Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma

Bernard Shaw the Playwright

Author(s): L. N. Morgan
Source: Books Abroad, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring, 1951), pp. 100-104
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40089890 .
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 G. B. S.
i 856-1950
« a
Bernard Shaw the
By L. N. MORGAN
ARCHER, in a letter to
BernardShaw, June 22, 1921,wrote:
I doubtif thereis any caseof a man so widely
read,heard,seen,and known as yourself,who
has producedso litde effecton his generation.
On the contrary, in 1950, Hesketh Pear-
son asserted:
No one since the time of Tom Paine has had
so definitean influenceon the socialand politi-
cal life of his time and country as Bernard
Shaw.
G. B. S. himself was not always the
bouncy prophet of Socialism and Creative
Evolution, certain that he could save Hu-
manity by preaching the Kingdom of Shaw.
Sometimes he agreed with Archer, as he
confessed in the Preface to Bac\ to Methu-
selah, "I have spent forty years, in writing
in this fashion, without, as far as I can see,
producing any visible effect on public opin-
ion."
Yet whatever doubts may exist about
Shaw's influence on the generations who
have read him and heard him, there can be
no debate on the stimulus which he gave
to other writers. Within the year, 1933, of
the publication of his The Adventures of
the Blac\ Girl in Her Search for God, ap-
peared, from London to Lahore, The Ad-
ventures of the Blac\ Man, The Adven-
tures of the Brown Girl, The Adventures
of the White Girl, all searching for God,
and The Adventures of God in His Search
for Mr. Shaw.
a a *
Playwright
Including Chesterton's study of 1909, at
least forty-five books on Bernard Shaw
have been published since that date, rang-
ing from the ponderous biography by
Archibald Henderson to the anecdotage of
Winsten's Days with Bernard Shaw and
Pearson's A Postscript. As many more
books have contained chapters about him.
Portraits have vied with Full Length Por-
traits; the Real Bernard, with the Quintes-
sence; the Monk with the Harlequin; the
Playboy with the Philosopher; Bernard
with his Brethren. No dams control the
floods of periodical literature. He has been
subjected to what he would have dismissed
as the indignity of a doctoral dissertation;
and to critical examination by college pro-
fessorsdescribedby him as having a "mania
for intellectual subjects without a ray of
intellect."
Which of the fifteen reputations Shaw
claimed is most significant or will survive,
no one at present should dare to name. An
observercan make his own choice; and for
me it is Shaw the playwright, the maker of
forty-three plays for the theater from 1892
to 1923, who is most important. The last
plays, written in what he called his "third
manner," are another story.
Once it was the habit to condemn him
as a pamphleteer devoid of dramatic facul-
ty. As late as 1913, Androcles and the Lion
was criticized not as a play, but as an "enor-
mously clever insult thrown in the face of
the British people." In 1950, not even "a
buffleheadedidiot of a university professor"
102 BOOKS ABROAD
would interpret his dramas as essays rather
than as plays of life, character,and human
destiny, written in the tradition of the Eng-
lish theater for performance by actors be-
fore an audience. If Shaw was an icono-
clast in the theater,he was also a conformist.
The legend that he was an essayist in
dialogue has persisted partly because Shaw
attracted readers before he distracted audi-
ences. Between 1892 and 1900, Shaw com-
pleted ten plays, only two of which were
performed in theaters where the public
could pay its money to see them. All had
been published by 1901. Readers found a
man already obnoxious as a street-corner
rabble rouser, Fabian pamphleteer, and
dramatic critic, publishing plays about
slum-landlordism, a keeper of bawdy
houses who credited Capitalism with her
success, a soldier who preferred chocolates
to bullets, and an avuncular Caesar who
gave Cleopatra his advice instead of his
love. Every play was filled with brilliant,
paradoxical, and outrageous attacks on
hallowed institutions and accepted morali-
ty.
Each published volume had its preface
with such titles as "Mainly about Myself,"
or "Better than Shakspear?"a question in-
terpreted at once as rhetorical. Most read-
ers frothed over the prefaces before they
ever saw or heard the plays performed.
Shaw wrote prefaces because, like the
scientist in Bac\ to Methuselah, he was
"constitutionally incapable of exhibiting
anything without first giving a lecture to
explain it." Few readers noted that the
prefacescame after the plays had been com-
pleted. "Captain Brassbound" (written
1899-1900; published, 1901; publicly per-
formed, 1906), he told Ellen Terry, "shall
not be profaned by the stage: I will pub-
lish it presently with the Devil's Disciple
and Caesar, and preach a nice sermon in
the preface."The preface was, in fact, writ-
ten in the spring and summer of 1900.
The addition of a preface to a published
play had been a common practice in Eng-
land for many years. Dryden was Shaw's
great predecessor though not his model,
but almost every play printed since the
Restoration has had its "Epistle Dedica-
tory" and its "To the Reader." Sheridan
wrote a preface for The Rivals; Somerset
Maugham, for each of the six volumes of
his Plays, issued 1931-34.Shaw simply fol-
lowed a tradition.
By nature, by study, and by practice,
Bernard Shaw was a "master of the thea-
tre." "Anyone could have done the propa-
ganda," he remarked, "no one else could
have written my plays. I had to write them;
they were a part of me." They were a part,
also, of a dramaturgy venerable in the
theater.
For study, he spent four years writing
every week the only journalistic theatrical
criticism of his time which can still be read
with profit and delight. With it he taught
himself what makes a play succeed in a
theater. He began his own theatrical prac-
tice by writing, as he described them, "a
series of comedies of manners in the classic
fashion." Those who denied his description
knew very little about the comedy of man-
ners with its ancient purpose of exposing
vices by ridicule, that fine art of disillusion
by which without malice evil is destroyed
and sanity restored. Aristophanes, Moliere,
and Shaw- the line is continuous.
Knowing, too, that "even comedy in
England demands comic relief," Shaw
rarely failed to add to his plays farce with
its salutary and "irresponsible laughter."
Surely farce has been at home in English
comedy, high and low, from Falstaff in a
basket or Lord Foppington in a dog-kennel
to the suave King Magnus in The Apple
Cart, wrestling with a wench, the two of
them rolling over and over each other in
the royal apartments. This was an episode
based on Shaw's own repeated struggles
with Mrs. Pat Campbell. Shaw knew that
the groundlings always applaud such antics.
Sermonizing is another element in
Shaw's plays. "The theatre,"he wrote in one
of his dramaticreviews, "is really the week-
day church; and a good play is essentially

identical with a church service as a com-
bination of artistic ritual, profession of
faith, and sermon." For over fifty years
Shaw preached from two texts: Socialism,
or the equality of income, and Creative
Evolution, or "the aspiring will of human-
ity towards divinity." The texts were new,
but sermons, and "sentiments"as they used
to be called, can be found in running brooks
and hundreds of English plays.
Although Shaw knew that "all interpre-
ters of life in action, noble or ignoble, find
their instrument in the theatre," he also
knew that no one could succeed unless he
wrote first of all a play which can be per-
formed. He knew that one necessary func-
tion of a play "is to provide an exhibition
of the art of acting. A good play with bad
parts is not an impossibility,but it is a mon-
strosity." Hence, just as other writers for
the theater have done, Shaw deliberately
wrote fat parts for performers: Henry
Irving, Forbes-Robertson, Cyril Maude,
Richard Mansfield, Cedric Hardwicke;
Janet Achurch, Ellen Terry, Florence Farr,
Lillah McCarthy. He deliberately tailored
parts for them, giving them all many lines
and much business. He provided long
speeches, and insisted that they follow the
flamboyant style which he said was proper
for Shakespeareanplays. "The stage effects
came off perfectly,"he said of his first play.
He selected Sybil Thorndyke for Saint
Joan before starting on the play, and read
the play to her three times after it was
finished. To a friend, with Mrs. Pat Camp-
bell present,who had been tagged for Eliza,
he read Pygmalion. She interrupted: "You
beast, you wrote this for me, every line of
it: I can hear you mimicking my voice in
it." Such a play was not composed for the
closet. Not even the cinema could spoil it.
His friends were his models, in whole or
in part, for his characters.Annie Besant for
Raina {Arms and the Man); Jenny Pat-
terson for Julia (The Philanderer) ; Gilbert
Murray and Lady Carlisle (Major Bar-
bara) ; H. M. Hyndman (Man and Super-
man); Lawrence of Arabia for Private
BERNARD SHAW 103
Meek (Too True To Be Good) - the list is
too long to chronicle.
In a letter to Archer, who believed that
Shaw had "no love of art, no enjoyment of
it," Shaw appended a list of persons who
had served as his models. Archer answered
that "a likeness depends, not on whom it
is meant for, but on whether it is like, and
furthermore, a likeness may be very like
and yet a shocking work of art." Shaw
opened his reply with, "Well I am
Damned!"
From the beginning, with his own muta-
tions, he used the old device of giving the
dramatis personae in comedy names which
revealed their characters. Witwoud and
Snake, Lady Wishfort and Mrs. Malaprop
are familiar examples. Shaw contributed
to this antique lineage: Lickcheese, Mrs.
Lutestrings, Alfred Doolittle, Lady Utter-
word, Private Meek, Schneiderkind, Cap-
tain Shotover, Hector Hushabye.
As an old marj, he perhaps carried the
device too far. The names in The Apple
Cart come chiefly from classical and Bibli-
cal sources,but not many theater audiences
will recognize their application without
notes or even a preface. King Magnus and
Proteus, the changeable Prime Minister,
are easy. More difficult is Boanerges, Presi-
dent of the Board of Trade, pictured as
"heavily built and aggressively self-asser-
tive." In Mark III, 17, we read: ". . . and
he surnamed them Boanerges, which is
The Sons of Thunder." Lysistrata, Power-
mistress General, called a "grave lady in
academic robes," signifies "a dismisser of
armies." Boanerges pronounces her name
Lysis Traitor. Jemima, the Queen, in the
Hebrew, is "a dove."And Orinthia,"roman-
tically beautiful and beautifully dressed,"
who tries to steal Magnus from his Queen,
may have been taken from a song, "The
Pilgrim of Love," by Mrs. Amelia Opie,
which contains the line "Orinthia, my be-
loved." But it also means "one who excites."
The Apple Cart belongs to the "third man-
ner," when, as has been said of Shake-
speare, its author indulged himself.
104 BOOKS ABROAD
know that every tragedy had its comic
Shaw followed other traditions of the
epilogue. Read Lillo's London Merchant
English playhouse: The Devil's Disciple,
which he called a "threadbaremelodrama,"
(1730), for example.
In his fashion, as other playwrights have
depends on mistaken identity, reversals of
been, he was a picker-up of unconsidered
situation, and a last minute rescue with
musical accompaniment, all implausible,trifles: "the seven deadly virtues"; "Wher-
ever the ladies are is Hell" (Marlowe, Mil-
coincidental, and good theater. The play
ton, et al.) ; "A little science is a dangerous
ran for four months on Broadway in 1950.
thing" (Pope) ; "I never resist temptation"
Getting Married and Misalliance were ex-
(Wilde) ; the title Too True To Be Good;
periments in classical unities. His plots, he
"Better never than late"; "Vengeance at
boasted, were as silly as Shakespeare's,and
least is human" (St. Paul) ; "Life levels all
"like Shakespeare's, they were all stolen
men; death reveals the eminent." Shaw
from other writers." Saint Joan, the finest
fiddled variationson whatever themes came
tragedy in fifty years, arouses in everyone
who sees it that "indescribabledisturbance
his indefatigable way.
of the soul"- the phrase is Shaw's own- Shaw the Marxian Socialist, Metabiolo-
which Aristotle long ago pronounced the -
gist, Phonetician all the fifteen reputa-
tions- will be discussed for many years;
supreme object of drama. It concludes with
a comic epilogue. Why? Perhaps his giftbut it is Shaw the Playwright who will
for anti-climax drove him to write it; but
keep them alive. Despite William Archer,
those who have read late seventeenth orhe was an artist in his profession.
early eighteenth century English plays University of Oklahoma

That there was not much love lost between G.B.S.
and H.G.W. in spite of their "friendship"becamepain-
fully obvious even to the uninitiated when the London
Daily Express carriedonly one day after Shaw's death
an obituary by H. G. Wells which does not contain
a single word of appreciationor kindness but, on the
contrary, ferocious criticism and censure. Unusual, to
say the least, is this procedure of having "kept on
ice" for four years this literarytime-bomb,exploded by
remote control from the grave by an antagonist whose
undying resentment thus stands self-revealed in this
attempt at having the last word as a voix d'outre-
tombe. This unique case of posthumous libel doubtless
representsa particularlystartling incident in the long
history of writers' feuds.
When BernardShaw was awarded the Nobel Prize
in 1925, he did not accept the money, saying that the
most coveted literary award was "a lifebelt thrown
to one who has already reached shore in safety."
A London periodical conducted a contest, offering
a prize to its readers for the one who could best
imitate Bernard Shaw's style when he first began to
write. Shaw himself competed and won a consolation
prize of five shillings. Hispano-Americano
"The voice of the prophets has never been the voice
of love. But now less than ever. We do not progress
toward social justice, toward universal peace, as we
ought to progress, by the paths of persuasion,convic-
tion, analysis, but by those of intimidation, threat,
exhortation, bitterness." Revista de las Indias
"There is a profundity of the jovial and the festive,
although probablyit is much m&redifficultto capture
the profound when it is hidden under simple, clear,
and serene appearancesthan to perceive it when the
sea is darkened and the clouds are stormy."
Homero Guglielmini in Cultura
"But I do not believe in thesis novels: on political,
moral, racial, or any other theme. Great revolutions
are generated quietly, from the depths. So Dostoevsky
and Tolstoy, with their depiction of misery, without
speaking of social equality, did more in favor of the
oppressedthan all the pamphleteersof their epoch."
Espiral
"If it is true that literature is a struggle against
time, if it is true that every writer worthy of the
name is preoccupied with attaining a small measure
of eternity, I do not see how this insistence on our
personal misery can be of use, this stupid speculation
about our inner drama."
Carlo Bo in Le Carte Parlanti
"Not many years ago, even in our own country,
business men, politicians, read poetry. In England
you would find Gladstone quoting freely from Homer
and Lord Beaconsfieldanswering him with something
from the Greek or Latin classics. What is the change
due to? I think, to the fact that we identify our interest
mainly with necessaryexchangeablecommodities.The
struggle for existence has become keen and we have
no time to think of these impracticalthings."
N. MadhavaRao in The Aryan Path