The Bell Cap: summary and short plot of Luigi Pirandello’s comedy. Themes and characters of the work written by the Sicilian playwright.
The bell cap
The Bell Cap is a play written by Luigi Pirandello . The work, based on the short stories The Truth and Certain Obligations , was performed in Italian for the first time in Rome in 1923.
Let’s briefly look at the plot.
The Bell Cap: Short Plot
Mrs. Beatrice Fiorica, jealous and dissatisfied, wants to report to the delegate Spano’, a family friend, the betrayal of her husband, the cavalier Fiorica, with the wife of his scribe Ciampa. The latter, elderly and aware of the facts, tolerates the situation as long as his child and his face , that is, his respectability, are saved.
Ciampa tries to avoid the complaint by trying to persuade Mrs. Beatrice to turn the “serious” rope, that is, according to him, the one that makes people think and avoids disasters.
According to Ciampa, we all wear three strings on our foreheads like a clock: “the serious one, the civil one, the crazy one. Above all, having to live in society, we need the civil one, so it’s here in the middle of the forehead…; on the right temple, there’s the serious string, to talk seriously, face to face; on the left, the crazy string… the one that makes you lose the sight of your eyes… and you don’t know what you’re doing anymore”.
Beatrice, however, does not want to hear about remaining silent in the face of her husband’s betrayal, so she causes the scandal to explode . The whole family, however, goes against her: her mother, her brother, the servant, to the point that in the end the delegate tries to make it appear that there was no relationship between the knight and the young Nina Ciampa.
But it is precisely Ciampa, the betrayed husband, that is no longer happy with things: he is offended and hurt, and everyone knows now, after all that noise, that he is wearing “the cap with bells”, or rather the clown’s hat, and wants revenge.
It will be Beatrice who turned the “crazy” rope who will suffer the consequences of the scandal and save her husband’s good name.
How? By committing herself to a mental asylum for three months for behaving like a madwoman: “… she branded three people with a mark of infamy: one, for adultery; another, for being a whore, and me (Ciampa), for being a cuckold… she must prove that she is mad – truly mad – and must be locked up!… She must be locked up! She must be locked up! She is… mad! She is mad!”
The comedy ends with a horrible laugh from Ciampa, a laugh of rage, of wild pleasure and of desperation at the same time.
