compiled by Rick
[The third and last
installment of this series is drawn from “A Shaw Sampler” by Kirk Woodward (31 October and 3 November 2025). I inserted some short
identifications and explanations of the names and some other references in the
quotations Kirk included in his collection and their titles, and Part 3 is an
expansion of some of those insertions and an addition of more explications of
the contents of the essays and reviews from which Kirk selected his excerpts.
[All the quotations in Kirk’s
article are taken from George Bernard Shaw’s drama columns in the Saturday Review, for which he wrote from 1895 to
1898. Kirk drew from a complete collection of the columns, the 1954 reprint
of Shaw’s Our Theatres in the Nineties, originally published in three
volumes by Constable and Company in 1932.
[For ROTters who want to
read some of GBS’s theater columns, most libraries will probably have one
edition or another of his collected writings, especially his reviews. The only edition of Shaw’s collected reviews
that’s currently in print is Our Theatres in the Nineties Vol. II (Creative Media Partners, 2021; hardback
& paperback). Antiquarian book sites
offer a selection of volumes of the essays, including all three volumes of Our
Theatres in the Nineties and the two volumes of Dramatic Οριnιοns and
Essays, a selection of the columns collected in Our Theatres.
[Online sources include Dramatic
Οριnιοns and Essays: Volume One
[Brentano’s, 1916], Dramatic Οριnιοns and Essays: Volume Two [Brentano’s, 1922], The Saturday review of politics, literature, science
and art from the HathiTrust
Digital Library [with gaps], and The Saturday Review 1855-1938 from the Internet Archive. (All four are PDF’s; the last two are the
entire issue of each date of the paper.
They are all searchable and copiable).
[Kirk, a longtime friend
and frequent contributor to Rick On
Theater, has written a considerable amount on Shaw for this blog. An
avid fan of GBS, his past posts about the renowned Victorian-era Anglo-Irish
dramatist and theater critic are: “Bernard
Shaw, Pop Culture Critic” (5 September 2012), “Eric
Bentley On Bernard Shaw” (3 December 2015), “Re-Reading Shaw” by Kirk
Woodward (3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August,
and 2 September
2016), and “Shaw
versus Shakes” (8 September 2023).
[As Kirk wrote in his 2012 Shaw post, the playwright
brought into his work – not just his plays, but
all his writing and speaking – elements of economics, politics, morality,
religion, social relationships . . . whatever seemed to him to pertain to the
world that was related to the work at hand. In the course of his theater reviews he
definitely does give a strong sense of what the play in front of him is like. But he doesn't review it in a vacuum. He gives his work the context of the life
around it.
[In a sense, that was the
impulse that led to this compilation. It started out as just identifications of
the names and some of the other things mentioned in the quotations and the
headlines about which I thought readers would want to know. But that snowballed.
[I got curious about such
titles as “Quickwit on Blockhead,” “Boiled Heroine,” and “Chin Chon
Chino.” That turned into looking up what
essays like “Mary Anderson” (who'd stopped performing years before the essay
was published), “Manchester Still Expiating,” “The Second Dating of Sheridan,”
and “Alexander the Great” were about.
[What did Manchester have
to expiate? What was Sheridan's 'second
dating'? Or his first, for that
matter? Who was "Alexander the Great"? If it was the Macedonian conqueror, what did
GBS have to say about him in a theater column?
[It obviously became too
much, above and beyond mere ID’s, to leave in Kirk’s post. It had little to do with his point; it was
just to satisfy my curiosity about those mysterious, intriguing, and puzzling
headlines. So what do I do with all that
irrelevant information? Do I just dump
it? Can I do anything useful with
it? Some of it, maybe even all of it, is,
as my friend suggests about all GBS’s writing, interesting. (Well, if you’re obsessively curious, like
me.)
[As this blog’s most
prolific guest blogger put it, “Shaw is just too darned entertaining and
quotable.” He went on to muse: “I was .
. . going to suggest that you put together a [blog] piece on the [notes], and
now . . . I think that's a great idea. Can't lose with Shaw. Also, it's delightful stuff.”
[So, that’s what I’ve
done. Some of what follows are just my
summaries of the point of Shaw's columns, but others required a bit of further
research, such as Henry Irving's knighthood, Queen Victoria's jubilee, and what
the "hustings" were to which GBS referred. A few were almost most interesting because of
a throw-away reference GBS made as a joke: who was "Corno di Bassetto,"
for example? What about "a Mr. G.
B. Shaw"?]
“Mary Anderson,” 4 April 1896
Mary Anderson (1859-1940) was an
American stage actress who went on the London stage in 1883 and stayed for six
years. She performed to great acclaim
before returning to the United States, where she was met with a hostile
reception by the press. This may have
caused her to suffer a breakdown.
In 1888, Anderson collapsed on
stage one line short of finishing a performance of Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) A
Winter’s Tale (first performed in 1611).
She retired from the stage soon after at the age of 30. She returned to England, where she married
and had three children (one of whom died at birth). Anderson died in England at the age of 80,
survived by her son and daughter.
Anderson did not return to the
stage when she came back to England; Shaw wasn’t reviewing a performance in the
quoted piece, but the first of the retired actress’s two memoirs, A Few
Memories (London: Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., 1896; New York, Harper &
Bros, 1896). She published A Few More
Memories in 1936 (Hutchinson).
“Nietzsche in English,” 8 April 1896
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
was a German philosopher. He was best
known for his concepts of the Übermensch and the declaration that “God
is dead,” as well as the works Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond
Good and Evil (1886), and The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Shaw’s Saturday Review column included
remarks on The Case of Wagner; Nietzsche Contra Wagner; The Twilight of the
Idols; The Antichrist, translated by Thomas Common, the first volume of the
collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche (London: Graves, Henry & Co., 1896).
The Übermensch is
a philosophical ideal representing a future, higher stage of human
potential (the ‘overman’ or ‘beyond-man’). Shaw
used ‘Superman’ as the English translation in the title of his 1903 play, Man
and Superman, which brought the word into prominence in English-language
culture.
Following Shaw’s popular usage,
Thomas Common’s (1850-1919; Scottish translator and critic) influential 1909
English translation of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (as
Thus Spake Zarathustra), the work in which the concept is introduced,
rendered Übermensch as ‘Superman.’
Shaw explicitly invokes and
discusses Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the Übermensch, both in the
main text of Man and Superman and in supplementary materials published
with the play. (See Kirk Woodward’s
discussion of this play in “Re-Reading
Shaw – Plays from 1901 to 1909” (18 July 2016).
(The creation of the Superman
comic book character in 1938 helped cement the word in the public consciousness,
but many modern scholars, such as Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980; German-American
philosopher, translator, and poet) advocate for ‘overman’ or ‘beyond-man’ as
translations to avoid the association with the physically powerful hero, which
is quite different from Nietzsche’s philosophical concept.)
“Mr William Archer’s Criticisms,” 13 April 1895
William Archer (1856-1924) was a Scottish
theater critic, author, and friend of Shaw’s.
He was also an early advocate for the “new drama,” particularly the
works of Henrik Ibsen.
The column was about Archer’s
book, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1894, a book of theater reviews written
by Archer for The World (hence the quotation marks in the book’s title),
a London weekly for which the reviewer wrote from 1884 to 1906. The book was published
in London by the Walter Scott Publishing Co. in 1895, with an introduction by
George Bernard Shaw. (Shaw wasn’t above
a little self-promotion: he refers to “my excellent preface to Mr. Archer’s
book.)
Shaw begins his commentary on
Archer’s collected reviews for 1894 by lambasting “most of our theatre
criticism” as “born stale: it is hardly sufferable as news even on the day of
its birth,” for which he blames the newspaper publishers and editors. Then he proceeds to justify his praise of
Archer as “the best of critics.” (Shaw
also takes a line to point out that “in his epilogue [Archer] insists that
there is nobody like G. B. S.”)
“Criticism
on the Hustings,” 20 July 1895
A ‘husting’ was a platform from which
candidates in an election gave speeches.
By the mid-19th century, the formerly plural form, ‘hustings,’ took the
meaning of a ‘political campaign,’ especially in the expression “on the
hustings,” and the plural form was used as a singular noun.
Shaw’s column starts as a disparagement of
political “criticism”—which we understand as reportage and commentary—as
compared to artistic criticism, particularly theatrical. (At the time, the United Kingdom was in the
throes of a general election from 13 July to 7 August 1895, to which Shaw made
reference. The Conservative Party won a
large majority and the Marquess of Salisbury [1830-1903], Conservative leader,
regained the Prime Ministership [1895-1902].)
The Saturday Review theater critic’s
discussion then morphs into an assertion that modern—in this instance,
late-19th-century—staging practices aren’t beneficial to Shakespearean (and,
one presumes, other classical) plays, proposing that plays from earlier eras be
mounted in the manner of the stages for which they were written.
“A Musical Farce,” 9 January 1897
This is a review of a three-act bit
of “brainless sentiment and vulgar tomfoolery” called A Man about Town
which premièred in February 1897 and seems to have played for a total of 18
performances. Written by “Huan Mee,”
which seems to have been a pseudonym for the brothers Charles Herbert Mansfield
(1864-1930) and Walter Edwin Mansfield (1870-1916); it may have been a pun on “You
and Me.”
The Mansfields were both journalists
who collaborated on short stories, novels, and this musical. Their usual fare was sensational fiction,
detective tales, and mysteries, so A Man about Town was a departure for
the writers. (There’s little information
on the plot or characters of the farce.
Shaw doesn’t supply any details of either, though he fairly demolishes
not only the performances—especially the dancing—but the musical farce as a
genre as well.)
If the identification of the
Mansfields as “Huan Mee” is correct—I couldn’t confirm it—then even less is
known about the play’s composer, Albert Carpenter. He was active in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, primarily composing light music and works for the British musical
theater.
“Satan Saved at Last,” 16 January 1897
The reference in the title of the
above review is to The Sorrows of Satan, a play adapted in 1897 by
Herbert Woodgate (dates unknown) and Paul M. Berton (1856-1918) from the 1895
novel of that name by Marie Corelli (1855-1924).
The plot of the stage adaptation follows
the novel’s Faustian storyline of a starving writer, Geoffrey Tempest, who is
visited by a mysterious Prince Lucio Rimanez. Lucio, who is secretly the Devil,
guides Geoffrey to fame and fortune, which leads him down a path of socialite
life, wealth, and moral compromise. The stage play injects some structural and
tonal shifts, particularly the addition of melodrama and physical comedy.
Shaw opens his review by stating, “I
wish this invertebrate generation would make up its mind either to believe in
the devil or disbelieve in him.” He then
backs off somewhat, adding, “Let me not, however, dismiss ‘The Sorrows of Satan’
too; for I take Miss Marie Corelli to be one of the most sincere and
independent writers at present before the public.”
“Mr Pinero on Turning Forty,” 3 April 1897
The column is a review of two
plays: The Physician, an 1897 play in four acts by Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929)
and The Princess and the Butterfly, or The Fantastics, an 1895 comedy in
five acts by Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934).
The headline refers to the fact that both plays are “all about being
over forty.” In both cases, Shaw finds
this tedious. The reviewer points out
that it is 1897 and Pinero was born in 1855 (making him 42), Jones was born in
1851 (making him 46), and he, himself, was born in 1856 (making him 41), and yet,
“the world is as young as ever.”
Pinero (1855-1934) was an English
playwright. His best-known plays are The
Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) and Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898). Like Shaw, Pinero was heavily influenced by
Ibsen. Both writers sought to address
social issues in their work, though Shaw preferred a more didactic,
problem-focused style, while Pinero concentrated on the people affected by the
problem, which Shaw felt weakened the overall argument.
Jones’s playwriting echoes the
realistic style of Henrik Ibsen, but from a conservative viewpoint and he
engaged in extensive debates with liberal-minded writers such as Shaw. He frequently introduces religious themes
into his plays, often exploring the moral turmoil that arises when personal
desires conflict with religious doctrines, though his resolutions often remain
conservative.
The latter portion of Shaw’s
review is devoted to an evaluation of the acting, which doesn’t save either
play. He remarks that “[t]he two authors
have not been equally fortunate in respect of casting.” “In ‘The Princess’ matters are better
balanced,” asserts Shaw. “. . .[O]ut of twenty-nine performers . . . hardly six
have anything to do that could not be sufficiently well done by nobodies.”
“Chin Chon Chino,” 6 November 1897
The title of the above review of The
Cat and the Cherub (1896) by Chester Bailey Fernald and The First Born
(1897) by Francis Powers, two examples of what Shaw saw as theatrical
Orientalism by Western dramatists, is a phrase meant to imitate how the Chinese
language sounds to ignorant Westerners. It
doesn’t have any basis in that or any other East Asian tongue.
Fernald (1869-1938) was an
American writer and Powers (1865-1940), also American, was a writer, screenwriter,
and actor in both theater and film; neither had any connection to China or Asia. Shaw derided both plays as faux-Chinese. By calling the plays "Chin chon
chino," Shaw signals that they are not genuine portrayals of Chinese
culture but rather a clumsy, inauthentic performance meant to appeal to
audiences' Orientalist tastes he labels “Chinatown plays.”
“Mr Heinemann and the Censor,” 2 April 1898
William Heinemann (1863-1920) was
an English publisher and the founder of the Heinemann publishing house in 1890 in
London. (The imprint no longer exists as
a single entity but has been divided and sold over decades to various owners. It continues today as multiple imprints with
the Heinemann name under different publishing houses focusing on different
categories of publications.)
Shaw’s column is a satirical
commentary on the illogical nature of the British theatrical censorship system. He mocks the hypocrisy of the Lord
Chamberlain, Great Britain’s official theatrical censor, who approved Arthur
Wing Pinero’s controversial 1893 play The Second Mrs Tanqueray while
banning Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (written in 1893; not produced in
London until 1902).
As Shaw’s publisher, Heinemann was
not subject to the Lord Chamberlain’s authority over theatrical performances. He was free to publish the full, uncensored
texts of Shaw’s plays. By publishing the
banned play. Heinemann made it available
to the public despite its suppression on the stage—thus revealing the hypocrisy
of British censorship.
“Toujours Daly,” 13 July 1895
Augustin Daly (1838-99) was an
American drama critic, theater manager, playwright, and adapter who became the
first recognized stage director in the United States. He maintained a standing company in New York
City and opened Daly’s Theatre there in 1879, and a second one in London in
1893.
Daly was recognized as the first modern
stage director because he assumed control of all aspects of a production, from
casting and rehearsal to staging and costume.
He was responsible for the creative vision of his shows, which was a new
concept for the time. His method
involved centralizing creative power, moving it away from the actor and placing
it firmly with the director.
His intense and sometimes severe
methods led to him being called “the autocrat of the stage” for the strict
rules he imposed on actors, including fines for forgotten lines or late
appearances.
The column was a review of Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (written 1589-1593; first performed, 1594-1598)
at Daly’s Theatre and Madame Sans-Géne, an 1893 historical comedy-drama
by Victorien Sardou (1831-1908; French dramatist) and Émile Moreau (1852-1922; French
playwright and librettist) at the Garrick Theatre. (The Sardou-Moreau play was performed in
French and starred Gabrielle Réjane [1856-1920; known simply as “Réjane”],
who’d led the Paris première in 1893.)
“Quickwit on Blockhead,” 5 June 1897
Taking off from The English
Stage (J. Milne, 1897) by Augustin Filon (1841-1916), translated by
Frederic Whyte (1867-1941) from Le Théâtre anglaise (C. Lévy, 1896),
Shaw reflects on what he perceives as the intellectual superiority of French
theater critics to their English counterparts.
Filon was a French professor of rhetoric and the author of a number of
books on contemporary English politics, art, and literature.
Duruy, then the French minister of
education, appointed Filon the tutor of the Prince Imperial Napoléon (1856-1879;
only child of Napoléon III [1808-1873; President of France: 1848-1852; Emperor
of the French: 1852-1870] and Empress Eugénie [1826-1920] from 1867 to 1875. Upon the fall of the Second French Empire and
Napoléon III’s deposition, Filon accompanied the Prince Imperial into exile to
Chislehurst, Kent. After the prince’s death
in 1879, Filon settled in England with his family, living in Croydon in South
London, where he died at 74.
Filon published several books of
criticism of both English and French theater in addition to The English
Stage: Le Théâtre anglais contemporain (“The contemporary
English theater”; Calmann-Lévy, 1906); De Dumas à Rostand: Esquisse du
mouvement dramatique contemporain (“From Dumas to Rostand: an outline
of the contemporary dramatic movement”; Armand Colin, 1898; The Modern
French Drama: Seven Essays [Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1898]).
(The critical essays that made up
the 1906 Le Théâtre anglais contemporain, which was not published in an English
edition, originally ran in the French literary journal Revue des Deux
Mondes starting in 1895.)
Using French author and teacher
Filon as the exemplar, Shaw characterizes the French writers as “quick-witted,”
while considering the English to be “blockheads” who lack the critical insight
of their French colleagues. (Shaw never
uses the words of his headline in his column itself.)
“Manchester Still Expiating,” 12 February 1898
In the 1890s and into the early
1900s, there were discussions among Manchester’s wealthy and influential
figures, as well as the intellectual and artistic leaders, of establishing an
“endowed theater” in the city. Also
called a “public theater,” this was a non-commercial, publicly funded (by a
government subsidy or a private endowment) institution that would be freed from
the constraints of the box office. This
would allow it to prioritize artistic merit and innovative drama over purely
commercial appeal.
Manchester at the time had a
powerful intellectual and reformist tradition, making it ripe for an
art-oriented theater. It was, however,
also a thriving industrial city with noisy, dirty, crowded streets. Its art establishments were, in Shaw’s view,
its “expiation”—recompense for the hard life it offered its residents.
In 1907, tea heiress and theater
patron Annie Horniman (1860-1937) bought the Gaiety Theatre and established the
Manchester Playgoers' Theatre as a short-lived repertory company. In 1908, she transformed the Players’ Theatre
into the Gaiety Theatre to put Shaw’s plan into action. The endeavor lasted until 1921, but its
influence set the tone for British theater that followed—and was clearly a
model for the non-profit theater of the modern-day U.S.
“The New Ibsen Play,” 30 January 1897
The play of the headline is John
Gabriel Borkman (1896), Henrik Ibsen’s [1828-1906] next-to-last play. Though it continues the social commentary of the
Norwegian dramatist’s work of the preceding thirty years, this play is a bridge
from the naturalism of those plays to the symbolism of When
We Dead Awaken (1899), his final work.
This Shaw essay, a somewhat unusual
occurrence, is about the columnist’s sense of disappointment that Ibsen’s new
play, which was published (in Danish) in 1896 and had its world première in
Helsinki, Finland, in 1897, was unlikely to see an English staging soon due to
the resistance of Henry Irving and his Lyceum Theatre, which Shaw saw as the
most likely London producer, to mount it.
What makes this column unusual is
that in it, Shaw references “[t]he appearance some weeks ago in these columns
of a review of the original Norwegian edition of Ibsen’s new play.” That review, entitled “Ibsen’s New Play,” ran
uncredited six weeks earlier on 19 December 1896. Then, on 8 May 1897, 14 weeks after Shaw’s
lament, he published “John Gabriel Borkman,” his review of the first
performance of William Archer’s English translation of the play by the New
Century Theatre at the Strand Theatre on 3 May.
(One correction, I believe, is
necessary here. Like all of Henrik Ibsen’s
plays (and other writings), John Gabriel Borkman was first published,
not in Norwegian—there wasn’t yet a recognized written form of a Norwegian
language [there was a spoken Dano-Norwegian dialect]—but in Danish.
(From 1380 until 1814, Norway was
in a political union with Denmark [known as Denmark-Norway]. During this
period, Danish became the official administrative and written language of
Norway. Even after Norway separated from
Denmark in 1814, Danish remained the dominant written language because there
was no standardized written Norwegian language.
(Ibsen, active in the latter half
of the 19th century, was educated in this linguistic environment and wrote in
the standard, educated written language of his time, which was Danish. His works, including John Gabriel Borkman,
were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal Boghandel in Copenhagen. This circumstance didn’t change until a year
after Ibsen’s death, when the 1907 spelling reform, the first of several, moved
the written Norwegian closer to the spoken language and further away from
Danish.)
“L’Oeuvre,” 30 March 1895
Aurélien-Marie Lugné (1869-1940; French
actor, theater director, and scenic designer) founded the Paris theatre
company, the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (literally, the “Theater of the Work”). He was known by his stage and pen name,
Lugné-Poe (taken in homage to Edgar Allan Poe [1809-1849; American writer,
poet, editor, and literary critic; best known for his poetry and short stories
involving mystery and the macabre]).
L'Oeuvre (sometimes written L’Œuvre) produced experimental work by French
Symbolist writers and painters at the end of the nineteenth century. Like his contemporary, theatre pioneer André
Antoine, he gave the French premières of works by the leading Scandinavian
playwrights Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg (1849-1912; Swedish playwright,
novelist, poet, essayist, and painter), and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910;
Norwegian writer; received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Literature).
With periodic pauses in
production, the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre has operated in various locations from 1893
to the present. Lugné-Poe retired in
1929 and others have led the company as his successors.
The quoted column covers performances
at London’s Opera Comique of the Théâtre de I'Œuvre de
Paris of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm and The Master Builder and Maurice
Maeterlinck’s (1862-1949; Belgian symbolist playwright, poet, and essayist; Flemish
but wrote in French) L’Intruse (Interior; published, 1894; premièred,
1895) and Pelléas ét Mélisande (Pelléas and Mélisande; published,
1892; premièred, 1893).
Of the overall experience of seeing
the work of Lugné-Poe’s company, Shaw wrote: “In the Théâtre de I'Œuvre there
is not merely the ordinary theatrical intention, but a vigilant artistic conscience
in the diction, the stage action, and the stage picture, producing a true poetic
atmosphere, and triumphing easily over shabby appointments and ridiculous incidents.” He went on to lament, however, “Of course, this
is so much the worse for the Théâtre de I'Œuvre from the point of view of the [London]
critics who represent the Philistinism against which all genuinely artistic enterprises
are crusades.”
(Rosmersholm is mentioned
in passing several times in a collection of reports on the 2006 Shaw Festival in
Canada: “The
2006 Shaw Festival” [8 and 11
December 2015], “Design
for Living (Shaw Festival, 2006)” [29 March 2012], and “Two
Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival, 2006)” [25 September 2012]. There’s a script
report of a different Maeterlinck play, Aglavaine et Sélysette [Aglavaine
and Selysette] in “More Script Reports V: Classics
(Continued)” [18 January
2022], posted on Rick On Theater.)
“Lorenzaccio,” 26 June 1897
Lorenzaccio is an 1834
Romantic French play about Lorenzino de’ Medici (1514-48) by French dramatist,
poet, and novelist Alfred de Musset (1810-57).
In the production Shaw reviews at the Adelphi Theatre, Sarah Bernhardt
played the title role.
The nickname “Lorenzaccio” comes
from the Italian suffix -accio, which has a pejorative meaning, turning
the diminutive and innocent-sounding “Lorenzino” (little Lorenzo) into “nasty
Lorenzo” or “bad Lorenzo.” Lorenzino earned
this insulting name for his debauched and erratic behavior, which included decapitating
ancient statues and committing the assassination of his cousin, Alessandro de’
Medici (1510-37), first Duke of the Florentine Republic (1532-37).
“Boiled Heroine,” 28 March 1896
This review with the intriguing
title is of an 1896 play entitled True Blue by actor and dramatist Leon
Outram (1855-1901), who went to the U.S. in 1886, and Stuart Gordon, a Royal
Navy lieutenant about whom little is known.
(Not to be confused with the contemporary (1947-2020) American
filmmaker, theater director, screenwriter, and playwright of the same name.)
The play is a nautically-themed
comic melodrama involving a love triangle and a humorous, if ridiculous, plot. The title of Shaw’s column mocks a scene in
which a villainess plots to do away with her rival by trapping her in a ship’s
boiler. True Blue seems to have
had little history after its 1896 premiere.
“Alexander the Great,” 12 June 1897
The Alexander of the title of
Shaw’s review isn’t the Macedonian conqueror of the 4th century BCE, but
Alexandre Dumas père (1802-70), French author, famously, of the
adventure novels The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte
Cristo (1844-46). He also wrote the
stage comedy Un mariage sous Louis XV (“A Marriage under Louis XV,”
1841), which, under the title A Marriage of Convenience, had its London
premiere in 1897.
Marriage is a translation
of the Dumas play by prolific English dramatist Sydney Grundy (1848-1914), most
of whose works were adaptations of European plays. Shaw spends most of his column lauding the
script and production of Marriage before dismissing two other
performances, Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a reading by William Poel’s
Elizabethan Stage Society and Settled Out of Court, a play in four acts
by Estelle Burney (English actress and dramatist, active 1891-1899), at the end
of his notice.
“The Two Latest Comedies,” 18 May 1895
The plays reviewed here are The
Home Secretary, an 1895 play by R. C. Carton (1853-1928; English actor and
playwright) and The triumph of the Philistines: and how Mr. Jorgan preserved
the morals of Market Pewbury under very trying circumstances, an 1895
comedy in three acts by Henry Arthur Jones.
Shaw opens his review by declaring
that he would forego an introduction and get straight to his assessment of
Carter’s The Home Secretary, “for, to tell the truth, I am forgetting it
so rapidly that in another half-hour it may all have escaped me.” Of the play, Shaw says simply, “Mr. Carton has
a second-hand imagination and a staggering indifference to verisimilitude.”
A few words about the office of
the Secretary of State for the Home Department, or the Home Secretary, which
may be unfamiliar to those of us who live on this side of the pond: in 1895, he
was one of the most senior and influential ministers in the British government. The office was responsible for the internal
affairs and interests of England and Wales, overseeing areas like crime,
national security, and immigration. The
role involved managing law enforcement, responding to social issues like child
labor and factory safety, and addressing concerns about national security and
espionage.
The Home Secretary was responsible
for creating and enforcing laws related to these areas, often by setting
standards and creating inspectorates to ensure compliance. The position’s responsibilities have changed
many times over the years, though it has been compared to the interior minister
of other nations.
The Home Department, however, bears
little similarity to the U.S. Department of the Interior. It’s closest to today’s Department of
Homeland Security with the law-enforcement responsibilities of the Department
of Justice. The law-enforcement concerns
for the modern U.K. Home Department were transferred to the Ministry of Justice
in 2007. (As far as the character in
Carton’s “hopelessly slovenly play” is concerned however, GBS asserts: “Though supposed
to be a Home Secretary, he presented us with exactly the sort of Cabinet Minister
who never goes to the Home Office.”)
Jones’s play “with the nineteen-word
title” is a comedy/satire that uses the fictional town of Market Pewbury and
its residents to critique the rigid social conventions and moral hypocrisy
prevalent in late 19th-century English society.
Shaw allows that it’s well
crafted, but posits that “when Mr. Jones claims the sympathy of the audience for
the Philistine as against the Puritan, the Puritan snatches the sympathy from him;
for the idealist, being the higher if more dangerous animal, always does beat the
Philistine.” In the end, Shaw concludes,
“The acting is hardly as good as the play.”
“Shakespear and Mr Barrie,” 13 November 1897
J. M. Barrie (1860-1937) was a
Scottish novelist and playwright, best known as the creator of Peter Pan (play:
1904; novel [Peter and Wendy]: 1911).
Shaw’s review is of productions of Barrie’s play The Little Minister
(adapted in 1897 from his 1891 novel of the same title) and The Tempest (1610-11)
by William Shakespeare.
“At the Pantomime,” 23 January 1897
Shaw wasn’t a devotee of pantomime
(or any of “the mere sillinesses and levities of the theatre,” so he’d never
seen a Christmas “panto” of Oscar Barrett (1847-1941), a renowned director and
producer of the entertainment, until he reviewed Aladdin at the Theatre
Royal, Drury Lane, the subject of the review above.
British pantomime was a popular
musical-comedy theatrical entertainment, particularly during the Christmas
season. It was a boisterous form of
family entertainment that combined a loose retelling of a fairy tale or folk
story with a mix of topical humor, slapstick, and often risqué comedy, with
audience participation. It developed in
the 18th century—when it was a “dumb show” or dance and gesture—and was at its
peak as a popular entertainment throughout the 19th century. It continues into the 20th and 21st,
especially during the Christmas holidays.
Barrett, who started as a composer
and musical director, worked at Drury Lane starting in the 1880s and took over
as manager in 1896-97. The theater was
already famous for its Christmas pantomime and Barrett continued the tradition
and expanded it. Aladdin was one
of the season’s most enduring productions.
“Michael
and His Lost Angel,” 18 January 1896
Michael and his Lost Angel
was a new play of modern English life in five acts by Henry Arthur Jones. In the play, Michael, a rigidly moralistic
clergyman, compels a girl who has committed what he believes to be a deadly sin
to confess it publicly in church. He
subsequently commits that sin himself with a worldly woman named Angel.
His fall from grace torments him
and he laments the loss of his spiritual anchor, the idealized memory of his deceased
mother, whom he has always considered his guardian angel.
Shaw lauds Jones, whom he labels a
“born dramatist,” for the dramatic construction of his plays. But he holds back his full-throated praise
because, he says, “It is a play without a hero.” Shaw sees that Michael, though behaving
penitently before his congregation, is not actually sorry for what he’s done. If he were a true hero, as Shaw would have written
him, Michael would have embraced his lack of remorse and marched out through his
shocked and shamed parishioners, with colors flying and head erect and unashamed.”
“The Immortal William,” 2 May 1896
The title of this review, a phrase
Shaw used often, refers to William Shakespeare, the subject of The Shakespeare
Anniversary Celebration the reviewer attended on 23 April 1896, the date
traditionally commemorated as the Bard’s birthday.
(Although his exact birthdate isn’t
recorded, Shakespeare’s birth is traditionally dated as 23 April 1564, a best
guess based on his baptism record and the customs of the time. Records of Holy Trinity Church in
Stratford-upon-Avon show that Shakespeare was baptized there on 26 April 1564.
It was customary at the time for
infants to be baptized within three days of their birth, so, 23 April is a
logical approximation for the day of the Bard’s birth.)
“La Princesse Lointaine,” 22 June 1895
La Princesse lointaine is
an 1895 classical romance by French poet and playwright Edmond Rostand
(1868-1918), the world-famous author of 1897’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Translated as The Far Princess, The
Distant Princess, or The Princess from Afar, it was written for
Sarah Bernhardt and premiered at her theater in Paris. Shaw reviews the play with Bernhardt in the
title role when she brought the production to London. There is a “script report” of La
Princesse lointaine on this blog.
“The Chili Widow,” 12 October
1895
The Chili Widow is an 1895
play adapted by Arthur Bourchier (1863-1927; English actor and theater manager)
and Alfred Sutro (1863-1933; English dramatist, writer, and translator) from Monsieur
le Directeur (1895) by Alexandre Bisson (1848-1912; French playwright and
novelist) and Fabrice Carré (1855-1921; French playwright and librettist).
The Chili Widow was a comic
melodrama which ran for over 300 performances at its début engagement the Royalty
Theatre. While a detailed plot description
isn’t available, the play is centered on a series of misunderstandings concerning
the lives of two couples whose paths to “marital bliss” are complicated by
external factors or “meddling.”
While the specific origin of the
title The Chili Widow isn’t recorded in available sources, the name likely
refers to the main female character, the widow, possessing a “spicy,” “hot-tempered,”
or “fiery” personality.
Shaw’s principal reaction to the
performance was that he “was astonished to find that Mr. Bourchier . . .
has actually founded . . ., with apparent success, a new school of stage art. At least it is new to the regular professional
stage . . . . It is the school of the
romping, gleeful amateur . . . .”
“‘The Spacious Times,’” 11 July 1896
“The Spacious Times” of the title
of Shaw’s essay is a common reference to the era of the reign of Elizabeth I (1533-1603;
reigned: 1558-1603). (It comes from an
1832 poem of Alfred, Lord Tennyson [1809-92], A Dream of Fair Women.)
Its usual context is an evocation of the
grandeur of the Elizabethan age, referencing its expansion, adventure, and
flourishing arts.
In a rare instance of Shaw’s
enclosing a column title in quotation marks, however, the critic is using the
phrase in an ironic way. The column is a
review of a reading of Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-93) Doctor Faustus (1592),
but Shaw was a harsh critic of Marlowe, whom he labeled the “true Elizabethan
blank-verse beast,” and the Elizabethan dramatists—including Shakespeare.
The presentation was by the
Elizabethan Stage Society, founded and directed by William Poel (1852-1934),
who devoted his career to recreating performances using the staging techniques
of the Elizabethan era—a practice Shaw lauded.
In a burst of self-deprecating
humor, Shaw explains that Poel, in creating the E.S.S. announcement of the
presentation, quoted some “eminent authorities” in praise of Marlowe’s merits,
among them, “a Mr. G. B. Shaw.” The
critic, alluding to his frequent disparagement of Marlowe’s talents, observes
that “Mr. Poel was supposed by many persons to be quoting me. But though I share the gentleman’s initials, I
do not share his views.” Be assured,
though, that “G. B. Shaw” was, indeed, this essay’s author. There is no other of that name or those
initials.)
“Mr Grundy’s Improvements on Dumas,” 17 July 1897)
The review is of The Silver Key,
an 1897 comedy in four acts, adapted from Alexandre Dumas père’s Mademoiselle
de Belle-Isle (1839) by Sydney Grundy.
“Ibsen Triumphant,” 22 May 1897
Ibsen’s triumph, it seems, isn’t
just the superiority of his plays over all others of the day, but how
thoroughly he’s eclipsed the playwriting of all the work that went before he
was introduced on the stages of London. This
column begins as an encomium to the Norwegian’s dramaturgy in comparison to the
native writing of the decade before he made his debut, then morphs into a
review of a production of The Wild Duck, Ibsen’s 1884 tragicomedy,
considered the first modern masterpiece in that genre.
“Why Not Sir Henry Irving?”
9 February 1895
Henry Irving (1838-1905) was a
British actor-manager; he took complete responsibility for the productions in
which he played the leading roles. In
this column, Shaw seems to be giving a tongue-in-cheek critique of Irving’s
apparent campaign for a knighthood. Shaw
notes that while worthy practitioners in other fields have been honored with
knighthoods, no actor had been.
Declaring that actors should be as
worthy of recognition as, say, painters, Shaw asserts that Irving should be so
considered. On 18 July 1895, Henry Irving
did become the first actor in England to be awarded a knighthood.
(Shaw, himself, was offered a
knighthood in 1909, he declined the honor on principle. The offer was made privately through the
office of Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928; British statesman and Liberal Party
politician), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1908-1916), not announced
publicly before Shaw could decline it.)
“Ghosts at the Jubilee,” 3 July 1897
The Diamond Jubilee of Queen
Victoria was celebrated on 22 June 1897 to mark the occasion of the 60th
anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne of England. (The actual anniversary fell on 20 June 1897.)
The “Ghosts” of the title are the
ones in the Ibsen play of 1881: Ghosts, first staged in 1882 in Chicago
in Danish.
Shaw felt himself “cut off by my
profession from Jubilees; for loyalty in a critic is corruption.” Nevertheless, he wondered, upon seeing a
performance of Ghosts, “how far life had brought to the Queen the lessons
it brought to Mrs. Alving.” This musing
launched the reviewer into a review not of the play so much as the list of deprivations
placed upon women at the “the last quarter of the hour of history called the
nineteenth century.”
“The Second Dating of Sheridan,” 27 June 1896
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
was an Anglo-Irish playwright, poet, and politician. He’s best known as the author of The Rivals
(1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), post-Restoration comedies of
manners. This column is about an 1896
performance of the latter play.
The “second dating” refers to
Shaw’s notion that the various aspects of human society “date”—that is, pass
out of consequence—at different rates, some sooner than others, making plays
that focus on or are motivated by those society traits obsolete after different
time spans. Shaw also observes that
sometimes, those obsolescent societal concerns become more embedded in human
behavior, and the plays pronounced “dated” can return to significance, and he
declares that Sheridan’s School for Scandal, which had passed into
irrelevance in the 19th century, now at the cusp of the 20th century, once
again speaks to audiences of the human condition.
“Some Other Critics,” 20 June 1896
Shaw discusses Dramatic Essays,
an 1896 collection of reviews by John Forster (1812-76) and George Henry Lewes (1817-78)
reprinted from, respectively, the Examiner (1835-38) and the Leader (1850-54),
with notes and an introduction by William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (1872-1946).
In addition to Forster and Lewes,
Shaw mentions in passing William Hazlitt (1778-1830), Arthur Bingham (A B)
Walkley (1855-1926), other critics of the past.
He also makes humorous mention of
a music critic called “Corno di Bassetto.” (That’s a pseudonym used by none other than
G.B.S., himself. The name is Italian for
‘bassett horn,’ an obsolete musical instrument which Shaw assumed no one would
know.)
