in the manner of a Greek chorus. Betti’s characters often bear foreign rather than Italian names: They belong to no country, yet they are from everywhere.

Landslide

In 1932, with Landslide, Betti established his place in the world of Italian letters. Widely acclaimed at home and abroad, this play was labeled by the author “a modern tragedy.” Although there are no specific political references in this or in any other of Betti’s plays, the author’s implicit indictment of the Fascist regime can be deduced from the characters’ crimes and vices. At the same time, the foreign names and the setting in a distant city point to the universality of the theme of justice.

The characters’ confession and plea for mercy is exemplified by Parsc. He is a judge unable to pronounce a sentence. He commiserates with the townspeople, who pay with their sorrow every day of their lives for the crimes they have committed. Revealing Betti’s own longing for leniency, Landslide is a plunge into the human soul, in the deepest recesses of which are hidden unfulfilled desires, grudges, emotions, love, and hatred.

A landslide has fallen during a rainy night at the North Yard of the city, causing the death of a number of workers, driving some of the townspeople close to madness. It is up to Judge Parsc to try the case and discover who is responsible for the disaster. Accusations are whirled all across town, for, all feeling guilty, the people all become accused and accusers. In this “landslide of accusations,” even the dead return to call for justice and to confess their lifelong sins, particularly those haunting them most. The Kurzes, father and son, confront each other, the younger denouncing parental harshness as the main cause for children’s unhappiness. Kurz’s father acknowledges the need for a loving dialogue rather than punishment as a means to educate his children.

A frenzied young girl, Nasca, blames herself for the landslide, as does the contractor Gaucker. Even Judge Parsc feels disqualified to pronounce a sentence, publicly confessing to his sins of lust and selfishness. Pressed by Goetz, who is the most persistent among the accusers, the judge in the end opts for mercy. To fulfill the townspeople’s longing for justice, divine mercy is invoked; the play ends with the word pietà (mercy) uttered over and over by the judge and by all those present. Anchored on a simple plot, Landslide is one of many of Betti’s plays dealing with the theme of justice. It is an indictment of society and humankind at large for its responsibility for all the sorrows of the world.

The play derives much of its power from its subtle shifts from realistic to symbolic action. The chorus of voices rising in unison to plead for mercy introduces elements of poetic mystery and surprise. A gunshot and the blaring of a factory siren resound as echoes of doom for people’s sins and for the atonement of universal guilt. The evanescent atmosphere pervading the play and its haunting quality of guilt make Landslide a unique masterpiece of eschatological scope.

Corruption in the Palace of Justice

Corruption in the Palace of Justice has been hailed as the best of Betti’s great dramas. It is in fact in this play’s dynamically constructed plot and for its detective-story quality that Betti best succeeds in synthesizing his stern indictment of the inadequacy of human justice, because of the failure of those who are entrusted with the administration of it.

A dubious type, Ludvi-Pol has been assassinated in one of the chambers of the courthouse, where he was called to act as a witness in a trial. Another crime takes place in the city at about the same time: A woman is killed in a fire set to destroy some documents, the location of which is known only to the judges. An inquest is conducted on request of the alarmed population of the town. A high-placed inspector, Erzi, is chosen to investigate the crimes. The judges in the courthouse are in great turmoil, as they all fear being accused of corruption through the investigation. They all become one another’s prosecutors, but suspicion falls heavily on old, disease-ridden Judge Vanan through the diabolical machinations of Judge Cust.

Cust is almost outwitted by Judge Croz, who is easily his match, and who, like Cust, covets the presidency of the courthouse currently held by Vanan. Pretending to be the victim of a seizure and on the brink of death, Croz extracts a confession from Cust. When he is about to denounce Cust, Croz actually succumbs to sudden death. The only obstacle to Cust’s achievement of his goal is Vanan’s young daughter Elena, whom Cust must convince that her father has committed the crimes being investigated. Cust succeeds in placing seeds of doubt in Elena’s heart by forcing Vanan to draw up an ambiguous memorandum. Unable to accept her beloved father’s dishonor, Elena commits suicide by throwing herself down the elevator shaft.

Cust’s deceit and his unrivaled corruption earn for him the presidency. His elevation to the coveted position would be unhindered, were it not for his conscience, which in the end suddenly stands between him and his victory. Incapable of bearing the burden of innocent Elena’s tragic death, he is haunted by the echo of her screams as she was falling into the shaft. Suddenly it is this new obsession that prompts him to climb the staircase leading up to the High Revisor in the middle of the night. The blare of a trumpet in the distance accompanies him on his climb to unburden his guilt from his conscience.

Written in 1944 at the height of World War II, Corruption in the Palace of Justice is a vehement condemnation of corrupt society, but particularly of those who are entrusted with the sacred task of administering justice and who betray that trust. Elena’s innocence, in contrast, counterbalances the judges’ heinous crimes. Her presence in the drama is at times announced by the blare of the faraway bugle sound; Betti juxtaposes this harmony to the violent images of putrefaction and death that pollute the halls of justice. In the end, the most corrupt of men is urged by the call of innocence to recapture paradise lost.

The Gambler

The Gambler of 1951 begins the final cycle of Betti’s dramas, in which transcendence is the central theme. Innocence and guilt, so obsessively explored in previous dramas, are now seen from the perspective of the author’s renewed Catholic faith. Emanating from God, grace lends these last works an almost religious resolution.

When Ennio, the gambler, is charged with the death of his wife, Iva, during the turmoil of the war, he pleads that he is innocent, but only of the physical crime, confessing his moral guilt for having wished for Iva’s death. Absolved by human justice, Ennio, who has played a game with death, recognizes the need for Divine forgiveness. He hopes by the grace of God to be reconciled with Iva, who does in fact come back: They will be reunited for all eternity.

The Gambler, like all the plays in Betti’s last phase, has been likened to a mystery play. The Functionary in The Gambler; the Tizi, or Some People, in Acque turbate (troubled waters); and the final chorus in The Fugitive play the role of commentators, while the Doctor of Acque turbate is a prototypical antagonist, a symbolic devil who wants Daniele to give up his struggle to gain eternal salvation.

Acque turbate

Acque turbate (alternately titled O, Il fratello protegge e ama; the brother protects and loves) is a drama of overwhelming universal dimensions, offering perhaps the fullest expression of Betti’s credo, both as a man and as a playwright. Although good and evil coexist in the world inhabited by human beings, Betti points to the certainty of a final catharsis, at a higher level of transcendental redemption. The drama symbolizes the liberation sought in death by people—to rid themselves of the heavy burdens weighing on their conscience.

Giacomo examines his conscience as he is in the process of committing suicide, after having admitted his guilt to his friend. Gabriele had accused Giacomo of protecting his own sister Alda from a life of vice, during and after the war, because of his evil passion for her. While falling from a high rock into death’s abyss, Giacomo tries to understand how such a despicable passion could have taken hold of his inner being so silently, without his knowing it.

The answer is given by the choral voice of the Tizi, who, embodying a universal conscience, tell Giacomo to take heart and to have faith, as everything will be explained. There is love and understanding in the Godhead, the need for whom all people feel within, where they can also know him. The ultimate message of Acque turbate is that, since human beings are intelligent and loving, they must emanate from a Creator who is intelligent and loving. Humanity represents God on earth as the fish represents the sea, and humanity can hope for salvation, for the choice between good and evil is within its grasp. Disorder and disharmony are brought about by humanity’s failure to represent God in the world and by its yielding to the insinuation of evil.

Focusing on the torments that sin inflicts on the human soul, Betti judges humankind severely, as a professional judge should. Yet, interspersed with his stern judgments and rising above them are the poet’s lyric accents of divine love and mercy. Although it is true that Betti pronounces severe sentences on all human vices and sins, his most anguished judgment is directed at the misuse of justice by those in whose trust it has been placed.

Dealing with such violent crimes as homicide, matricide, uxoricide, and fratricide, as well as with adultery, the lust of the flesh, the thirst for power and riches, theft, fraud, and gross parental neglect and misunderstanding of children, Betti the judge and playwright shows, in dramatic terms, humankind as it breaks all God’s commandments. Yet even as it sins, humanity is listening to the divine voice within it. Humankind’s compulsion to sin is matched by its compelling need to return to the Godhead.

In a letter Betti wrote in the summer of 1947 to Emilio Barbetti, one of his most appreciative critics, the playwright stated that all his writings had been “various terms of a slow proof of the existence of God,” and he added that seeking God is the same as finding him. No matter how dismaying their sins and vices, all Betti’s heroes are “seekers after God.” Betti himself continued his relentless search for God’s love and mercy to the last.

Biliography

Arnett, Lloyd A. “Tragedy in a Postmodern Vein: Ugo Betti Our Contemporary?” Modern Drama 33, no. 4 (December, 1990): 543. Provides an analysis of the postmodern aesthetic in Corruption in the Palace of Justice and Crime on Goat Island.

Licastro, Emanuele. Ugo Betti: An Introduction. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1985. A biography of Betti that provides criticism of his major works. Bibliography and index.