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From British Drama 1890-1950: A
Critical History by R. F. Dietrich |
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1900-1930: THE TRIUMPH
OF THE NEW DRAMA
The death of Queen Victoria in 1901, so soon after the demise of the
nineteenth century, gave a sense of conclusion to modern drama’s initial period
of the nineties; but the rest of the modern age does not so easily break down
into sub-periods. The Edwardian Age (1901-10) certainly had a distinctive character, taking its cue from its
fun-loving king and his flamboyant friends, but its drama was not significantly
different from that which followed in the teens and twenties. The Great War of
1914-18 divided two very
different cultures, prosperous prewar and diminished postwar, seriously
affecting the content of the drama, but the general British drama in its basic
forms and techniques was not much affected. In fact, a significant change in
the drama did not come about on a large scale until the thirties, accompanying
a change in mood brought on by the ripple effect of the American Depression,
the general failure of immature Western democracies to achieve social justice
for its citizens, and the rise of fascism in the world. Allardyce Nicoll, in his English
Drama: 1900-1930, has argued persuasively that although there are no
clear lines of demarcation, the year 1930 roughly marks a point in dramatic
history when one kind of motivating force in drama was nearing its
conclusion—most of the playwrights who achieved their first fame in the
nineties or the Edwardian age being pretty much finished by then, if not
before—and another kind was gradually taking its place.1 A few dramatists overlap ages,
and Shaw of course uniquely lasted through all the periods, but the years 1900
to 1930 will serve as well as
any in marking off an age of drama.
“The boundless grinding collision
of the New with the Old” that Carlyle saw marking the Victorian age continued
into the Edwardian age, but after Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 there was a sense that the New was
winning, though few suspected how cataclysmic would be the death rattle of the
Old. Or how hard it would die, for it is not dead yet. But at first there was
earnest optimism, especially among the young, about their ability to remake the
world. The conflict between Victorian and modern, insofar as it was
generational, led to the habit of treating anything “new,” “young,” “modern” or
“progressive” as inherently superior to their opposites. The old Victorians may
have had wealth and influence, but the young Edwardians had the weapon of
language, and with it they fashioned the term “modern” into a bludgeon to
pummel the out-of-date. Shaw pointed out the irony that the fads of the young
tended merely to be the resuscitated fashions of grandparents and
great-grandparents (“retro” we call it nowadays), his own plays being
revitalizations of forgotten drama, but many of the young were blithely unaware
of any debt to the past, preferring to believe that rebellious youth could take
on the whole of history and, in Ibsen’s words, “torpedo the ark.” Disdain for
the past was matched by enthusiasm for the future, which, though vaguely
envisioned, was energetically pursued—at least until the great disillusionment
of World War I soured some, persuading them that youth was better served in
“jazzing” than in social reconstruction.
This passion for reaching for the
future added to the difficulties of artists, forcing them to be at least
up-to-date, or, better yet, on “the cutting edge” of the avant-garde. And so as
Pinero and Jones mostly kept on doing what they had succeeded with in the
nineties, their drama seemed old-fashioned by the end of Edward’s reign (1910). For the next twenty years, realizing
his dilemma, Pinero occasionally experimented, rather unsuccessfully, with
nonrealistic forms; Jones, pretty much abandoning the drama after the war,
settled into a despairing sort of existence, occasionally exploding with
poison-pen attacks on Shaw, Wells, and others of the avant-garde, twisting
himself into a very unattractive sort of jingoist and flag-waver. Shaw’s fate
was the opposite. He had had the ironic good fortune to be censored and,
seemingly, suppressed in the nineties, which meant that though forty-five at
the death of Queen
By 1930 the New Drama, preponderantly realistic social drama but
including the Shavian drama of ideas, had triumphed to the extent that it was
widely acknowledged that a higher drama existed exclusive of Shakespeare and
the classics; that it was the legitimate heir to the heroic tragedy that had
been the nineteenth century’s standard for high drama; and that the lower drama
could no longer hog the whole of the West End. A sizable segment of the
audience was now too sophisticated, not to stoop to attending lower drama, but
to have that drama undisguised. And so the last melodrama at
The popular preference for musical
theater, Variety, and winter pantomime was for a theater much more entertaining
than edifying. In the Edwardian age, the music hall continued to dominate, as
it had in the late Victorian age, though now it was more respectable and
preferred to be called "Variety." The names of the theater idols with
the widest name recognition, in
Meanwhile, musical comedy also
flourished in the West End, developing from its roots in the Gilbert and
Sullivan comic opera established by D’Oyly Carte at
the Savoy in 1881, and the George Edwardes’ Gaiety
Theatre shows of the nineties, with their combination of spectacle, dance,
comic routine, showgirls, and stylish dress partly derived from burlesque. The
exotic orientalism of Edward Knoblock’s
Kismet (1911) and Oscar Asche’s
wartime smash hit, Chu Chin Chow
(1916), helped develop that
taste for what later would be known as “the Broadway musical” when
That such frothy stuff competed for
audiences with straight drama was cause for concern for the latter of course,
but one need not take too highbrow an attitude. The music hall, revue stage,
and musical comedy, however lacking in emotional depth and intellectual scope,
met the needs of an audience eager for such stimulus and cannot be said to have
failed the Dionysian purposes of the theater—they did revive, or at least prop
up, a population deadened by routine and convention. But their medicine was
only therapeutic, not curative. And so it is always cause
for despair when froth becomes the only fare, which came close to being the
case during World War I.
With the possible exception of
But, of course, this being an age
that worshipped the new, and popular entertainment, for economic reasons, being
most susceptible to fickle fashion, new technologies gradually did in at least
two of the popular forms—music hall and revue—as radio, the gramophone, and the
cinema, especially "the talkies" in the late twenties, stole their
audience. In an increasingly democratic age, popular taste and its craving for
novelty had more and more to be considered.
And so the major dramatists of the
period, though they could now command West End theaters, often found that they
had to accommodate West End commercial principles, as in the way Galsworthy
introduced elements of the well-made thriller into some of his plays, Maugham
and Coward “lightened” their comedies, and Barrie indulged in the
sentimental. In some cases, the accommodation was made for them: Shaw’s
anti-romantic Pygmalion was
given a romantic ending by Herbert Beerbohm Tree (called the last of the great
actor-managers and just as willing to “sell out” the playwright for the sake of
the box office as most of that breed). All too often the greatest successes
under the New Drama banner were slight, sentimental pieces such as R. C.
Sherriff’s Journey’s End (1928),
which rocked audiences with what was thought its tough anti-war look back at
the Great War but which strikes us now as very naive and artificial.
More hopeful in the 1900 to 1930
period was the modest, fitful, but steady success of the repertory revival and
the arts-theater movement (notwithstanding the setback of the Great War),
featuring, in mostly provincial and suburban companies, the many varieties of
the New Drama as well as the classics. This success not only forced the
Our period opens with a mournful
note at the death of the beloved queen, but many were in a celebratory mood at
the accession to the throne of the former playboy Prince of Wales, now Edward
VII, for it seemed to mean that they were “free at last” to be themselves, as
was the king after decades of leading a double life. Though the queen had been
less prudish than the age that bore her name, still she had not been amused at
the stories of Edward’s “sporting life,” nor had Edward’s long-suffering wife,
Alexandra, but the gossip had titillated and added color to the Victorian age,
promising a golden day for the young at heart when at last the prince would
become king and free all the slaves of Victorian convention.
Among the new king’s charms was
his love of the theater, in all its forms (as well as its actresses, in all
their forms). Victoria, as a youth and before her husband died, had frequently
patronized the theater, thereby contributing to the rising respectability of
actors and dramatists. But Edward was a dedicated theatergoer all his life, and
in knighting the leading artists of the theater, he encouraged the idea of an
aristocracy of talent. Immediately a prince arose to lead this new aristocracy,
but Shaw so well disguised himself as a fool that few recognized him as that
leader. This Shaw was quite as irrepressible and fun-loving as the king, and
seemingly kindred in his rebellion against things Victorian; but his pleasures,
it turned out, were on such a higher plane than those of the king, who
preferred music halls to straight drama, that they found themselves at odds.
The king never quite understood that Shaw’s jesting aimed to show that the
Edwardian spirit, however welcome as an antidote to life-denying Victorian
ideals, was making a fool of itself in its abuse of its new freedoms,
particularly in its insistence on the privileges of wealth and rank, which
divided society into “upstairs” and “downstairs.” Shaw’s point was that
Edwardian self-indulgence, however understandable as a reaction, was not the
answer to what he saw as the perverted, ghost-ridden Victorian idealism of
self-denial.
“Court Jester” is aptly suggestive of
Shaw’s role in the years 1900 to 1930. With
the command performance before Edward VII of John Bull’s Other Island in 1905 (not to mention a second
command performance at No. 10 Downing Street arranged by Prime Minister Asquith
in 1911 for the newly crowned
George V), an official stamp was put on Shaw as a sort of “privileged lunatic”
serving the royal government, licensed to say outrageous things as long as they
were amusing. But that Edward and his cronies seem to have missed some of
Shaw’s subtler ironies and paradoxes, especially those aimed at themselves as
the real privileged
lunatics, adds another dimension—that of Lear’s fool, who plays not just to
amuse the king but to administer to his follies and madnesses
in their kind. And then, with Shaw’s reputation growing to international
proportions but his seriousness as missed or ignored abroad as at home—to the
end that the disregarding nations tumbled into world war, revolution, and
unceasing civil strife—Shaw began to reveal more and more openly that, as Eric
Bentley put it, “his fooling was holy” and that as a clown-prophet he was
playing “the Fool in Christ” to the court of world opinion in an effort to save
the world from its own savagery.3 The world responded as it usually does
with its wise fools—persecuted him at first, gave up when he proved right,
eventually honored and lionized him, and, finally, put him on its shelf of
dusty idols, treatment Shaw protested to the end.
But Shaw might never have reached
either that world court or Edward’s court had he not found favor first at a
much smaller court, the Royal Court Theatre, located in Chelsea’s Sloan Square,
well west of the West End. The Court has had a distinguished history as an
avant-garde theater; it was the management of Harley Granville Barker and J. E.
Vedrenne from 1904 to 1907, featuring the plays of Shaw, that set
the tone. The Court pioneered in replacing the old-style actor-manager with an
independent producer or director as leader of the theatrical team, a change
similar to but less extreme than the notion Edward Gordon Craig expressed in Art of the Theatre (1905) that the director should be the supreme
artist of the stage, with playwright, actors, and technical people all
subordinated to his single-minded artistic vision. Barker himself, ever
respectful of the text, did not go that far, but he
helped open the way for the Craigian style of
directing. For the moment in question, however, the Court provided the
apotheosis, not of the director as artist, but of the playwright as artist, as
Barker wisely allowed Shavian wit to captivate an audience eager to laugh at
its Victorian past.
Most of Shaw’s Victorian plays saw little
or no performance in the nineties (except in
But the “fun” of a Shaw play is
deceiving. In fact, Shaw acknowledged
that his plays were sugarcoated. Because, though part of the audience
might come to the theater to be edified, most came to escape reality, and thus
great dramatists are forced to be extraordinarily entertaining “in order to
induce our audience of shirkers and dreamers to swallow the pill.”4 Martin Meisel
has explained best how Shaw made his sugarcoating functional by having it serve
the purposes of his visionary realism. “Shaw does not cover his pill with an
unrelated sugar-coating of conventional drama. Rather he combines edification
with a comedy in which the conventions are themselves the butt of the joke, and
in which the fun relieves the spectator of an immediate obligation to damn or
say ‘Amen.’”5 The objects of satiric attack are the
dramatic and theatrical conventions as
embodiments of social idealisms. Because Shaw saw the theater as an
important social institution, central to the well-being of society, he was
attacking society in attacking the theater. Shaw exploited the popular genres
for revolutionary purposes, elevating them to high drama by creating what Meisel calls “genre anti-types,” which expose how the
conventions of a given type are humorously inadequate to account for reality and
are thus artistically unacceptable in their pure, unparodied
or uninverted state. Much of the fun for Shaw’s
Edwardian and Georgian audiences lay in seeing Shaw explode recognizable
conventions, conventions still played straight in other theaters, thus giving
Shaw’s plays a powerful immediacy.
All of Shaw’s plays to date were
partially parodistic exaggerations or comic
inversions of standard melodramatic or romantic patterns; unfortunately, we
have somewhat lost the key because we no longer know the plays they refer to.
For example, Mrs. Warren’s
Profession was the genre anti-type of two kinds of “fallen woman”
play—the courtesan play (featuring the vocational “fallen woman” in a usually
luxurious setting) and the Magdalen play (featuring
the domestic fallen woman seeking to “get back”), two popular types of
melodrama that tsk-tsked at prostitution or sexual
delinquency while secretly promoting its glamorous attractions. In similar
fashion, Candida was a
genre anti-type of domestic comedy, Arms
and the Man of military romance, Caesar and Cleopatra of the heroic history play, and so on. In
each play, Shaw systematically destroyed all the unrealistic conventions of
popular Victorian drama.
The purpose of Shaw’s satiric
attack on dramatic and theatrical conventions was to get at the larger social
and moral conventions of which they were a part, conventions created by the
general habit of mind he called “idealism,” which dehumanized behavior by
mechanizing it, reducing idealists to knee-jerk ideological purity. If
society was ever to reach a high state of civilization, fit for fully evolved
human beings capable of thoughtful and felt moral responses, a forum had to be
found for the reinforcement of the Realist vision. That forum, for Shaw, was
the theater, whereby idealism could be overcome through immersion in a dramatic
action of disillusionment, and realism made attractive in a portrayal of its
fruitful enlightenment. And the specific medium he devised for realizing
Realist (or Superman) potential was a “drama of ideas,” the drama that aims to
change minds.
THE DRAMA OF IDEAS
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Shaw never abandoned the technique of
generating comedy from the creation of genre anti-types, but he sought to
create a new genre of his own as well, variously called “The Drama of Ideas” or
“The Discussion Play,” in which he flaunted his difference from the old
Theatrical Theater in its emphasis on plot.
Drama had become so patterned that
most plays had little or no content, thereby leaving out the ingredient that
makes the pattern significant. Shaw’s emphasis on ideas was a strategy of
overstatement designed to force playwrights to bring content back into drama.
Unfortunately it led some inattentive critics to assume that Shaw’s dramas of
ideas were all content
and therefore simply essays in disguise or political or economic tracts, which
is hardly the case. As Shaw explained, “there is only one way of dramatizing an
idea, and that is by putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea,
yet none the less a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin
and interesting to us.”6 When, for example, some critics
dismissed Mrs. Warren’s Profession
as a mere essay in economics, Shaw replied that his play “is no mere
theorem, but a play of instincts and temperaments in conflict with each other,”
and he later asked, “Would anyone but a buffleheaded
idiot of a university professor, half crazy with correcting examination papers,
infer that all my plays were written as economic essays, and not as plays of
life, character, and human destiny like those of Shakespear
[sic] or Euripides?”7
Much of the misunderstanding
derived from the critics’ clinging to an old-fashioned faculty psychology,
which divided “cold reason” from “warm passion,” as though the brain, bathed in
blood, was not the source of both. Shaw’s understanding of the brain as the
seat of the passions, including moral thinking as the highest of the passions,
was more akin to our own. Martin Meisel explains how
Shaw’s advanced view of the workings of the brain contributed to his conversion
of nineteenth-century drama into modern drama. “No aspect of Shaw’s
accomplishment . . . was more important than his creation of a modern . . .
rhetorical drama of impassioned ideas, . . . created .
. . from the refractory materials and traditions that came to his hand. The
rhetorical drama of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a drama of
passions and sentiments, not ideas. It used language, like action, for the
externalization of emotion.” Such passionate drama “was thrilling, startling,
electrifying, beyond anything dreamt of on our humdrum realistic stage.” But
all too often the nineteenth-century form for this drama, such as melodrama,
was mindless. Shaw needed a way to embody ideas, and a way that would be as
thrilling, startling, and electrifying as the passionate drama, but it could not be as mindless as so much
of the passionate drama was. And so he simply updated the obsolete rhetorical
drama of the passions by treating ideas as passions, which indeed they are.
Thus, says Meisel, “Shaw was able to fuse the new and
the old into something theatrically viable, and to secure to this medium for
ideas both the superabundant energy of the rhetorical convention and its
superhuman expressiveness.” When his plays were criticized for being cold,
rational, and lacking in passion, Shaw replied: “Not for a moment will you find
in my plays any assumption that reason is more than an instrument. What you
will find, however, is the belief that intellect is essentially a passion, and
that the search for enlightenment of any sort is far more interesting and
enduring than, say, the sexual pursuit of a woman by a man.”8 Shaw’s impassioned drama of
ideas was anything but untheatrical. His practice was
to replace “the thrusts, ripostes, parries, and passados”
of the so-called Theatrical Theater with verbal fencing on an intellectual
plane, accompanied by appropriate body language, producing thereby a very
“athletic” drama.
MAN, ANN, AND SUPERMAN
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With Man and Superman (1901-1903), his first declared drama of ideas, Shaw went from being a major
playwright to becoming the playwright
of the day. It catapulted him to a level of excellence that he maintained for
twenty years, though he would occasionally stoop to lesser work. The play alone
is of considerable complexity, with ironies piled on ironies, but the
reverberations set off by its placement between two lengthy, complicated
essays—”An Epistle Dedicatory” and a “Revolutionist’s Handbook”—compound the
complexity.
The play involves the disposition
of the will of the recently deceased Mr. Whitefield, a gentleman of advanced
Liberal views, who has left behind a widow and two unmarried daughters, Ann,
the elder, and Rhoda. Ann is a “vital genius,” Shaw tells us, meaning both that
she possesses unusual vitality and that she is a genius at fulfilling it.
Fulfilling one’s vital instincts in Victorian society required duplicity (thus
all the pretense of mourning in the opening scene), and Ann has become a master
at bullying everyone while playing the dutiful daughter who never gives her own
will as a reason for doing anything. For example, she claims to be interested
only in fulfilling her father’s last will in the matter of who
her guardian will be (fatherless, unmarried females being expected to have
guardians, no matter their age). Whitefield’s old friend and Liberal colleague,
Roebuck Ramsden, had expected to be named guardian,
but the will names him as co-guardian with John Tanner, also a friend of the
family but a much younger and more revolutionary man, author in fact of the
notorious “Revolutionist’s Handbook,” which Shaw kindly appended so that we
would have proof of Tanner’s genius, and which Ramsden
angrily denounces as anarchist drivel without having read it. The early
conflict between Ramsden, yesterday’s settled-down
Liberal, and Tanner, today’s fiery revolutionist, would seem to identify this
as the youth versus age sort of romantic comedy, but that conflict eventually
takes a back seat to Tanner and Ann’s duel of the sexes, instigated by Tanner’s
belief that he, the Shavian Realist, sees through ‘Lady Mephistopheles’
“duplicity.”
The question is,
whose will is it that Tanner should be Ann’s guardian and thus forced into
constant touch with her? An eloquent Tanner leads us to believe that it
is entirely Ann’s will, as usual plotting behind the scenes to influence her
father’s choice. Tanner thinks that the object of her maneuvering is to get him
into a position where she can manipulate him for her own ends, such as to
approve her matrimonial designs on Octavius Robinson,
a young poet of hopelessly idealistic notions about women. Tanner jokingly
tells “Tavy” that he would warn him away from this “man-eater” if he weren’t
concerned for his own flesh. Rather belatedly it occurs to Tanner that he is the marked-down prey of this
“spider woman.” Leaping into his car, probably the first car to be driven off a
stage, Tanner heads for the hills, his Cockney chauffeur, Henry Straker, running to catch up. But the driver soon learns
that he is more “driven” than “driving.”
Arriving in the Sierra Madres,
Tanner and Straker are “held up” by an amusingly
quarrelsome band of Robin Hood socialists and anarchists and are invited by
their lovesick leader, Mendoza, to spend the night. Here the Wellsian New Man, Henry Straker,
reveals that a command of engineering principles is no guarantee of a command
of social principles, his readiness to fight Mendoza for the sake of his
sister’s honor (his sister Louisa being the object of Mendoza’s unrequited
love) suggesting an atavism. After the arguments subside and they fall asleep,
Shaw’s seemingly realistic social comedy is interrupted by an expressionistic
“dream play,” in which Tanner envisions a debate in Hell between the Devil and
Tanner’s ancestor, Don Juan, with interjections along the way from Mozart’s Donna
Anna, just arrived in Hell, and her father, the statuesque Commander, who
fought for her honor against “the vile seducer” but lost and who has just
escaped to Hell from the very dull Heaven to which he claims he was misassigned. The dream is appropriate to an impudent and
disruptive revolutionist’s play, for expressionism reveals the impudent and
disruptive truth that lies under the polite surface of bourgeois society. The
dream also provides rationalizations for the dreamer.
It is in this semi-Freudian dream
that Tanner discovers a philosophical justification for letting Ann catch
him—it is the will of the Life Force that the best women should be free to hunt
out the best men, so that in their mating evolution may proceed from man to
Superman, self-transcendence being the only hope for a species seemingly bent
on self-destruction. That settled, on Tanner’s awakening there stands Ann, who
has tracked him through Europe like Sherlock Holmes, proving that there is
creative intelligence behind that siren beauty. Later, in an Edenic garden in
It seemed that in reversing the
sex chase, female pursuing male, Shaw was as usual merely scandalizing
Victorian Idealists who dreamt that women were domestic angels despising
sexuality but submitting to man’s beastly impulses out of angelic charity and
dutifulness. Shaw did wish
to counter such idealism with a realistic portrayal of women as flesh-and-blood
sexual beings, impelled by their vital instincts to procreate, but that was a
relatively superficial point. A deeper point was made by his reversal of the
old Philistine joke on the Victorian ideal. The joke went that women run from
men who pursue for sex, but they take care not to run so fast they can’t be
caught; Shaw’s reversal put Tanner in the role of the “coy maiden.”9 That Ann catches Tanner is as
much a testimony to his penchant for leaving clues as to her skill in finding
them. (But the romantic "test of the hero" has definitely been
assigned to her. The chase is a test of her speed, endurance, and
intellectual acumen, qualities that make her a fit mother for the
Superman.) It was Tanner who planted the idea in Whitefield’s mind that
Ann should have a younger man as guardian—Whitefield’s will is thus Tanner’s
will, as well as Ann’s. So Tanner is a flirt (a "shocking flirt,"
according to Ann), though coyly pretending otherwise. As his sleeping
subconscious reveals to him in the dream, he’s perfectly suited for the fatherhood
she seeks for him and is as enchanted by the procreative Life Force within him
as she is.
But Tanner the philosopher needs more than procreative reasons for
marrying. Just as a recently married Shaw, contracted into a childless
marriage, was seeking to establish what purpose humanity had outside of
replenishing the earth with babies to participate in the Darwinian struggle for
survival of the fittest, so Tanner wants to know if he has any purpose beyond
fertilizing the Mother Woman and providing for her children. As a philosopher,
Tanner needs a philosophy to justify marrying Ann; the purely personal question
of his relation to Ann must be understood in terms of the universal question of
man’s relation to the universe. The dream provides him with a worthy reason to marry. The purpose of life is not enjoyment or happiness—the domestic
bliss of bourgeois marriage as propagandized—nor is it mere brutal
propagation and survival of the species; rather, the purpose is transcendence,
to push life to higher forms of expression in search of God.
Perhaps Tanner dreams of Don Juan
because, as a seducer, the don was the type of man who did not want to be a
mere instrument of woman’s procreative purpose but tried to use woman’s
sexuality for his own purpose—on one level, to find some joy in existence, but
on a higher level, to rebel against a stiflingly conformist society in order to
create a new and, one hopes, better society, one in which sexual relations are
conducted on a more open and honest basis. The don further appeals to Tanner’s
imagination, because, in Shaw’s conception, the centuries have made him
philosophical about sex, his libertinism now directed more at “free thinking”
than “free love.” As a rebel against things as they are, but now a seducer of minds
rather than bodies, Don Juan leads Tanner to a realization that the purpose of
the universe is growth and transcendence, to the end of life’s becoming the
omniscient and omnipotent God of theology. We are all experiments at godhead.
And so when a woman like Ann,
consumed by her maternal instincts, selects for a mate a man who is consumed by
an intellectual creative urge, that is source for high comedy, even “divine”
comedy, given the cosmic implications. Particularly comic is the fact that the
Realist Tanner romantically enjoys playing out the cosmic drama to the end,
intensifying the love agony to the greatest degree bearable, thereby almost
losing Ann. He struggles with his fate with such heroic resistance that he
leaves Ann exhausted and ready to give up the hunt. But the second she gives
up, Tanner immediately seizes her in his arms and proclaims his love.
Tanner is an amusing fellow, but
perhaps we don’t realize how much fun Shaw has been having with him all along
because he speaks Shaw’s own philosophy. The explanation is that Shaw’s satiric
attack is always aimed at idealism, and when Shavian philosophy becomes just another idealism, it too is ripe for attack. Notice how
Tanner, his head in the clouds of Shavian Vitalism,
is forever being tripped up by facts, as when he misreads Violet’s pregnancy.
Shaw once wrote that he was “interested, not in the class war, but in the
struggle between human vitality and the artificial system of morality.”10 The joke here is that the apostle of Shavian Vitalism,
a philosophy that champions the vital genius against the system, is the slave
of his own system.
The process of forming ideals, of
creating systems of thought, is crucial to the further development of the Life
Force, as it grows from ideal to ideal (“Take out the world’s pursuit of
illusions and you take out the world’s mainspring,” Shaw had said as early as
1896),”11 but comedy
results when man becomes so absorbed in the system he has created that he
forgets about life. Both are needed, life and the thinking about life. But babies first.
Man and Superman fulfills
romantic comedy’s formula for resolution of the sex duel in marriage, but the
love that conquers all here is the Life Force’s biological command, not some
ethereal blending of kindred souls, and the marriage that results is more
likely to be a debating match than a bower of wedded bliss. About
what you’d expect from a marriage that was, after all, made in Hell (as are
most marriages, in Shaw’s view), where debates between those of the hellish
temperament and those of the heavenly temperament seem to be the only means of
relieving the boredom. Shaw’s Hell is a realization of the utopian
dreams of the romantic imagination, presented to show what a crashing bore
self-indulgence and self-cultivation are when pursued for their own sakes. Hell
is the place where, as the royal Edwardians wished, one has nothing to do but
enjoy oneself, without the limitations of the body. Don Juan makes clear Shaw’s
preference for the heavenly temperament, which devotes itself to the pleasures
of creative thought in the pursuit of transcendence.
Among the many complexities of
this play, Shaw seems to be playing with archetypes of male and female,
archetypes derived from ancient religions in which the goddess of life, the
Great Mother, figures prominently. Shaw takes the traditional association of
the goddess with earthly fertility as he finds it, but he arbitrates the
antagonism between the goddess and the type of male who possesses his own sort
of creativity, an antagonism that may have led in history to the patriarchal
overthrow of the goddess. The outcome of his dramatic arbitration is to show
that both kinds of creativity, biological and intellectual, may work in
dialectical harmony, and that both sexes may possess both kinds. Shaw shows how
fruitful sexual dialectics may replace destructive sexual politics.
This play had a decidedly
liberating influence on sexual relations, making them more honest and open, and
contributed to freeing “respectable” women from the tedious pretense that they
were sexless in their motives. This liberation of sexuality was one aspect of
the invoking of the Dionysian spirit upon that cast of mind we call Victorian.
In subsequent plays Shaw interested himself in other aspects of the Dionysian
force.
Many
critics have noted how Shaw’s discovery of Ibsen’s Hegelian structuring of Emperor and Galilean (1873) reinforced his favorite dialectic
between “pagan” and “Christian,” Caesar
and Cleopatra being a play that attempts in the person of Caesar a
synthesis of those opposing ideas, Caesar providing, in fact, a more successful
embodiment of Ibsen’s “third empire” synthesis of life-affirming pagan values
and Christian moral idealism than Ibsen’s own Julian the Apostate. But Caesar
represents not only the
The professor of Greek who courts
Barbara is Adolphus Cusins,
modeled on the classical scholar Gilbert Murray, whose translations of
Euripides Barker was staging at the Court Theatre along with Shaw’s plays.
The play starts at Wilton Crescent, home of
Lady Britomart Undershaft,
“a typical managing matron of the upper class,” mother of three
children—Stephen, Barbara, and Sarah—who are supported by their absent father,
the notorious Andrew Undershaft, dealer of death and
destruction. In visiting the family from which he has long been separated,
Andrew first dismisses Lady Britomart’s idea that
their supercilious son, Stephen, is fit to inherit his business, but then he
discovers that his idealistic daughter Barbara and her scholarly suitor Cusins have potential for succeeding him. Barbara scorns the way her father makes
money, but after Undershaft points out that his money
has made possible her upper-class life, saving her soul from poverty, daughter
and father challenge each other to visit the other’s place of work to see who
is most effective at saving souls. First Undershaft
visits her Salvation Army shelter in the
A moral of many melodramas (such
as Boucicault’s The Streets of
London) was that “poverty is not a crime.” Hadn’t the saints
made poverty a virtue, along with withdrawal from a corrupt world in an attitude
of contemptus mundi? Shaw’s problem,
however, was not with long-dead saints but with the habit of non-engagement chary modern intellectuals had inherited from them. The
play’s action shows how even two of the more assertive of moderns can fall into
a habit of retreat and how easily these salvation shelters, romantic bowers,
and ivory-tower retreats can be subverted, for the crime of poverty creeps in
everywhere and forces one’s attention, destroying one’s splendid isolation.
And so Barbara undergoes something
like Christ’s Passion in suffering the loss of her illusions about her ability
to remain pure. In scenes evocative of the temptation of Christ,
“Mephistopheles” Undershaft subjects his saintly
daughter to the torture of seeing her most cherished ideals contradicted by
fact and tempts her with a seemingly secular salvation. He first exposes her
Salvation Army as an army without real power to save, for its acts of Christian
charity further demean and corrupt the poor and make them more passive in accepting
their wretched fate. And the more the millionaire gives to the Salvation Army,
the more certain is he of escaping social unrest and additional taxes for poor
relief. When the Salvation Army general accepts Undershaft’s
“tainted” money, the angelic Barbara believes she stands alone in the midst of
a very wicked world. Feeling the pain of an extreme alienation, Barbara echoes
Christ’s cry on the cross, “My God: why hast thou forsaken me?” And she
imagines her promised visit to her father’s munitions plant to be her descent
into hell.
Meanwhile, pulled in a different
direction by his aroused Hellenic passion for the Dionysian Life Force, Cusins suffers a different sort of abandonment, first to
the music of the drum-and-brass band (“Blow, Machiavelli, blow!” cries the
possessed Cusins to Undershaft
on the trombone), as the Salvation Army marches off to the all-London meeting
that will announce Undershaft and Bodger
(a whiskey maker) as the great benefactors of the poor, then abandonment to the
brandy of Undershaft, “The Prince of Darkness,” who
entices him to an evening’s disillusioning discussion. Forced from his academic
cloister and his romantic trifling with Barbara, the Greek scholar becomes
enthralled with the Dionysian spirit he senses in Undershaft,
though his Christian acculturation makes him still suspect that the cloven hoof
of the Dionysian is that of the devil.
In the play’s concluding scenes, Undershaft intensifies his wooing of Barbara and Cusins, trying to convince them that they can create the heaven
on earth they yearn for only by exercising, not abdicating, power; such
abdication is the Christian game she has been playing and the ivory-tower game
he has been playing, based on the superstition that the spiritually pure must
avoid the taint of all-corrupting power. For every human
relationship is a power relationship, and all money is “tainted.” As
Shaw wrote in the preface, “there is no salvation through personal
righteousness. . . .[They] must either share the world’s guilt or go to another
planet. [They] must save the world’s honour if [they are] to save [their] own.” And so they learn to face the world as it is,
for, as Barbara puts it, “turning our backs on Undershaft
and Bodger is turning our backs on life.”12
Upon visiting Undershaft’s
Perivale St. Andrews, Barbara and Cusins find it to
be not hell on earth but a model workers’ town run on very enlightened
principles, no poverty anywhere in sight. The “perfection” of this celestial
city is a qualified one, however, for there is something fundamentally wrong in
the fact that its well-being, like Barbara’s own, is based on the sale of
weapons and munitions. Further, Barbara is delighted to discover that even in
this workers’ utopia there is “divine discontent” and thus work to do for a
saver of souls, work she can now do without bribing the poor with bread or
promises of heaven. At the realization that God’s work can be done for its own
sake, Barbara become “transfigured.” As she cries out, “Glory
Hallelujah!” Barbara is described as having “gone right up into the
skies.” Somewhat less transported but still taken with the idea of attempting
to become Plato’s philosopher-king, Cusins bargains
with Undershaft to be his apprentice, hoping that the
humanely educated intellect he possesses, in league with the spiritual
ministrations of Barbara, can somehow civilize the industrial forces of the
world by “making war on war.” Undershaft’s steel furnaces can produce munitions to blow
up the world or they can produce rail lines and automobiles that facilitate
worldwide transportation and communication. The phosphates used to manufacture
explosives can also be used to make fertilizer to grow food. The terrible
ferocity of a blast-furnace fire, though conventionally imagined as hellish,
can be an instrument for the creation of “heaven” as well.13
A century before, in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley
had imagined the liberation of Prometheus, fire-bringer to mankind, largely in
terms of intellectual enlightenment. Fire certainly sheds light, but first and
foremost it is heat energy, like the heat of Undershaft’s
furnaces, the atomic furnaces of the sun and stars, the earth’s molten core,
and, most important, the furnace of the human body. Believing this last to be
the source of the creative force necessary to evolution, Shaw would have that Dionysian force liberated along with the Promethean, with
the caution that the Life Force can become a Death Force if it gets into the
wrong hands. By getting Cusins and Barbara to join Undershaft in running Perivale St. Andrews, Shaw hoped he
was putting the Life Force in the right hands. The three pistons, or “undershafts,” that Shaw supposed were needed to drive the
civilization of the future are represented in this play by Andrew Undershaft’s mastering competitive drive and enterprising
spirit, Cusins informed intellectual-moral passion,
and Barbara’s natural, spiritual passion for salvation through acts of
“brotherly love.” The dynamics of their interaction would produce sufficient
energy for transcendence as well as for maintenance of civilization. One
wonders if when Prime Minister Balfour sat watching this play he questioned
whether he or Asquith or Lloyd George or Kaiser Wilhelm possessed the right
hands for directing the civilization of the future. History suggests they did
not.
Shaw subtitled Major Barbara “A Discussion” in order to express his
exasperation with critics who were unable to appreciate his plays because they
did not fit academic definitions of the genres. The year before, John Bull’s Other Island (1904), though drawing distinguished crowds,
had initially been panned for being too discursive and had been declared “not a
play.” Shaw struck back openly in 1911 with Fanny’s First Play, in which he satirized various
critical reactions to his plays, especially that of the academic Idealist who
would not allow plays to be called plays unless they fitted conventional
models. Continuing his campaign in prose, in 1913 he revised The Quintessence of lbsenism
for publication, including a new chapter titled “The Technical Novelty in
Ibsen’s Plays,” declaring the Ibsen of the last scene in A Doll House to be the inventor of
“discussion” in drama, a technique that post-Ibsen playwrights like himself had
developed “until [discussion] so overspreads and interpenetrates the action
that it finally assimilates it, making play and discussion practically
identical.”14
From about 1904 to 1910, then, Shaw experimented with
discussion to see if it could be made the dominant element of a play, to see if
his drama of ideas could be, as in “Don Juan in Hell,” a drama of ideas
discussed. Whereas in most of his earlier plays action had produced discussion,
he now sought to put discussion first as a producer of action. The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), a
“discussion” of medical ethics, Getting
Married (1908), a “disquisitory
conversation” about parental relations with marriageable children, and Misalliance (1909-1910), a “debate” on the subject of how to
get the right people married to each other, are the major plays of this period
that illustrate Shaw’s attempt to generate action from discussion.
Though Shaw’s discussion plays are
crowded with incident, the incidents are not the merely mechanical working out
of an artificial complication of a sterile plot; rather, they follow naturally
from the characters’ struggle to grapple with important ideas. Shaw’s problem, then, was with inattentive
directors who, like certain critics, assumed that discussion plays were by
definition static, consisting of actors standing around declaiming rhetoric at
one another, just as bad directors turn Shakespeare’s plays into mere poetry
recitals. But good directors, picking up
on the “action cues” embedded in Shaw’s text, can produce an almost balletic effect realizing that Shaw not only imagined his
plays operatically, with roles assigned by “voice,” but visualized his drama of
ideas as a dance of ideas, with bodies moving to and fro to the rhythms of
argument, the beat of agreement and disagreement, attraction and repulsion.
When Shaw directed his own plays, actors found his rehearsal readings like
opera and ballet and fencing combined.
After the modest success at the Court
Theatre, Barker and Vedrenne moved their highbrow
repertory to the
Partly accounting for their
success, however, was the fact that the original Pygmalion production in 1914 had in common with My Fair Lady a perversion of
Shaw’s original script. Intended as a
genre anti-type of romantic comedy, the 1914 play production and later musical
tacked on a romantic conclusion. The well-known story of
Professor Higgins’s triumph in teaching Eliza Doolittle, Cockney flower girl
and slum dweller, to speak and act like a lady was meant to satirize the class
system. Shaw’s point was not just
that the difference between rich and poor is a superficial difference of
education and social training but also that the desire of the poor to be like
the rich in manners is mistaken, for Eliza’s transformation into a lady does
not constitute a transformation into a living, independent human being, since a
lady is as much a slave of upper-class convention as the flower girl is a slave
of poverty, both being mechanical wind-up dolls full of automatic responses to
social stimuli.
Shaw’s intent was to deromanticize both the myth of Pygmalion and the fairy tale
of Cinderella. In the myth, Pygmalion is a sculptor who, after creating the
perfect woman as a statue, so falls in love with Galatea that he begs Aphrodite
to give her life and then marries her when Aphrodite obliges. The Cinderella
story also involves the transformation of a young woman into something better,
with the reward of marriage to Prince Charming. Knowing the audience’s
expectations and ignoring director Shaw’s explicit commands, Herbert Beerbohm
Tree as Higgins threw flowers to Mrs. Pat Campbell’s Eliza at the curtain,
suggesting a romantic future leading to marriage. Said Tree to Shaw, “My ending
makes money; you ought to be grateful.” Shaw replied, “Your ending is damnable;
you ought to be shot!”15
Shaw’s play had made the point that a modern Galatea would not really come
alive until she determined to be, not a society doll, but herself, and that a
modern Cinderella would be more likely to throw the slippers at Prince
Charming, as Eliza does, than fit into his triple-A-size conception of what a
woman should be. Tree’s romantic ending made nonsense of all the action leading
up to the final parting of Eliza and Higgins, which in Shaw’s script suggests
only future friendship and, possibly, professional rivalry. Trees’s
ending returned Eliza to a master-slave relationship; Shaw wanted her not to
capitulate to Higgins’s male chauvinism, but to prove the miracle of her
transformation by going off to a life of productive independence.16
Shaw’s usual interest in the quality of change takes an
interesting turn in Pygmalion.
As a Fabian dedicated to the conversion of
The relation of male to female is
also a significant part of what Shaw was addressing. So much of the radical
change that was occurring was instigated by undereducated women, and Shaw as an
elder Fabian, surrounded at Fabian summer schools by young Fabians, the
majority of whom were women, saw how appropriate and true to life it was that
in his modern fable the male teacher’s real success consisted in making the
female student independent of him, and of the male in general.
But throwing slippers at male chauvinists
was Shavian understatement, as far as the times were concerned. The women’s
movement, particularly its drive for voting and legal rights, had been
gathering steam for twenty years and was now producing women who were prepared
to take desperate measures. The papers were full of sensational reports of the
violence attendant upon the suffragette movement, both against the women and by
them. But this was just part of a developing unrest among the disenfranchised.
There was growing violence in the labor movement as well, and a sense of
exploitation felt by colonized peoples was festering all over the world. The
wealth that colonization was bringing to the privileged “trickled down” enough
to make people supportive of national proprietary interests and of empire
building, making necessary a certain military vigilance; but the empire
builders were all, at bottom, small European countries, that, heady with the
success of colonial exploitation, were overreaching themselves with
nationalistic ambitions. With nationalism tied to highly competitive capitalist
adventurism, it is small wonder the nations began to eye each other nervously,
and not surprising that Germany, recently arrived at true nationhood and unpropitiously placed in central Europe, its seaports
farther removed from colonial territory than most and its empire smaller, began
to fear “encirclement” in the deadly game of international Monopoly they were
all playing. And so it took only a shot at Sarejevo
to trigger a German reach for empire, forcing other nations to ally themselves
in a war of containment. The lighthearted atmosphere in
Shaw had had premonitions of
catastrophe for some time. The Devil’s chilling speech about man’s love of
weapons and war in “Don Juan in Hell,” and the urgency of introducing the
civilizing Barbara principles and Cusins principles
into Undershaft’s munitions factory in Major Barbara, are clear
signs of Shaw’s growing alarm. In 1913, for his play Androcles and the Lion, set in the
time of the Roman persecution of Christians, Shaw imagined a character named Ferrovius, who in a crisis abandons his professed
peace-loving creed of Christianity to revert back to being a disciple-warrior
of the god Mars, as Shaw feared the nations of Europe were about to do.
During the war Shaw wrote a dark
comedy, which he later thought his greatest play—Heartbreak House, subtitled A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes. It tells
the story of the strange house of old Captain Shotover,
retired from the sea and now barely scraping out a living with his inventions.
The house is run rather haphazardly but charmingly by his voluptuous siren of a
daughter, Hesione Hushabye,
who keeps her dashing husband, Hector, as a pet, and who loves to invite
interesting people to visit, particularly if there’s some love interest.
Arriving first is young Ellie Dunn, later followed by her liberally idealistic
but improverished father, Mazzini Dunn, both invited
largely because Hesione wants to talk them out of
marrying Ellie to the supposedly rich but middle-aged capitalist Boss Mangan, also invited, who they think has been their
benefactor. Arriving unexpectedly is Ariadne, Hesione’s long-absent sister and the wife of Sir Hastings Utterword, known for his forceful ruling style in the
colonies. Ariadne is pursued by Randall Utterword, Hastings’s younger brother, in a forlorn and
pathetic manner, expressed in flute solos. As the guests arrive, Ellie leading
the way, each is met by confusion, neglect, and disorder, typical of this
charmingly bohemian house. So strange are the manners of this house that a 1985
production (at the Shaw Festival in
Martin Meisel
argues that the play’s manner is both the fulfillment of Shaw’s discussion-
play technique and its sublimation into another form. As a “fantasia,” the
play, in keeping with that musical term, is not restricted by formal subject
but, in playing variations on a theme according to the author’s impulse, drives
toward a conclusion that satisfies the feeling of the play rather than
logically resolving a prepackaged plot. This free development had been the goal
of the discussion play from the beginning, but here the technique of free
development also becomes the subject of discussion—the progressive stripping
away of pose and illusion. The culmination of the process is Boss Mangan’s cry near the end of the play: “Look here: I’m
going to take off all my clothes. . . . We’ve stripped ourselves morally naked:
well, let us strip ourselves physically naked as well.” Meisel
believes that in embodying the stripping technique of the discussion play in an
action, Shaw was moving “from an illustrative and discursive dramatic technique
to one that tries to give analogical form to the matter under discussion; from
a drama concerned with ideas set in a more or less real, contemporary,
country-house world, to a drama concerned with the contemporary world set in an
altogether fantastic realm of embodied ideas.”17
The story of how this play came to
be, and the circumstances attendant upon Shaw’s growing despair in writing it,
are most completely told in Stanley Weintraub’s Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of
Bernard Shaw 1914-1918.18 Weintraub
believes that the original impulse for Heartbreak House lay in Shaw’s sense that he had succeeded all
too well with his two primary objectives—that of Fabianizing
the young and getting them into the government, and that of rejuvenating the
British theater. By 1914 he was
acknowledged as both a major playwright and an important public figure with an
international audience. Having conquered, he was faced, at the age of
fifty-eight, with the temptation to rest on his laurels and subside into
contentment. And so, in Heartbreak
House, he has old Captain Shotover,
owner of a delightful country house architecturally suggestive of the ships he
once dangerously sailed the seas in, but now landlocked and domesticated,
complain of “the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness
that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of
resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.”
What caused
Shaw further despair was the feeling that his successes were not enough in view
of the malaise that was in the air. The old order seemed to long for its own
ruin, and the new order was dizzy with its freedoms. Despite all he had said
and done, the world seemed bent on returning to barbarism. Feeling old and
“shot-over,” his best shots fired, he imagined himself as this eccentric
eighty-year-old man, of Carlylean aspect, who wants
desperately to retire but who can’t find a captain to replace him. Most
disturbing to Shaw was the realization that too many of the young, whom he had
helped to educate and refine and liberate (as Higgins helped Eliza), seemed not
to care anymore about the larger world. The Fabians were turning inward toward
exclusively local concerns, and many bright young people seemed to be content
to drift, to be satisfied with the cultivation of fine sentiment, private
feeling, and happy love affairs (Shaw was particularly concerned with the cult
of sentimental personal relations among the Bloomsbury intellectuals, many of
whom where his friends or Fabian colleagues).
And so you have Heartbreak
House, “cultured, leisured
History records that many British
found themselves delighted at the outbreak of
The
turnaround came as the horrendous “body counts” and reports of military
futility began to reveal the full stupidity and horror of the war. The more
awful the war, the more attention paid to Shaw. “My reputation grows with every
military failure,” said Shaw.23
And, gradually, most of the turncoat “friends” came back. And others began
hailing him as a wise man. After the war
this former “enemy of the people” was treated as an oracle, especially as Leonard
Woolf’s Fabian plan for a League of Nations, which Shaw had so assiduously
promulgated, was finding favor with President Wilson. Shaw was even offered a
knighthood by Ramsey MacDonald’s government (the first socialist government) in
1923, which he turned down just as he refused the money from the Nobel Prize
awarded him in 1925, directing the money to be used in translating Scandinavian
playwrights. But they did not listen to his arguments for what would have been
a World War I equivalent of the Marshall Plan for restoring the conquered;
rather, the allies insisted on German reparations, which, as Shaw predicted,
led to the beggaring of Germany and the militaristic backlash of the thirties
and forties.
And so the peculiar tone of Heartbreak House (finished in 1917; staged in 1920) is due partly to its personal background—Shaw’s wartime experience of disillusionment with his intellectual progeny and his sense of failing powers. Weintraub finds in this a parallel to King Lear, a parallel Shaw explicitly drew attention to in his late puppet play, Shakes vs. Shav (1949).24 As Weintraub explains it, abdication is the Lear problem, but the abdication in Shotover’s case is partly the consequence of his own philosophy. He has preached, in Shavian fashion, that the golden rule is that there is no golden rule. The authority figure has used his power to see that there will be no more authority figures; he has raised two generations of children to be independent, as Higgins taught Eliza. Before the war, the thanklessness of children is seen as a positive virtue, as it testifies to their coming of age; but in Heartbreak House it is cause for despair, as the children of the wise father turn on him and blame him for the moral vacuum he has created around him. The ship of state still needs steering, but the captain’s specially groomed replacement, the romantically handsome Hector, is not up to the job. Hector is lost in dreams of heroism; like Troy, Hector is defeated from within. And the men who are eager to rule, Hastings Utterword, whom Shotover calls “the numbskull” for his single-minded devotion to forc