By describing the hypocrisy of contemporary society and customs in the play Man, Beast and Virtue, performed in 1919, Pirandello puts together a rather pungent and tragic satire of human existence.

The theme the play deals with was at first viewed as scabrous and was not well accepted by critics or by the audience. However, it soon became one of the most represented plays among Pirandello’s works. In this comedy the ludicrous strength powerfully emerges and imbues the characters: the Man, that is Prof. Paolino, a thirty-year old person of the utmost integrity, leads in fact a double life, and, whilst being a respectable and honest gentleman, he is also the lover of Mrs Parella, who is a symbol of Virtue. Owing to a twist of fate, this model wife and mother, a reserved woman who always knows her place, is made pregnant by the professor, whilst no longer having had intimacies with her husband for quite a long time; the latter is the Beast, a see captain who, whenever he gets back home after a journey, does not so much as look at her and only seeks opportunities to quarrel.

One day Mrs Perella pays a visit to Paolino, who is the tutor of her son Nonò, during a lesson he is giving to other children, to confirm her pregnancy to her lover, owing to the evidence provided by continuous retching and sudden sicknesses, as it used to happen when she was expecting her first child.
Mr Perella is an uncouth and coarse man, and being a sea captain and rarely stopping at home, is not attached to his wife or son, and has created a new family for himself in Naples. Paolino and Mrs Perella would have continued to play their public role as “respectable” people; yet now the professor can only envisage one option to solve the condition of the woman, who is two-months pregnant: to do his best to throw Mrs Perella into her husband’s arms, taking advantage of a one-night visit by the man, before setting off on an another long voyage.
To this end, Paolino gets a friend of his, who is a chemist, to prepare an aphrodisiac pie, to stimulate the Beast to seek a sexual encounter with his wife. The two lovers tremble with expectation as they wait for the plan to come off: Paolino’s suggestions to the woman as to how to appear more charming and approachable, the professors’ presence for dinner and the sharing of the pie, the abundant portion eaten by the captain all seem to hint at an anguished and paradoxical solution. It is only thanks to this grotesque trick and to the power of pharmacology that the woman can maintain her respectable role within society. Instead of opting for genuine values, she prefers bourgeois respectability; to save face and front and at the same time allow space for possible secret transgressions.
The couple agrees that, if the intercourse should take place during the only night available, the woman will display a vase on the veranda to let Paolino know that their plan has succeeded.
However, first thing in the morning, after a restless night, Paolino does not see the agreed signal and is overcome by furious distress. He then meets the captain, who appears to him exhausted after the night, but it is the woman’s arrival and request to the professor to take some vases to the veranda that confirms the intercourse has taken place.

Whilst in Man, Beast and Virtue Pirandello exposes the middle-class people who desperately aim at holding to their role, not matter whether this involves resorting to continuous instances of hypocrisy, in the comedy "As Well as Before, Better than Before", written in 1920, the ending involves for the main female character a different choice and a departure from the conventional mould, probably escaping towards a different future. The story, which centres on the complex character of Fulvia, relates to the woman’s troubled human and family situation.
When she was very young, she had had from Silvio Gelli, a well-known surgeon, a daughter, Livia, who has never met her mother and who has been told that her mother is dead, since, also due to her husband, Fulvia used to lead an unscrupulous life, switching from one man to the other.
Silvio has always had a particularly morbid attitude towards her. Having found her at a time in which the woman, desperate and disgusted about her own existence, attempts suicide, he saves her life.
During her convalescence, here husband, who is a doctor, makes an effort to recover their marital relations, so much so that he makes her pregnant.
Silvio wishes to take her to his house facing the Como lake, where he lives with their elder daughter. In order for Livia to accept her in their home, the husband “forces” Fulvia to dissociate, and accept to introduce herself as Francesca, his second wife.
Livia gives her a hostile reception; she feels she is a usurper, a detached stepmother. Fulvia-Francesca, who is very open, tries to prove close to Livia on a number of occasions, but to no avail, as the young woman deeply hates her and despises her. In the meantime Fulvia gives birth to a baby girl and the woman’s return home also coincides with her disclosing the secret to Livia: she is the mother she thought had died and now Livia has a newly born sister.
Fulvia represents a defeated person in all respects, a human wreck who desperately tries to cling to “something” in order to survive: she is an unaware victim of an absurd game.
She has touched the bottom and she knows there is nothing she can do: she is tired out; she has been constantly deceived and betrayed by her husband and has in turn effaced herself in a corrupt and deceitful conduct, to keep up with him.
Her tragedy involves leading a life that is a limbo in constant exile, from which she is unable to find a single way out. She even feels sorry for her husband, up to the point of accepting to return to conventional life as a dissociated person. But possibly the real tragedy lies elsewhere, in the heart of her daughter Livia, who loves Fulvia as her dead mother but despises her as her living stepmother.
At that point the only choice the woman is left with is to annihilate, to no longer exist as a mother for the sake of her daughter’s psychological wellbeing.
However, her new motherhood grants her renewed strength, which then leads the woman to the decision to leave the oppressive atmosphere created by her husband’s duplicity and by the hatred of her daughter Livia, who does not believe in what she says. Her escape is probably meant to lead her towards more truthful feelings. Fulvia runs away with one of her former partners, the only one who had really loved her, Marco Mauri, who had come looking for her. In this way, she wishes to offer her newly born daughter a normal and honest life, whilst the hypocritical doctor Gelli tries to comfort Livia, stunned by the sudden news that her mother is alive and well, and is not the stepmother her father would have liked her to see in her.
Translated by interpres sas