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From British
Drama 1890 to 1950: A Critical History By R. F. Dietrich |
“OUR THEATRES IN THE NINETIES”: HAUNTED BY GHOSTS
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This volume could have started with the
London production of Ibsen’s A Doll
House1 in
1889, for that was a seminal event in the development of the New Drama, but
1890 has been chosen for the beginning of the modern period because in that
year two events occurred, involving British playwrights of Irish origin, that
loom even larger as symbols of history—the death of Dion
Boucicault, one of the nineteenth century’s most popular, prolific, and
innovative playwrights, and the birth of “Ibsenism”
at the hands of George Bernard Shaw, two years away from writing his first
play. The two events symbolize the death of the old order in the British
theater and the rebirth of that theater in a new form.
Shedding light on these two events, a third
significant event of 1890 was the publication of the first two volumes of
Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which
suggested that ancient myth and ritual survived in the hidden structures of
literature and its processes. For example, the death of Boucicault and the
birth of Ibsenism could be understood as
manifestations of the spirit of Dionysius (also called Bacchus), a Greek god of
vegetation (especially the grape), whose periodic death and resurrection was
generally associated with the process of communal decay and regeneration.
Dionysius was also the Greek patron saint of the theater because Dionysian
rituals of lament for the god’s death and of celebration for his revival seem
to have transmuted into the theater’s patterns of tragedy and comedy. The drama
above all other genres seems to be the most appropriate for the communal
contemplation and ritual experiencing of the rhythms of life.
It almost seems that it was as much the
late Victorians and Edwardians who made Dionysius the patron saint of the
theater as it was the Greeks. As archaeologists dug up the past, the British
naturally looked through the remains of history for kindred societies. They
were particularly intrigued by the rare combination of democracy and
imperialism they found in classical
Gilbert Murray’s focus on drama makes his
work especially relevant.
The Nietzsche-Frazer-Cornford-Murray-Frye
account of drama’s origin goes something like this (although they would not
have agreed on some details): Dionysius
was a god who, like Christ, died annually in the rituals of religion and in the
spring was miraculously reborn. The tragedy of this vegetation god’s “fall” in
harvest time and the comedy of his springing back to life in seed time made
natural material for drama, and apparently the priests themselves were the
first to dramatize the tragicomic story, even as the priests of the Middle Ages
were the first to dramatize the Bible.2 Through a
complicated series of substitutions—priests and scapegoats substituting for
Dionysius, eventually actors substituting for both, and the stories of Greek
monarchs and heroes substituting for the story of Dionysius—the ancient drama
passed into forms less recognizable, or not recognizable at all, as religious
in origin, until tragedy and comedy lost their seasonal connection and the
playing of the “fall” and “rise” was telescoped into a single week in spring,
similar to the playing of Christ’s death and resurrection in Easter Week, and
had more to do with communal well-being than with seasonal renewal, though the
two could be related. By the 5th century B.C., the huge Theater of Dionysius
had been built in amphitheater style on the southeastern slope of Athen’s acropolis, becoming the model, however modified,
for all the Greek, Hellenistic, and Greco-Roman theaters built thereafter. That
it was also the model for the main
theater of London’s present National Theatre (see Figure 2 at the end of Chapter 1)
is the point here, suggesting that what modern British drama was driving at was
a return to the origin of theater, to its cultural centrality and ritual
significance. It was during the modern age that this return became a consuming
idea, though not everybody understood that to return to the origin of drama was
to revive the spirit of Dionysius and that to invoke Dionysius was to set loose
a spirit inimical to certain Victorian ideals.
The resurrecting of Dionysius may also partly
account for the modern era’s being more an age of comedy and tragicomedy than
of pure tragedy. Dramatic festivals in honor of the god were staged annually at
the Theater of Dionysius, in keeping with his dual nature, tragic and comic.
During the festivals’ richest development, in midclassical
times, a balance was struck between tragedy and comedy, except that the
comedies were generally performed last, with even the great tragedies in their
trilogies being followed by comic satyr plays. The religious justification for
comedy’s climactic position must have been to emphasize the triumph of life and
joy over death and suffering. To the extent that this drama still embodied
religious ideas, Dionysius, in the guise of however many Greek kings and
heroes, never died in the tragedies or suffered a fall but he rose again in the
comedies, for he was the personification of ever-renewing primal energy. Though
the apparent ritual means of regeneration—sexual passion under the influence of
strong drink and intoxicated destruction of the old for the sake of providing
seed for the new—did not endear Dionysius to many Victorians, his
life-affirming spirit and regenerative powers, Shaw and Murray thought, were
the theater’s guiding principle, a principle Shaw thought was particularly
needed in its comic mode to offset the age’s death-worshipping conventions.
Certainly an age attempting a renaissance of the theater would do well to put
the emphasis on Dionysian resurrection. The dominance of comedy in our modern
period, especially when mixed with tragedy (tragicomedy simply being a further
telescoping and thus intensification of the Dionysian dual nature), suggests
that the playwrights of the age responded appropriately.
The problem with liberating the Dionysian
spirit of comic revelry in the nineties, however much needed to redress an
imbalance, was its anarchic tendency, which, bringing new freedoms, frightened
as many as it exhilarated. Sexual
freedom was especially frightening, for it threatened a society founded on
the virginity of unmarried females and the monogamous family. It is no wonder
that playwrights of the nineties were preoccupied with the “woman question,”
for the invoking of Dionysius involved questions of sexual freedom that led to
further questions about the equality of the sexes. The notorious Victorian double
standard, tacitly allowing sexual license to males but not to females, was a
contradiction of such intensity that it was certain to find dramatic
embodiment. Traditionally, for male playwrights the problem of “woman” is the
problem of life. To be Victorian was to avoid the problem by cliché thinking,
compartmentalizing women into “good” and “bad” to serve the ambivalence of men.
To serve their aspirations men invented “good” women, who were pure, angelic,
and, well, “womanly,” an ideal at which most advertising aimed and whose
illusion a surprising number of women took earnestly and contrived to achieve.
But the presence of “beastly” impulses in men made it necessary that there also
be “bad” women, whom poetic men liked to sentimentalize as “fallen angels.” To be modern was to be aware of the
contradictions between ideal and real, and to realize that to enforce angelic
behavior on women through a stringent code of respectability was to outlaw
those women who refused stereotyping and to condemn the obedient, smothered in
conformity, to a sort of death-in-life, which ended in killing the souls of men
as well. The test of modernity for a playwright of the nineties was whether he
had truly liberated himself and his art from the sexual stereotypes of the Victorian
double standard. There were more failures than successes, and the successes
were mostly partial.
It is appropriate that the story of modern
British drama begin with a death, then, for death must precede rebirth. The
death of the old order in Victorian drama is symbolized by the death of a
playwright happily named Dionysius Boucicault (1820?-1890).
Allardyce Nicoll reports that
something like thirty thousand plays were produced in
nineteenth-century
He is said to have written as many
as four hundred plays, though many were translations, adaptations, and doctored
scripts. Typical was a melodrama he adapted in 1857 from a French play entitled
Les Pauvres de Paris—produced in New York, it
was called The Poor of New York; in Liverpool in 1864, after revising
place names, he changed it to The Poor of Liverpool; later,
revising it again for London audiences, he changed it to The Streets of
London. And so it went. He expressed his contempt for the whole proceeding
by declaring playwriting “a degrading occupation, but more money has been made
out of guano than out of poetry.”3 Boucicault simply followed the formula
for melodramas, with nick-of-time rescues of fair maidens from cursing villains
and happy endings with virtue triumphant.
But he also put his stamp on these plays with bold, thrilling theatrical
effects, a flamboyant style, and broad humor for relief. Unlike most hack
writers, he made several fortunes in the theater, even initiating for British
playwrights the custom of being paid royalties (instead of flat rates); but his
life-style was so expensive that he died broke, bewildered by the waning
interest in the Old Drama and the gathering enthusiasm for the New Drama.
Ironically, his dedication to making his spectacular stage effects up-to-date
realistic (as in using the newly invented camera to solve a mystery in The
Octoroon, an 1859 play dealing with slavery) encouraged a growing
taste for the realism that would supplant him.
Though melodrama was his specialty,
Boucicault wrote many kinds of plays, actually gaining his first fame, in 1841,
with an imitation Restoration comedy of manners (London Assurance, revived
in 1890 against the rising tide of the New Drama). And he was largely
responsible for creating the comic stage Irishman—happy-go-lucky and
irresponsible but witty, loyal, and lovable (as in The Shaugraun,
revived in 1988 by the National Theatre). Whatever he wrote, however many
little touches of real talent one may find in an unusually vivid
characterization here or a bit of striking dialogue there, however much he
might seem to challenge the day’s mores (as The Octoroon seemed to
question slavery), or however much he experimented with the formulas (as he did
in suggesting environmental reasons for the villainy of some of his villains),
his plays, typical of all the hack writers, were always faithful at the last to
conventions—their endings, strong in sentiment and simplistically moralizing,
were always predictable, inartistically imposed from without rather than
following from character and event. That is, Boucicault’s plays are full of
life, of the Dionysian spirit, as recent
Civilization needs conventions—we
need to know which side of the street to drive on, what clothes to wear for
what occasions, what sort of small talk is appropriate when meeting strangers,
what language formations are to be ended with a period and what with a question
mark, etc. Such conventions keep civilization going. But some conventions are
stoppers. By killing spontaneity, by replacing the spontaneous response with a
programmed response, they cause human beings to act like zombies or robots. The
French philosopher Henri Bergson based an entire theory of comedy on the idea
that comedy arises from our reaction to seeing mechanical behavior enforced
upon the living; obviously convention would be a major source of that enforcement.4 When Shaw said that “England is an
island populated exclusively by comic characters,” he was referring to the
Englishman’s tendency to mechanize manners and morals to the point of
self-caricature. The value of Dionysius was that through the intoxication of
wine he inspired passion, the means by which inhibition and mechanical behavior
were overcome and the individual’s life force reestablished in a field of
spontaneity. The passion of spontaneous laughter, Bergson theorized, was the
means by which comedy sought to correct the over-mechanization of life. No
wonder the period of modern British drama is one of the great ages of comedy
and tragicomedy—no age ever needed laughter more.
Conventions are invented by the living, but their tendency to last
beyond their time, like the institutions they support, promoting routine
response at the expense of real thinking and feeling, means that often they
rule from the grave. One of the principal themes of modern literature is that
of the living being ruled by the dead in the form of a duty to one’s parents
and grandparents to keep alive the conventions that earlier ruled them from the
grave, the conventions being part of the matrix of their beings, thus
preserving in the conventions a form of immortality, however ghoulish. This
theme was perhaps most beautifully expressed in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914)
and most harrowingly in Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881). Joyce acknowledged Ibsen as his mentor in
this. Shaw too knew well the theme of Ghosts and knew that the
nineteenth-century theater was not only haunted by ghosts but by a play called Ghosts
as well.
Reacting to all the furor over the 1889
production of A Doll House (mistakenly interpreted as a call for women
to abandon their chauvinist husbands), Shaw in 1890 delivered a lecture to his
own Fabian Society, a group of socialist reformers, on the seemingly kindred
spirit Ibsen, whose plays he knew mostly from the translations of his friend
and fellow critic, William Archer. Shaw’s lecture, revised and expanded, came
to be called The Quintessence of Ibsenism when
published in 1891. The impetus for Shaw’s revision came partly from the public
uproar over the Parnell scandal and partly from the reaction to the
Ghosts* was a play that proved its point—that
convention haunts the living from the grave—by eliciting the very response from
some of its critics that it exposed as ghost-ridden in the play. Certain
critics, more ghost-ridden than others, became hysterically and uncustomarily vituperative in their denunciation of play
and author, Shaw picking out Clement Scott as the most horrible example of a
critic gone haywire, as though the “Do Not Touch!” button had been pushed on a
nuclear reactor.6 It was in
his analysis of Scott’s berserk reaction that Shaw found the best proof of his
clue to Ibsen, to society at large, and to the universe, drawing conclusions
thereby that were to have a profound effect on his own dramatic career, on the
critical reception other dramatists were to have, and on the general
understanding of the age held by the avant-garde.
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*Shaw’s summary of
Ghosts is as follows: “A
clergyman and a married woman fall in love. . . The woman proposes to abandon
her husband and live with the clergyman. He recalls her to her duty, and makes
her behave as a virtuous woman. She afterwards tells him that this was a crime
on his part. Ibsen agrees with her, and has written the play to bring you
around to his opinion.”
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Shaw saw Ibsen as a prophet of human evolution, presenting in dramatic
parables the social and individual conflicts that arise out of evolution’s
uneven progression. Individual human destiny is partly a matter of what stage
of evolution one is born to. According to Shaw, Ibsen’s characters represent
three stages of evolution—in ascending order, the Philistine, the Idealist, and
the potential Realist (here capitalized to distinguish it from the literary
realist). Each is imbued with a will to power (the aggressive phase of the
Dionysian life impulse or the Darwinian survival instinct) and thus is in
conflict with the other as each seeks to control his or her environment or self.
Such conflict is healthy if it is a spur to growth or creativity, as Shaw
emphasized, but Ibsen more often showed its destructive, frustrated side. Shaw
saw the prime motor of Ibsenist evolution as will,
which Shaw defined as “our old friend the soul or spirit of man.”7 “Life consists in the fulfillment of
the will,” said Shaw, “which is constantly growing.”8 Because
the will seeks fulfillment in ways appropriate to its stage of growth, it
experiences frustration when it encounters conventions that represent the wills
of the dead, wills arrested at an earlier stage of development, wills that
would imprison the living within a sarcophagus of moral response. How one
reacts to this frustration determines one’s identity as Philistine, Idealist,
or Realist (although in practice both Shaw and Ibsen presented these identities
as psychological principles in conflict within the minds of characters as well,
implying that we all have a bit of Philistine, Idealist, and Realist in us,
though one principle often dominates in moments of crisis).9
Shaw listed a number of ideals that Victorian society mandated as
absolute truth: that men spontaneously love their kindred better than their
chance acquaintances (“blood is thicker than water”), that the woman once desired
is always desired (“passion is eternal”), that the family is woman’s proper
sphere (“a woman’s place is in the home”), that “no really womanly woman ever
forms an attachment, or even knows what it means, until she is requested to do
so by a man.” But in his principal example, Shaw presented his three types or
principles as reacting differently to conventional marriage and family
arrangements. The Idealists, when failures at marriage, continue to
idealize marriage as “made in heaven” and the family “as a beautiful and holy
natural institution,” insisting guiltily on suppressing any attack on the
institutions; the easygoing, comfort-loving, silent-majority Philistines,
though cynical of the Idealists’ fancy picture of things, and always trying to
get away with as much as they can, when pressed go along with the Idealists for
the sake of convenience and safety (the Idealists, though fewer, are usually
more powerful, as leaders of institutions); and the rare Realist, seeing that
because institutions are man-made, temporary, and relative to culture they must
be changed periodically to keep pace with human evolution and the individual
growth of will, proposes reform and advises the Idealists not to be ashamed of
their failure to live up to their own ideals, for the impossible ideals are at
fault, not human nature. Drama arises
from the fact that when the Realist proposes a reform, such as abolishing the
compulsory character of marriage, “the Philistines will simply think him mad.
But the Idealists will be terrified beyond measure at the proclamation of their
hidden thought—at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of
silence. . . . At his worst they will call him cynic and paradoxer:
at his best they do their utmost to ruin him if not to take his 1ife.11 This at least was the reaction to Ibsen, who
in his dramatizing of the evolution of the species portrayed “a conflict of
unsettled ideaIs”
in the clash among Philistine, Idealist, and Realist principles.
Shaw believed that Clement Scott went
berserk in reviewing Ghosts because
it championed Dionysian freedom, the seemingly anarchic primacy of the
individual’s desire for self-renewal, over convention’s dictate that because
marriages are made in heaven, the individual should sacrifice personal desires
to that ideal. Scott’s ideal or “fancy picture” of marriage, inherited from the
ghosts of the past, is contradicted by experience everyday; yet Scott,
desperate to have the ideal vindicated, as though it were his very life,
screeched the vilest imprecations of denial at the Ibsenist
reformer who would change the marriage laws to accommodate individuals’
different rates of growth.13
Shaw’s examples of Realists are those who like Ibsen and Shelley pierce the
illusion— insisted upon as real by the Idealist—in order to see the
ever-evolving truth behind the “eternal verities” and, so seeing, attempt to
bring society and individuals more in line with the way things are.
Shaw’s Quintessence was, among other things, a clever semantic ploy
to regain the initiative for art in a world increasingly dominated by
scientific materialism. Artists could be greater Realists, Shaw implied, than
scientists and businessmen, for reality is more what the poet “envisions” and
less what the materialist “observes.” His complaint against literary realism was that it too
often was a sellout to literal-minded, surface-obsessed scientific materialism.
Ibsen felt the same way but was forced by circumstances to shift from the
poetic, heroic drama he favored to mimetic realism, which he then subverted
with a secret symbolic- expressionistic method that used surface reality to
evoke a greater reality.
Quintessentially, Shaw thought, Ibsen’s priorities were correct, the
poet’s vision mattering more to him than mere scientific observation.
Shaw had been an art and music critic since
1885, and a novelist before that, and now The Quintessence of Ibsenism launched
him on a career as a drama critic. Largely unable to get his plays staged in
the nineties, he worked as drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1895 to 1898, at the height of the
sensation caused by the Ibsenite New Drama; his
reviews were collected under the title Our Theatres in the Nineties. His criticism expectedly jibed
with the views of Archer and others about the shallowness, conventionality, and
inartistic nature of the long-popular Boucicaultian theater (though Shaw had some kind words for its crude
vitality). But unexpectedly Shaw found
that the drama that was becoming
popular, the New Drama, was a sham, the realism merely a veneer—this drama
had some “observation” but not much “vision.” Further, overpowering even what
observation it had, the ghosts
of convention still ruled it from the grave, the same sentimental stereotyping
and the same inartistic bailing out at the end prevailed, and thus its patrons
still came for escapist pleasure, precisely because this New Drama ultimately
had little more to do with “real life” than did the old melodramas and farces.
The point of Shaw’s criticism was that drama and theater should abandon their
trivial pursuit of escapist pleasure and take up once again the seriousness and
fundamentally religious purpose of the ancient Greek theater, thereby becoming
worthy of playing a central role in the cultural development of a world
civilization.
Boucicault’s death in 1890 conveniently
symbolizes that his kind of theater had reached a decadent phase, symptomatic
of the decadence of those Victorian conventions that ruled its dramaturgy from
without. True to the spirit of Dionysius, the dying out of one kind of theater
was the occasion for the birth of a new kind of theater, supposedly Ibsenist. But did the New Drama of Pinero and Jones embody Ibsenism? The tip-off, Shaw thought, was that neither of
them thought all that highly of Ibsen, however much they traded on his
stylistic revolution; their Ibsenism was superficial
at best. Thus in Shaw’s view the decadence merely continued in a disguised
form. Well, did Shaw’s
Drama of Ideas any better embody Ibsenism? Not as far
as surface appearances are concerned, but perhaps quintessentially it did. Both
Ibsen and Shaw emphasized vision over observation. Both visions were of the
rottenness of the old order and the need to start over. Both partly embodied
their visions in parodied versions of the old forms, the familiarity with the
old forms making their works more accessible to many, but, at the same time,
the satiric charge given the content exploding the conventions, necessary to
the regenerating of both drama and society.14 And though Ibsen’s
perspective was more tragic than comic and Shaw’s more comic than tragic, both
employed a tragicomic blend to express unusually comprehensive and dynamic visions.
Regardless of whether the Shavian or the
Pinero-Jones New Drama is taken as the model, the British New Drama of the
nineties was seen as a “deliverance,” and the
playwrights were “prophets” of a new dispensation. But we can see now that most
of the prophets of the nineties were more like precursors of an even greater
drama to come.
The theater in the nineties was a mixture
of Old Drama and New, though matters were further confused by a New Drama that
wasn’t realistic. In addition to Shaw, an interesting counterpoint to the
rising tide of realism was the staging of plays by Maeterlinck, the Belgian
Symbolist who was sowing the seeds of a wholesale revolt against realism; the
first production of a play by Yeats, who would follow Maeterlinck into
Symbolism and thereby temper the realism of Irish drama to come; and the start
of the career of James Barrie, who would become a master of fantasy. And the
staging of Tennyson’s Becket proved
that the seemingly vain effort to make a success of verse drama was continuing
despite realism’s vogue. To be sure, plays roughly in the realistic,
“well-made” camp increasingly gained on the Old Drama, but the
"realism" often disguised melodrama, and the "problem
plays" were often unproblematical. And not all
the Ibsen productions together could match the commercial success of Wilson
Barrett’s melodramatic Sign of the
Cross or Brandon Thomas’s farcical Charley’s Aunt. A distinction must always
be made between the drama that appealed to the intelligentsia, mostly short
runs in smaller theaters, and the popular plays that ran longer in larger
theaters. To be a New Dramatist at the larger theaters, one had to tone down
one’s Ibsenism and let convention have the last say;
one could be “unpleasant” in one’s realism only if one were melodramatically
“moral” in one’s denouement. The masters of this compromise in the nineties
were Pinero, Jones, and Wilde, though Wilde more fooled with compromise than actually did so.
Throughout
the 188os William Archer watched for a savior of the theater, someone who would
do for British drama what Ibsen was doing for European drama. As early as 1882,
in his English Dramatists of To-Day,
Archer had noted the promise of two young and barely produced playwrights
named Jones and Pinero. As the eighties came to a close, both showed signs of
moving toward a more realistic sort of theater. But the one who first made the
great leap forward was Pinero, gaining in courage from the change in atmosphere
brought about by the ground-breaking Ibsen productions of the day. At the
sudden appearance of The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray (1893), Archer declared it “the one play of what may be called
European merit which the modern English stage can as yet boast” and immediately
treated Pinero as his champion of the New Drama.15
Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) was
born in London, the grandson of a Portuguese Jew who, emigrating to England,
changed his name from Pinheiro and became a wealthy
and prominent solicitor, marrying into a fine old English family. Pinero’s
father inherited the law practice, married well himself, but, through
carelessness, allowed the practice to decline, so that at the age of ten Pinero
was taken out of school and set to work in his father’s office. There,
countering his father’s insouciance, the boy developed a meticulous, precise,
industrious style that was to be characteristic of his later playwriting and
directing. On his father’s retirement he took jobs in a library and with
another law firm. Finding law boring, Pinero studied elocution at night school,
capping off his education by playing Hamlet. From his earliest years his
parents had taken him to the theater, and every chance he got he attended the
one nearest him, the old Sadler’s Wells, eventually branching out to others,
especially the Prince of Wales under the Bancrofts,
where T. W. Robertson’s realistic social comedies were “revolutionizing” the
theater.
When Pinero was nineteen his father died,
and the young man, hopelessly stage-struck by then, abandoned law for an acting
career. He began as general utility actor for Wyndham’s stock company, then in
Edinburgh; moved to Liverpool for a short stint in a Wilkie
Collins’s novel adaptation; was recommended by Collins (apparently mistaking
Pinero for another actor) for a part in another such adaptation at the Globe
Theatre in London; and eventually was recruited by Henry Irving for minor roles
at the Atheneum, where he gained a reputation as a character
actor, especially in the roles of old men. He may have been a mediocre actor,
or perhaps the more realistic style he was attempting was not to the tastes of
the day’s critics; but whatever the verdict, he gave up acting for playwriting
in 1882. Three years earlier, in 1879, in
a piece of his own, he had played opposite an actress named
Pinero had been writing plays from at least
1874, but a one-act curtain raiser was the first, in 1877, to be produced.
Walter Lazenby, the only critic who has attempted to
categorize all fifty-seven of Pinero’s extant works, dismisses his first ten
plays, written before he retired from acting in 1882, as fledgling work,
“tentative efforts in which the emerging playwright had not exactly found his
métier.”16 These plays are remarkable in their
attempt, not entirely successful, to avoid melodrama, to break down character
stereotypes, and, in the longer plays, to give more depth and variety to the
plot than was usual in melodrama and farce. From the start Pinero appears to
have been interested in “the drama of reputation,” particularly as it concerned
women with a past.
The surprise comes when, looking at Lazenby’s categorizing of Pinero’s work from 1883 on, one
discovers that this model of the New Drama actually wrote only seven plays that
could be considered well-made, realistic problem plays. Discounting some
overlap, a total of thirty-four plays are listed as either farces (twelve),
sentimental comedies (twelve), or comedies of manners (ten), which leads to the
conclusion that comedy was really Pinero’s forte. Certainly Pinero’s first
great success came with the writing of playful farces and sentimental, Robertsonian comedies.
The farces are excellent of their kind, and
many of these witty, rollicking pieces would be playable today. After he became
successful at writing “serious” problem plays, Pinero claimed that his farces
and comedies were a necessary rest, relaxing him for the more serious efforts,
but one suspects a camouflaging of a predilection that he knew would displease
the likes of Archer. A sort of English Feydeau,
Pinero might be better known and appreciated today had he been more proud of
and more open about his comic genius.
The farce that vaulted him into the front
ranks of successful dramatists was The
Magistrate (1885; revived in 1987 by the National Theatre). With over three hundred performances,
it set a record and was the first of a quick succession of similar farces that
was staged at the old Court Theatre. Pinero sought “to raise farce a little”
from its “low pantomime level” and make it a more artistic genre, “thinking ...
that farce should have as substantial and reasonable a backbone as a serious
play.”17 His more
realistic drawing of characters led him to discard the old stock figures that
were merely vehicles for star actors. As Lazenby
says, “drawing upon the wealth of types in Victorian society, he grounded his
plays in observable Victorian realities and created fresh emblems of the
institutions and assumptions whose sanctity his audiences may have secretly
wanted to violate. The result was a new formula for farce based on showing
possible people doing improbable things.”18 Pinero’s technique in the Court farces was to take
pillars of the community—such as a judge in The Magistrate, a teacher in The Schoolmistress (i886), a church dean in Dandy Dick (1887), and a respected
politician in The Cabinet Minister (1890)—and
contrive to show them, by the pursuit of their own rectitude, caught in a
downward spiral of events that finds them at last confronted with some ultimate
indignity (for example, the magistrate is nearly tried in his own courtroom for
a crime) before being rescued at the last minute. That these plays take upright Victorians to
the very depths of disreputableness suggests some subversive intention, but
Pinero escaped any such suspicion by making their comic downfall purely
circumstantial and accidental. No satiric comment is necessarily directed at
institutions; rather, all the fun is in seeing the foibles of individuals
exposed to the test of trying circumstances, usually of an improbable nature.
Further evidence of Pinero’s conservatism can be seen in the way he simply
domesticated the French bedroom farce to suit a more prudish audience.
Pinero was also having success with
sentimental comedies, Sweet Lavender
(1886) setting records and Lady Bountiful (1891) doing well enough, and already quite
wealthy, he might have rested on a career of farces and sentimental comedies.
But he knew that critics like Archer were calling for a native drama that would
match the stature and seriousness of the European social drama, and he was
aware that productions of Ibsen’s plays were causing both box-office
controversy and a readiness for something new. In a bid for posterity, then,
Pinero attempted what he considered a higher drama—the realistic problem play. His first, pre-Ibsen. effort. The Profligate (written in 1887,
produced in 1889), was timid, but his next, post-Ibsen, effort, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), was much
bolder. One can look further back and see in The Rector (1883), Lords
and Commons (1883), and The
Ironmaster (1884) some experimentation with problem-play material,
but they were more in the line of Dumas fils than of Ibsen,
that is, more “well-made” than truly problematic or truly realistic. The
question about The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and the other problem plays that
followed is whether they were what they pretended to be.
Stage directions for The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,
setting a fully realistic stage, are noticeably more detailed than in the
standard play of the century. The story is of Aubrey Tanqueray,
a man of forty-three and long widowed, who marries a twenty-seven-year-old
woman legally known as “Paula Ray,” but who has used other names in plying her
unstated trade as courtesan. She has convinced high-minded Tanqueray
that she has been “ill-treated,” meaning that she was always promised marriage
but never given it, and so they have fallen in love, determined to live down
any scandal. She has given Aubrey a list of her “adventures,” which he
chivalrously burns without reading. But Aubrey has “a problem” when his
saintly, convent-raised daughter, Ellean, comes to
live with them. While he is willing to say “yes” to the question of whether a
particular woman with a past can “get back,” he feels pressured by the problem
of his “pure” daughter’s being thrown into the company of his “tainted” wife.
Complications occur when pleasure-loving Paula, bored with life in the country
and increasingly angered by their ostracism, jealously quarrels with Aubrey
over what seems to be his greater regard for his “angel” daughter than for his
“fallen angel” wife. When an opportunity arises for Ellean
to go to
William Archer said that “technically, the
work is as nearly as possible perfect,”19 but on its publication in 1895 Shaw attacked it on those
very grounds, noting the crude, wasteful, and naive machinery of much of the
exposition and plotting. “It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that what
most of our critics mean by mastery of stagecraft is recklessness in the
substitution of dead machinery and lay figures for vital action and real
characters.”20 Archer
plausibly defended Pinero, but the further point Shaw made, that in crucial
spots Paula speaks not in her own character but “from the Tanqueray-Ellean-Pinero
point of view,” is very damaging. Paula ceases to be a believable character
when she capitulates totally to a set of values that the character Pinero has
given us would have rejected or at least challenged. Too often the hand that
wrote this play, Shaw thought, was the dead hand of convention. Paula is made
to behave, not as she would
behave, but as convention would have her. Underneath this play’s realism works
the old machinery of melodrama, which served convention by allowing villains
and rakes to reform themselves at the last and redeem themselves by suffering
the consequences of their “sins.”
Archer replied that, regardless, the play worked and that is all that
matters in the theater. It seems to have been both Pinero’s virtue and his vice
as a dramatist to be so single-mindedly a man of the theater. As a director of
his own plays from The Magistrate
(1885) on, he was concerned with making his plays work for their audiences,
with emphasis on theatrical effect, as he had learned from the
Scribe-Sardou-Dumas fils school. With a reputation as a masterful
stage craftsman, Pinero was bowed to by even the great actor-managers of the
day (such as George Alexander, who lent the
Pinero had a reputation for having “no
philosophy of life, no message that he was burning to deliver to the public, no
deep-rooted personal obsessions which had willy-nilly to find expression. He
was a professional writer who took his position seriously, and his plays, where
they triumph, are above all a triumph of craftsmanship. . . . He had ideas too:
not so much ideas about life, but ideas for subjects which would make
interesting plays. He was . . . a writer who could tell interesting stories to
maximum effect on the stage.”21 While granting the general truth of
this, one should note the presence of at least one deep-rooted personal
obsession—with the “tainted” woman and her conflict with the double standard.
But there is little evidence that he knew, except from afar, the sort of woman
he was obsessed with, another of Shaw’s objections—a realist is supposed to
draw from life, but Pinero’s woman with a past seems to be largely a figment of
the conventional and secretly erotic literary imagination.
An even more curious version of his
obsession turned up in his next “serious” play, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895).
The central role of Agnes Ebbsmith was played by
the young Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who had just made her
Though the problem plays were his major successes of the nineties,
Pinero never lost sight of the fact that he had two audiences, the one led by
Archer waiting for his next “serious” play, the other hoping that he would
write another Court farce or another Sweet
Lavender. The Amazons (1893), a satire on
the idea that the New Woman could be “manly,” was his only pure farce in the
nineties, but he wrote his best sentimental comedy, Trelawney of the “Wells,” in 1898 and a series of comedies of
manners, The Benefit of the Doubt
in 1895, The Princess and the
Butterfly in 1897, and The
Gay Lord Quex in 1899. Through the remainder of his career he kept
all the genres going, with comedy in the majority, but ended with surprisingly
experimental, nonrealistic plays. His
major plays of the Edwardian era, after which he was considered so
old-fashioned he could no longer command a West End box office, were His House in Order (1906), The Thunderbolt (1908), and Mid-Channel (1909).
The nineties, though, saw the gradual triumph of Pinero’s brand of
realism, and one has only to look at the increasingly detailed stage directions
of Pinero’s comedies to realize the comedy was growing more realistic too. In fact, Trelawney of the “Wells” (1898) was a salute to the man Pinero
believed had planted the seed of realism in English soil. The character of Tom Wrench, utility actor
turned playwright, is based on Tom Robertson and his “wrenching” of the theater
from old ways to new. Though Robertson’s
1860s “revolution” at the Prince of Wales looks very slight to us now, Pinero
remembered it as a significant turning point, a courageous, visionary effort
that renewed interest in native-born drama.22
Shaw was disarmed by this play because it
made no pretense at being up-to-date:
Its charm . . . lies in a certain delicacy which makes me
loath to lay my critical fingers on it. . . . Mr. Pinero, as a critic of the
advanced guard in modern life, is unendurable to me. . . . When he plays me the
tunes of 1860, I appreciate and sympathize. Every stroke touches me: I dwell on
the dainty workmanship shewn in the third and fourth
acts: I rejoice in being old enough to know the world of his dreams. But when
he comes to 1890, then I thank my stars that he does not read the Saturday
Review.24
Pinero
would be surprised to know that Trelawney
has become the most enduring of his works, and the
most beloved.
The Gay Lord
Quex
(1899) shows Pinero at his
best in the comedy of manners, of which The Weaker Sex (1884),
Mayfair (1885), The
Hobbey Horse (1886), and The Times (1891) were early examples in his career (The Times, by the way, is
noteworthy as the first British play to be published under newly revised
international copyright laws. Unheard of before, copies were
sold on opening night). Pinero wrote Quex contemplating the recent
successes of Wilde and Jones in this line. As with Jones, Pinero fell far short
of the standard of wittiness set by either Wilde or the original Restoration
models. According to Clayton Hamilton, Quex is a comedy of
manners “because it skillfully contrasts the manners of the aristocracy with
the manners of the lower classes and sets forth a tense and thrilling struggle
between the different ideals of conduct. “25 The plot concerns the determination of Sophy, a slightly vulgar manicurist, to keep her foster
sister, Muriel, from marrying Lord Quex, an old rake
claiming to be reformed, and to have her marry instead the romantic young
Captain Bastling. After four acts of incredible
machinations, first to get her way and then to undo what she has wrought, Sophy comes to realize that Lord Quex
really is reformed, whereas Captain Bastling is just
getting started as a rake. In the process, Lord Quex
develops respect and admiration for Sophy’s courage
and loyalty to a code of honor. Lazenby believes that
the notorious “amoral” quality of Restoration comedy of manners is present
here, although more as a foreshadowing of the Edwardian age, in that the play
shows that “sensible women simply adopt the way of the world and accept men for
what they all are.”26 But Lazenby
also notes that “Quex’s reformation seems to be
curiously genuine,” a sentimental note, and that the play lacks the despairing
satiric denunciation of an entire society that seems characteristic of
Restoration comedy of manners. Whether Pinero has managed a traditional comedy
of manners or not, there is no gainsaying that this play is one of many plays
that show Pinero’s mastery of comic effect in the theater, something that
should have been more highly valued.
The Victorians were not the only people who habitually confused
earnestness of manner with seriousness of purpose, but they were the most
notorious for it. And thus their inclination to confuse the
comic with the frivolous. When Archer, Pinero, or Jones referred to
“serious” drama, they meant drama that was not comic. The serious drama of the
social-problem-play sort was not tragic either, in Aristotelian terms, but it
mimicked tragedy in its general solemnity of tone and disastrous outcome. With
only serious plays considered worthy, a playwright with a comic bent might be
intimidated enough to denigrate his comedy and strain after “tragedy” for the
sake of his reputation. Pinero was a wonderful example of a man who understood
perfectly the importance of being earnest and somehow contrived to get himself
recognized as the leader of the earnest New Drama, despite two-thirds of his
plays being comedies. The trick was to deprecate the comedies, referring to
them as “relaxation,” preparatory to writing “serious” drama. The trick worked
splendidly but to the cost of Pinero’s ultimate reputation. Had he recognized
that much of the situation and characterization of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, and other problem plays was
fundamentally ridiculous, he might have turned those plays into great comedies
or tragi-comedies that would not now be questioned
for their authenticity.
There is much good to be said about Henry
Arthur Jones (1851-1929). No one sought more earnestly the
welfare of the theater as a cultural institution. As a pamphleteer and speaker
he fought for a literary drama, challenging dramatists to publish their plays
and thus submit them to literary criticism. He argued for the abolition of an addlepated censorship, for almost two centuries a great
blight on the stage. He was for whatever would reinstate the theater as an
edifying and ennobling force in the national culture. As early as 1883,
following the suggestions of William Archer and Matthew Arnold, Jones began a
long campaign for the endowment of a national theater.27 As a dramatist he tried to show the way by
attempting a high drama concerned with serious matters; in this he made the
best of what talents he had, achieving a considerable popularity that lasted
for over thirty years.
In old age Jones might have looked back
with satisfaction on a worthwhile career, but instead his old age was filled
with gall and wormwood. The circumstances of his life, and the limitations of
his talent and vision, conspired ultimately to make his career one of the sad
tales in the annals of British theater. His is the very familiar story of the
late Victorian who was unable to free himself sufficiently from the ghosts of
the past. Though he intellectually rebelled against his provincial,
fundamentalist Christian upbringing, it overwhelmed him emotionally at crucial
times and distorted his responses to life.
Jones was born in the West Country village
of Gandborough, Buckinghamshire, in 1851, his
hardworking father a tenant farmer of Welsh ancestry and his neurotically
pious, self-sacrificing mother the daughter of a farmer; the ruralist-religionist outlook inculcated there haunted him however
far he roamed. That included his roaming in books. Limited to six years of
formal schooling, Jones later educated himself by reading the classics, but
self-educated meant self-limited. Never entirely at home in the modern
industrialized city either, Jones later would think fondly back to that
childhood farmhouse where, as though Ruskin or Morris had approved it, “every
utensil, every piece of crockery, every piece of furniture was a thing of
beauty.”28 It was a
wholesome and tidy environment to grow up in, but strictly puritanical.
“Dancing, card-playing and theatre-going were vices. Lying was a sin to be
promptly punished by a severe thrashing.”29 This was compounded
by his quitting school at the age of twelve and being sent to his uncle at Ramsgate to earn his living. His hated uncle was a deacon
of a Baptist chapel, stern and joylessly fundamentalist, exacting fourteen-hour
workdays from Jones for the next six or seven years. Escaping his uncle’s
dominion in 1869, he worked in
trade in Gravesend and London and then as a traveling salesman in the west of
England until 1879, when he committed himself entirely to writing. As early as
1869 he had entered that stronghold of the devil, the theater, and immediately
converted to its brazen rites by writing his first play, The Golden Calf (which, like about
half of his hundred plays, went unstaged). The
theatergoing and his voracious reading in the classics and modern science
(particularly Herbert Spencer) seemingly liberated Jones from his puritanical
upbringing, for he said many harsh things about the prudery and hypocrisy of
his times and usually took the side of science against religion, but many of
his plays suggest otherwise in their defeat, frustration, or ridicule of
characters who stand for modern, liberated values.
His first play
staged, in
Jones made a questionable contribution to
Ibsen’s public fame in 1884 by writing, in collaboration, a very free
adaptation of A Doll House called
Breaking a Butterfly, which,
by tacking on a miraculously happy ending, revealed either Jones’s incomplete
absorption of Ibsenist principles or his willingness
to forego those principles for commercial reasons. Actually, Jones seems more
astute in his reading of Ibsen than most, had more in common with the dour
Norwegian than he knew, and might have led Ibsenism
on a different path if he had not so often taken Ibsen’s reputation—what he was
supposed to have meant—for what he actually meant.31 Throughout his life Jones indignantly denied that Ibsen had
any influence on him, justifiably citing English sources and experiences as his
models and inspiration. At times confusing Ibsen with Zola, a common mistake,
he protested against the Ibsenist school of modern
realism that “founded dramas on disease, ugliness, and vice.”32 Jones made many
disparaging remarks about realism as mere photography, disdaining its concern
to reproduce the merely pedestrian and commonplace (an argument Ibsen would
have sympathized with) and once wrote a play in verse to demonstrate his
defiance of it, but still most of the plays that made his reputation were
roughly of the Ibsenite well-made, realistic
problem-play school.
The
Middleman (1889),
containing some satiric commentary on the exploitation of worker-inventors by
capitalist middlemen, is often cited as the play that saw Jones turn toward the
New Drama, in that it contains a slight shift away from the drama of pure
action toward the drama of character and social criticism; but it is still
obviously a melodrama. ]udah (1890), a
seduction drama of the sort Jones became obsessed with, featuring a spiritual
man whose passion for a worldly woman would lead him into a crisis, is somewhat
more realistic, not so much in its topical interest in faith healing as in the
fact that it replaces the melodramatic improbabilities of his earlier plays
with some psychological subtlety in characterization and allows the usual
confession scene climax to develop more naturally from the moral struggles of
the characters. It includes as well some satire directed at the aristocratic
patronage of fads, especially aiming at the mannish New Woman, a favorite
target of his. The Dancing Girl
(1891), his biggest success since The Silver King, shows Jones suffering a relapse. Supportive
of the Victorian double standard, the play depicts a wastrel aristocrat
(winningly played by Herbert Beerbohm Tree) eventually rewarded with what we
would consider undeserved happiness (partly in the form of marriage to a pure
heroine) after his last-minute repentance, and a rebellious, seductive, “pagan”
woman, who had escaped a boring existence in a small country town to find
meaning as a dancer in London and as the aristocrat’s mistress, reaping death
at the hand of a Victorian poetic justice that would strike us as injustice. Jones was incorrigibly unfair in depicting rebelliousness in the
young, as though making up for his own transgressions to appease a puritan
conscience.
Jones tended to follow box-office successes
with more experimental plays of the sort he really wanted to write, and when
those failed he went back to writing for the public. And so the success of The Dancing Girl was followed by
the failure of The Crusaders (1891),
which he managed himself, to his financial embarrassment. Then
followed The Bauble Shop (1893),
a romantic melodrama that Charles Wyndham turned into a big hit at the
Criterion. This success emboldened him to try his hand at a four-act
blank verse tragedy, The Tempter
(1893), which looked all the odder appearing in the year of Pinero’s
epitome of the New Drama, The Second
Mrs. Tanqueray. Pinero’s great triumph
pushed Jones to write now popular New Drama of his own, starting with The Masqueraders (1894), and to
abandon poetic drama forever. Nevertheless the “unsuccessful” plays were of
greater literary worth and even broke new ground.
From The Masqueraders to the death of Queen
Mrs. Dane’s
Defense (1900) is perhaps
Jones’s most earnest attempt to write the sort of play Archer idolized and
Pinero epitomized—the well-made, realistic problem play. The “problem” is
whether Mrs. Dane—supposedly a widow but actually a woman named Felicia Hindemarsh who had been involved in a scandal in Vienna a
few years before—can disguise her “fallen” state and “get back” into
respectable society. She has settled in a country community in
Yet Jones once dismissed the play as
“drawing room melodrama,” perhaps because he knew in his heart of hearts that,
once again, he had allowed convention to overrule characterization. Convention
alone, not the logic of character, made Mrs. Dane a villainess. And convention
also cancelled the “problem,” for the conclusion was foregone. Another typical
feature is that the play’s raisonneur (spokesman for the author), Sir
Daniel, who represents the idea that women can be kept straight only through a
diligent and unforgiving rectitude, confesses offhandedly that he himself has
had affairs, once with a married woman, but he expects no blame, knowing full
well that the double standard excuses in men what it finds inexcusable in
women. Sir Daniel is typical of the raisonneurs Jones
would use in other plays, presenting the worldly-wise point of view of an
avuncular, conservative old bachelor, counseling caution and discretion to the
rebellious (usually younger women) and, however sympathetic he finds their
case, arguing that society is justified in meting out unhappiness to those who
defy its conventions. This simply mirrored Jones’s own absolute
abhorrence of divorce and general fear of anarchy.
The play in which Jones first used the
cynical and rather unlikable raisonneur is
also one of his best high comedies, The
Case of Rebellious Susan (1894). His comedies were not of the witty sort
Wilde delighted in but were comedies of humor derived from incongruity of
situation. The play is the story of a charming lady who, instead of forgiving a
philandering but abjectly apologetic husband, as the worldly-wise raisonneur
would counsel, decides to retaliate with a little romantic adventure of her
own. Back from
In a variation on this theme in The Liars (1897), a wife is
tempted to desert her older husband for a younger, more heroic adventurer, but
when she stumbles into an inadvertent dalliance with him she begs her friends
to lie for her. At the last she is persuaded by the usual male raisonneur
to stick to her husband, who is willing to overlook her indiscretions. As
in The School for Scandal, model
for all Jones’s comedies of manners, an entire society is satirized for its
double-faced predilection for the scandalous and its desperate willingness to
lie to avoid scandal personally.
Whitewashing
Julia (1903), Dolly Reforming Herself (1908),
and Mary Goes First (1913) are other fine examples of Jones’s
talent in this genre. A critic who thinks the social comedies are Jones’s best
work and finds them praiseworthy, Richard A. Cordell, nevertheless suggests why
they fall short of the best work of the age:
The sparkling comedies skim
delightfully over the surface of a society (bitterly analyzed by Shaw in the
Preface to Heartbreak House) almost as unlike the society of
post-war
Despite the mistaken notion that Shaw wrote
“tract plays,” Cordell’s reference to Shaw points to the difference between
genius and talent. The genius sees further and more comprehensively, and works
more freely. Jones’s dramas were full of dimly perceived truths that in the
works of Shaw would burst forth in a much clearer light, partly because Shaw
would be freer of those ghosts of convention that in Jones’s case too often
turned a promising playwright into an automaton writing as convention dictated.
Yet in his public remarks Shaw was generally very kind to and supportive of
Jones, backing him against Archer’s Pinero, for example, because, unlike
Pinero, Jones was not at ease in Zion, was more courageous in taking chances,
possessed a genuinely religious sensibility beneath the agnosticism (though he
would have denied Dionysius as his god), and had aspirations for the drama in
keeping with Shaw’s own high goals. In private correspondence, however, Shaw
let Jones know that he was falling short of his own aspirations, too often
confusing the trivial with the significant, and the ideal with the real, and
failing the future by judging modern events with medieval standards. Jones
sometimes sadly admitted to falling short, even by his own lights, but the
realization must have rankled and festered, for it burst forth during the Great
War in one of the most incredible displays of hostility and betrayal of
friendship on record, as Jones ended by playing Salieri
to Shaw’s Mozart. But that was in the distant future. Just ahead lay the
Edwardian years and a continuing career of general success, though he produced
nothing remarkably different from what had gone before, and the expected
knighthood, given to Pinero in 1909, did
not materialize. Only toward the end of that period did it begin to dawn on
Jones that he was only a precursor, not the savior, of modern drama, and that
he was being passed by and overlooked.
Henry Arthur Jones was an example of what
is termed an “earnest Victorian,” and he remained so long after the Queen died.
Earnest Victorians were not always the sourpusses they are portrayed to be,
Jones being representative in enjoying a joke on some of the foibles of the
day. But Jones’s deep earnestness comes out in the selectivity of his satire.
Some of his most ridiculous characters, such as his raisonneurs, are
hardly satirized, if at all. That is because the raisonneurs are busy
defending the status quo that Jones increasingly saw as the only bulwark
against anarchic modern ideas. What was not funny to an earnest Victorian was
any joke that seriously undermined (recall Ibsen’s “torpedo the ark”) the
established principles of society. In theory, Jones’s conservatism allowed for
change, the slow change of slight modification to social law, broadening out
from precedent to precedent over decades and centuries, but the theory was
increasingly overcome by an emotional reaction against all change.
Besides a split in his consciousness
between ideas of progressiveness and reactionary feelings, Jones developed a
curious counterpoint in his plays between the high idealism of the conventions
that gripped him and a profound cynicism about those ideals based on their
constant failure. As Shaw pointed out, cynicism is simply disappointed
idealism. When, after holding humanity to impossible standards, Jones naturally
found humanity falling short, he took refuge in the old Tory dodge that society
is incorrigible and can’t be changed. Such refuge may have provided him
comfort, but it made for a sour and bitter old age as well.
What
everybody seems to know about Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is that he came to a bad end. Wilde died in Paris, far from home,
because Europe was his chosen place of exile after a two-year prison term, and
the place where in the denouement of his life he underwent a fantastically
accelerated aging, as in his own Picture
of Dorian Gray. His prison term was the result of a conviction on
several counts of pederasty involving young boys of the lower class. That
conviction would never have come about had not the maddest love of Wilde’s
life, young Lord Alfred Douglas, persuaded him to take Douglas’s hated father,
the Marquess of Queensberry, to court on libel
charges, the Marquess having made it known that he
thought Wilde a corrupter of youth. The first trial not only failed to
establish Wilde’s innocence but also suggested a greater guilt,
leading to a second and third trial and to Wilde’s being sent to jail. The
story of how Wilde got to be a criminal is long and complicated, and some
understanding of the day’s artistic climate might best set the stage.
Modern artists tended to define themselves
against the middle class, particularly the wealthier, more pretentious middle
class, whose values they found wanting. Riding a tide of prosperity made possible
by
Finding in the middle class a perverse
contradiction between its vigorous but ignoble commercial practice and the
deadening conformity of its social and moral code, the modernist artists of the
nineties fought a valiant but largely losing effort to break the hold of the
day’s ruling ideals. Wishing to remake a world they perceived as devoted to the
suppression of creativity, true individualism, and true society, these artists
saw their first step as estrangement from the routine and the mundane, a
process of defamiliarization that would free them to
create the world afresh. This struggle to alienate themselves from the usual
and the familiar often exacted a great toll—the incidence of madness, disease,
and drug and alcohol addiction among them inspired Yeats to lament over them as
a “tragic generation” and caused many to be dismissed with the label
“decadent,” as, ironically, they took onto themselves a label they believed
belonged to society.
Because Pinero and Jones sought not
estrangement but social acceptance, their works lacked precisely the freshness
and individuality of vision one expects of great art, instead partaking of the
age’s real decadence in manners and morals. More expressing society than
themselves, they produced largely standard, machine-made art, the machine being
the social, literary, and dramatic conventions that secretly ruled them. With somec instinctive feeling for the need of an artist to be
an individual first, though not without an ambivalent longing for social
acceptance as well, Oscar Wilde followed a fatal attraction to the very
alienation Jones and Pinero eschewed, though he tried hard to make his
alienation enjoyable. His style was to complement outrageous dress with
outrageous opinions, making of “the term ‘middle class’ a satiric epithet for
the dull, unimaginative, hypocritical, stale, mid-century Philistine, a term of
disparagement for a class supremely deficient in appreciation of the art of
living and the living arts.”35
Wilde’s art suggested that as society was suffocating in conformity, the artist
must be a bit of a criminal in society’s eyes in order to awaken perceptions,
force out one’s individuality, and thus lead the way to a healthier humanity.
When Wilde said, “I live in dread of not being misunderstood,” he was referring
to his role of iconoclast.35 But somewhere along the line Wilde’s
ironic criminal turned into a criminal in earnest, the estrangement becoming
derangement.
His Irishness and
a certain family eccentricity started Wilde out with a different view of
things. Descended from a Dutch Colonel de Wilde, who had been given land in
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie
Wills Wilde, the second of three children, was born with both an heroic, Ossianic name and his mother’s heroic aspirations for him. His heroism did not manifest itself in the
usual life of action but in the life of the mind, particularly as it could
gracefully display itself in art and social wit. From the beginning he was a
brilliant scholar, winning prizes and special recognition wherever he went. His
specialty in his studies, both at
At
Wilde did not invent the aesthetic
movement, but he became a convenient vehicle for its advertisement, no doubt
distorting it in the process. Ruskin and Pater had been preaching the Gospel of
Beauty at
In those days Wilde enjoyed the joke on himself and was thus not offended when Richard D’Oyly Carte, theater impresario, asked him to follow the
1882 American tour of Patience
with lecture performances in aesthetic costume. Said Wilde,
“Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.”39 In going along on the tour, Wilde simply
seized an opportunity to get himself known, make a little money, have
adventures, and promote aestheticism, with lectures on “The House Beautiful”
and “The English Renaissance in Art.” To au American customs agent wanting to
know if he had anything to declare, Wilde replied, “Nothing but my genius.”40 He
traveled from coast to coast, north to south and back again, even into
He was an accomplished public speaker by
his return to
Despite the growing scandal, many people
believed that Wilde was as usual just posing for attention, and so he was
allowed to thrive publicly, even as privately he was emotionally and
financially wasting away from the draining, mostly one-sided relationship with
the vain, expensive, bratty Douglas. The year 1890 opened a five-year period of
incredible productivity and great public success. Not only did stories, fairy
tales, poems, and essays come from his pen, but he at last was persuaded to
embark on the writing of the plays that embodied his own social presence and to
which he owes most of his lasting literary fame. He was encouraged by a short
run in New York in 1891 of The
Duchess of Padua, a blank verse “tragedy” (melodrama, really) that
he had written in 1883 and nearly forgotten. At George Alexander’s insistence,
he then wrote three serio-comic plays or
comedy-dramas, Lady Windermere’s Fan
(written in 1891, produced in 1892), A Woman of No
Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1894 written, produced in 1895).
Quotes from the dialogue of
these three serio-comedies (“serious” comedies, that is) would reveal Wilde’s developing ability
to express dramatically his epigrammatic style, but plot summaries best expose
the plays’ weaknesses in their use of melodramatic and sentimental formulas. Lady Windermere’s Fan opens twenty
years after Mrs. Erlynne had left her husband and
baby to go off with another man, who in turn soon abandoned her. She has since
lived the life of a “fallen woman,” but now seeks to “get back.” Learning that
her daughter, Lady Windermere, has married a rich man, Mrs. Erlynne
blackmails him, succeeding because he wishes his wife to be innocent of her
“tainted” roots. But when Mrs. Erlynne discovers that
her daughter is about to make the same mistake she did (by running off with
Lord Darlington), her maternal instincts force her to sacrifice her profitable
venture for her daughter’s well-being. And so as the woman with a past redeems
herself the Windermere’s marriage is saved. There is nothing in this plot
summary to indicate that the play might not have been written by Pinero, and
the same is true of A Woman of No
Importance and An Ideal
Husband.
In all three
plays, however, Wilde introduced an element of moral ambiguity and relativity
into “well-made” plots, whose “well-made-ness”
depended partly on moral conventions that previously had brooked no ambiguity
or relativity, his most convincing device being the giving of the cleverest
lines to the more villainous characters. That there is progression in the
degree to which each play allows the “villainous” characters to shine
conversationally and to escape any absolute moral condemnation suggests that in
these plays Oscar was nerving himself to “come out of
the closet.” He even told Tree, the actor who played Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance, that
that villain was himself, but of course he meant as seen through the warped
perspective of conventional art.
The wit of the
“bad” people in these plays is what redeems them, not whatever reformations the
strange twists and turns of plot puts them through. The temptation is to just
go on quoting the aphorisms, paradoxes, and epigrams that give the plays their
life—such as Lord Darlington’s assertion that “I can resist everything but
temptation”— and ignore the fact that the plots require them to say things that
contradict their wit. Lord Darlington says to Lady Windermere, with whom he is
flirting: “Now-a-days so many conceited people go about society pretending to
be good, that I think it shows rather a sweet and modest disposition to pretend
to be bad. Besides, there is this to be said. If you pretend to be good, the
world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is
the astounding stupidity of optimism.”41 And later he says that “life is far too important a thing
ever to talk seriously about it” (9). And yet he does talk seriously, once the
plot captures him and he becomes an agent of the conventions rather than a
spokesman for himself. In A Woman of
No Importance Lord Illington suffers
similar relapses, saying that “taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and
earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore”
(68), but precisely following that very pattern. Fortunately, he occasionally
revives to delight us with something like “Nothing succeeds like excess” (101)
or with that immortal comment on “the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable
in pursuit of the uneatable” (68). Lord Goring of An Ideal Husband, described as
“the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought” (173), speaks as
he’s dressing to his perfect and perfectly agreeable butler: “Fashion is what
one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear . . . just
as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people and falsehoods the truths of
other people. . . . Other people are
quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. . . . To
love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance” (174). And yet how earnestly and selflessly he persuades Lady Chiltern
not to force her husband to leave Parliament, which according to the stage
directions shows “the philosophy that underlies the dandy” (204). But what it
really shows is how much Wilde was still in the grip of conventions, as
embodied in ready-made plotting, and how he was not yet able to make the plots
express himself and his characters rather than the societal expectations that
ruled the world of plot.
Critics who valued
the conventions and not the wit tried to denigrate the dangerous parts of
Wilde’s plays by claiming anyone could write such silly stuff. But they were
well answered in 1895 by a new drama critic who signed his articles “G.B.S”:
Mr. Oscar Wilde’s new play . . . is a dangerous subject, because he has
the property of making his critics dull. They laugh angrily at his epigrams,
like a child who is coaxed into being amused in the very act of setting up a
yell of rage and agony. They protest that the trick is obvious, and that such
epigrams can be turned out by the score by anyone light-minded enough to
condescend to such frivolity. As far as I can ascertain, I am the only person
in
A very unlikely play to have
been written in the midst of these serio-comedies is Salomé, written in French
in 1891, mostly during a stay in
An oft-treated subject in French
literature, though never quite as Wilde treated it, is the story of Salomé’s
perverse love for Jokanaan (John the Baptist), who
has been imprisoned by Herod for denouncing Herod’s “incestuous” marriage to
Salomé’s mother and his former sister-in-law, Herodias, and of Salomé’s dance
of the seven veils to satisfy the “incestuous” desires of Herod, in return for
which Herod provides her with the promised severed head of Jokanaan,
kissed by Salomé in the play’s most sensational scene (see Figure 4 at
the end of Chapter
1). The story seems to have been inspired by another
underground classic, Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884); there one finds the suggestion
that Salomé was a monstrous beast of the Apocalypse, capable of being
understood only by “brains shakened and sharpened,
made visionary as it were by hysteria.”43 Only a very alienated artist, seeking
deeper alienation, would be capable of it.
And of course the expression of such a vision could only be poetic.
In Walter Pater’s Appreciations (1889), Wilde had
read that “all the arts aspire to the condition of music,” and that a play
“attains artistic perfection just in proportion as it approaches that unity of
lyrical effect, as if a song or a ballad were still lying at the root of it.”43 Summing up his career as a dramatist,
Wilde wrote in a letter that his unique contribution “was that I had taken the
Drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of
expression as the Lyric or the Sonnet, while enriching the characterization of
the stage, and enlarging—at any rate in the case of Salomé—its artistic horizon. . . . The recurring
phrases of Salomé,
that bind it together like a piece of music with recurring motifs, are . . .
the artistic equivalent of the old ballads.”45
The lyrical repetitiousness of Salomé expresses themes Wilde
appears to have derived from Pater’s Studies
in the History of the Renaissance (1873), the conclusion to which
argued that the individual is imprisoned in a subjective world, the external
world being ultimately unknowable, except as sensation valuable as stimulus.
Sylvan Barnet has shown how the dialogue of Salomé, biblical and incantatory in its repetitious
rhythms and imagery, expresses not social exchange but individual feeling,
perception, and dreaming, that of one character parallel to that of other
characters but never intersecting, until the dreamers, each an object in the others’
dream worlds, stumble into conflict. The most heroic character is Salomé, for,
feeling most intensely, she follows out the line of her feeling and dreaming
most uncompromisingly. Her love for Jokanaan is based
both on admiration for his equally uncompromising personal vision and on her
need to possess him and his purity as part of her own dream, proof of the power
of her vision. Except that Herod has the last word by having her killed. This
killing of Salomé may further illustrate the heroic attempt to discover what
love is and why we always kill the thing we love, or it may illustrate how the
world always crushes such attempts, or perhaps both.
But what does Salomé have to do with Wilde’s comedies? The standard line on
the three serio-comedies is that they are brilliant
failures, compromised by their well-made, conventional plots, which were
calculated for box-office appeal. Had The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) not shown how
much better the thing could be done, however, they might not be so denigrated.
Perhaps when one sees what Earnest
actually does, how vastly ahead of the times it is, one can excuse Wilde
for taking three plays to get the hang of it. What he tried to accomplish in
the three serio-comedies was the probably impossible
blending together of the lyrical ideal of the Symbolists with the traditional
comedy of manners and the new well-made, realistic problem play, a mix to be
expressive of the modern sensibility. He succeeded in his synthesizing efforts,
in Earnest, only
when he abandoned the attempt to take the well-made, realistic play seriously,
adding it to the mix only in its parodied form.
Anton Chekhov’s lyrical comedies may seem
very unlike Wilde’s in their lack of witty dialogue, but thematically their
plays are much alike in their expression of the aloneness of the individual,
separated by, in Pater’s words, “that thick wall of personality through which
no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us.”46 Like Chekhov’s characters, Wilde
himself was said to be a monologist rather than a conversationalist, looking to
others only for inspiration and appreciation. And Wilde’s comic dialogue
illustrates as well as that of Salomé’s
the insistent estrangement of the individual, however zany the
circumstances and however unbothered most characters seem, as social contact
serves only as occasion for personal displays of wit. That the characters
choose to express the suffering that arises from the disjunction between
society and self, not with satirized Chekhovian angst, but with Wildean epigrams, is their unique feature. Lord Illingworth
of A Woman of No Importance partly
explains Wilde’s penchant for the comic. “The world has always laughed at its
own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them.
. . . Consequently, whatever the world has treated seriously
belongs to the comedy side of things” (98). The kind of comedy Wilde
found most self-expressive was that in which the witty characters take pride in
being unruffled by their own despair, using it, in fact, entertainingly and
creatively to display the positive value of personality. When Wilde permeated
an entire plot with that sense of comedy, he produced the masterpiece of Earnest.
The conventions of the day denied this
disjunction between society and self, and Wilde’s struggle to overcome those
conventions and come out of the closet artistically, so to speak, was what
delayed his masterpiece. The day’s moral idealism, as found in melodrama and
sentimental comedy, would have none of the moral relativity implied in Pater’s
theories of personality. The absolutist conventions said that villains may
threaten but objective standards of right and wrong ultimately prevail, as
society always defeats the selfish, individualistic villain. So overwhelming
was the convention that self-assertion was tantamount to selfishness, so
relentless the propaganda in behalf of convention, so steady the inculcation of
self-denial in the young, that only a powerful, revolutionary personality could
overcome it, after hard struggle.
Salomé is sometimes considered a remarkable freak
but no masterpiece because its revolutionary quality was too easily achieved,
too obviously expressed, and too pseudo-French. More difficult would be to use
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
is the epitome of standing things on their head. Subtitled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,
Earnest follows the wooing
by Algernon and Jack of Cicely and Gwendolen, who
insist straight-facedly that neither of them could marry a man who did not
possess the name Ernest, though they are just as likely to say things, as
above, that suggest an opposite concern for style over sincerity. Because a
man’s merely having the name of
Ernest “inspires absolute confidence” (128), what their wordplay means of
course is that such good form is all that society requires, never mind
earnestness itself. And yet these clever young people are earnest enough about
their playing. In a world that habitually confused the serious with the
trivial, Wilde felt this confusion could only be done justice by the
paradoxical philosophy that “we should treat all the trivial things of life
seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied
triviality.”47
Because the
fundamental absurdity of conventional “well-made” plots, with their sacrifice
of sense to suspense, frequently went unnoticed, Wilde emphasized it in Earnest to draw attention to it. So exaggerated, the plot becomes a parody of
plots. The play centers on a device called “Bunburying”48 that allows our playboy
dandies, Jack and Algernon, to lead double lives, in town and country. This
deceit naturally leads to elaborate masking, the confusion over identities
intensifying until relieved by a denouement that unties the silliest knot ever
tied, as the long arm of coincidence reaches so deep into the well-made play’s
bag of tricks that it finds a hole in the bottom. No less parodistic
is the paroxysm of romantic feeling that ends the play, with every available
couple thrown into embrace.
Earnest is foremost a
dramatization of Wilde’s own conversational cleverness and the social manner by
which he established dominion, a combination of cool self-possession, bland
detachment, and nonchalant brightness. There are satiric thrusts in all
directions, but the satire is merely the channel for the lyrical expression of
personal wit. Its revolutionary quality comes less from its satiric hits than
from its audacity to be itself, to care for nothing beyond its own
self-expression, art indeed for art’s sake. It ridicules Victorian earnestness,
which was thought the outward aspect of such inward virtues as nobility,
purity, and manliness, but that ridicule is subordinated to the lyrical
celebration of the opposite of earnestness—namely, flippancy of tone and
frivolity of attitude, life-affirming qualities in a society wretched with
mechanical earnestness.
And, of course, in
lyricism it is authentic feeling
that matters, not logical consistency. It is not logical that such irreverent
young ladies as Cicely and Gwendolen, so little
earnest about anything, would really
insist on the name Ernest, nor is it logical that our cynical bachelor
dandies, after deploring the doldrums of marriage and domesticity (“divorces
are made in Heaven,” say they) and hinting at irregular lives of regular Bunburying, should so cheerfully become engaged, but
appropriately Wilde had abandoned realistic logic for the sake of poetic
expressiveness. Recalling Chekhov again, we may cite a similar disjunction
between his characters’ speeches and actions as symptomatic of that greater
disjunction between subject and object that everywhere
plagues modern life.
Whereas in the
three serio-comedies this disjunction reveals either
Wilde’s indifference to plot or his inability to fuse plot with dialogue, in Earnest the disjunction is
artistically managed; an irrelevant plot is made relevant. That plot and
dialogue go in different directions, or operate according to different laws,
expresses the fundamental “absurdity” of a universe in which people imprisoned
in the self are expected to live socially, and in which such egotists are in
fact so agreeably and sanguinely sociable. The further absurdity of the
traditional marriage ending is that marriage, as with any other social
contract, will not prevent our young romancers from continuing to lead double
lives. The result of all this institutionalized Jekyll-and-Hyding
could only be a comedy of mistaken identities, but in having his characters
keep on quipping, no matter what, Wilde added a comedy of cleverness to the
traditional comic pattern.
The increasingly
alienated Wilde, ironically seeking social “connection” in the sexual pursuit
of young boys even as he was writing a farcical tribute to heterosexual
romance, found in Earnest the
perfect vehicle for expressing a dangerous ambivalence, in which feelings of
despair clashed with a classical hubris. The despair lay in his sense of the
insanity and uncontrollability of the strictly heterosexual social machine,
which was driving him deeper into alienation; the hubris lay partly in his belief
that he could control the social machine by using it for amusement. Marry if
you like, but then do what you like. Surely everyone will see the joke. But the
queen’s law court was not amused.
It would seem that
Earnest, beneath its
slick exterior of innocent fun, is expressive of a deadly combination of states
of mind. The rupture of feeling it expresses in the disjunction between plot
and dialogue, its downplaying of “sin,” and its hubristic, unconcerned attitude
(assumed by Oscar as he sauntered into his first trial, intoxicated with
success, arrogantly certain of his power to charm a jury as he charmed dinner
parties) joined with its absurdist vision that said what Wilde really wanted to
say about society and thus was indicative of a readiness to come out of the
closet. Had his friends known how much Wilde sought total revelation of being,
they might not have wasted their time trying to save him.
The ultimate
cleverness of Earnest,
from Wilde’s point of view, was that it allowed him to say what he really
wanted to say without artistic compromise and still sell a lot of tickets. And
only he, and perhaps a few other exquisites, realized how serious this farce
was. But the consummate irony of Oscar Wilde is that this mocker of earnestness
at last took himself too
seriously, succumbing to the temptation of the scapegrace to be the
scapegoat, losing his sense of humor because he secretly aspired to vindicate
his superiority by being a scapegoat, forgetting that his superiority consisted
in his amusing way of making people believe he wasn’t serious. But if he was
secretly driven by a passion for some ultimate alienation, how could such a
superior person commit the vulgar, middle-class error of suing for the
respectability of his name? Unless in
playing with a double life he had in earnest become two people? It is of course awful beyond words that the
prophet who sought society’s renewal by calling on it to sympathize with “Greek
things”—youth, freedom, beauty, joy, and color—should end up fat, ugly,
suffering, imprisoned, and exiled: not Dionysius but his caricature Silenus. Lord lllingworth had said to his son, “To win back my youth,
Gerald, there is nothing I wouldn’t do—except take exercise, get up early, or
be a useful member of the community”(94).
Noticeably he left out last-minute conversions to Catholicism, which Wilde apparently attempted, in the
last of a series of desperate improvisations, aimed at being born again.
And he was born again, in an amazing
number of ways. For Oscar Wilde, in the history of drama at least, was the
great precursor. Even more than Christopher Marlowe, whose promising but
disastrously brief career invites an inevitable comparison, Wilde opened doors
to the future for the greater drama to come. First as a contribution to the Pineroesque
New Drama, his three serio-comedies questioned the
double standard and idealistic notions of good and evil in a way that
strengthened that genre, making it possible fur Galsworthy and Maugham to take bolder steps, and also showed
that wit was no liability to the
genre—in fact, the plays of both Jones and Pinero may have been wittier because
Wilde was a box-office rival. Second, Wilde joined Maeterlinck and Yeats in
opening up the possibility of a new kind of poetic-Symbolist drama. Third, the
vision and technique of Earnest
is only slightly askew from
that of The Theater of the Absurd, and one can imagine a Beckett, lonesco, Orton, or Stoppard meditatively perusing Wilde. Fourth, his revival and transformation of the comedy of manners made that a viable genre again for the further
development of Hankin, Sutro,
Maugham, Lonsdale, and Coward, not to mention a host of postmoderns.
And fifth, his particular way with parody, making content out of the parodied
use of dramatic and literary conventions, would become Shaw’s stock-in-trade.
In contributing to the development of so many different kinds of “new drama,”
Oscar Wilds achieved the kind of “youth” that might be compensation enough for
his shade. Although it was Shaw’s opinion, on hearing of Wilde’s death, that Oscar must have gone straight to heaven, for “he
is too good company to be excluded.”49
If Oscar Wilde was
the Marlowe of the New Drama, did a Shakespeare follow? Well, not exactly, but
in George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) something great of itself
and equally as unique occurred. As Robert Corrigan puts it, “those writing
while G.B.S. was at his dramatic best seem like midgets when placed beside
him.”50 Shakespeare had a similar dwarfing
effect on his contemporaries, though it took longer to recognize it. That The Oxford History of English Literature,
in 1963, devoted to Shaw its only chapter on modern playwrights in its
volume Eight Modern Writers is
a fairly good indication, from a conservative source, that criticism is being
quicker with Shaw than it was with Shakespeare in acknowledging preeminence.
If
Shaw thought Oscar Wilde would be welcomed in heaven, it was because he had an
unusual view of that place, as he had an unusual view of most everything. In
his preface to Plays Pleasant and
Unpleasant (1898), Shaw catalogs his unusualness:
I had no taste for what is called popular art, no respect for popular
morality, no belief in popular religion, no admiration for popular heroics. As
an Irishman I could pretend to patriotism neither for the country I had
abandoned nor the country that had ruined it. As a humane person I detested
violence and slaughter, whether in war, sport, or the butcher’s yard. I was a
Socialist, detesting our anarchical scramble for money, and believing in
equality as the only possible permanent basis of social organization,
discipline, subordination, good manners, and selection of fit persons for high
functions. Fashionable life, open on indulgent terms to unencumbered
“brilliant” persons, I could not endure. . . . I was neither skeptic nor cynic
in these matters: I simply understood life differently from the average
respectable man.51
Shaw said he found the clue to his peculiarity
when, on having his eyesight tested, he discovered that although his eyesight
was physically “normal” it was socially “abnormal” because 90 percent of the
people did not possess such vision. This, according to Shaw, explained his
inability, initially, to be popular as a writer—his “vision” of existence did
not square with other people’s. “My mind’s eye, like
my body’s, was ‘normal’: it saw things differently from other people’s eyes,
and saw them better.”52 Playing
with the metaphor of “normalcy” led to playing with the metaphor of “sanity.”
“If I am sane,” said Shaw, “the rest of the world ought not to be at large. We
cannot both see things as they really are.”53 But he was just as likely to play “mad”
to the world’s assumed “sanity.” Like Lear’s fool, his strategy at times was to
deal with madness on its own ground by playing the fool to berserk authorities.
Every despot must have one disloyal subject to keep him sane. Even Louis
the Eleventh had to tolerate his confessor, standing for the eternal against
the temporal throne. Democracy has now handed the sceptre
of the despot to the sovereign people; but they, too, must have their
confessor, whom they call Critic. Criticism . . . may say things which many
would like to say, but dare not, and indeed for want of skill could not even if
they durst. Its iconoclasms, seditions, and blasphemies, if well turned,
tickles those whom they shock; so that the critic adds the privileges of the
court jester to those of the confessor. . . . It was as Punch, then, that I
emerged from obscurity. All I had to do was to open my normal eyes, and with my
utmost literary skill put the case exactly as it struck me, or describe the
thing exactly as I saw it, to be applauded as the most humorously extravagant paradoxer in London.55
The central
paradox that this Punch-critic-court jester wished to convey is that somehow
the world had habituated itself to seeing “good” where normal vision would see
“evil” and “evil” where normal vision would see “good.” The world was seeing
things upside down. Of course anyone who tried to point this out or right
things would appear to conventional minds as “the devil’s disciple,” a dangerous
person everyone had been taught to resist, if not attack. Yet Shaw invited
attack by drawing attention to his devilish self—for example, by banking up his
red hair on the sides to look like horns, to complement his devilish opinions (see Figures 5 and 6 at the end
of Chapter 1).
But such
inversions of the “normal” were of course overstatements aimed at waking people
up to what was real. The Shavian clowning meant to convey that human reality
was being ludicrously distorted as melodrama, consisting of clearly
distinguishable good and evil, whereas the truth for those who have eyes to see
is that good and evil are mixed in people and that “hell is paved with good
intentions” and "the Devil can quote scripture." The twinkling
eye and the jesting style in which his devilish opinions were uttered gave him
away to those who could read irony and paradox; but for all too many, the
joking betrayed his cause. The court jester kept the devil’s disciple from
being hanged by diverting the angry with laughter, but for those who did not
understand that joking is a form of figurative language, the jester persona
created the impression that he wasn’t serious. Shaw tried to counter this by
sometimes playing the gadfly in tones of the prophet, which added the leaven of
seriousness so important to an age of earnestness, but some people could never
understand if he was “just trying to be funny, or what?”
How does such a
complicated, paradoxical personality construct itself? At first, as with
everyone, it is at the mercy of family environment operating upon family genes.
Shaw’s father, George Carr Shaw, married Shaw’s mother, Elizabeth Gurley, a
woman much younger than he, on the pretext that he was a solvent and sober
member of the Irish Protestant governing class. She was soon disillusioned, for
he was poor at handling money and even worse at handling his liquor. Genteel
poverty was their lot (though they had rich and noble relations), and Shaw was
born the son of what he called a “downstart,” one of
those who were sliding down the social scale. The principal cause of descent,
and even family ostracism, was his father’s tipsiness. Alcoholism was rampant
in the family, at least three uncles and one aunt suffering from it as well,
and thus Shaw wisely became a teetotaler. (This made Shaw a peculiar Dionysian,
by the way, but he was so intoxicated with life, words, music, etc., that he
did not need the grape. He was born drunk.)
Mrs. Shaw’s
disappointment with her husband led to rather cool relations between them, and
their three children were coolly received as well. The virtue of this coolness
was that it left young Shaw more free to grow up as
his nature was inclined, in an age in which the misshaping of children was
determinedly pursued by the respectable. Had other children of his day
fulfilled their sense of protest by painting a picture of Mephistopheles on
their bedroom wall, as Shaw did, they would probably have been severely
punished, as he was not. He could explore his imagination to his heart’s
content. Except that the more he explored that romantic region, the more
discontented he became with its genres.
The Shaws’ relatively anarchic bringing up of children was
compounded by the mother’s interest in singing, which frequently took her away
from the family and sometimes brought into the house a variety of musical
artists who lent a touch of bohemianism. Chief among them was George Vandaleur Lee, locally famous for his conducting and his
“method” of voice training, who eventually moved in with the Shaws. The resulting ménage a trois may have been
Platonic, as Shaw thought, but it was a shaping influence, for Lee’s mesmeric
energy, said Shaw, reduced his father to nullity in the house, causing young
Shaw to look more to Lee than to his father for a model. From Lee he learned to
be skeptical of academic authorities, especially doctors, how to enjoy his
passion for music, and, most important, how to dramatize himself and become an
effective personality. Shaw must have remembered Lee when he later converted
his own shy and introverted self into the bold and brash G.B.S. From his
father, however, he did inherit the famous Shavian sense of anticlimax, the
technique of undercutting a crescendo of piety or solemnity with a joke.
Shaw was also instructed by the
fact that some of the best singing voices around his mother belonged to
Catholics. The usual notion that all Catholics were doomed to perdition, heaven
being reserved exclusively for Protestant ladies and gentlemen, was rather
thrown into question by the heavenly voices of the Catholics his mother knew.
Shaw soon discovered that Protestantism and Catholicism in
The life of art his mother and her friends
had led him into was the only thing that made
But that all came later,
after years of seedy, hand-to-mouth existence. During the early years,
when suitable jobs were hard to come by, Shaw read heavily, joined debating
societies to develop a speaking style, and in five years (1879-83)
industriously wrote five novels in which he experimented with various personae
and constructed "G. B. S." Unable to get the novels published
at first, largely because they were too far ahead of the times, Shaw took to
journalism, his friend William Archer getting him started in 1885 as an art and
music critic and book reviewer for a number of reviews, magazines, and
newspapers, his career capped off by his 1895-98 stint as drama critic for the Saturday Review. Seldom has journalism been graced by so much
cheerful and informative wit as Shaw poured into his weekly articles. He told
his readers, “I do my best to be partial,” taking humorously mortal offense at
bad performances.59 Of
his drama criticism he later admitted that it was “not a series of judgments
aiming at impartiality, but a siege laid to the theatre of the XIXth Century by an author who had to cut his own way into
it at the point of the pen, and throw some of its defenders into the moat. . .
. I was accusing my opponents of failure because they were not doing what I
wanted, whereas they were often succeeding very brilliantly in doing what they
themselves wanted.”60
Shaw also became
one of the most popular mob orators and platform debaters in
Shaw not only
excelled as a political pamphleteer and stump speaker but also as a
committeeman, his effectiveness apparent in his work on the Fabian executive
committee and in his six years as vestryman on a London borough council (St. Pancras). What with serving on councils and committees,
orating and debating, writing novels, pamphlets, reviews, articles, and finally
plays, not to mention keeping up a voluminous correspondence, Shaw lived an
extremely busy and engaged life, committed to revolutionary purpose.
As the nineties opened, Shaw had
little inkling that he was going to alter careers as journalist and Fabian
proponent in order to become the age’s foremost playwright, though his 1890 address to the Fabian Society on “Henrik Ibsen,” revised for publication as The Quintessence of Ibsenism
in 1891, was indicative of
the pull toward drama Ibsen’s magnetism was asserting. Ibsen showed him that
the drama could answer better than any other medium his need for both private
expression and participation in the public forum. At first Shaw overemphasized
the public nature of his work, to counter the tendency of the day’s aesthetes
to overindulge in seemingly amoral private fantasizing and “art for art’s
sake.” But, as Eric Bentley has explained, while “Shavian drama is didactic and
public . . . it is personal and
expressive as well. . . . Shaw’s drama
expresses his nature much more than it champions particular doctrines. It even
mirrors Shaw’s life rather closely in a series of self-portraits.”62
The Quintessence of Ibsenism
is typical of Shaw’s multidimensional writing in its sociopolitical,
psychological, metaphysical, and autobiographical levels of import. Sometimes
mistakenly read as purely sociopolitical and thus as misrepresentative of
Ibsen as an ideologue, The
Quintessence is today generally understood as providing an
enlightening, if limited, commentary on Ibsen’s dramatic vision, as well as a
prospectus for Shaw’s efforts as a New Dramatist and an expression of Shaw’s
private search for identity.
Written by a young
man who had failed in the private world of art as a novelist but who was
beginning to succeed in the public world as a critic, pamphleteer, and gadfly, The Quintessence takes on the
character of a Shaw struggling to become an extrovert. Having come to an
understanding of his social alienation as more an evolutionary phenomenon than
a family condition—that is, he was separated from others not so much because
his father’s drunkenness had brought ostracism on the family as because he was
more highly evolved—he proceeds to classify people according to how evolved
they are. Already thinking in terms of character types (actually derived more
from his own novels than from Ibsen’s plays), he divides the world into
Realists (1%), Idealists (29%), and Philistines (70%), in
descending order of evolution, based on people’s attitudes toward evolutionary
social change. Shaw finds Ibsen’s character types involved in “a conflict of
unsettled ideals,” the secretly ambivalent Idealists hypocritically defending
and enforcing ideals to the death, the Philistines complacently or fearfully
going along with the Idealists, and the lonely Realist struggling to get the
rest to change ideals to accord with human growth. Seeing that “the real
slavery of today is slavery to ideals of goodness,”63
the Realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether and sees in them
only something to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in
us, something whereby, instead of resisting death, we can disarm it by
committing suicide. The Idealist, who has taken refuge with the ideals because
he hates himself and is ashamed of himself, thinks that all this is so much for
the better. The Realist, who has come to have a deep
respect for himself and faith in the validity of his own will, thinks it so
much the worse. To the [Idealist], human nature, naturally corrupt, is held
back from ruinous excesses only by self-denying conformity to the ideals. To [the Realist], these ideals are only
swaddling clothes which man has outgrown, and which insufferably impede his
progress. No wonder the two cannot
agree. The Idealist says, “Realism means
egotism; and egotism means depravity.”
The Realist declares that when a man abnegates the will to live and be
free in a world of the living and the free, seeking only to conform to ideals
for the sake of being, not himself, but “a good man,” then he is morally dead
and rotten, and must be left unheeded to abide his resurrection, if that by
good luck arrive before his bodily death.64
It was obviously the
Christian policy of self-abnegation that was Shaw’s target, for he saw its
suppression of human selfhood as a major source of his society’s corruption and
decadence. This constant banking of the
fires of human creativity keeps things at a standstill, preventing evolutionary
growth, and causes unnecessary hyprocrisy. Nature’s command to the individual is “be
thyself,” not “be good.” Being good
means straining to live up to impossible ideals rather than relaxing and being oneself. One has to
“murder self” in order to "be good," and thus the metaphor of the
walking dead. Of course Nature always
wins in any battle with idealism, but the Shavian lesson is that the defeat of
idealism is no cause for despair and cynicism, as the Idealists think, for the
natural self is an aspiring self, imbued by evolution with a need to seek
higher levels of being. The astral body
will be reached, not by denying the natural self, but by allowing it to fulfill
its will in the evolutionary process.
In short, The Quintessence
implies, follow the example of the man with the abnormally normal sight, to
whom evolution has given the power to see things correctly, realistically, who
in his self-assertive construction of the “immodest” G. B. S., “the devil’s
disciple,” and other personas of inverted goodness, is demonstrating how to
fulfill the evolutionary will in good health.
Shaw’s theory of
character types in The Quintessence
was at bottom a struggle to understand himself as an artist-prophet, an
exercise in self-analysis disguised as sociological analysis. As he moved into
playwriting, the exercise became habitual. Shaw dramatized and fictionalized
the special problems of genius in its attempt to adapt to a hostile environment,
his craving for public participation in his private story an expression of his
need for human communion, to make his environment less hostile. This is
emphasized at the outset as a corrective to Shaw’s strenuous attempts, at
first, to make everyone believe that his concerns were purely sociopolitical,
objective, and didactic.
Oscar Wilde had
shown how to draw contumely by playing the idler and the aesthete; Shaw, though
also playing an Irish ironist, wanted enough respect from the citizenry so that
he could lead them to a better life, and that could be achieved only by
convincing them of his probity as a realistic, journalistic sort of artist
concerned, not with exotic private fantasies, but with the everyday world. The
further contrast was between a Wildean selfishness
that seemed to act entirely for its own sake and a Shavian self-assertiveness
that, abstemious and vegetarian, had as its by-product the good of the whole.
Wilde too saw that individual will, the source of human energy, needed to be
liberated from the suffocating policies of self-abnegation, but Wilde’s gadflying went astray when it mistook self-indulgence for
self-assertion and when it neglected to replace discarded moral conventions
with what Shaw called “moral passion.” Based on his own experience as an
adolescent, Shaw believed that beings sufficiently evolved to be truly human
develop an inner passion for the moral that is far more demanding than
conventional standards, and that because they insist on following that passion
rather than heeding conventions, they as the highest are confused with the
lowest who also ignore external law but who lack moral passion.
Shaw’s plays in
the nineties use dramatic art to embody the dilemma of the more highly evolved,
who, possessed of moral passion but contemptuous of
moral conventions for their perversity and low standards, discover that the
freedom they assert from convention is problematic, particularly in the context
of others’ lack of freedom.
Making the same false start as a
dramatist as did Ibsen, Shaw in 1878 began a blank-verse heroic tragedy he
called Household of Joseph,
which has since been given the title Passion Play. As the
prose drama was in such a low state, and Shakespeare’s reputation was soaring,
anyone in the nineteenth century who had intentions of writing serious literary
drama automatically wrote blank verse heroic tragedy. But that genre was
already an anachronism by the eighteenth century, owing to the rise of the
bourgeoisie and parliamentary democracy.
Perhaps sensing this, Shaw abandoned his play in the second act. Yet,
despite the antiquated verse, this fragment is full of astonishing modernisms,
especially in its irreverent, humanizing characterizations. Further, Jesus and
Judas seem to represent compelling forces contending in the young Shaw’s
psyche, Jesus illustrating the fervent Idealist and poetic dreamer whose vision
of a better world is so radical that it can be reached only by escaping this
world, and Judas representing the analytic skeptic whose outraged moral sense
can only find vent in personal probity, iconoclastic criticism, and,
inevitably, compromising political activism, all religions having been exploded
for him. This dialectic would become recurrent in Shaw’s plays. The figure of
the scapegoat would also recur, usually associated with that visionary realism The Quintessence talks about. As
in Passion Play,
Shaw’s strongest plays would have a Realist or potential Realist at their
center, involved in an action that threatens martyrdom. But it took a few plays
for this pattern to emerge.
After trying novel
writing and journalism, Shaw returned to playwriting in order, he said, to save
the nation’s honor. In his 1898 preface
to Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant,
Shaw wrote: “I turned my hand to playwriting when a great deal of talk
about ‘the New Drama,’ followed by the actual establishment of a ‘New Theatre’
(the Independent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that the New
Drama, in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination.
This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let
it collapse I manufactured the evidence.”65
His first three plays—Widowers’ Houses (1892), The Philanderer (1893),
and Mrs. Warren’s Profession
(1893)—were designated as “unpleasant” when published in 1898 because they
ostensibly dealt with social crimes that were considered by many to be
unmentionable in polite society. The surface subjects of Shaw’s three
plays—slum landlordism, the degradations marriage laws force upon “advanced”
people, and prostitution—though fit for the blue books of governmental
investigative committees, had not been thought proper for the stage. But taste
was changing. Pinero, Jones, and Wilde would soon draw crowds to their “woman
with a past” problem plays, and so Shaw, somewhat tentative in beginning his
new career, tried to carpenter something that would fit the day’s developing
taste for plays that exposed the seamy side of life. In pretending to write
hard-boiled, stick-their-noses-in-it realism, in what was thought Ibsen’s
style, Shaw actually succeeded better than most of the pretenders in doing just
that, however compromised these plays were by the farcical trivialities of some
of the plotting and characterization. Shaw’s plays were tougher-minded right
from the beginning. Pinero, Jones, and Wilde provided escape valves by making
everything come out all right, allowing convention to triumph over realism and
the problem to prove unproblematic. Shaw’s plays, though ending happily enough
from the Shavian point of view, ended unpleasantly from the conventional point
of view.
Shaw’s difference from other playwrights is
immediately noticeable in his account of the origins of Widowers’ Houses. It seems that in
1884 or 1885 drama critic William Archer proposed to novelist Shaw that they
collaborate on a play. Shaw agreeing, Archer supplied “the scheme of a twaddling cup-and-saucer comedy.”66 Shaw quickly used up Archer’s
plot in one or two acts and asked for more. Archer, priding himself on knowing
a “well-made” plot when he saw one, indignantly declined to tamper with what he
considered perfection, and so Shaw laid the fragment
aside. It was this he resurrected in 1892 when, in the humiliating national
emergency of having no great modern English drama to produce, he changed
Archer’s “sympathetically romantic ‘well-made play’ of the Parisian type then
in vogue” into “a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism, municipal
jobbery, and the pecuniary and matrimonial ties between them and the pleasant
people with ‘independent’ incomes who imagine that such sordid matters do not
touch their own lives.”67 In revising
the play Shaw demonstrated the difference between Archer’s method of imposing a
mechanical plot construction on a play and true storytelling that follows
naturally from interesting, credible characters; Shaw allows Trench, the
central character, to engage in an action that relentlessly exposes the
complicity of all in tainted money. The play does not advocate socialism, however, though socialism is, of
course, a possible remedy for the social ills portrayed. Despite the fact that
socialism, if mentioned at all in Shaw’s plays, is usually satirized, Shaw
would spend the rest of his life living down a reputation as a purely political
dramatist—a reputation based on a few early plays that lean slightly in that
direction—though sometimes he perversely reveled in the misunderstanding.
Shaw was equally
misunderstood on the subject of Ibsen and his individualism. The Quintessence of Ibsenism
had correctly portrayed Ibsen as an ironist who undercut all programs,
liberal or conservative, the quintessence of his moral position being that
there was no quintessence, that is, no easy formula for deciding moral
questions, for the human will being constantly in growth cannot be judged today
on standards set yesterday, nor can the individual be judged by group
standards. But many people still felt that there was a definite Ibsen doctrine,
and so in Shaw’s next play, The
Philanderer, set during the first vogue of Ibsen in London
after 1889, he lightly mocked both sham Ibsenism and Ibsenite enthusiasms. The plot has mainly to do with the
efforts of Leonard Charteris, philanderer, to escape
an old flame, the possessive, passionately jealous, and very womanly Julia
Craven, by proposing marriage to a new flame and a New Woman, Grace Tranfield, with frustrating results. Charteris
is supposedly a confessed self-portrait, based on Shaw’s difficulties in
shedding the possessive Jenny Patterson, who stalked him about
Mrs. Warren’s Profession was the best of the Unpleasant Plays,
presenting two very powerful characters. In their conflict, Mrs. Warren and her
daughter, Vivie, have the sort of intellectual scope
and emotional force that one came to expect from Shaw. In the year of the great
success of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Shaw one-upped Pinero by
creating “a woman with a past” who was allowed to speak for herself rather than
having words put into her mouth. And yet the triumph went unnoticed because the
censor kept the play out of the theater.
The story is that
of Vivie Warren’s gradual realization of the source
of her mother’s income and thus of her support through her many years of higher
education. It seems her mother, to escape a life of extreme poverty and
hardship, took to prostitution as a young girl, becoming through perseverance,
thrift, and the exercise of managerial skills the owner and operator of a
successful and humanely run chain of European brothels, heavily invested in by
respectable types, and she feels that she has no apologies to make and that
there is no need to retire as a businesswoman, prostitution being the universal
condition in a capitalist system. Vivie goes through
a bitter disillusionment at the discovery of universal complicity in “tainted”
money, but she does not end believing in Trench’s complacent “letting be.”
Without condemning her mother, she nevertheless chooses to live a separate,
self-supporting life.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession attacks
several different kinds of social idealism—marital, parental, religious,
aesthetic, romantic, and so on—but the attack on them is not really the heart
of the play.69 The principal action of this, as well as many
other Shaw plays to come, is essentially psychological: one character, usually
a younger person, a potential Realist in mind-set, is taught a lesson by
another character, usually an older person, who may or may not be aware of what
is being taught; and the result is, first, disillusionment, second,
enlightenment, and, third, a growth in spirit that allows the evolving
character to better realize his or her authentic self. Here Mrs. Warren, rather
unawares, is the principal catalyst in the development of Vivie,
as Vivie experiences a death of the old Idealist self
and is reborn as an incipient Realist. Despite many relapses to Victorian
womanhood, Vivie’s genuine Realist self emerges from
a series of painful disillusionments, strengthened for the final break with her
mother. One test of the would-be Realist is in the ability to assert
independence from parental authority and to escape the drug of romance. Vivie passes the test, but one wonders if the work of
actuarial accountant is really appropriate to one who sees that prostitution is
a universal, inescapable condition of modern employment. She seems curiously
uncommitted, as cutting off parent and suitor only leaves her in a vacuum.
Leaving Vivie with nothing very worthwhile to do with
her new soul may, however, express the problematic nature of becoming a Realist.
Shaw’s Unpleasant
Plays were largely unproduceable at the time. Widowers’ Houses received only two
performances at first (at the Royalty Theatre in 1892) by J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre
Society. This private, semiprofessional society labored from 1891 to 1898 to bring modern drama to the theater,
specializing in Ibsen’s plays. It operated in provincial towns as well,
particularly
Shaw’s effort from the beginning, following from the theory of The Quintessence of Ibsenism,
was to convert the power of the theater to the service of the realistic
imagination. Shaw saw the idealistic or romantic imagination as doing great
mischief, with its visions of women as domestic angels, marriages as made in
heaven, and gloriously ennobling cavalry charges as proving grounds for manly
men. The romantic imagination, he said, “begins in
silly and selfish expectations of the impossible, and ends in spiteful
disappointment, sour grievance, cynicism, and misanthropic resistance to any
attempt to better a hopeless world.”70 Appropriately, in Shaw’s cosmology hell is the paradise
of the idealistic imagination and heaven is the home of “the masters of
reality.” As a drama critic Shaw found the nineteenth-century theater,
exclusive of Ibsen, a hell on earth because it was steeped in the romantic
imagination, and thus he strove to discredit that drama and replace it with one
that looked realistically at life.
At first Shaw
imagined that his task was to engage his audience in a relatively direct confrontation,
to rub their noses in “unpleasantness,” to make people see the “social horrors”
that “arise from the fact that the average homebred Englishman, however
honorable and good-natured he may be in his private capacity, is, as a citizen,
a wretched creature who, whilst clamoring for a gratuitous millennium, will
shut his eyes to the most villainous abuses if the remedy threatens to add
another penny in the pound to the rates and taxes which he has to be
half-cheated, half-coerced into paying.”71 As Martin Meisel argues, Shaw’s strategy was to make
audience-surrogates of the most self-righteous, honorable, and seemingly
blameless characters, who might serve as raisonneurs in more
conventional plays, and then to allow the action of the play to overwhelm these
“good” people with taint and sin. “Shaw’s point is the inescapable complicity
of all members in the social crime.”72 As Shaw said in The Quintessence, the Idealist is
villainous only “by virtue of his determination to do nothing wrong,”72 and so Shaw would not allow
his audience to treat the Idealist as a villain—that is, as a scapegoat who
excuses the audience from complicity and responsibility—but rather forced them
to see the Idealist as a person much like themselves. Shaw allowed his
characters who represented popular social idealisms the forceful expression of
their own points of view “so that by justifying and explaining themselves they
will send their audience home radically discontented with a society in which
such justification is not only possible but logically impeccable.”74
In
the four plays of Plays
Pleasant—Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1895), The
Man of Destiny (1895), and You Never Can Tell (1896)—Shaw changed his strategy and with
it his conception of himself as a playwright and his notion of how best he
could convert the powers of the theater to the service of the realistic
imagination. He began “to write plays
which, dealing less with the crimes of society, and more with its romantic
follies and with the struggles of individuals against those follies, may be
called, by contrast, Pleasant.75
As Meisel sums it up, the shift from Unpleasant to
Pleasant was a shift “from the social institution, overwhelming individual
compunction, to the private imagination, accessible to grace. . . . The shift
in attention from social crime to romantic folly, from the public institution
to the private imagination, was for Shaw an easy shift from effect to cause.”76 But the shift was only one of emphasis,
not a complete change of character. Meisel points
out, for instance, how the “social crimes” of the Unpleasant Plays are
paralleled by the “human follies” of the Pleasant Plays. Both Candida and Mrs.
Warren are examples of the strong woman who manages a house, but they represent
the mentionable and the unmentionable sides of “the woman question.” Mrs.
Warren was faced with the unpleasant choice of becoming a prostitute or dying
in spirit and body, whereas Candida must choose between the much more pleasant
alternatives of comfortable domesticity with her husband and Marchbank’s romantic idolatry. And so, as an emphasis on
crimes is replaced by an emphasis on follies, and as an emphasis on the ill
effects of social problems is replaced by an emphasis on the search for causes
within individuals, the audience of the Pleasant Plays is more entertained and
made to feel less uneasy. But the strategy simply sets a subtler trap. As Meisel puts it, “Shaw charms us with his heterodox
individuals and amuses us with the orthodox so that we will feel sympathetic to
the heterodox and superior to the orthodox.”77 But that works to the same end as in
the Unpleasant Plays—that of converting the power of the theater to the service
of the realistic imagination. The object now is not to dwell on the negatives
of idealism’s crimes but to emphasize the positive by showing us the
attractions of realism. We are to evolve more through aspiration than through
repulsion.
Arms and the Man, first presented
by Florence Farr (with secret backing from Miss Horniman)
at the Avenue Theatre in 1894, along with Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire, in
its fifty performances gave Shaw his first commercial success, proving that it
paid to be pleasant. It was also the first Shaw play to be seen in
A greater play is Candida (I895), though it too was
sometimes admired for the wrong reasons. It received its first public performance in 1904, with private performances
in I897 and I900. Taking his cue from Morris, Burne-Jones, and other
Pre-Raphaelites, whose “medievalism” suggested to Shaw that “religion was alive
again, coming back upon men, even upon clergymen, with such power that not the
Church of England itself could keep it out,”78 Shaw attempted in Candida a modern mystery play on the subject of the Madonna,
his modern Madonna also representing the questionable Victorian ideal of the
angel in the house. Shaw’s Madonna is a very charming woman in her thirties
named Candida, wife of Rev. Morell, confident and
successful spokesman for Christian socialism. When Candida brings home, as she
would a waif or a stray dog, a young poet of rather puny aspect named Marchbanks, she falls prey to Marchbank’s
romantic idealization of her (even as the Madonna is an idealization) and finds
herself adored by him. The ebb and flow of the play lies in the contest between
Morell and Marchbanks for Candida’s love, and the surprise lies in the realization
that her choice of Morell as “the weaker” implies
that she knows her husband’s strength is only apparent, that he is really the
sort who is dependent on the “woman as mother.”
“To distill the
quintessential drama from pre-Raphaehtism, medieval
or modern,” Shaw wrote, “it must be shewn at its best
in conflict with the first broken, nervous, stumbling attempts to formulate its
own revolt against itself as it develops into something higher.” In Marchbanks “was the higher but vaguer and timider vision, the incoherent, mischievous, and even
ridiculous unpracticalness, which offered me a
dramatic antagonist for the clear, bold, sure, sensible, benevolent, salutarily shortsighted Christian Socialist idealism” of
Morell.79
Candida appears to lend itself
well to the character typing of The
Quintessence, with Morell as Idealist,
Candida as Philistine, and Marchbanks as incipient
Realist (though they experience inner conflict as well, with the types as
warring psychic principles).80
Rather bored by poetry herself, Candida is the sort of woman young men like Marchbanks write poetry about. Immaturely succumbing to
idealism, the poet transmutes Candida (as the Virgin Mary had been transmuted)
into something she is not. The critics, equally charmed by her “maternal
wisdom,” have done the same, so much so that Shaw ridiculed them as Candidamaniacs. The clue to Candida’s
basic philistinism is in her name—candida is Latin for “yeast,” that common
element without which the bread of life is flat. Shaw may even have had the
maternal condition in mind (as in “Metaphors” Sylvia Plath speaks of the
“yeasty rising” of her pregnant self). The point of the play is that however
essential to life bread is, poets like Marchbanks cannot live by bread alone, his idealization of
Candida indicative of his aspiring spirit, however misguided. The hot baked
bread of domestic bliss—which is the husband’s ideal of marriage and the
illusion the Philistine wife works hard to maintain—is not sufficient food for
the artist-Realist, whose real craving is for spiritual sustenance.
The play questions
the artist’s relation to domestic reality, answering by its action that the
artist is not so unlike others that he isn’t tempted to live within “the castle
of comfort, indulgence, and love.” Later, in the person of John Tanner, he will
succumb to it (as Shaw himself did in his 1898 marriage); but while young and
vigorous he imagines himself compelled to leave the castle to live a harder
life in the service of the Life Force. He is thought “mad” for doing so, as
many other Shaw characters are thought mad for trying to live beyond bourgeois
notions of happiness. But Shaw thought the sanity of art consisted in just such
madness, for divine creativity is the product not of the satisfied but the
dissatisfied.
The title of
Shaw’s next play, The Man of Destiny
(1895), suggests that the destiny Marchbanks
seeks in the dark of the night will have some light shed on it, but curiously
this relative trifle of a play fails to deliver. Shaw’s search for an
embodiment of the new heroism of the Realist led him to think of Napoleon
Bonaparte; but the plot concerning the interception by a strange lady of
letters incriminating young Napoleon’s wife in illicit affairs with a high
government official, while conveying something of a realistic handling of the
situation (Napoleon contrives to ignore the letters for the sake of his
advancement), displays more a pragmatic ambition than a visionary realism. Shaw
subtitled the play A TrifIe, and dismissed it as “hardly more than a
bravura piece to display the virtuosity of the two principal performers” (Shaw
had hopes that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry would play the roles).81 It was privately performed in 1897 and
1901, and its first public
performance was in 1907.
You Never Can Tell (1896), Shaw
said, was "an attempt to comply with the many requests for a play in which
the much paragraphed 'brilliancy' of Arms and the Man should be tempered by
some consideration for the requirements of managers in search of fashionable
comedies for West End theatres. I had no difficulty in complying, as I have
always cast my plays in the ordinary practical comedy form in use at all the
theatres; and far from taking an unsympathetic view of the popular preference
for fun, fashionable dress, a little music, and even an exhibition of eating
and drinking by people with an expensive air, attended by an if-possible-comic
waiter, I was more than willing to shew that the
drama can humanize these things as easily as they, in the wrong hands, can
dehumanize the drama."82
Shaw here
temporarily abandons the attempt to invent a new heroic type in favor of
presenting an ensemble of “advanced” types in conflict with each other and with
conventional thinking, a foreshadowing of his later discussion plays. The story
finds Mrs. Clandon, an authoress of “advanced” views,
returning to
You Never Can Tell was aimed
directly at commercial success, which it achieved many times in its career
(most recently in Broadway and Shaw Festival productions in 1986 and 1988), but
it began disastrously. Written for and accepted in 1897 by Cyril Maude at the
Haymarket Theatre, the play was withdrawn by Shaw because of rehearsal troubles
and had to wait until 1900 for its first public performance. But Shaw’s
frustration was to the greater glory of both himself
and dramatic literature, for the play’s aborted production caused him to
resolve henceforth to avail himself fully of his literary powers to put his
plays before the public in his own way and, through publication, to guard
against stage misrepresentation. The 1898 publication of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant saw
not only the beginnings of the most delightfully readable stage directions of
any playwright but also the institution of the new art of the Shavian preface,
which soon became a growth industry. Declaring that the preface gave him the
advantage over Shakespeare of being able to provide an “intellectually coherent
drama” and “to pursue a genuinely scientific method in ... studies of character
and society,”83 Shaw
matched his plays with commentaries that informed as we would give our eye
teeth to be informed about Shakespeare’s plays. But the prefaces were deceiving
as well, for they were less explanations of plays than
tangential afterthoughts and occasional polemics that really stood
independently from the plays. More than one unsuspecting critic has gone awry
by taking Shaw’s commentary at face value, it being just as artful and
figurative in its own way as are the plays.
In
1901 Shaw published his second volume of plays, Three Plays for Puritans, containing The Devil’s Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), and Captain Brassbound’s
Conversion (1899). Its preface finds Shaw tacking a bit, clarifying
what he meant by “pleasantness.” Pleasantness does not mean
“pleasure-mongering,” that is, sacrificing the theater’s powers of edification
to an all-consuming sensuality, the result of theater managers trying to please
everybody with a false idea of what was pleasing. They assumed that what was
pleasing was nice to look at—sumptuous sets, voluptuous leading ladies,
handsome leading men, with everyone exceedingly well dressed and involved in a
“gorgeous stage ritual”—and, most pleasing of all, untroubling
to the mind. “Even Shakespeare was played with his brains out,” said Shaw. In
all sorts of plays Shaw found “the same intentional brainlessness, founded on
the same theory that the public did not want brains, did not want to think, did
not want anything but pleasure at the theatre.”84 Shaw agreed that this was true of a certain segment of
the public, who preferred the music hall anyway, but it was also true that this
mindless pleasure-mongering had driven out of the theater a large segment of
the population, who, being English and “Puritanical,” would only go to the
theater if the theater were edifying and earnest about saving its soul. Ibsen
succeeded with this segment because for the old Scribean
art of intrigue he “substituted a terrible art of sharpshooting
at the audience, trapping them, fencing with them, aiming always at the sorest
spot in their consciences.” Following Ibsen, “the dramatist knows that as long
as he is teaching and saving his audience, he is as sure of their strained
attention as a dentist is, or the Angel of the Annunciation.”85 As these were the community-minded
people Shaw most wanted to reach, he called, only half-facetiously, for the
Puritans to rescue the theater again “as they rescued it before when its
foolish pursuit of pleasure sunk it in profaneness and immorality.”86 Shaw argued in a way that has misled
critics ever since (especially G. K. Chesterton, who described Shaw’s tolerant
and rather bohemian upbringing as “Puritanical”). Shaw wrote:
I have, I think, always been a
Puritan in my attitude towards Art. I am as fond of fine music and handsome
building as Milton was, or Cromwell, or Bunyan; but if I found that they were
becoming the instruments of a systematic idolatry of sensuousness, I would hold
it good statesmanship to blow every cathedral in the world to pieces with
dynamite, organ and all, without the least heed to the screams of the art
critics and cultured voluptuaries. And when I see that the nineteenth century
has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every
poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced
that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer
in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell’s major generals than it will be
if it ever gets into mine.87
Shaw is having fun here playing the Puritan
scourge of immorality, but he follows by saying, “The pleasures of the senses I
can sympathize with and share,” and earlier in the preface he had made it clear
that his disgust with the theater of sensuousness “was not mere thin-skinned
prudery. When my moral sense revolted, as it often did to its very fibres, it was invariably at the nauseous compliances of
the theatre with conventional virtue. If I despised the musical farces, it was
because they never had the courage of their vices.”88
Shaw’s “Puritanism” was severely restricted
to the area of art, and all he meant by it was that the highest art must serve,
indirectly, a moral purpose. There is no lack of sensuality in, say, Caesar and Cleopatra, from
the gorgeous stage setting to the pretty actresses and handsome actors who
dress very becomingly; but this sensuality is put in its place: the leading
character plays off against it for the moral purpose of showing how the Realist
transcends sensuality, not by denying it for himself, but by affirming that it
is not necessary to him, it is not the proof of his legitimacy as a hero, true
heroism being internal. Shaw did not repress
the sensuous and pleasurable, as Puritans are thought to do; rather,
he merely placed in the background what other playwrights and theater managers
had placed in the foreground. Shaw
humanized the sensuous and pleasurable by subordinating them to the presentation
of character and idea. In short, this preface explains how Shaw steered between
the Scylla of delight and the Charybdis of
instruction. He simply wanted it known that his “pleasant” plays were to be
edifying as well as pleasing, and indeed that the highest pleasure his plays
offered was the pleasure of creative moral thought.
The Devil’s
Disciple (1897)
illustrates well both Shaw’s play on “Puritan” and the pleasures of creative
moral thought. Set in the
Dick Dudgeon, the devil’s
disciple, is a Puritan of the Puritans. He is brought up in a household where
the Puritan religion has died, and become, in its corruption, an excuse for his
mother’s master passion of hatred in all its phases of cruelty and envy. . . .
In such a home the young Puritan finds himself starved of religion, which is
the most clamorous need of his nature. With all his
mother’s indomitable selffulness, but with Pity
instead of Hatred as his master passion, he pities the devil; takes his side;
and champions him, like a true Covenanter, against the world. He . . . becomes,
like all religious men, a reprobate and an outcast.89
The critics
were wrong to take “Mrs. Dudgeon at her own valuation as a religious woman
because she was detestably disagreeable,” and they were wrong to take “Dick as
a blackguard on her authority because he was neither detestable nor
disagreeable. “90
Shaw means us to see that where “virtue” (Dick’s mother) is mean-spirited,
uncharitable, and sanctimonious, and “vice” (Dick) is not only witty and joyful
but kind and generous, cruel only to dishonesty and hypocrisy, then obviously
goodness and badness have gotten mixed up. In such a backward world, the only
moral thing to do is to become a “devil’s disciple.”
Returning to the pattern of Passion Play, Shaw again
overtly associates his visionary realism with scapegoating,
becoming bolder in asserting both the dangerousness of and the endangerment to
the Realist in a self-deluded, morally inverted society. But there seems
to be something aesthetically awry both in the play’s miraculous ending, for it
seemingly betrays Shaw’s general undercutting of melodramatic conventions, and
in the way Dick accidentally turns up in the martyr’s role. Perhaps Shaw was
implying that the British had not only mistaken Dudgeon for Anderson but also
had mistaken who the really dangerous man was, Dick ironically being the right
man to hang after all. Even so, that accidental quality, compounded with the
melodramatic ending, suggests that Shaw was avoiding the realization, in art,
of his own kind of dangerousness and endangerment. In the next play, however,
the truly dangerous man is openly presented, he does not come by his
dangerousness accidentally, and his endangerment is entirely for himself, no
identity mistaken.
The background of Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) is to
be found in the daily
Following the style of King Leopold II of
In 1912 Shaw wrote a
prologue for his “history play” that made it clear that the Roman attempt to
annex Egypt served him as an analogue for current British imperialism. The god
Ra’s address to the British public compares Rome and England as imperial powers
who had undergone such an expansion that their geopolitical size dwarfed the
minds of those who attempted to run them, making it necessary for persons of
great mind and spirit to come forth and provide leadership. As the land that
Rome would conquer in Caesar’s day is ruled partly by a kitten of sixteen and
partly by a boy of ten and, plunged in intrigue and treachery, is headed for a
round of conspiracies and assassinations, ending in civil war, so the colonial
world of the nineteenth century, also in turmoil, is also childishly ruled and
in need of a steadying hand. Is there therefore any justification in the Roman
or British takeover of other countries? Shaw thought colonial policy
reprehensible in general; but, convinced that a world government was necessary
to avoid world catastrophe and presented with the inevitability of the
strongest nations’ attempting to realize that world government through the
pursuit of the likes of the Pax Romana or the Pax Britannica, Shaw
dramatized an alternative to that effort, suggestive of what thirty years later
would be instituted as the British Commonwealth of Nations. That is, the effort
of Shaw’s Caesar, never
mind history’s Caesar, is to educate
Caesar is principally characterized by
contrast with Cleopatra. They contain the same mix of principles in their
psyches, but whereas Caesar gave up brutality and no longer justifies it (the
pre-play murders of Vercingetorix and Pompey were
done for him, not by him), Cleopatra is still dominated by it, even sending a
symbolically brutish woman, Ftatateeta, to murder Pothinus; whereas Caesar saves his craving for Philistine
relaxation for brief moments when he can afford a holiday, Cleopatra is rather
more devoted to her creature comforts, which she maintains in luxurious style,
no doubt in anticipation of the arrival of her desired playmate, Mark Antony;
whereas Caesar’s idealistic posturing is confined mostly to making fine
speeches and romantically proposing at dinner to build a holy city at the
source of the Nile, Cleopatra’s imagination is largely possessed by the
idealism of queenliness and heroic honor—it is her
dedication to this idealism that causes her vengefulness against the offending Pothinus and thus her failure to absorb Caesar’s lessons in
realism. Caesar, in fact, stands alone in seeing the futility of vengeance, and
it is his independence from the moral system of his day that chiefly
characterizes him as the Hero-Realist.
Because of the considerable debunking of
the hero that goes on in Caesar and
Cleopatra, not to mention other Shaw plays, Shaw was once
thought one of the fathers of anti-heroic literature. Caesar’s baldness,
stringy physique, and rheumatism, his tendency to speechify, to be greater off
the battlefield than on, and out of bed than in, are certainly not traits of
the romantic hero, but to humanize the hero as Shaw has done is not to kill the
hero. Shaw in fact was one of the last defenders of heroism in literature,
seeking to rescue the hero by separating his essence from all the romantic
claptrap that had grown up around him. “We want credible heroes,” said Shaw:
The demand now is for heroes in
whom we can recognize our own humanity, and who, instead of walking, talking,
eating, drinking, making love, and fighting combats in a monotonous ecstasy of
continuous heroism, are heroic in the true human fashion; that is, touching the
summits only at rare moments, and finding the proper level on all occasions,
condescending with humor and good sense to the prosaic ones as well as rising
to the noble ones, instead of ridiculously persisting in rising to them all on
the principle that a hero must always soar, in season or out of season.91
The play amusingly displays Caesar as a man
of very definite human limitations, quite aware of his fundamental equality
with his subordinates, but nevertheless possessed of a visionary realism that
distinguishes him from the crowd. This delicate balance between human and hero
was not realized on the stage for Shaw until Forbes-Robertson, the man for whom
he had designed the part, took the role in 1907.
But Caesar’s unusualness derives even more
from the anomalous portrayal of a Roman emperor as Christ-like: magnanimous,
compassionate, peaceable, full of loving-kindness and democratic feeling, with
a strange combination of a child’s heart and a godlike wisdom, “dangerous”
qualities in a world that only pays them lip service.92 And in his great speech
denouncing Cleopatra’s doctrine of revenge, which is what the world really
believes in, Caesar is most Christ-like, and most endangered. Yet just as
Caesar seems most Christ-like in his vision of the futility of vengeance, Shaw undermines
the comparison by reminding us that Caesar, no pacifist, strives for the Pax Romana by
conquering the world rather than by letting it crucify him. Shaw
further subverts the comparision with Christ in the
final scene when Caesar accepts Rufio’s justification
of his execution of Rufio's assassin, Ftatateeta. “This was natural slaying,” says Caesar,
in a very un-Christlike speech; “I feel no horror at
it.” And so, leaving Egypt to Rufio to govern, Caesar
goes about his heroic business of trying to establish peace in the
Mediterranean world, even to “settling the Jewish question” on his way back to
Rome. Just as, beyond that joke, Shaw in his characterization of Caesar
has tried to settle the Jewish
question of all time—can one imitate Christ and still live in this world?
Shaw’s answer was—up to a point. Up to the point where one is
required to turn one’s cheek to an attacking beast like Ftatateeta.
Shaw implied that to allow the beast from the heart of darkness to triumph by
turning one’s cheek to it is mere escapism and death worship. Shaw seems to be
implying, in drawing his Caesar so near to the character of Christ and then
withdrawing from that identification, that Caesar represents a heroism a step
evolved from Christ, the difference being that between a full-fledged Realist
(Caesar) and a partial Realist (Christ), half in love with martyrdom, who
relapsed to idealizing death.
Shaw closed out the Victorian era with The Admirable Bashville
(1901), a joking, blank-verse adaptation of his novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, done to
secure copyright in England (after a pirating experience in America), and Captain Brassbound’s
Conversion (1899). The latter is superior to most of his early work,
but it gets lost between Caesar and
Cleopatra and Man and
Superman. Subtitled An Adventure
and set in Morocco, it focuses on the theme of the futility of
vengeance. The most remarkable character is the lady who teaches this futility,
Lady Cicely Waynfleet, illustrative of the feminine
style in Shavian realism. The play had been written for Ellen Terry, whom Shaw
had been trying to woo away from Henry Irving’s company to the cause of the New
Drama, but Janet Achurch gave the first performance
in 1900 with the Stage Society.
And so ended a decade of many more frustrations
than successes for Shaw. But
a new age was dawning, and it was
to give him an international stage for both his plays and the clown act he
called “G.B.S.,” as he tried to entice the nations from the path of war they
were so humorlessly treading.
Link to Chapter 3--"1900-1930:
The Triumph of the New Drama"