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1930-1950: WAITING FOR BECKETT
MURPHY’S ASHES: POETS IN THE THEATER
In Samuel Beckett’s early novel Murphy (1938), the hero in his
will asks of his heirs that his ashes be taken to the toilet of the Abbey
Theatre, Dublin, and flushed, “if possible during the performance of a piece.”1 With typical disdain, Beckett
pronounces judgment on the commonplace, superficial, literal-minded mimetic
realism that characterized not only much of the Abbey’s repertoire after O’Casey’s initial break with it but much of the popular
modern stage in general. As led by Beckett in the fifties and sixties, the
absurdist theater’s total onslaught against what Beckett called “the grotesque
fallacy of a realistic art” would be far more drastic than realism’s revolution
had been in the eighties and nineties.2 This chapter,
however, is concerned with what led up to that revolt—the milder and more
traditionalist revolt against realism that typified the poetic-drama movement
of the thirties and forties, a movement that could variously be understood as
an accomplishment in its own right, as something of a false start toward a
dramaturgy that transcends mimetic realism, or as a roundabout path to that
transcendent drama. The poetic-drama movement had two facets—the verse play
revival, and the attempt to create some of the same theater values as the verse
play through the use of poetic prose, symbolic action, evocative stage imagery,
and other nonrealistic means.
The long attempt to restore verse drama to
its former Greek and Elizabethan magnificence didn’t miss a beat in the modern
era, with Tennyson’s efforts of the seventies and eighties followed closely in
the period from 1900 to 1930 by
the verse drama of John Masefield, Stephen Phillips, Lascelles
Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, Gilbert Murray (in Euripidean
translations), and a host of others.3 Kept up in the teeth of realism’s growing triumph,
these early twentieth-century verse plays, often as imitative of Elizabethan
models as nineteenth-century efforts had been, did little to justify the use of
verse in a modern prose age; and though they had their enthusiastic supporters,
and occasionally produced a sensation, generally they did poorly at the box
office, seeming to the general theatergoer merely to manifest a cranky,
stubborn refusal to admit that verse drama was strictly a thing of the past.
Yeats heroically fought that judgment, and almost alone at this time produced
verse drama of much value, significantly by avoiding the strict imitation of
Elizabethan models and by creating a more modern look and sound. Yet Yeats
compromised his own modernism by tying himself to decadent aristocratic
traditions. Ultimately, too, his
language was less modern than that of the age’s, and so his drama often fell
short of the feel of relevance verse drama needs in order to connect with a
modern audience. But as Yeats was running out of time, hope for a great verse
drama revived in the thirties with the advent of, among others, T. S. Eliot, W.
H. Auden, and Christopher Fry, poets who managed a modernization of verse drama
that gave it greater credibility and a potential for development.
Unfortunately, with but few exceptions, the bright promise of this period for a
great verse drama has not as yet fulfilled itself.
Rather, from today’s perspective, the chief
hope for the revival of a poetic drama in the modern period lay, not with verse
dramatists, but with prose dramatists, such as Synge and O’Casey, who took the
path of matching a heightened, lyrical prose to a symbolic action and an
evocatively imagistic staging. In a time when the greatest drama was being produced
in Europe and
Symptomatic of the decline of realism at
this time and the accompanying urge for a more poetic, or at least
transcendent, theater were, among others, the plays of Priestly, Carroll, Bridie, and Robinson, minor playwrights whose contributions
to mimetic realism were sometimes tempered by a subversive experimentation or
flirting with other modes.
The Irishman Paul
Vincent Carroll (1900-1968) began
as an Abbey playwright in 1930, achieving
his greatest successes with Shadow
and Substance in 1937 and
The White Steed in 1939. Mostly realistic treatments of
small-town life among schoolmasters, clergymen, and the like, his plays,
imitative of O’Casey but without his strength and linguistic flair, offer
social criticisms against the intolerant stultifiers
of life and champion the crusading liberal intellectuals. In 1943 Carroll
joined James Bridie and others in founding the
James Bridie (1888-1951) was a Scottish playwright who
wrote in both realistic and nonrealistic veins, on subjects ranging from the
domestic to the theological, often with a strong moral or ethical bent, his
favorite recurring character being the devil. His first play appeared in 1928,
his first success—The Switchback—in
1929, and perhaps his best
known—The Anatomist—in
1930. A steady production
through the thirties and forties totaled about forty-two plays. In addition to
his role in founding the
The Englishman J. B. Priestly (1894-1984) was better known as a novelist and essayist, and as a public and
media personality, but he wrote over thirty plays as well. The majority were largely realistic but the realism was often
undermined by trick endings or by a philosophical- didactic strain that told
against the realism. His best-known plays, Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here
Before (both 1937), played
with concepts of time and space in a manner subversive of realism, and later he
attempted an overtly expressionistic style.
But still there were playwrights who seemed
perfectly content with the realistic tradition, such as the Englishman Terence Rattigan (1911-77), who even attempted to revive the
well-made play. Rattigan began a career in the mid-thirties with popular light
comedies, but in the forties he attempted soldier dramas such as The Winslow Boy (1946) and The Browning Version (1948). Most
of his plays and TV and film work date from after 1950 and seem old-fashioned
amidst the radical experimentation of the
time.
Back
The work of all of these playwrights, along
with the contemporary drama of Coward and Maugham (not to mention R. C. Sherriff, Emlyn
Williams, and a host of other minor playwrights), illustrates the taming or
watering down of realism, weakened partly by an ambivalent desire for things
beyond the ken of realism. But none of them were capable of the radical break
with realism the times yearned for. And so, unknowingly, they waited for
Beckett, the heroic spirit who would have the heart to do what Ezra Pound had
commanded the modernist artist to do—”make things new.”
Among the poets who did their damnedest to
“make things new” in drama, the most significant achievement was by T. S.
Eliot, and will be dealt with later, with minor accomplishments by W. H. Auden
(mostly in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood), Christopher Fry, Louis
MacNeice, and Charles Williams.
Auden
(1907-1973) and Isherwood
(1904-1986) were like perennial “preppies” in their dramatic collaboration,
more often having fun with private jargon and jokes than attempting a serious
effort to communicate a coherent vision. Though their plays had scant success (i. e., beyond a coterie success), their radical dramaturgy,
full of Auden’s cryptic poetry and nonrealistic, sometimes surrealistic,
staging, strengthened the hand of those wishing to break with popular realism.
For example, they provided the Group Theatre, an experimental group under the
directorship of Rupert Doone (disciple of Tyrone
Guthrie), material to conduct a revival of “total theatre”—a synthesis of
dance, mime, and speech. One famous double bill, in 1935 at the Mercury
Theatre, comprised Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes and Auden’s The Dance of Death, plays joined by a spirit of
revolt.
Auden had experimented in playwriting with Paid on Both Sides (1933), an
obscure verse drama in charade style; its particular subject was feuding, but
its more general subject was the spiritual and moral collapse of Western
civilization (his recurrent theme); and The Dance of Death (1933), a verse ballet satirically
depicting the death wish of the middle class in allegorical style, making use
of all the forms of “low” theater—music hall, pantomime, revue, cabaret, and
jazz band—to coney its anti-fascist theme. At this
time, the novelist Christopher Isherwood, who had known Auden since prep school
days and had kept up a friendship in their common pursuit of boys, fled from
his beloved
Of greater significance would seem to be
the plays of Christopher Fry (1907-), though
his detractors believe that it was impeccable timing that made them significant
at all. He arrived in the postwar West End with sprightly, vigorous, gorgeously
poetic comedies just when bombed-out
Fry was unique among the verse dramatists
of his time in that his training came from practical stage experience rather
than from the library or the study. He acted and directed with the Tunbridge Wells Repertory Players from 1934 to 1936, and he
became director at the
Although his recurrent theme of man’s
estrangement makes him akin to the French existentialists, Fry eschewed their
pessimism. While his plays are fully cognizant of the dark side of the human
condition, even suggesting that the Christian idea of Original Sin is a
metaphorical approximation of what ails us as a species, nevertheless Fry encourages
a belief in some ultimate rightness or unity in human endeavor, however briefly
and uncertainly we can envision it. He joined the Christian belief of his
childhood with the Shavian-Bergsonian theory of
Creative Evolution to form a precariously-held faith in Life; and in an age
when positivism presented a dreary picture of life as mechanical and
determined, Fry dramatized his intuitions of a mystery at the heart of
existence, one both mystifying and mystical, imbuing flesh with spirit, the
mundane with the divine, and chaos with unity. A wry acceptance of Life is
Fry’s norm, reached after much searching and doubting, typically after an act
of sacrificial love on the part of one character atones for the character who
makes the affirmation. This act typically occurs in a rather fairy-tale world,
usually set in the past, where freedom from realistic conventions allowed Fry
whatever improbabilities of plot and character were necessary to the
realization of his themes, his themes being ones of faith rather than logical
deduction. With such faith, Fry’s plays imply, one may be perpetually amazed at
how much marvel lies in the most humdrum of experiences.
Such themes found expression in a somewhat
irregular blank verse and a Shakespearean tone of romantic exuberance,
revitalized by strikingly fresh imagery and figurative language. Fry flaunted
his style. Using such verbal bravura, in the Elizabethan manner, as wit-combat,
bombast, exuberant invective, and punning, Fry audaciously proclaimed that
modern verse, contrary to Eliot’s theory, could imitate Shakespeare and still be modern. Fry had noticed
that contrary to Eliot’s theory, modern audiences reveled in Shakespeare
precisely for his utter abandon in plot and character and his outlandish word music;
Shakespeare was admired, not because his blank verse was connected with living
Elizabethan speech, but because his verse had so little connection with modern
speech, thus intimating a world beyond the horrible realities of realism and
naturalism. Fry fed the postwar hunger for a reaffirmation of such worlds with
an appropriate flamboyance and extravagance that compounded theme by tone, but
with such tragicomic finesse and acknowledgment of a problematic universe that
he could not be called unrealistic in his attitudes.
Fry’s detractors, accusing him of
constructing a mere “theatre of words” in which “pretty words” take the place
of viable dramatic action and character differentiation, found such verse
“distractingly autonomous” and “self-consciously literary,” full of “spurious
joviality” and “preciosity.”6 In a violation of dramatic
decorum, they said, all his characters sound the same—”even flat, stock types
use an extraordinarily rich, metaphorical language”7—and though four of his comedies were meant to represent
the four seasons, “April sounds
just like November.”8 Even worse
was the accusation that Fry “applied a grand style to trivial themes, ‘what one
might expect of Paradise Lost
if it were rewritten by
But surely a modern Paradise Lost (Waiting for Godot?)
would be legitimately quite different from the original. Further, Fry’s questioning of modern identity
and of the possibility of meaningful action in an ethical vacuum does not seem
trivial, nor does the overstated poetry and hearty manner in which he chooses
to ask it seem false to its context; in fact, that the manner lends itself to
its subject in its time is one of the defenses of Fry’s apologists. His
defenders reply variously that his detractors have missed Fry’s self-mocking
ironies and his prose counter-voice, that his language is an extension of his
theme, and that his “weaknesses” are really his strengths, for the autonomous
language carries a dramatic vibrancy that more than compensates for the lack of
conventional dramatic decorum. Critical consensus may not be possible with Fry,
but at the least the historian must acknowledge that in Fry a very remarkable
meteor shot through the postwar skies and considerably brightened a darkened
and despairing world. If nothing else, he reinstated the comic spirit in a
gloomy age.
Also worthy of note as verse
dramatists were Louis
MacNeice (1907-1964) and Charles
Williams (1886-1945), MacNiece
succeeding not so much with stage plays (Out of the Picture, 1937, being his only one) as with a series of radio plays written in
the forties and fifties, starting with The Dark Tower in 1946;
and Williams following Eliot’s lead in the writing of religious
plays—historical dramas for festival performance, such as Thomas Cramner of
Canterbury (1936) and
Judgment at Chelmsford (1939), and shorter plays on religious
themes, such as The House by the
Stable (1938) and Seed of Adam (1939), both Nativity plays.
Dylan Thomas’s verse drama falls outside our period, else much would be made of
the great loss to the genre’s development incurred by his early death.10
However influential such minor verse
dramatists were at the time, the verse plays of the most lasting value seem to
belong to T. S. Eliot. Even so, though
Eliot was undoubtedly a major poet and a major critic, it is going too far to
call him a major dramatist. The major dramatist of the period was,
surprisingly, still George Bernard Shaw, several of whose plays of his dotage
were as good as anything being penned.
In 1930 George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, believing that drama should again become an
ally of the Church, appointed E. Martin Browne as director of religious drama
for his diocese, and it was Browne who gave T. S. Eliot the opportunity and the
sort of production expertise the poet needed in order to find his way as a
religious dramatist.
There
had been a considerable dramatic quality in the poetry that made Eliot famous,
such as in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
(1915) and The Waste Land (1922). In addition, throughout the twenties Eliot
had written critical pieces on the theory of drama that suggested a desire to
try out his theory. Finally, the two
fragments that make up Sweeney Agonistes (1926-27) received a brief production
as a play in 1933. But this inclination toward the
dramatic received its chief practical encouragement from Browne’s commission to
Eliot in 1933 to write a pageant
play for a
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born
in
Excluding a year of study at the Sorbonne
in
After briefly attending
Eventually an editorship of the influential
magazine the Criterion,
in 1922, and an appointment
as director at the publishing firm of Faber and Faber in 1927 got him out of the bank job and into
more congenial work. In 1927 he
received baptism in the Church of England and became a British citizen,
afterward declaring himself a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics,
and an Anglo-Catholic in religion, presenting the paradox of one of the most
radical of the age in his literary forms becoming one of the most conservative and
reactionary in his social forms.
For many years Eliot lived with or near
Father Cheetham, rector of St. Stephen’s in
Kensington, and then in Chelsea with the paraplegic John Hayward. Vivienne died
in the mental hospital in 1947. The next
year Eliot received the Nobel Prize. Not long after, in 1949, Valerie Fletcher became his
secretary; it would take eight years for them to discover they were both
interested in marriage, which they entered into in 1957. As they traveled about warmer climes to seek relief from the
emphysema that would eventually kill him, she apparently made his last years
the happiest of his life, and she remains a sort of dragon guarding the Eliot
reputation, though his stipulation that no biographies be written has not
prevented them despite her lack of cooperation. Eliot’s desire to separate “the
man who suffers from the mind that creates,”12 while a laudable attempt to emphasize the work over the
author in an age when that was not common, seems nevertheless, in the context
of Eliot’s life, an expression of a “dissociated sensibility,” a condition he
himself diagnosed as a modern malady.
That Eliot should have been driven toward
the drama was perhaps inevitable, given his theories about poetry. He wanted
poetry to be “an escape from emotion”13 and the life of an artist “a continual extinction of
personality,”14 but
this appears to be more a rationalization of his own needs than an objective
account of things, for his own poetry is dominated by a subterranean
romanticism that contradicts his theory. Perhaps bothered by this contradiction
and seeking better means of escaping himself, he naturally gravitated toward
the more objective form of the drama.
In the drama, he also seemed better able to
realize his own ideal, as stated in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” of
becoming the means to express a tradition, however much his individual talent
might alter the tradition. The tradition he had in mind was part literary, that
of verse drama, but more religious, that of Christian salvationism.
The result was that Eliot’s drama has much less of the striking personal image
that characterized his poetry and much more of the objectivity and
impersonality he desired, to the extent that his plays at times seem to
illustrate the triumph of abstract theology and dramatic technique over
feeling, as sometimes the characters are less thinking and feeling beings than
enactors of a patterned, predetermined thought. Curiously, we find in Eliot’s
plays the old Scribean dominance of pattern over idea
and character returning to haunt the stage, as Eliot tries, perhaps too hard,
to become the stage craftsman.
Eliot’s formal achievements in reviving and
modernizing verse drama offset to some extent his limitations as a dramatist.
This traditionalist was one of the most extreme of his age in altering the
tradition to accommodate his individual talent. For example, while standing
firmly behind the tradition that verse drama is a superior mode, Eliot
understood that the dominance of Shakespeare (Shaw’s “bardolatry”)
prevented the genre’s revival. The tradition, if it was to live, must
accommodate the present. And so Eliot’s first experiment, in the unfinished Sweeney Agonistes,
was in the direction of eschewing Shakespearean blank verse and inventing a
verse rhythm and diction appropriate for the modern context.
As David Jones points out, blank verse may
originally have had a living relationship to Elizabethan spoken language, but
soon it became divorced from it as the living language, constantly changing, moved on while the form of blank verse stood
still. Thus the increasing air of unreality about verse drama
from the late seventeenth century on. “The vital tension of poetic
rhythm,” says Jones, “arises out of the subtle interaction of ordinary speech
rhythms with the basic metric pattern,” and that tension is lost when the two
are too widely separated. “Eliot saw quite early ... that the only solution to
the problem was to go back beyond Shakespeare to earlier forms of dramatic
verse and indeed to the root principles of English prosody—organization by
stress rather than numerical division into syllabic units.”15 The greater flexibility of a
stress measure would allow poetry to more accurately capture modern speech rhythms. In Sweeney Agonistes,
which satirizes the modern wasteland through the evoking of a heroic past,
the speech of lower-class individuals is caught in stresses that recreate while
parodying such disparate language as is found in popular jazz songs, telephone
conversations, music-hall routines, and banal, vacuous party chatter.
Eliot’s title is of course evocative of Samson Agonistes,
but in Sweeney we have no Miltonic wrestling with fate, only a dim and
rather inarticulate perception of the horror of modern secularized life, from
Eliot’s view drained of meaning and significance by its abandonment of a
spiritual dimension (fortune-telling being its debased idea of religion). The
second fragment shows Apeneck Sweeney, type of the
modern sensual man, responding to this horror with an expression of desire to
escape from civilization, not to a higher, but to a lower, more primitive,
sphere. Since
The element in Sweeney that led him in a different direction was his use of
minor characters as a chorus, expressive of communal feeling, for it was his
talent in writing choral verse that was particularly called upon and developed
in the commission from Martin Browne to contribute to the pageant play
eventually called The Rock. Browne
had written a scenario to order, based on a C. B. Cochran revue, and while
Eliot apparently made small contributions to the story line (he claimed that
only one scene was all his), he made major contributions to what was really the
most dominant character—the chorus, half-masked to emphasize its impersonality.
Written in aid of a church-building fund, The Rock made the building of a church in London its central
action, relating that contemporary event to the long history of the Church’s
struggle in England and to current events that threatened it (especially the
challenge of the rival but godless creeds of fascism, communism, and
capitalism), emphasizing that such building is essentially a spiritual
enterprise that encounters constant testing of the faith. “The Rock” itself,
first Christ and then Peter, reappears throughout to bolster the faith. The
pageant play is a wide-ranging, all-encompassing form, appropriate for the
occasion, but in its straying in time and space it sacrifices dramatic unity
and intensity, and thus did not answer Eliot’s desire to achieve a truly
dramatic voice. Concerned to provide links between episodes through choral
commentary, for the most part he either provided fairly pedestrian
descriptive-explanatory verse or verse that spoke of
the evils of the day in the editorial, haranguing voice of the preacher.
Despite his success with a more colloquial diction matched to a free verse
organized by stresses rather than syllables, Eliot was not satisfied. On the
other hand, the experience had introduced him to the practical life of the
theater, to its craft, and had made him known as one who could do good choral
work. No doubt the commission that came
next, to write a play for the
Experimentation over, Eliot in 1935 became
a full-fledged dramatist with the writing of Murder in the Cathedral.
Employing allegorical figures and obviously
poetic rhetoric and versification in the manner of Everyman, Eliot combined medieval dramatic techniques
with a full-throated Greek chorus to dramatize both the importance of spiritual
community and its periodic renewal, through martyrdom, after its
disintegration. In part 1, after
the threat of martyrdom to Becket is made known, Four
Tempters appear as allegorical representatives of inner temptations, offering
pleasures and worldly success and power. For the heroic Becket, it is the
Fourth Tempter who presents the greatest challenge, for he strikes at Becket’s
blind spot, his love of heroic action for the pridefulness
of it; Becket’s severest test is in accepting martyrdom, not for the personal
glory that comes with sainthood, but for the sake of fulfilling God’s divine
plan. In an interlude between parts 1 and
2, Beckett addresses his congregation on Christmas Day, presenting his belief
that he has made perfect his will by acceding to the will of God. In part 2,
after the Four Knights murder Becket ritualistically, the audience and the
chorus are forced to deal with the aftermath of the murder as the knights offer them a temptation to excuse the crime on
perfectly reasonable, modern grounds. Eliot’s point is that for martyrdom to be
efficacious, not only must the martyr accept his martyrdom in the right spirit,
but the mass of men who may be redeemed by it must also accept the act in the
right spirit, as part of God’s design for the world. In having the knights
address the audience directly, in their own terms, the audience is forced to
realize that modern assumptions about the primacy of state over church
automatically exonerate Becket’s killers, and thus the audience sharing those
assumptions is implicated in that murder. Redemption for the
audience-congregation begins with the admission of guilt. That was a very
effective bit of dramaturgy by an author who was rapidly learning his craft.
In Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot “has shown how drama can
still be an instrument of community in the two senses corresponding to its
original function as an extension of the liturgy and as an interpretation of
God’s word in terms of flesh and blood.”18 But Eliot would emphasize, contrary to
Shavian practice, that while drama of this sort can be a supplement to worship,
it is not worship itself. Eliot sought, not to replace the Church, as Shaw did,
but to bolster it by bringing the Church and its values to the secular
In 1936, seeking to break openly with the
naturalistic stage, Eliot spoke of “the necessity for poetic drama at the
present time to emphasize, not to minimize, the fact that it is written in
verse,” and so in Murder in the
Cathedral “we introduce rhyme, even doggerel, as a constant reminder
that it is verse and not
a compromise with prose.”19 But as Eliot became more interested in evangelically
invading the West End, to close the gap between secular and religious drama as
a means of cultural reintegration, he reversed his strategy, creating a verse
drama that would be unobtrusively poetic and apparently naturalistic.
Eliot’s final four plays, all placed in
contemporary settings naturalistically rendered, are dramaturgically and
thematically similar; he increasingly thinned out the poetry to make it less
obtrusive and employed popular literary and theatrical conventions for the sake
of spreading the gospel. It has been argued that Eliot’s attempt to claim the
West End for Christian drama ended in the West End’s claiming Eliot (just as it
has been argued that the conversion of pagans to Christianity is usually more
the conversion of Christianity to paganism). His use of the mythic method in
basing his plays on Greek models added to this ambiguity, though his intention
was to show how Greek plays could be understood as intuitions of the more fully
realized Christian scheme of things.
Eliot’s first starting venture in the
The war then intervening, it was 1949
before Eliot returned to the theater with The Cocktail Party, the first of the three plays to be
introduced at the
Edward and Lavina
Chamberlayne are at the center of the action, each
having betrayed the other with an adulterous relationship. Their friends have
been invited to a cocktail party at their place at a time of great social
embarrassment—Lavinia is missing as hostess because
she has left Edward on discovering that he has a mistress, Celia. The shock of
being confronted with his wife’s defection sets Edward on a course of
self-exploration, assisted by an Unidentified Guest, later discovered to be a
psychiatrist (the secular world’s substitute for the father confessor) and by
Guardians, Alex and Julia, who work for some sort of undeclared spiritual Red
Cross Society. Edward, Lavinia, and Celia are led to
an understanding that they have been imposing roles on each other that falsify
the self; they are made to see that given life as it is (“fallen,” in the
Christian view), one is faced with the choice of living an ordinary married
existence, making the best of things, or living as a celibate wholly devoted to
God. Realizing they are not heroic types, the Chamberlaynes
choose the former, returning to their old life but with a renewed spirit. At the end, two years later, we find them
preparing for a cocktail party that they will do their best to make a communion
of souls. As Celia chooses atonement and
the saint’s life, ending up martyred in
The
Confidential Clerk (1953),
another three-act play, went even further in suiting West End requirements—the
poetry is even thinner, the verse dialogue more conversational, the theological
message more muted, and the tradition behind it partly that of
mistaken-identity farce. The plot is too complicated for brief summary but
involves questions of misplaced and illegitimate offspring, with young people
turning out to have parentage different from what was thought. The point is
that one’s heavenly Father is the one to be counted on, and with a right
relationship to the spiritual Father, all other relationships fall into place.
The title puns on clerk and
cleric, the
confidential clerk (private secretary) hired by Sir Claude, one Colby Simpkins,
turning out to be, not Sir Claude’s illegitimate son, as they think, but a
young man with a legitimate spiritual vocation, that of a cleric; the action of
the play leads Colby to discover his true identity among the spiritual elect.
The Elder
Statesman (1958), also in
three acts, is loosely based on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and like
Sophocles Eliot too ended with a more mellow and optimistic view of things.
Lord Claverton, a retired politician, has discovered
that his lifelong cultivation of a public self has caused his inner self to
atrophy, and now, a “hollow man” in retirement, he is terrified by loneliness.
He is also haunted by vengeful “ghosts,” people from his past on whom he
inflicted “crimes of the heart” and who return now to force his conscience,
just what he needs to awaken the inner self, though he resists that path of
rebirth. His son seems destined to make similar mistakes, but fortunately his
daughter is loving enough to hear his confession and
give him some absolution. He at last is reconciled to death by the discovery of
love and forgiveness, and, having found himself as a father, he leaves his
daughter and her fiancé to their celebration of mutual love. Unlike former
Eliot plays, here the central character, though achieving some spiritual
illumination, does not find himself among the
spiritual elect who can expiate the sins of others. And he “finds his salvation
not by rejection of ordinary family life, but by purification of the life
within the family,”22
as Eliot himself was doing in his second marriage and in his frequent visiting
with close relatives. Family love is now something not to rise above in heroic
sacrifice, but to accept as a manifestation of the divine in ordinary life.
Arguments for verse drama by enthusiasts are usually one way— they
emphasize gains but never losses. Eliot was no different in seeing the
advantages but never the disadvantages of writing the kind of drama he was
inclined to write anyway (though he encountered plenty of the disadvantages in
his practice). Eliot argued that “the tendency . . of prose drama is to emphasize the ephemeral and
superficial; if we want to get at the permanent and universal we tend to
express ourselves in verse.”23 Such an argument was constantly
disproved by the day’s best playwrights. And it indicates a fundamental
misunderstanding of that realistic drama the modernists reacted so strongly
against—the drama of Ibsen—which was anything but superficial and ephemeral.
But these critical blindnesses aside, Eliot clearly
stands as a significant ground breaker, who provided a rationale for verse
drama that keeps its future open, and though his practice was flawed, it
contains enough successful material to provide models and food for thought for
young poets for some time to come. Certainly we need the enrichment of verse
drama if the theater is not to become too monotone.
Curiously, at the same time Eliot was in
some way groping toward the sort of poetic theater eventually realized by
Beckett, Pinter, et al., he was also a reactionary figure. As Martin Browne
points out, the tide that was gathering against the conventions of the theater
of realism “Eliot forestalled . .
; he
accepted the conventions because his audience would expect to start there.”24 He was a bit like
conservatives on our own Supreme Court who for conservative reasons refuse to
overthrow liberal precedents. And so while Eliot, as leader of the verse-drama
movement after Yeats’s death, was driving toward a
theater transcendent of the conventions of realism, he was simultaneously
delaying the advance by compromising tactics that steered clear of a too
radical overthrow of realism’s precedents. And so the times would have to wait
for Beckett.
No longer wishing to be “Georged,” Bernard Shaw amazed the world with his resurgence
as a playwright at age seventy-three. Six years after Saint Joan had seemed to cap his
career, Shaw suddenly exploded with The
Apple Cart in 1929, ushering in his final phase, in which he wrote enough
significant plays to constitute a career for most playwrights. This final phase
took the form of an increasingly oracular and sometimes apocalyptic
performance, as Shaw, building on the prestige of receiving the Nobel Prize and
having been proved right about World War I, found in radio, film, and
international translations of his plays a wider and wider public forum, in
which he was more and more celebrated. Of course celebration did not
necessarily mean that people changed their ways or heeded his warnings about
the catastrophe he foresaw, a fact that brought a bit of wistful sadness to the
clown face and made him look more like the exasperated prophet he really was.
The news media, rapidly becoming more like
our own, would not leave Shaw alone, no world event being complete without his
opinion being solicited. With more devilment than reverence, reporters
approached his
Perhaps the epitome of his celebrity came
with the establishment of a summer drama festival in Malvern, near
Shaw’s celebrity had always been a mixture
of fame and notoriety, and he took care to keep it
that way. He had started out by shocking conventional thinking, and from then
on whenever he saw the times coming his way, his ideas becoming conventional, he would instinctively attack
the very ideas he had earlier seemed to espouse. He did not like to be at ease
in
Shaw had never been a democrat in the sense that he thought people at
present and in general were capable of governing themselves or even of electing
wise, capable rulers, and he had always admired what he believed to be more
highly evolved talents. Well, never mind the presidential and congressional
buffooneries of more recent history, one has only to contemplate the breakdown
of the immature Western democracies in the thirties to see some justice in
Shaw’s view, and the possibility that these democracies survived only because
World War II allowed them to declare martial law under “strong man” rule is
further supportive.
But Shaw’s skepticism of democracy as a political system did not
prevent him from supporting the democracies in their war with the fascist
states, just as he supported England in the Boer War, because it was a question
of the survival of the more highly civilized. Nor did it prevent him from being
a democrat in a more important sense—he had unusual fellow feeling for the humblest
of beings and had no wish to keep anyone down. His belief in evolution was
partly a hope that natural inequities would be overcome in the long run by a
natural process of the lower rising to the higher, and he stood ready to
welcome or encourage any such progress. As his John
Tanner put it, in the idiom of Man
and Superman, “a democracy of Supermen” is the goal, an ideal as
ancient as
Being a member of the political Left
himself, however, he was much more circumspect in criticizing the shortcomings
of leftist dictatorships, such as Stalin’s, though he did criticize them. In the days of
the rapid rise of the fascist bully boys, it seemed to many that the only hope
for humane government lay with the Left, and so when news came of Stalin’s
purges, Shaw did not want to believe that things had gone that wrong; rather than
openly denounce Stalin, he characteristically tried to steer leftist thinking
in a more civilized direction. In something resembling Swiftian
irony of the “modest proposal” sort, Shaw in the preface to On the Rocks modestly proposed the
Stalinist position that intractable political opponents of social progress must
be eliminated, but he eventually made it clear that he thought a truly liberal
education a better means of
elimination—he preferred changing minds to killing people. Under the guise of
an ironic Stalinism, Shaw was still preaching social toleration and peaceful
enlightenment, though he wished to make everyone see how desperate the times
were.
Shaw’s last plays illustrate Tanner’s
dictum from “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” that the true revolutionary becomes
more radical with age but appears to grow conservative because he has lost
faith in conventional methods of reform. These plays took what had always been
a strong Shavian theme—the need for change to go deeper than mere social
reform, the need for it to reach into the soul and psyche of individuals—and
made it a dominant theme, as Shaw seemed to lose patience with transitory and
mostly cosmetic social change while human nature continued incorrigible. This
more radical stance found expression in the full flowering of his most radical
nonrealistic form— the extravaganza.
In the 1890s, Shaw had had to cover his
basic extravaganza method with a realistic veneer (accompanied by a brief
propaganda for the realistic mode in his criticism) because extravaganza, a
form employing fairy-tale worlds or “otherworlds”
remote in time and place (such as a tropical island or a futuristic society),
had gotten a reputation for being frivolous, mindless, and sometimes cynical.
The extravaganza had come to Shaw (and Barrie) from J. R. Planché
and W. S. Gilbert, with whom he associated “pointless fun and soured idealism.”25 Shaw was further put off
extravaganza because, in correctly perceiving that there was something
fantastic about the play worlds Shaw created, William Archer drew precisely the
wrong conclusion that this therefore identified them with a tradition of
trivial and cynical fun, which disqualified them as serious New Drama. But as
the generation that shared Archer’s critical categories passed away, Shaw felt
less constrained, and his career saw the gradual emergence into the open of an
extravaganza method.
From The Apple Cart on, Shaw openly acknowedged
extravaganza as his method; he nevertheless made clear that he was returning
the genre to its Aristophanic seriousness of purpose.
While Planché, and later Barrie, used it primarily
for escapist reasons (their whimsical fairy tales were meant to charm one into
a belief in the primacy of imaginative reality in the face of the day’s
degrading materialism), and Gilbert to express his cynicism about the failure
of the world to live up to imaginative ideals, Shaw used the imaginary world of
the extravaganza to comment, satirically and ironically, on the everyday and
commonplace world, particularly its foolish idealism.
At first Shaw had not wanted to relinquish the word “realist” to those
who painted only surfaces, trying valiantly for a while to argue for himself as
a ‘realist (though his reference was confusingly more to “visionary realism” than
“mimetic realism”), but he gave up that game when he saw that his own need for
expression required him more and more to use what everyone was calling (however
incorrectly) “nonrealistic” modes. As Meisel sums it
up, “He . . . turned from discrediting fixed idealisms by a standard of
actuality to commenting upon actualities through a medium of fantasy.” This
allowed him to use the drama as “a means of foreseeing and being prepared for
realities as yet unexperienced, and of testing the
feasibility and desirability of serious Utopias (Shaw’s definition of the
‘realistic imagination’).”26 Shaw’s
otherworld method was to carry to their logical extremes tendencies already
present in the political, social, and spiritual life of England, and to embody
them in a mythical world of the future or the past (or, if of the present,
placed in a strange, defamiliarizing environment).
The extravaganza, with its remote and exotic world, looks romantic (and is
romantic, in Planché and Barrie), but in Shaw
that’s often a booby trap, for he makes the romantic the target of satire and
burlesque. The extravaganza form aided Shaw in showing how unrealistic the
world had become. Lending itself to the allegorical methods of parable and
fable, and to anachronism (the deliberate confusion of different times and
places), the extravaganza of his youth was the perfect device for the elderly
Shaw to use to startle the West into an appreciation of how dreamlike modern
life had become, on its way to Armageddon.
Shaw’s extravaganzas were labeled
“political” or “philosophical,” but they were both political and philosophical—it was a matter
of emphasis—and they served his “religion of the future” by being “parables of
evolution” or “parables of futurity.” The extravaganzas reflect on a postwar world
in which sensitive, thinking people are aware of living in a condition
immortalized by Eliot in The
Of the fifteen plays of his last phase,
over half were full-length, and their innovations placed Shaw once again in the
vanguard. Stanley Weintraub has argued, in “The Avant-Garde Shaw,” that many of Shaw’s plays, especially
the late plays, can be seen as leading directly to the Theater of the Absurd and
other experimental drama of the fifties and sixties.27 Through the period of realism’s and
naturalism’s strongest hold, Shaw helped keep alive the arts of the
pre-realistic stage. The self-conscious theater that calls attention to itself
as theater was Shaw’s forte long before it was Brecht’s or Beckett’s or lonesco’s. Too, in presenting an essentially grave message
comically, Shaw anticipated the dark comedy of the absurdist theater. And when
a character in Too True to Be Good
defines man as an inefficient machine for making bad manure, the
Augustinian scatology of several Beckett plays comes easily to mind. Of course
Shaw would not go as far in embodying absurdity in absurdist forms as Beckett
and lonesco would, but many of his late plays come
closer to that than the plays of most of his younger contemporaries.
The Apple
Cart (1929), set in a mythical kingdom of the
future, typically (for the extravaganza) rationally follows out an irrational
proposition—what would happen if a popular constitutional monarch should
abdicate out of frustration with his powerlessness and run for office? King Magnus uses the probability that he
would be elected as a threat to force the politicians and bureaucrats to govern
more wisely. But ultimately, as Shaw wrote in the preface, “the conflict is not
really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which,
having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has
bought and swallowed democracy.”28 Capitalism
in the form of a corporation called Breakages Limited runs everything for its
own ends, to make money, and cares not what social wreckage it creates in the
process, wreckage being as profitable as any business, if not more.
Perhaps the best of the late plays is Too True to Be Good (1931-32), which ironically depicts the plight,
not of the poor, but of the rich. The real opposition to a civilized
distribution of income, Shaw supposed, lay in the fear of the majority poor
that the new system would cut off the possibilities of becoming filthy rich; he
wrote therefore to disillusion the poor about the happiness of the rich. He
shows that modern wealth, frequently detached from work, responsibility,
tradition, and routine, leaves the idle rich with an unstructured life and an
emptiness that grows emptier the more they try to fill it with pleasure-seeking.
And soon they become sick unto death with a spiritual malaise, though they try
to blame it on microbes and the like and bring in expensive doctors. Shaw’s
opening scene finds a sick bacillus complaining to the audience not only that
it is innocent of the illness of Mops, the spoiled, petulant rich girl in bed,
but that Mops gave it the
measles. Her illness being spiritual or psychosomatic, Mops is rescued by a
burglar and his mistress-accomplice who persuade the girl to flee her boring,
bedridden existence and join them in an adventurous life, made possible by
selling her jewelry. The rest of the play is set in a strange Middle Eastern,
On the Rocks
(1933) presents the disaster of
The Depression in a contemporary setting (beginning at No. 10 Downing Street),
but in the extravaganza manner of imagining what would follow if something so
improbable should happen as a prime minister actually bringing himself
up-to-date, thinking intelligently, and making the necessary radical proposals
for reform. The play depicts the inability of an emergency coalition government
to deal with either rampant unemployment or the prime minister’s unlikely
transformation into an intelligent and informed statesman. And
so, with the floundering of the masses in their leaderless condition, the ship
of state drifts ever closer to the rocks.
The next major play, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934-35),
returned to the “philosophical extravaganza” method of Back to Methuselah, presenting an
allegorical Day of Judgment. The setting is the tropical outposts of the
The Millionairess and
In Good King Charles’ Golden
Days (1939) charmingly recreates the Restoration
in anachronistic terms, as Shaw imagines what would happen if the likes of
Charles II, his brother James, Sir Isaac Newton, George Fox (founder of the
Quakers), Godfrey Kneller (the painter), and three of Charles’s mistresses—Nell
Gwynn (the actress), the Duchess of Cleveland, and
the Frenchwoman Louise de Keroualle—were all to meet
in the same house and have to deal with opposing points of view, the scientific
with the artistic, the unworldly with the worldly, the male with the female.
The resulting uproar sends echoes all the way down to the mid-twentieth
century, as we are forced to recognize the contentiousness of the modern world
as mere consequence of earlier disharmony. Charles despairs of bringing order
out of all this chaos, but his reassuring wife sends him back into the fray to
at least try, as Shaw felt the nations on the brink of World War II must do.
Charles, who rules by his wits, understands that “the riddle of how to choose a
ruler .
. . is the riddle of civilization.”34 The preface to this play proposes an
interesting solution—the “coupled vote.” Candidates for office would be paired
as male and female and would vote in Parliament as one. Just as Charles gained
much political insight from the constant criticisms of his mistresses and his
wife, so “detailed criticism by women has become indispensable in Cabinets.”35 The “coupled vote” would
institutionalize that arrangement.
Though at work on other matters during the
war, Shaw produced no more new plays until 1947, when he completed Buoyant
Billions, a play started in 1936. In its preface, Shaw apologizes for his
need to write but explains that he is only a medium—”the play writes itself.”36 Though past the age that would
justify his writing, he feels compelled to write one more “smiling comedy with
some hope in it.”37
The hope in Buoyant Billions is
that the Life Force will make irresistibly attractive to one another one Junius Smith, “world-betterer,”
and Clemmy Buoyant, eldest and most capable child of
a billionaire, who have met in faraway, exotic Panama, where Clemmy has fled to escape civilization, and Junius has fled to find himself. Their union is meant to
give creative impulse to their instincts for making a better world. Junius has been “a missionary without an endowed
established Church,” but with the buoyancy provided by marriage to this
particular Buoyant, he feels that he can keep afloat in the uncertain waters
ahead, even without the direction an established faith can provide. An
interesting aspect of the play’s hopefulness is that it looks to an
atomic-weaponry stalemate to keep the peace and to the peaceful use of atomic
energy to make world-bettering a less frustrating occupation. Shaw at
ninety-one was keeping up with the times.
In the preface to Farfetched Fables (1948-50), Shaw underscores that he has no panaceas to offer, only suggestions for sociopolitical experiments. And as people seem to understand such suggestions better when presented in the forms of popular entertainment, he employs “childish fables” for the task. Through a series of six fables, then, Shaw shows humankind becoming entranced with the idea of creating what we would call a “clean bomb” (a poison gas that kills people but leaves real estate untouched), using it destructively but somehow surviving into the distant future, continuing on the never-ending quest for knowledge and power, and evolving beyond the body to “a vortex in tho