Invited to lecture to the British Pirandello Society, I suspect the character Marco Mauri, who everyone seems to agree is mad, found his way into my unconscious. How else could I have agreed to speak about a play I had never even heard of, let alone seen or read? Felicity Firth, whose translation of the play into English I have used as the basis of my lecture, was familiar with a paper I had given on the subject of shame, guilt and forgiveness derived, in the main, from King Lear (Conran 1991a). Therein I had made reference to Pirandello in an important way, and one to which I shall return. That paper was the interim expression of a slow digestive process over a period of years. I had then moved on to an examination of the business of ageing from mid-life to old age and death, drawing