SOURCE: Mignone, Mario B. “Early Works: Range and Versatility.” In Eduardo De Filippo, pp. 37-66. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Mignone explores the development of de Filippo's major themes as they appeared in his early, often critically neglected plays.

From Farce to Satire

De Filippo's theatrical works of the first phase, written before World War II and collected under the title Cantata dei giorni pari (Cantata for even days), are usually neglected by critics. In 1945 De Filippo himself characterized them as “plays of the old theater”:

In those plays I wanted to show the world of plot and intrigue and interest: the adulterers, the gambler, the superstitious, the slothful, the fraudulent. All part of a recognizable, definable Neapolitan way of life, but a way of life belonging to the nineteenth century. In those plays I kept alive a Naples which was already dead in part, and...