by Kirk Woodward
[This is part 2 of Kirk Woodward’s series, “Re-Reading
Shaw,” his commentary upon reading all six volumes of the playwright’s Complete Plays with
Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963). The first section, covering plays written
from 1885 to 1902, was posted on ROT
on 3 July, and though there are some references to earlier parts of the series
in later ones, each section substantially stands on its own. Nonetheless, I strongly recommend reading
them in order to get a sense of the sweep of Shaw’s work over the 65 years of
his playwriting career. (Even before the
Irishman turned to writing for the theater, he had a significant career as a
respected music and theater critic.)]
MAN AND SUPERMAN (1901-1903 / 1905)
begins with the inscription “To Arthur Bingham Walkley” (1855-1926), drama
critic for the Times of London, who
Shaw says suggested that he write a play about Don Juan, the fictional
womanizing libertine.
Shaw
then goes on to write a preface of dumbfounding folderol, crammed with
assertions like “It may seem a long step from [John] Bunyan to [Friedrich]
Nietzsche, but the difference between their conclusions is merely formal” (like
hell it is), and the claim that his Don Juan character is a direct descendant
of the original fictional Don.
There
are in fact only the small differences that he is neither a womanizer nor a
libertine – he’s only a society radical who has written a book called The Revolutionist’s Handbook (which Shaw
has written and attaches to the play, and in which Shaw, following his usual
pattern, redefines the concept of Revolution into something unrecognizable).
The
high-sounding nonsense of the preface leads into a lively comedy of social
relations, mixed with a heavy dose of discussion and enough plot to make one
think it might equally well have been a novel.
It
is a four act play, and in Act III a famous “set piece” interrupts the plot, a
discussion between four main characters of the original Don Juan story – Don
Juan, Dona Ana, the Commodore (her father), and the Devil – that has become
known as “Don Juan in Hell.” Hell, in Shaw’s vision, is the place where
everyone is completely entranced by ideals.
The
four characters are played by the actors who play their counterparts in the
other three acts. (Some productions cut this act; occasionally the act has been
performed by itself.) I had not realized until this reading of the play that
the third act is not all that different from the others.
They
are all filled with talk about ideas – if not Shaw’s ideas, at least ideas of
interest to Shaw; but in Acts 1, 2, and 4 the ideas belong to their characters,
and are not arbitrarily assigned to them.
I
do not feel the same is true of Act III, “Don Juan in Hell.” In the rest of the
play Jack Tanner, the Don Juan character, is so extreme that he comes across as
a bit loony (“possibly a little mad,” Shaw says in his description). But in Act
III he, as Don Juan, clearly speaks for Shaw.
I
am not saying the scene is only a pamphlet – the dialogue is very clever – but
from the time Don Juan begins his series of monologues on the subject of the
Life Force and Woman as its instrument, I find myself increasingly irritated by
the repetition of concepts that aren’t original, difficult to understand, or
fundamentally very interesting, and are repeated so often that taking a swig
every time a character says “Life Force” would make a potent drinking game.
What
is this Life Force, exactly? I remember listening to a recording of “Don Juan
in Hell,” as performed by Charles Boyer, Agnes Moorehead, Cedric Hardwicke, and
Charles Laughton, with my friend Steve Johnson. When it was over, Steve said he
didn’t think Shaw was clear whether the Life Force was personal or impersonal.
Is it blind or mind?
It
seems to me that Steve is correct and that Shaw wants to have it both ways – or
at least to allow his audience to think that it could be either. In any case,
the Life Force, Don Juan says, “needs a brain . . .” “The Life Force is
stupid.” Personally I am not sure Don Juan is putting the blame in the right
place.
“Every
child,” Shaw says in another preface, “is an experiment by the Life Force.” But
an experiment requires a scientist or an observer – an experimenter, one who
stands above the experiment. Shaw does not appear to notice this.
The
third act does not begin with the “Don Juan in Hell” scene, incidentally. It
begins with an extraordinarily articulate group of brigands in the mountains of
Spain. Of course they are articulate. In this play everyone talks. (At one plot
point, the chief brigand exclaims, “A dramatic coincidence!”)
One
sees in Man and Superman Shaw’s
ability to draw on a huge range of reading and to synthesize what he reads.
In
the case of this play, Walkley, I suspect, challenged Shaw to write a Don Juan
play to goad him into writing something with more sex in it than Shaw usually
chose to include. Shaw answers him by writing a play about the sexual instinct, which he sees as an instrument
of the Life Force that uses woman’s manipulation of man to advance the species.
One
can get tired, however, of Shaw’s continual insistence in the play on the
sexual instinct and on how woman drags man along – or rather about the talk
about it by John Tanner, the title character (both the Man and the Superman).
At least I do.
Act
IV seems to me a bit schematic, although I have not seen it performed and might
feel differently if I saw it staged.
It
was while reading Act IV that I realized that the play is Shaw’s version of
what he thinks Shakespeare should have written in Much Ado about Nothing. (Matt Wolf made this same point in a review
of a London production of Man and
Superman in the New York Times,
11 March 2015.)
Shaw
severely criticized the characters of Beatrice and Benedick:
Paraphrase the encounters of Benedick and
Beatrice . . . and it will become apparent to the most infatuated Shakespearean
that they contain at best nothing out of the common in thought or wit, and at
worst a good deal of vulgar naughtiness. . . nothing more than the platitudes
of proverbial philosophy, with a very occasional curiosity in the shape of a
rudiment of some modern idea, not followed up. (The Saturday Review, 26 Feb 1898)
Shaw
attempts to correct Shakespeare’s alleged insufficiencies by making his Ann
Whitefield tricky, and his John Tanner full of complaints about being entrapped
by women and the Life Force. As with the character of Julius Caesar, it seems
to me that Shaw does not surpass Shakespeare here – rather the contrary.
About
that “Superman”. . . not a bird, or a plane . . . Shaw took the term from
Nietzsche’s “Übermensch,” but a better translation might be Over-Man, or
perhaps Beyond-Human. Shaw uses the term to suggest that humanity might somehow
outgrow itself and become something greater – “the ideal individual being omnipotent,
omniscient, infallible, and withal completely, unilludedly self conscious: in
short, a god.”
Shaw
knows at some level how unappealing this
sounds; but it’s the Devil, interestingly, who says, “Beware of the pursuit of
the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.” Shaw’s
plays illustrate the Devil’s comment more than once.
The
word “superman,” along with the concept, has lost its charm and now seems as
ghastly as Nietzsche’s other futuristic idea, the “Eternal Return,” which Shaw
nods to in Act III but doesn’t otherwise promote, being allergic to an
“eternal” anything. Shaw uses “the Superman” aspirationally but fails to
suggest any way it might actually be an improvement on our present condition.
As
Shaw grew older and more frustrated with the pace of change in society, he
appears to have begun to think he had discovered the Superman in real human
beings – for example, in Lenin and Stalin. The size of his mistake is the
measure of his desperation.
JOHN BULL’S OTHER ISLAND (1904) – Shaw’s play about Ireland, his homeland, written for and
rejected by the Abbey Theatre because, as William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the
theater’s manager, said, it was technically too demanding to produce, but also,
as everyone understood, because Shaw presented the Ireland of his day
realistically:
It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the
neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own
ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old
Ireland.
Shaw actually
understates the matter. The play is an attack on everything an Irish audience
could possibly believe about itself. Shaw claims that he gets his effects by
telling the simple truth about things, but in fact he frequently goes out of
his way to be as obnoxious about them as possible; his denials of this are
disingenuous.
It makes sense that the
play had to succeed in London before it could be performed in Dublin; success
at least took a bit of the sting off it.
(As a tip of the hat to
the Abbey Theatre, the third act includes a long scene in which a large group
of people sit and talk – the kind of staging for which the Abbey was most
noted.)
There are three prefaces
to the play, less overbearing in tone than some of his more didactic
introductions, dated 1912, 1906, and 1929. In the first, Shaw predicts how
events will work out in Ireland; as he admits in a note, he was completely
wrong. In the second, written for the play’s first publication, he analyzes the
Irish and English national characters. In the third, he summarizes the ghastly
historical events – the Easter Rebellion, the Black and Tans, partition – that
shaped the Ireland we know today. In the course of these essays he makes
trenchant observations on colonialism, for example:
A healthy nation is as unconscious of its
nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s
nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.
Acquired rights are deduced from political
constitutions; but political constitutions are deduced from natural rights.
A political scheme that cannot be carried out
except by soldiers will not be a permanent one.
We settled the Irish Question, not as civilized
and reasonable men should have settled it, but as dogs settle a dispute over a
bone.
What is left of John Bull’s Other Island, now the Irish
Question has been (more or less) settled? The play became famous when King
Edward VII, at a special performance, laughed so hard that he broke his chair,
and it was a commercial success for Shaw. But the humor is of a particular
kind. It’s a comedy of reversals – in particular, reversals of the ideas that
the characters have about themselves.
In this sense it
resembles the plays of another Irishman, Eugene O’Neill, whoseThe Iceman Cometh (1939 / 1946) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1941-1942
/ 1956) also dramatize the destruction of illusions. O’Neill is not a funny
writer; Shaw’s tone here, of course, is comic, but also bitter. “My way of
joking is to tell the truth,” says the former priest, Keegan, who has a lot of
Shaw in him; “It’s the funniest joke in the world.”
Broadbent, the English
businessman who in 24 hours manages to dominate an entire swath of Ireland, is
a version of Undershaft, the arms dealer in Major
Barbara, but without Undershaft’s self-awareness; and there is nothing
humorous about Undershaft anyway. As the Irish character Larry Doyle says in
the play, “I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not
brutal and the dreams not unreal.”
There’s a fine line
between illusion and poetry. Shaw tells us that our poetic image of Ireland is
an illusion – and that the same is true of most of our lives. Whether or not
that’s so, poetry is forbidden territory for Shaw, although Keegan’s “vision” at
the end of the play sticks in the mind. I see it as a bleak play, a decade and
a half before the melancholy Heartbreak
House. One wonders what the King was laughing at.
“How He Lied To Her
Husband”
(1904) was written as a curtain raiser for “The Man of Destiny,” which wasn’t
long enough for a full evening. It is a telescoped version of Candida, with a married woman and a
younger man who idolizes her. When the poems he wrote about her are lost, and
presumably found by her gossipy sister-in-law, she becomes utterly realistic,
and the poet is disillusioned. Then the husband comes home...
“How
He Lied,” like “The Glimpse of Reality,” is a marvelous short play, funny and
smart, and well worthy of production.
MAJOR BARBARA (1905) – This play has an excellent reputation. When I first read
it years ago, my impression was that it (like Saint Joan) was
essentially a tragedy – that is, a play about a mighty conflict between
powerful forces that will not yield.
I still feel that
“tragedy” describes the play at its best. This time around, though, I see more
clearly what Shaw is up to, and I can’t applaud it. It is in Major Barbara that Shaw shows among the
first definite signs of the ugly pattern that will disfigure his later life –
his admiration for dictators, primarily Stalin, at times Hitler and Mussolini
as well, and others in theory.
“Major” Barbara is a
Salvation Army officer, working to save the lives and souls of the poor, and
her father, Andrew Undershaft, also dedicates himself to lifting the living
conditions of his workers – except that his business is weapons and munitions,
so he is equally to be credited for good working conditions, and for countless
brutal deaths throughout the world. He offers to underwrite the work of the
Salvation Army. Barbara finds this outrageous; the Army finds it a miracle.
Barbara’s faith is shattered.
Undershaft’s position is
that there is no active force in life except money; that poverty is the only
evil, and abundance the only good; that the only moral question is whether one
is well-off or not. Shaw astonishingly writes his preface to the play, not as
though he were Shaw, but as though he were Undershaft – as though he believed
exactly what Undershaft believes, even to the point that, as the arms czar
says, a person doesn’t really believe in something until he’s ready – not to
die, but – to kill for it.
For me, the effect of
this is ghastly – not that the character of Undershaft should feel this way,
because that’s appropriate, but that Shaw should appear to. This preface and
play prefigure Shaw’s future fascination with dictators, and his cheerful
acceptance of executions as a means of improving the world.
The critic Eric Bentley,
in general an admirer of Shaw, called him out on this point, asking: is killing
really the only way to improve
the world? Are there no alternatives? Shaw becomes unsettlingly ready to
accept the sacrifice of human life for the benefit of – human life! Reading the
preface and play this time around made my skin crawl.
Murder
is also the theme of “Passion, Poison,
and Petrifaction” (1905), a lunatic farce in which the victim, among other
actions, eats some of the ceiling. There is a whisper of a theme here about the
role of ideals in our lives, but mostly you can’t hear the whisper over the
knockabout farce.
THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA (1906) – The first play in the collection is one I had always
avoided on the understanding that it wasn’t top drawer Shaw. To my delight, it
turns out to be a well-crafted melodrama about the dangers of being a
Professional, whether in medicine or some other field (this play includes
Shaw’s famous – and accurate – aphorism that “all professions are conspiracies
against the laity”).
The core of the plot is
a story of sexual desire – a doctor lusts after the wife of a potential
patient, a dishonest, slippery con man who also happens to be a brilliant
artist. Perhaps the doctor ought to save the artist’s life because of his
potential for great contributions to society? On the other hand, the man is
essentially a sociopath, and if his life is not saved, the doctor may be able
to marry his wife! People who consider Shaw’s plays “bloodless” might want to
consider what happens in this one. The dialogue is clever throughout.
“The Interlude at the
Playhouse”
(1907), written for the opening of a new theater, is a comedy sketch for the
theater’s actor-manager, scheduled to give a speech, and his wife, trying to
prepare the audience to like it. Except for a bit of preaching at the end, it
is consistently funny, showing again that among many other things, Shaw was a fine
comedy writer.
GETTING MARRIED (1908) has a preface
on marriage almost a hundred pages long. Is there that much to say about
marriage? “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.” But that was Tolstoy, not Shaw. However, this is one of Shaw’s more
agreeable prefaces, because it is one of his least utopian.
We shall in a very literal sense empty the
baby out with the bath by abolishing an institution which needs nothing more
than a little obvious and easy rationalizing to make it not only harmless but
comfortable, honorable, and useful.
This
is not always the note we hear in Shaw. (Another exception is the waiter's
speech from You Never Can Tell quoted
in the first article in this series.)
The
preface is long, among other reasons, because Shaw doesn’t consider any social
problem to be separate from society as a whole. “Until we abolish poverty,” he
says, “it is impossible to push rational measures of any kind very far.” This
perspective opens the door a good deal wider than does a simple proposal for the
liberalization of divorce laws, which is Shaw’s basic recommendation.
The
preface predictably contains numerous unsupported generalizations delivered as
settled fact. But there are also shrewd observations. Among these are
reflections on the advantages of large families; on the difference between the
“what” of a problem (identifiable by popular opinion) and the “how” of its
solution (probably requiring expert help); and on Othello’s feeling for
Desdemona (“this is not what a man feels about the thing he loves, but about
the thing he owns”).
Getting Married and its preface have
a comfortable relationship: the preface illuminates the play, or the play
illuminates the preface, take your pick. Shaw wrote the play in one long act,
in which the characters try to figure out what marriage is and what they think
of it.
There
is a central situation – an engaged couple read a pamphlet about marriage just
before their wedding ceremony, and it frightens them – surrounded by many other
existing and potential marriages.
There
is a lot of talk – too much for the play to support – and yet another female
character entering toward the end to give the play a boost. “Marriage,” says a
Wisdom character in the play, “is tolerable enough in its way if youre
easygoing and don’t expect too much from it. But it doesn’t bear thinking
about. The great thing is to get the young people tied up before they know what
they’re in for.”
THE SHEWING-UP OF
BLANCO POSNET
(1909) – Blanco Posnet is a one-act
play, set in the American West. A notable fact about Shaw is that, while his
ideas remain basically consistent and reappear in play after play, the plays
themselves have a great variety of forms and settings. In externals, one play
by Shaw seldom resembles another one. Shaw certainly had never been in the
American West, and his picture of it has been picked at, but it does the job.
Shaw
being Shaw, of course, Blanco Posnet
is not a typical Western, being a story of spiritual redemption. Posnet says,
toward the end of the play:
By Jiminy, gents, theres a rotten game, and
theres a great game. I played the rotten game; but the great game was played on
me; and now I’m for the great game every time. Amen.
The
play suggests that there are good points in Christianity, but that there is
something greater; in this play, Shaw doesn’t make explicit what that is. We
can guess he means the Life Force, but an audience member who knew nothing
about his theories would have to work hard to extract specifics from this play.
In any event, the basic effect of it is highly spiritual.
Blanco Posnet was submitted to the
Lord Chamberlain’s Office – the censor of the stage – who denied it a license
for performance, on grounds of blasphemy, unless Shaw agreed to make changes
including removing references to God from the play – leaving in it, as Shaw
pointed out, all the things one would expect God would oppose.
Shaw
refused to make the changes; Yeats and Lady Gregory (1852-1932) arranged for
the play to be produced unaltered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where the
Lord Chamberlain could not block it.
The
preface to Blanco Posnet tells the
story of the battle with censorship and the attempt to have it abolished – an
attempt that did not succeed until 1968, eighteen years after Shaw’s death.
Since then the British theater, needless to say, has flourished. (Blanco Posnet finally had its U.K. premiere in
1909, but for only two performances, in a “private club,” not a licensed
theater.)
“Press Cuttings” (1909) – Shaw
burlesques the government’s treatment of the Women’s Suffrage movement in a
nearly absurdist sketch demonstrating once again that women and men are
practically different species, men being buffoons, and women, brilliant.
Reading the sketch works best if one imagines the Monty Python troupe doing the
all roles, including the women.
The
Censor predictably refused to license the sketch if names resembling those of
real politicians and military men were used. Shaw therefore changed the names
of the General and Prime Minister to General Bones and Mister Johnson,
borrowing them from minstrel shows and thereby making his point even more
satirical.
“The Fascinating
Foundling”
(1909) was written for a charity event at the request of the Prime Minister’s
daughter, and Shaw came through with a lively sketch that touches gently on a
few social issues but mostly presents people trying to get what they want,
totally oblivious to anything else. Fast and funny.
I
am not saying that Shaw’s characteristic themes don’t ever pop up in these
short plays. The title of the dashing “The
Glimpse of Reality” (1909 / 1927) is almost a summary of Shaw’s entire
output. The glimpse occurs to a nobleman about to be murdered by well-organized
scoundrels; he understands for the first time who he really is, and ironically
his insight makes the murderers think he is crazy, so they spare his life (for
a price).
This
is a really excellent little piece and I’m surprised it’s not more often
performed. If you didn’t know the author was Shaw, I’m not sure you’d guess;
but who else could the author be?
[As I said in the first
installment of Kirk’s Shavian
commentary, there are three more sections of “Re-Reading Shaw” and I’ll be
posting them every couple of weeks. Part
3 of the series covers the plays Shaw wrote between 1909 and 1920; I hope you’ll
come back to ROT at
the beginning of August to read what Kirk has to say about the period of the
great writer’s work.]
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