The Plays of T. S. Eliot

by Kirk Woodward 

[After his report on Norman Marshall’s book “The Producer and the Play,” posted on Rick On Theater last 20 July, Kirk Woodward returns with a somewhat more ambitious project: reading and discussing all of poet T. S. Eliot’s plays.

[I say “somewhat more ambitious” because Eliot only wrote a handful of plays; his poetry was much more voluminous.  It was also far better known and generally more admired as well.  On the other hand, he wrote his stage works in verse, a challenge for both the writer and the theatergoer in the first half of the 20th century.

[I’ll leave Kirk to assess the results from the perspective of a theater guy with a background in writing, directing, and acting (as even sometime ROTters will know). 

[I must say that Kirk’s selected a subject about which I know little myself.  He was an English major in college (I studied French and German—not much help here), so his foundation in literature, including poetry, is way firmer than mine.  I learned many details about Eliot and his plays (several of which I’d even read long ago).  I suspect that you will, too.]

The poetry of T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965) is widely considered a landmark in literature. His long poem The Waste Land (1922) is generally deemed to have begun the modern era in poetry, and I consider his Four Quartets, published between 1936 and 1942, to be among the great accomplishments of literature, a work I’ve “lived with” for a long time.

However, Eliot’s plays, written in “free verse” (defined as “poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter,” a subject to be discussed below), are not as well known today as his poetry, although they received attention and various kinds of success when they were produced. Those plays are:

Sweeney Agonistes (published 1926, first performed 1934)
The Rock (1934)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
The Family Reunion (1939)
The Cocktail Party (1949)
The Confidential Clerk (1953)
The Elder Statesman (first performed 1958, published 1959)

Eliot’s greatest theatrical “hit,” of course, was none of these plays, but the extraordinarily successful musical Cats (1981), in which Andrew Lloyd Weber (b. 1948) set a number of poems from Eliot’s volume of light verse Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) to music (with contributions from others). The original London and New York productions ran for 16,434 performances between them.

Today plays written in verse (as opposed to musicals) are rare, but nearly every well-known English-speaking poet since William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has at least toyed with the “poetic drama.” (Recently, La Bête, a 1991 play in rhymed couplets by David Hirson, had a successful run in London and has been popular in regional theaters in the U.S., and Mike Bartlett’s 2014 blank verse play King Charles III had a record-breaking run in London and was broadcast on both the BBC and PBS.)

Among the “great modern poets,” William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) not only wrote plays but for years was a central figure at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Along the same lines, W. H. Auden (1907-1973) wrote two plays with Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and The Ascent of F6 (1937), wrote several opera libretti, and translated works by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).

I have read the Auden plays and some of Yeats’ plays, but I realized I knew next to nothing about Eliot’s, so I set out to read all of them. In his essay “Poetry and Drama” (1951), Eliot describes what he had in mind in attempting to write “poetic drama”:

I have before my eyes a kind of mirage of the perfection of verse drama, which would be a design of human action and of words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and of musical order. . . . To go as far in this direction as it is possible to go, without losing that contact with the ordinary everyday world with which drama must come to terms, seems to me the proper aim of dramatic poetry.

A tall order, and I have tried to keep it in mind as I’ve read his plays. I read them in the reverse order from that in which they were written, because I suspected that the later the play, the closer it might be to “ordinary” drama, and that as a result the more spectacular “poetic” effects in the plays might be found in the earlier plays, making a kind of climax to my reading.

I tried to read the plays naively, responding to what I read rather than passing along the critical judgments of others.

The plot of The Elder Statesman, the last of Eliot’s plays, was suggested to him by the Greek tragedy Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles (c. 496/7-406/5 BC). He based all his plays beginning with The Family Reunion on Greek dramas; however, none of those plays of his are set in ancient times – they all have contemporary settings.

Almost immediately this fact suggests a difficulty for Eliot. His poetry extensively uses the devices of fragmentation and discontinuity. He assembled his poems, most famously The Waste Land, from bits of quotations and thoughts jammed together in what might seem random order. Those devices can also be used in plays, of course, but only deliberately and sparingly. Generally speaking a play needs some sort of story, continuity, plot.

Those were never Eliot’s métier. How well does he handle the replacement of some of his major poetic devices? He recognizes the problem. In “Poetry and Drama” (which is a worthwhile essay all the way through), he writes:

The first thing of any importance that I discovered, was that a writer who has worked for years, and achieved some success, in writing other kinds of verse, has to approach the writing of a verse play in a different frame of mind from that to which he has been accustomed in his previous work. . . . You are deliberately writing verse for other voices, not your own, and you do not know whose voices they will be. . . . Every line must be judged by a new law, that of dramatic utterance.

As far as verse goes, this was his solution:

What I worked out is substantially what I have continued to employ: a line of varying length and varying number of syllables, with a caesura and three stresses. The caesura and the stresses may come at different places, almost anywhere in the line; the stresses may be close together or well separated by light syllables; the only rule being that there must be one stress on one side of the caesura and two on the other. 

This may sound technical, but it is easy to understand. Shakespeare’s blank verse ordinarily has five stresses to a line (the stresses are in boldface here):

            But, soft! What light through yon-der win-dow breaks?

Eliot says he chose a three stress line, something like:

            Yes, Charles. I’m sure that I want to marry you

In this sentence the caesura comes at the period. Because Eliot doesn’t care how many syllables are in a line, this verse form is extremely loose, as this quotation illustrates. To my ear that particular verse form provides a sort of forward motion for the dialogue – unconsciously the hearer feels a pattern pushing itself ahead.

However, neither Shakespeare nor Eliot limit themselves strictly to a single pattern. Shakespeare frequently varies his meter for emphasis, variety, and surprise; so does Eliot. But the form of the verse provides a home base for it, a standard which can always be varied, depending on the needs of the drama.

As I read Eliot’s plays it seems to me that he regularly shifts between three, four, and five stresses per line. I might be wrong; he might read the lines differently; and he simply might vary meter from line to line, as he does in his poetry, according to the needs of the scene.

However, determining the meter of a line is a subjective matter. My impression is that Eliot feels that as long as there is some rhythmic structure to a line, it doesn’t matter much what that structure is. After all, that is also the way he has composed his non-dramatic poetry.

But so far we are speaking about verse (which according to the dictionary is “writing arranged with a metrical rhythm”). What about poetry (“special intensity given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm”)?

Eliot knows that a great deal of drama will be only verse, not poetry, even in a “poetic” play  – but he wants to be able to include poetry when it’s appropriate, something he feels that plays completely written in prose can’t do.

The poetic drama in prose is more limited by poetic convention or by our conventions as to what subject matter is poetic, than is the poetic drama in verse. A really dramatic verse can be employed, as Shakespeare employed it, to say the most matter-of-fact things.

That is to say, a play in verse can handle the ordinary as well as the poetic, but a play in prose can’t switch from the ordinary to poetry easily, or perhaps at all. So with exceptions in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot’s plays are entirely in verse.

THE ELDER STATESMAN

How does all this work out in practice? As I said, I began my reading with the last play Eliot wrote, The Elder Statesman, the story suggested by Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. No need for dread – the Greek tragedy provides only the barest scaffolding for the plot: a famous British statesman has retired, and into his life come several figures from the less reputable moments of his past.

The effect of this situation is comic, not tragic, as one person after another pops up with yet another story of how the “statesman” could have done better, usually by making the complainer happier. The resolution of the situation is also comic, as the group of self-deceivers deceives themselves together, and the statesman is free at least to die at peace.

The heart of the play resides primarily in its language. A number of passages from the play echo Eliot’s better-known poetry, particularly the Four Quartets, which shares with Statesman an interest in time, in consequences, in the futility of blame, and in forgiveness and love. Amid the verse, the poetry is sometimes lovely. In Act I, talking about her love for her fiancée Charles, the statesman’s daughter Monica says:

How did this come, Charles? It crept so softly
On silent feet, and stood behind my back
Quietly, a long time, a long long time
Before I felt its presence. 

Gomez, one of the miscreants, says:

You’ll come to feel easier when I’m with you
Than when I’m out of sight. You’ll be afraid of whispers,
The reflection in the mirror of the face behind you,
The ambiguous smile, the distant salutation,
The sudden silence when you enter the smoking room. 

I enjoy The Elder Statesman for what it is: a primarily verbal play, with a great deal of exposition, a modest plot (Sophocles’ plot isn’t one of the great ones either), a charming and worthwhile experience for an audience willing to enjoy a couple of hours of elegant intelligence.

THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK

The Confidential Clerk is based on a play by Euripides (c. 480-406 BC) called Ion (written perhaps around 407 BC) that is not particularly well known today and that has been sometimes described as a “romantic drama” rather than a tragedy. The website for The Actors Company Theatre [http://tactnyc.org/the-confidential-clerk-notes/], in an excellent article on Eliot’s play, summarizes Euripides’ plot as follows:

Ion is the son of the god Apollo and Creusa, an Athenian princess, left to die by Creusa but secretly saved by Apollo. Xuthus, Creusa’s husband, is later led to believe that Ion is his own child, and the jealous Creusa plots to kill Ion. At the last minute, Ion’s identity is revealed, and mother and son are reunited. 

The ultimately positive nature of the play by Euripides is a reminder that his plays cannot all be captured under the label of “Greek tragedy,” something we will see again in another of Eliot’s plays. In The Confidential Clerk, the clerk discovers that he may be the illegitimate son of a rich man, or of the man’s wife; while the others in the play make various discoveries about themselves and the choices they have made in their lives.

Because Eliot is both an important literary figure and a notable theological mind, one might feel a temptation to impose Eliot’s known ideas on a particular work. This impulse is common but unwise. To use the example of another playwright: George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) loudly announced his public position on many issues, and surely his plays endorse those positions – except that they often don’t.

It is certainly possible to see complicated theological ideas behind The Confidential Clerk, and some reviewers saw them – while others bemoaned their lack. Michael Maccaby, writing in The Harvard Review, offered this perspective:

In its evangelical message, it seems strangely more Calvinistic than Anglican (man finds God through himself without mention of the church and with a predestined role). And these moralistic overtones make the characters into theological robots rather than into the crisp, little chessmen of The Cocktail Party. Much as I enjoy the intellectual exercise The Confidential Clerk imposes, I had the feeling, when it was all over, that the equations didn't balance, not even when you accept the particular set of coordinates in which Eliot chooses to devote his life.

I see very little of Maccaby’s description in the play; his “Calvinistic/Anglican” observation leaves me dumbfounded. I also don’t agree that the characters in the play are “theological robots” (except of course in the sense that Eliot did determine who says what – but that’s true of any play).  Nor can I see that the play’s purpose is “evangelical.” What in the world would it convert one to?

I see the play as the dramatization of a question: where do our impulses and our decisions come from? From reason? From heredity? From circumstances? From the suggestions of other people? From God, in some way or other? From “the spirits”? And if they don’t come from within ourselves, what does that say about who we are?

Whatever the answer, as we grow we become specific people. Does it help to look back and see how we might have been something different? As the character Sir Claude says: “Where ought we to be? What ought we to be doing?”

A hint: family relationships in the play turn out to be closer than one might imagine. If one wants to extrapolate that to the “family of God” or something of the sort, Eliot won’t stop you.

In fact family relationships become quite tangled in the third act, and I am not sure how that act would play; but at its heart is a story of mercy and a great deal of forgiveness, or at least acceptance.

The Confidential Clerk was generally successful in its original productions in London and New York. The writing is bright and often funny. Eric Bentley (1916-2020) reviewed the Broadway production for The New Republic in 1953 and wrote:

If anyone should see The Confidential Clerk without knowing who wrote it, the last thing he would write in his diary that night would be: “Have just seen typical Broadway play.” It is true that the play falls short of both its main objectives: it is neither a great poetic drama nor a great light comedy. It is completely sui generis – praiseworthy or not, according to your own position. My position being a reviewer’s aisle seat, I must praise the play as more entertaining than 99 shows out of 100 – and in a different way. If you like being talked to by an incurably didactic but suave, eloquent, and intelligent uncle, you will enjoy listening to The Confidential Clerk. And in fact the Broadway audience does seem to enjoy it.

But must a play be categorized? Why can’t it be itself?

THE COCKTAIL PARTY

The Cocktail Party was the most commercially successful of Eliot’s “drawing room” plays. Its Broadway production ran for 409 performances and won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play – remarkable accomplishments for a play by a sophisticated, modernist poet (though of course it was no Cats).

The fact that the splendid actor Alec Guinness (1914-2000) played the “unknown guest” on Broadway may have had something to do with the play’s success. But the most likely reason is that it is a fascinating play, not to everyone’s taste perhaps, and containing a number of things today’s audiences might not think they’re interested in . . . but remarkable all the same.

It is framed at beginning and end, logically enough, by a cocktail party. In a larger sense, though, the cocktail party stands for life on the surface, the socially adapted world we live in as images of the people we’d like to be, a symbol like Vanity Fair, as it’s used by John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) or William Thackeray’s 1847-48 novel Vanity Fair. Eliot aims to dig as deeply below that surface as he can.

The party that opens the play is a rollicking scene, with Eliot in full control of his material, bringing characters in and out in hilarious ways, and drawing, at least as I hear it, on Eliot’s love for popular song, which keeps breaking through his poetry and, here, his play:

It’s such a nice party, I hate to leave it.
It’s such a nice party, I’d like to repeat it.
Why don’t you all come to dinner on Friday? 

Eliot writes of The Cocktail Party:

I tried to keep in mind that in a play, from time to time, something should happen: that the audience should be kept in the constant expectation that something is going to happen; and that, when it does happen, it should be different, but not too different, from what the audience had been led to expect.

A familiar theme of Eliot’s poetry, particularly in the Four Quartets, is the continual alteration of personality – we are not the same people we were ten minutes ago, or the same we will be ten minutes from now. This theme recurs repeatedly in The Cocktail Party.

A related major theme of the play is “knowing someone” – how do we know others, how much can we know about them, how much can we know ourselves. At the center of the play is a marriage where two people know very little about each other, and perhaps about themselves . . . and also a woman who can’t relate to the world.

The “unknown guest” to whom Eliot refers, on being asked “To what does this lead?” answers:

                        To finding out
What you really are. What you really feel.
What you really are among other people.
Most of the time we take ourselves for granted,
As we have to, and live on a little knowledge
About ourselves as we were. Who are you now?
You don’t know any more than I do,
But rather less. You are nothing but a set
Of obsolete responses. The one thing to do
Is to do nothing. Wait. 

The play could also be titled “The Unexpected Guest” or perhaps “The Perfect Guest,” a figure who is for some unknown reason at the first cocktail party, and who seems to know more than anyone else about the disappearance of the host’s wife. He turns out to be – not to give too much away – a catalyst for self-discovery.

The self-discoverers are the married couple, who through a sort of therapy return to their marriage accepting their own and the other’s faults, and able to be kind to each other. That, it appears, is one way to live a worthwhile life.

The other way, taken by one of the couple’s friends, is the way of self-sacrifice, and we learn later that she literally has given her life, in an appalling fashion, while serving others. In other words, she has taken the path of the saint, which as far as the play goes is one of only two ways to live meaningfully.  The two paths, the play says, have commonalities, links between the two worlds:

Such experience can only be hinted at
In myths and images. To speak about it
We talk of darkness, labyrinths, Minotaur terrors.
But that world does not take the place of this one.
Do you imagine that the Saint in the desert
With spiritual evil always at his shoulder
Suffered any less from hunger, damp, exposure,
Bowel trouble, and the fear of lions,
Cold of the night and heat of the day, than we should? 

Eliot became an Anglican (in the United States we would say an Episcopalian) in 1927. All his dramatic works except the first (which Eliot himself saw as poetry rather than drama) were written after that date. From that point on, both Eliot’s poetry and his plays begin to take account of theology.

However, both as a poet and as a dramatist, Eliot knows the value of the symbol as opposed to the flat statement.  Certainly this is so in The Cocktail Party. Metaphysics is always in the air, the words “mystery” and “vision” appear, there are references to “the Guardians” (whoever they may be), and so on. And how does the “unknown guest” know so much?   

Still, as Thomas Howard points out in Dove Descending (2006), a study of the Four Quartets, despite its religious themes Eliot never mentions God, Jesus, and so on by name. The same is true of his plays discussed so far. He is a poet and his job is to evoke, not to invoke.

Eliot’s choice of a Greek play on which to base The Cocktail Party is Alcestis (438 BC) by Euripides, frequently referred to as a “tragedy with a happy ending,” and one of my favorite ancient Greek dramas. However, Eliot doesn’t take much from it. He writes:

I was still inclined to go to a Greek dramatist for my theme, but I was determined to take this merely as a point of departure, and to conceal the origins so well that nobody would identify them until I pointed them out myself. In this at least I have been successful; for no one of my acquaintance (and no dramatic critics) recognized the source of my story in the Alcestis of Euripides. In fact, I have had to go into detailed explanation to convince them — I mean, of course, those who were familiar with the plot of that play — of the genuineness of the inspiration. But those who were at first disturbed by the eccentric behavior of my unknown guest, and his apparently intemperate habits and tendency to burst into song, have found some consolation after I have called their attention to the behavior of Heracles in Euripides’ play.

There is a bit more connection between the two plays than he suggests, but not much more. As for its verse form, I found I was reading the play as prose. Eliot in fact says:

I laid down for myself the ascetic rule to avoid poetry which could not stand the test of strict dramatic utility: with such success, indeed, that it is perhaps an open question whether there is any poetry in the play at all.

I haven’t seen a production of The Cocktail Party, but from reading it I would think a director would find it a delight to stage.

In the three plays we have discussed so far, theology as I said is mostly implicit. On the other hand, why shouldn’t issues of religion be dramatized, if that’s what the playwright wants to do? – although today they seldom are, certainly not in the way Eliot does.

THE FAMILY REUNION

For the first of his modern setting, “drawing room” plays, Eliot chose as his model the Greek tragedy The Eumenides by Aeschylus (c. 525/524-c. 456/455 BC) – a heavy hitter. The Eumenides are the former Furies, supernatural agents of retribution, renamed “Gracious Ones” (Eumenides) by the goddess Athena at the end of Aeschylus’ play.

In The Eumenides (458 BC), the Furies pursue Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, the wife of King Agamemnon of Mycenae. The goddess Athena arranges for a trial, presumably the first in Greek history, a model for the future Greek city-states. Orestes is acquitted.

In The Family Reunion Harry, the Orestes figure, is convinced that he has murdered, not his mother, but his wife, although this is not the case. She was accidentally swept overboard on an ocean voyage, but Harry had the impression that he had pushed her over – because he wanted to.

He has become unhinged (which makes his deeply poetic speech somewhat more plausible). In the end Harry, like other Eliot figures, leaves his home on a mystic task, announced but not explained. There is no trial, and not much of a benediction.

We have seen the modest, rather poetic ambitions of Eliot’s plays that followed The Family Reunion. In this play, however, there is nothing modest about the poetry. It fills the play, not least because there is a chorus, like a Greek chorus, of aunts and an uncle, who definitely speak in poetic verse. As Harry says in the play,

                                 that’s not the language
       That I choose to be talking. I will not talk yours. 

Eliot wrote the first of his Four Quartets before he began The Family Reunion, and the other three after the play. Much of the Quartets is echoed in the play, or vice versa, as in these lines from the play: 

The sudden solitude in a crowded desert
In a thick smoke, many creatures moving
Without direction, for no direction
Leads anywhere but round and round in that vapour –
Without purpose, and without principle of conduct
In flickering intervals of light and darkness;
The partial anesthesia of suffering without feeling
And partial observation of one’s own automatism
While the slow stain sinks deeper through the skin
Tainting the flesh and discolouring the bone –
This is what matters, but it is unspeakable,
Untranslatable: I talk in general terms
Because the particular has no language. 

Many of the major themes of the Quartets are contained in that one speech. For those who love the Quartets, as I do, and knew them before reading The Family Reunion, the play feels like welcoming back an old friend.

But I make this point primarily to illustrate that the poetry throughout The Family Reunion is intense. Eliot was aware of this and wrote about “the introduction of passages which called too much attention to themselves as poetry, and could not be dramatically justified . . . .”

He was also critical of the dramaturgy of the play as a whole:

There were two weaknesses which came to strike me as more serious still. The first was, that I had taken far too much of the strictly limited time allowed to a dramatist, in presenting a situation, and not left myself enough time, or provided myself with enough material, for developing it in action. I had written what was, on the whole, a good first act; except that for a first act it was much too long. When the curtain rises again, the audience is expecting, as it has a right to expect, that something is going to happen. Instead, it finds itself treated to a further exploration of the background: in other words, to what ought to have been given much earlier if at all. The beginning of the second act presents much the most difficult problem to producer and cast: for the audience’s attention is beginning to wander. And then, after what must seem to the audience an interminable time of preparation, the conclusion comes so abruptly that we are, after all, unready for it. This was an elementary fault in mechanics.

And he recognizes the difficulty of basing a contemporary play on a Greek tragedy, an approach that also bedeviled Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) in his play Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), also based on the Oresteia:

But the deepest flaw of all, was in a failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern situation. I should either have stuck closer to Aeschylus or else taken a great deal more liberty with his myth.

With a great deal of humor, Eliot describes in particular the problem of including a chorus like the chorus of an ancient Greek play, in his modern one:

One evidence of this is the appearance of those ill-fated figures, the Furies. . . . We tried every possible manner of presenting them. We put them on the stage, and they looked like uninvited guests who had strayed in from a fancy dress ball. We concealed them behind gauze, and they suggested a still out of a Walt Disney film. We made them dimmer, and they looked like shrubbery just outside the window. I have seen other expedients tried: I have seen them signaling from across the garden, or swarming onto the stage like a football team, and they are never right. They never succeed in being either Greek goddesses or modern spooks. But their failure is merely a symptom of the failure to adjust the ancient with the modern.

Okay, but the poetry in the play is superb, whether or not it’s a successful play. A character in it says:

What we have written is not a story of detection,
Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation. 

MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

With Murder in the Cathedral we, and Eliot, and Eliot’s dramaturgy are all on solid ground. The play is Eliot’s most performed – it initially ran in London for about a year, and has had many productions since. It is particularly inviting to theater groups situated in churches (or cathedrals). Eliot wrote the play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935, basing it on events that had taken place in the cathedral of that town centuries before.

Thomas Beckett (c. 1119/1120-1170), former chancellor to King Henry II (1133-1189), once he became Archbishop of Canterbury, opposed the king’s strictures on the church in England, and four knights, acting, or believing they were acting, on the King’s orders, murdered Beckett in his cathedral on December 29, 1170.

Part 1 of the play sets a mood of spiritual turmoil, the elements of which will be familiar to readers of Eliot’s other plays, or of his poems. Taking advantage of the church setting, Eliot makes full use of chants, responsive recitations, and rituals. The verse style is modern, not archaic.

Beckett faces four Tempters (the same actors will play the murderous knights in Part 2), representing the temptations of safety, worldly glory, political opposition to the king, and – most dangerously – the temptation to be a great religious martyr. Beckett replies in among the most famous lines of the play:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason. 

In Part 2 Beckett’s priests try to shield him from the murderous knights, and at first succeed, but at last, the knights corner Beckett and kill him. Beckett dies in a state of clarity about the relation between the world and God that his priests can hardly understand.

Then Eliot does a brilliant, unexpected thing: he has the knights address the audience, explaining their actions and portraying themselves as ordinary people, doing what any of us would agree should have been done. (The play ends with a chorus of prayer.)

I have read that Eliot said he might have been inspired to give persuasive speeches to Beckett’s murderers by the example of Bernard Shaw, who, particularly in his play Saint Joan (1923), was careful to provide well-reasoned arguments for those who executed Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431).  

The last two pieces to be discussed – written before the plays we have discussed – have dramatic form but Eliot did not think of them as plays. However, they both show Eliot thinking about how drama and poetry might conjoin.

THE ROCK

Not a piece about a former wrestler who’s now a popular movie star, The Rock was a “dramatic pageant” written by Eliot, with music by Martin Shaw (1875-1958), and performed in London at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre for two weeks in 1934 to raise money for building new Anglican churches in the London suburbs.

The Complete Poems & Plays contains “Choruses from The Rock.” They are splendid poetry, remarkable examples of religious verse, with occasional speeches assigned to “Voice of the Unemployed,” “Workmen,” and so on. Not only are the choruses worthy in themselves, but it is fun to see T. S. Eliot writing dialogue for the proletariat.

SWEENEY AGONISTES

Sweeney is Eliot’s name for the worldly, thuggish, absolutely unspiritual male. “Agonistes” is a Greek word meaning “engaged in a struggle.” We have, then, an early example of a Greek theme (sort of) in a modern setting, something we will see throughout Eliot’s career as a playwright.

Sweeney Agonistes is unfinished, but the two published sections (“Fragment of a Prologue” and “Fragment of an Agon”) are sometimes performed as a one-act play. The first, slangy and rapid-fire, shows two women discussing men, and then meeting several examples of masculinity. The second features Sweeney and is not just slangy but musical, showing once again Eliot’s love of popular song, viewed askew:

Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough.
You don’t remember, but I remember,
Once is enough. 

SOME CONCLUSIONS

In discussing Eliot’s plays I have tried to rely minimally on outside sources, and to respond to the plays as I read them. Eliot’s reputation waxes and wanes, but, like so much in art, that is a matter of fashion, and I prefer to draw my own conclusions as much as possible – after all, everyone else does.

There are many aspects of Eliot’s life and work that lie outside this piece – for example, his personality, which some dislike; his personal religious practices, which are no business of mine; and the anti-Semitic passages in his writing, which however do not occur in his plays (or for that matter in the Four Quartets).

Reading the plays I learned that a continuous line runs through Eliot’s work. I had thought that he wrote poetry, then stopped and wrote verse plays instead. This is not so; as noted above, he wrote The Family Reunion before he wrote three of the Four Quartets, and major themes of his poetry continue straight through the plays.

Therefore we need to be careful of the often-delivered statement that Eliot’s plays were not as successful as his poems. In a way this is obviously true – his poems are landmarks of literature. But in a way it’s like saying that other mountains fail to be as high as Mt. Everest. They do; but they are no less mountains for that.

Eliot’s concerns motivate both his poetry and his plays, which comment on and inform each other. It is extremely difficult to be a leader in two different artistic forms (or in one). Not to have the same level of success in both can be expected. For that matter, to have at least two or three popular successes in five tries at writing plays is a record other playwrights can envy.

Eliot’s spiritual conclusions are not everyone’s. On the other hand, the drama is not exactly crowded with plays that tackle the spiritual dimension of life, assuming there is one, as serious material for drama. Eliot’s plays should at least stimulate thought about aspects of existence that aren’t often presented in the theater.

And I take my hat off to him for remaining a poet despite his being a writer with ideas and with firm convictions. He might have preached; instead he (usually) tries to stimulate. He (usually) leaves a great deal of room for us to think for ourselves.

As far as his dramaturgy is concerned, even when he wrote his plays he was beginning to look a little old-fashioned, an impression perhaps fostered by his public persona. I suspect that in fact the plays may be a bit ahead of their time – that as they become more and more “period pieces,” it will be easier to see them as basically experimental, and in many ways exciting.

In any case, he wanted to contribute something to art that he thought needed doing, and he worked at it a large part of his life, diligently and with important results. We should all do so well.

[I commented to Kirk that T. S. Eliot seems to have been his own critic. Kirk responded that he was, adding, “in all his criticism that I’ve read, he’s well aware that he’s anything but omniscient, and often funny about it.”  Kirk quoted (from “Five-Finger Exercises,” 1936): 

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With a bobtail cur
And a porpentine cat
And a wopsical hat
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
(Whether his mouth is open or shut). 

[I find Eliot’s unsparing self-portrait in verse very amusing—and stylistically reminiscent of the poetry he composed for Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.]

Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1934 to 1950

by Kirk Woodward

[This is the final installment of Kirk Woodward’s series of commentaries on George Bernard Shaw from his reading of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  The four previous parts, covering the plays written from 1885 to 1902, 1901 to 1909, 1909 to 1920, and 1918 to 1933, were posted on ROT on 3 and 18 July and 8 and 23 August, respectively, and I recommend going back, either before reading part 5 or afterwards, to catch up on Kirk’s thoughts on the great playwright—not so much because part 5 is informed by what came before but because Kirk’s considerations are more than worth reading for their own sakes.  (In my introduction to part 4, I noted that Kirk’s written on ROT before about GBS and listed his past blog articles. I also recommend having a good look at those as well.)]

THE SIMPLETON OF THE UNEXPECTED ISLES (1934 / 1935) – People in society are known by the company they keep, and Shaw’s plays are often known by the prefaces they consort with. This play suffered because of the reputation of its “Preface on Days of Judgment.”

It begins calmly enough, with Shaw’s usual sleight-of-hand switching of categories:

When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe.

Religion is the mother of skepticism: Science is the mother of credulity. There is nothing that people will not believe nowadays if only it be presented to them as Science, and nothing they will not disbelieve if it be presented to them as religion. I myself began like that; and I am ending by receiving every scientific statement with dour suspicion while giving very respectful consideration to the inspirations and revelations of the prophets and poets.

This mild scrambling of preconceptions suddenly takes a sharp turn:

But what of the people who are incapable of restraint except that of intimidation? Must they not be either restrained or, as the Russians gently put it, liquidated.

Then Shaw, for not the last time making a fool of himself over the Soviet Union, gives a merry and sanitized rationale for the state murders carried out by Lenin and Stalin, which gives an unpleasant punning quality to the term “Days of Judgment.” This effect spilled over into Simpleton, and many saw in it a similar enthusiasm for improving the world by killing people.

The Simpleton itself has no explicit relation to its dire preface, except in one ugly passage:

If the angels fail us we shall set up tribunals of our own from which worthless people will not come out alive. When men no longer fear the judgment of God, they must learn to judge themselves.

Aside from its enthusiasm for governmental murder, The Simpleton is Shaw at his most avant garde. It must have been quite a novelty for its first audiences. “Why don’t you do The Simpleton?” Shaw once asked a producer. “It is a lovely play.”

It is certainly a most interesting one. Not to keep harping on age, but Shaw was nearly eighty when he wrote it. It is unusual, imaginative, daring; for the time its ideas about polygamy and mixed-race marriage were shocking. The dialogue is consistently clever.

Three little scenes (the Prologue) introduce us to the Isles – tropical lands that have recently emerged from the sea – and we observe their oddness and unsuitability for normal British ideals. A place, in other words, where strange things can happen.

We then see the Simpleton – a nebbish of an Anglican clergyman – explore what the Isles, in succeeding years, have become. Four people – two English, two not – have become the group parents of four children, to all appearances the most beautiful young people imaginable.

But the Day of Judgment arrives, and it turns out to be the day of Shaw’s judgment:

The Day of Judgment is not the end of the world, but the end of its childhood and the beginning of its responsible maturity.

The four children are among those who just disappear. They were Ideals – their real names were Love, Pride, Heroism, and Empire. So there is a thematic relation between the play and the preface after all. Those who do not work and produce, as Shaw sees they should, ought to and will disappear – however that happens.

“The Six of Calais” (1934) dramatizes Jean Froissart’s (c. 1337-c. 1405) story of the six merchants who surrender to King Edward III to be hanged in return for his lifting the siege of their city, and whose lives are spared through the queen’s intervention (from Froissart’s Chronicles). Shaw adds a twist to the story that gives it a lively comic ending.

In his fine preface Shaw claims that in this play “I am not driving at anything more than a playwright’s direct business,” which is that

Life as we see it is so haphazard that it is only by picking out its key situations and arranging them in their significant order (which is never how they actually occur) that it can be made intelligible. . . . All interpreters of life in action, noble or ignoble, find their instrument in the theatre; and all the academic definitions of a play are variations of this basic function.

Despite Shaw’s disclaimer, it is worth noting that the play does present a revolt of the proletariat of the time against the ruling power structure, and that the religious expressions of the six burghers are distinctly Protestant.

THE MILLIONAIRESS (1935 / 1936) – in his “Preface on Bosses,” Shaw identifies, but does not solve, an issue that afflicts Democratic societies but equally bedevils Socialist thought: the fact that some people rise to the top, whatever that “top” may be, regardless of the obstacles, and often the laws, around them.

Both Socialism and Democracy promote equality; but the fact is that some people cannot help triumphing over circumstances. They seem to make money in spite of themselves; or they get into higher and higher positions of power, or both. (This can even happen in the United States!)

The tyranny of the talented individuals will remain. Again I ask what are we to do with them in self-defence? . . . The problem is how to make sure that the decisions shall be made in the general interest and not solely in the immediate personal interest of the decider.

It comes as a shock to realize that Shaw, who has solutions for everything, has no solution for this problem, except that we become more aware of the situation and its dangers. “What are we to do with such people?” he keeps asking.

Worse, he can’t help admiring them, as his descriptions of Mussolini and Hitler in the preface make clear. Hasn’t he urged the Superman on us? Could they by any chance be Supermen?

The Millionairess uses money as the arena for demonstrating this dilemma – it stays out of politics, although the same points apply. Epifania, the title character, finds herself required to raise a large amount of money out of almost nothing, and she does. Shaw calls the play:

a comedy of humorous and curious contemporary characters such as Ben Jonson might write were he alive now.

The comparison with Jonson (1572-1637, author of Volpone and The Alchemist) is apt in the sense that Jonson wrote comedies that are forceful but difficult to stage successfully. So is The Millionairess. Katherine Hepburn, Shaw’s ideal for the role, did play it on stage, and must have been perfect for it with her brittle voice and angular bearing. Aside from Hepburn’s performance, the play has proven problematic.

Epifania, the title character, is driven, focused, and humorless. “There is nothing one can get,” she says, “but more money.” She ignores any other values. She is a parody of Shaw’s women who are miles ahead of the men around them. Epifania is miles ahead of everyone, but not in the service of Life, just in the service of herself.

Does she remind the reader of anyone?

SAGAMORE. He is taking an action against you.

EPIFANIA. An action! Very well: you know my invariable rule. Fight him to the last ditch, no matter what it costs. Take him to the House of Lords if necessary. We shall see whose purse will hold out longest. I will not be blackmailed.

If you read the role in the voice of, say, a billionaire you envision, you will understand the feel of the whole play. At the end of the play, Epifania has gotten everything she wants; some people have benefited from her activities, some have suffered from them; but she is indifferent to all results except that she is on top.

I am surprised at how highly I think of this play, contrary to my expectations. Shaw isn’t preaching, he’s presenting, and, like Ben Jonson, presenting without sentimentality. Productions that offer the play as a fun evening of theater probably won’t work. But if Shaw isn’t offering easy solutions, he’s identifying a problem, or trying to. All the more credit to him.

“Cymbeline Refinished” (1937) – Shaw scorned the last act of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline for years as jumbled and confusing. When he was invited to write a new fifth act for a production, he read the play again.

I began by reading the authentic last act carefully through. I had not done so for many years, and had the common impression about it that it was a cobbled-up affair by several hands, including a vision in prison accompanied by scraps of quite ridiculous doggerel. For this estimate I found absolutely no justification nor excuse. . . . My notion that it is a cobbled-up pasticcio by other hands was an unpardonable stupidity. The act is genuine Shakespear to the last full stop, and late phase Shakespear in point of verbal workmanship.

However, Shaw also realized that the only way to do the act successfully is to do it full-out, in particular the masque, which requires special handling. So he wrote an alternate ending that does not require unusual staging.

To my ear his verse, although it scans as iambic pentameter, is not otherwise poetic. But the act is efficient, and Shaw excuses himself: “All I can say is that the temptation to [rewrite someone else’s play], and sometimes the circumstances which demand it, are irresistible.”

GENEVA (1939) again looks at politics, but this time the setting is the League of Nations instead of Downing Street, and the cast of characters features the dictators of the time, stand-ins for Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco (but not, notably, Stalin).

The preface, on the other hand, was written in 1945, six years later, after World War II was over.

It seems to me to go off the rails after a while, in its summary of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s careers (“those poor devils”), and in its repetition of the hope that the human species will achieve longer life spans.

Shaw could hardly resist drawing morals not based on experience, and making predictions based on the idea that everyone else thought the way he did.

But it is fascinating to see how the war and the world looked to an intelligent man in 1945, and much of the preface is highly quotable:

England will do nothing outside her routine until she is thoroughly frightened; but when England is frightened England is capable of anything.

The drawback to England’s capacity for doing impossible things when in danger is her incapacity for doing possible things (except repeating what was done last time) in security.

It is sometimes better not to think at all than to think intensely and think wrong.

Ethical victories endure. Discoveries cannot be guaranteed for five minutes.

At the age of 89, Shaw seems less certain of his ideas about the Life Force than in earlier years. He writes for example that

Civilizations have never finally survived: they have perished over and over again because they failed to make themselves worth their cost to the masses whom they enslaved.

Do the “experiments” of the Life  Force have any value if they can’t be passed on? Shaw says, in fact:

All the evidence available so far is to the effect that since the dawn of history there has been no change in the natural political capacity of the human species.

On the other hand,

            It is life that is natural and infinite.

Infinite? Really? In that case – but I digress.

Shaw says that he found the key for the tone of Geneva in a translation of the comedies of Aristophanes by his friend Gilbert Murray. The result is a play of remarkable vigor for any playwright, much less one 83 years old. It is a farce, and the characterizations, as is the case in On the Rocks (part 4), have no depth, nor are they meant to.

Played with energy and speed, it must have delighted its first audiences, with its topical references to current international relations that Shaw kept rewriting as the news changed. The first production ran for a remarkable 237 performances in London, followed by a tour.

Then World War II broke out, and the play plummeted in popularity. It is hard to read it today, with its back and forth debates of rational concepts. It was not robust enough to account for the activities of dictators who turned out to be both brutal, irrational, and genocidal.

“IN GOOD KING CHARLES’S GOLDEN DAYS” (1939) is a title taken from the old satirical ballad “The Vicar of Bray.” The play brings together on stage not only Charles II but, among others, Isaac Newton, Charles Fox (the founder of the Quakers), the actress Nell Gwynn, and the artist Godfrey Kneller (who was included because Shaw’s first choice, William Hogarth, could not quite be fitted in the play’s date of 1680).

I can hardly express the pleasure this play gives me. That an 83-year-old wrote it is remarkable; that anyone can write such a warm, smart, sparkling play is little short of miraculous.

It began as a film script, and I think it would be better known if it had been used as one. It would have been a sort of seventeenth-century My Dinner with Andre, with dialogue and relationships between characters as the focus.

On stage, its two acts are of drastically different lengths, and there is no dramatic climax. Reading the play this time, I felt that the second act, a dialogue between Charles and his Queen, is stronger than I previously thought. However, it doesn’t give us anything much that we didn’t know after Act I.

Beatrice Webb, reading the play while it was being written, said, “If he can bring in some sort of striking incident into the play and not limit himself to sparkling talk, it may turn out A.1.” He did not, but perhaps he felt that inserting that kind of incident would be artificial.

However, if Shaw could repair the last act of Cymbeline, I can repair at least the last moments of Good King Charles. After [The clock strikes five.], insert:

VOICE. (Offstage) Your Majesty! Your Majesty! Would it please you to come out as soon as you can? Your brother has got himself in a bit of mischief!

CHARLES. Odsfish! And I have a Council meeting. I must go, etc.

That would help.

In any case, the play is by no means a failure on stage. It is lovingly revived periodically, and in 1957 it was a surprise off-Broadway success, running for almost two years. For actors it is a delight; and it has a glow and a kindly spirit unique in Shaw’s work. “Golden” is an appropriate word.

Which is not to say that the play is all sweetness and light. There are ferocious arguments over art, religion, science, and politics; there is a fist fight; there is much discussion of the perils of being a king. Charles is thinking about his own death, which does not seem to him to be too far off.

“The world must learn from its artists,” Kneller says, “because God made the world as an artist.” Shaw wrote this play as a great artist.

“Playlet on the British Party System” (1944) is an imaginative visualization in dialogue form of the rationale of the British parliamentary system, included in Shaw’s book Everyone’s Political What’s What. At the age of 88 he could, apparently effortlessly, devise an informative, well-crafted piece like this. Remarkable.

BUOYANT BILLIONS (1946-1948 / 1948) – Shaw finished this play in his early nineties, and, remarkably, wrote three more shorts ones after it. The play is brief, the plot disconnected, the themes familiar. There are Shavian mots but they sometimes seem formulaic, for example: “I am never happy. I dont want to be happy. I want to be alive and active. Bothering about happiness is the worst unhappiness.”

“Shakes Versus Shav” (1949) – a Shaw contribution to the Malvern Festival, where many of his later plays were first performed. This is a play for puppets acting out a rivalry between Shaw and Shakespeare, including the two of them thwacking each over the head.

The little play shows Shaw’s professionalism: he knew just what was expected in a puppet play. The dignified preface includes an answer to people who feel the man from Stratford was too low-class to have written Shakespeare’s plays.

FARFETCHED FABLES (1949-1950 / 1950) has a preface that reprises Shaw’s favorite themes, including the Life Force, equality of income and talent, official lying, miracles, the Roman  Catholic and Anglican churches, Marxism, Democracy, leadership testing, education, the atomic bomb – it’s a long preface – and art:

As events as they actually occur mean no more than a passing crowd to a policeman on point duty, they must be arranged in some comprehensible order as stories.

The play itself consists of six scenes (one a long monologue), each set further in the future than the one before, none that make one want to be there. Shaw’s fecundity at the age of 93 is impressive.

“Why She Would Not” (written 1950) is the last play Shaw wrote; opinions differ on whether he completed it or not. It’s a straightforward set of five short scenes tracing the relationship of a woman who likes her well-to-do life and a man who, as he succeeds in business, changes her situation in ways she doesn’t like. Whether Shaw thought the playlet was finished or not, it could use a concluding punch at the end.

*

Most of my conclusions about Shaw’s plays are included in the survey above. The variety of settings, plots, and characters in his plays is astonishing. Critics have pointed out areas of life that he does not include; but look at how much he gets in! He is, as I said, a professional writer: he can produce a serious play, a comedy, a farce, a sketch, an occasional skit, even on demand.

Certainly not all his writing is equally successful; he lived a long time and wrote a great deal. He has many successes, and some of them are successes indeed. In particular I was surprised at my positive response to several of his later plays. I felt this reading project introduced me to gems I either was not familiar with or had underappreciated.

Obviously Shaw was not a typical commercial playwright. He wasn’t just writing plays; he was creating a theater that at that time really didn’t exist, and along those lines he intended to do what he could to improve the world through his writing. Shaw’s major themes are easy to spot, including:

·         The clash between ideals and reality, and the related conflict between what people profess to believe, and what they really believe when the chips are down.

·         The Life Force as an always-developing instrument working in human life, and the obsolescence of traditional religion, particularly Christianity and its beliefs as traditionally understood. (We should note however that Shaw’s objections to orthodox Christianity do not stop him from frequently using its language.)

·         Woman as the primary instrument of the Life Force, and their general superiority to men.

·         The importance of the superior person, the Superman. (Why “man”? Why not “woman”? In his plays they are usually the ones leading the advances.)

·         The need for Socialism (noted mostly in prefaces), and the futility of Democracy in the face of the inequalities of individual ability. (This dilemma is the context of The Millionairess.)

·         The basic lack of worthiness in the professions, including medicine, law, politics, the military, and the clergy.

·         The importance of work as the supreme value in life.

Shaw isn’t a thinker with a lot of depth. After a while one notices his favorite points appearing over and over, almost reflexively, like pebbles in a pudding. I began to wish that some of these themes would not pop up so often – they seemed rote, and I began to get bored by them. 

However, it makes sense to me that Shaw’s themes might be themes of interest to a writer of comedy, as Shaw unquestionably was. For instance:

·         Comedy is always about the clash between the ideal and the real. “Take my wife – please!” contrasts the ideal of marriage and its reality. And so on.

·         Comedy thrives on energy – a slow comedy is probably not a comedy at all – so life could easily be conceived of as the Life Force by a comedian.

·         Comedy is usually about sexual relations. Ralph Cramden’s wife Alice on The Honeymooners (U.S. television sitcom, 1951-55) could be a character out of a Shaw play.

·         Comedy often includes Supermen – and then typically knocks them down, as Shaw also sometimes does.

·         Comedy, in the form of satire, frequently mocks the professions; Molière in particular was a master of this.

What can we learn from Shaw’s plays today? Obviously the task is not to be like Shaw. His era and generation are gone. More to the point, few of us can match his humor, his intelligence, and his enormous curiosity about everything in life.

And we don’t want to emulate Shaw’s faults, not that that hasn’t been done. He is the master of special pleading, of assumptions snuck into an argument as though they were facts, of straw men, of mistaken and misapplied “factual evidence.” He uncritically accepts the obsolete and misleading “facts” Marx embodies in Capital (1867); his Bible scholarship is shaky. His admiration for dictators, his naivety about Stalin and the USSR, and his growing enthusiasm for executions are horrifying.

Outweighing all these things is Shaw’s basically ethical viewpoint, which as Eric Bentley points out in his book Bernard Shaw is at the center of all his interests – economic, religious, and political. He does not care much how we got where we are. He is interested in where we are going, and he wants us to understand that our actions today determine what the future will be like.

Looked at from that point of view, Shaw’s plays are a continuing challenge to us to live in ways that count, to do everything we can to help the world be what it can be. Shaw uses the word “love” carefully, often redefining it as he does every other expression of the ideal. But his plays urge us, in particular, to work out the implications of the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” in the personal, but even more in the public, sphere.

[Well, that concludes Kirk Woodward’s remarks on George Bernard Shaw—at least for the time being.  As I observed in the fourth installment of this series, Kirk’s been a devoted and thoughtful fan of Shaw’s for a long time, so it wouldn’t surprise me to hear from him that he’s writing something else Shavian.  (Just a hint, Kirk: There are still the writer’s collected critical pieces on which to comment! ) 

[I know that any ROT-reader who’s followed this series will have picked up something interesting about GBS, and perhaps even something useful.   For the time being, however, ROTters who haven’t gotten enough Shaw for the moment may turn back on this blog not only to Kirk’s own past articles, but to several reports on productions of Shaw plays: “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival 2006),” 25 September 2012, and “The 2006 Shaw Festival,” 8 and 11 December 2015.]