Written in 1921 and represented at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan on February 24, 1922, where it was a huge success, Enrico IV is considered, together with Sei personaggi, the pinnacle of Pirandello's theater. The Agrigento-born writer composed the text specifically for one of the greatest actors in Italian theater of all time, Ruggero Ruggeri. But Enrico IV is in no way affected by its ad personam drafting.
The story of this noble man, who fell from his horse during a masked parade and has since been stuck in the clothes and character of Emperor Enrico, in a fiction that will eventually become deliberate and conscious—especially after the murder of Belcredi, his former friend who, after the misfortune, was ready to steal his woman, disguised at the time as Matilde di Canossa - engages and fascinates the viewer.
Pirandello's great question of madness finds its highest and most humanly significant development in the story of Henry IV.
