The Rules of the Game

Luigi Pirandello · 1918 CE · Play · Italian · Modernist

Leone Gala has moved out of the marital flat, keeps a cook, and spends his mornings beating eggs with the calm of a man who has emptied himself of anything that could be wounded. His wife's lover lives upstairs and dines with them; when a drunken nobleman insults her in the street, the challenge that follows is one only a husband can answer, and Leone accepts it before reading the small print. Pirandello's most exact demonstration that a role, once assumed, carries rules a person can be held to.

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