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Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950 A Descriptive Chronology of His Plays,
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1856
July
George Bernard Shaw is born on July 26 in
1876
April
Shaw moves to
1884
August
Shaw
begins writing a play based on romantic plot materials supplied by William
Archer, with working titles of The Way to a Woman's Heart, then Rheingold
and Rhinegold, but eventually Widowers'
Houses (1892).
1885
March
After seeing a performance of As You Like It,
Shaw writes to Archer: “The decadence of the stage is awful. We have our work
cut out for us, I can tell you. My opinion of Shakspere
has gone up prodigiously: my opinion of stage culture is below zero.”
1887
October
Having finished the first two acts of Rheingold,
Shaw forewarns Archer that he “has brought the romantic notion which possessed
you, into vivid contact with real life,” and that “the title Rheingold
ought to be saved for a romantic play. This is realism.” When he reads the
completed portion to Archer two days later, he records in his diary that a
“long argument ensued, Archer having received it with contempt.”
1889
August
Shaw writes the journalist / novelist Tighe Hopkins, "Some time ago I tried novelizing
again, and wrote a chapter & a half; but I could not stand the form: it is
too clumsy and unreal. Sometimes in spare moments I write dialogues; and these
are all working up to a certain end (a sermon, of course) my imagination
playing the usual tricks meanwhile of creating visionary persons &c. When I
have a few hundred of these dialogues worked up and interlocked, then a drama
will be the result—a moral, instructive, suggestive comedy of modern society,
guaranteed correct in philosophic & economic detail, and unactably independent of theatrical considerations.
Meanwhile, I live. Point out to me any 'brilliant' person who can say as
much. I repudiate brilliant promise, fiction & political economy as ends.
My business is to incarnate the Zeitgeist, whereby I experience its impulse and
universality, and it experiences the personal raptures of music and
copulation" (the last two words, not printed in the Collected Letters,
have a single line drawn through them in the ms. of the letter at Cornell).
1890
July
Shaw
lectures on Ibsen to the Fabian Society, opening fire "from the depths of
my innermost soul against [the] confounded ideals of Truth, Duty,
Self-Sacrifice, Virtue, Reason and so on."
1891
July
In a music review, Shaw says that W. S. Gilbert, "at his best, was a
much cleverer man than most of the playwrights of his day: he could always see
beneath the surface of things; and if he could only have seen through them, he
might have made his mark as a serious dramatist instead of having, as a
satirist, to depend for the piquancy of his ridicule on the general assumption
of the validity of the very things he ridiculed. . . . Nevertheless, there was
a substratum of earnest in Mr Gilbert's joking."
November
Shaw
expands his Fabian lecture on Henrik Ibsen into
The Quintessence of Ibsenism, defining the realistic social dramas as
"ideal-destroying plays," the mode of his own plays of the 1890s.
With some justification, critics have quipped that the book is virtually
"The Quintessence of Shaw." He interprets Ibsen's implicit beliefs in
the light of his own developing philosophy that the human will should be the
determinant of actions rather than external pressures that parade as "ideals":
conventions of duty and the dictates of religious, rationalist, and materialist
doctrines ("Ideals are only swaddling clothes which man has outgrown, and
which insufferably impede his movements"). His call for women to
"repudiate duty altogether" marks him as an early feminist. His
revision 22 years later (see August 1913) will bring his discussion up to date
and extend it to "the Ibsen school"—which
includes himself.
1892
August
Shaw completes the evolution of Rhinegold
into an antiromantic exposé of slum landlordism and
retitles it Widowers' Houses: An Original Didactic Realistic Play. That
Autumn J. T. Grein complains to Shaw of the dearth of
new British plays, and Shaw submits his play to him for the Independent
Theatre.
December
Shaw's
Widowers' Houses is given two performances by the Independent Theatre
Society at the Royalty Theatre in
In stark contrast to Shaw's theatrical
achievement is the success met by Brandon Thomas's facetious farce Charley's
Aunt beginning nine days later, a run of 1,469 performances.
1893
May
Widowers' Houses is published with Shaw's defense of the play (his third),
"The Author to the Dramatic Critics." To the widespread contention
that he is emulating Ibsen, he replies that the first two acts of the play were
written when he "knew nothing of Ibsen," and it has "no trace"
of Ibsen's retrospective technique; furthermore, the subjects which supposedly
reflect the Norwegian's influence—heredity,
the emancipation of women, marriage laws and customs, and a "mixture of
wickedness and goodness in the same character"—can
be more easily traced to "half a dozen English writers than to
Ibsen," which he proceeds to specify. To the equally recurring complaint
that virtually all of the characters in the play are unpleasant and immoral,
Shaw uses the example of the slum landlord Sartorius to point out
that, as in real life, his plea that he does not repair his tenements because
the tenants would burn his improvements "is perfectly well founded";
his "rascality—for from the social point
of view he certainly is a callous rascal—. . . .
lies altogether in his indifference to defects in our
social system which produce a class of persons so poor that they are driven by
constant physical privation to turn everything they can lay hands on into more
fuel and more food."
Shaw praises Wilde in a letter to Lady Colin Campbell for “teaching the
theatrical public that ‘a play’ may be a playing with ideas instead of a feast
of sham emotions compounded from dog’s eared prescriptions.” Later he twits,
“there are only two literary schools in
June
Shaw
finishes The Philanderer: A Topical Comedy for J. T. Grein's
Independent Theatre, incorporating satires of the Ibsen and New Woman fads, and
featuring a critique of marriage laws that people evade by instituting
"grotesque sexual compacts." Shaw calls it "an extremely
advanced farcical comedy" and says it "exudes brimstone at every
pore." Grein tacitly rejects it, and the play is
not performed until 1907. Its reputation will be heightened by a revival in
November 1991 which restores Shaw's highly discursive original last act,
unknown until the holograph manuscript is published in Early Texts: Play
Manuscripts in Facsimile (1981). Shaw next composes Mrs
Warren's Profession, partly in reaction to Arthur Wing Pinero's The
Second Mrs Tanqueray. The drama, which deals with
a brothel manager and her strong-minded daughter, is too daring to be suitable
for performance, and in 1898 is refused a licence by
the Lord Chamberlain's Office. The Stage Society produces it in 1902, but it is
not licensed until August 1924 (and then “reluctantly”) or performed publicly
in
1894
April
Shaw's Arms and the Man is presented at the Avenue Theatre, the
first of 50 performances. (Shaw does not learn for ten years that the
"angel" who leased the theatre was A. E. F. "Annie" Horniman, making the first of her many notable ventures
into financing the "higher drama.") The comedy, an attempt to
discredit romantic ideals of war and love, features a thoroughly prosaic
military antihero who packs grub instead of bullets and whose blunt common
sense finally wins everyone's admiration. His abrupt intrusion into a glamorous
lady's bedroom starts a series of events that explodes her idealization of a
handsome major she refers to as "my hero!" and converts her to the
businesslike captain. The deposed "hero," just as aware as the
captain that his success in battle was the result of dumb luck, realizes that
his ideal of womanhood is less desirable to him than a delectable servant. At
the finale he expresses his admiration for his oddly constituted replacement by
declaring, "What a man! Is he a man?" (In early
editions, simply "What a man! What a man!") Watching his first
Shaw play prompted Yeats to record that it caused a nightmare in which he was
"haunted by a sewing-machine" that "clicked and shone"
while it "smiled, smiled perpetually." The holograph manuscript of
the play is published in Early Texts: Play Manuscripts in Facsimile.
In response to Archer's criticism that Arms
and the Man is "a fantastic, psychological extravaganza, in which
drama, farce, and Gilbertian irony keep flashing past
the bewildered eye," Shaw retorts in a long letter, "Gilbert is
simply a paradoxically humorous cynic. He accepts the conventional ideals
implicitly, but observes that people do not really live up to them. This he
regards as a failure on their part at which he mocks bitterly. . . . I do not
accept the conventional ideals. To them I oppose in the play the practical life
& morals of the efficient, realistic man . . . . My whole secret is that I
have got clean through the old categories of good & evil, and no longer use
them even for dramatic effect. Sergius is ridiculous
through the breakdown of his ideals, not odious from his falling short of them.
As Gilbert sees, they dont work; but what Gilbert
does not see is that there is something else that does work, and that in that
something else there is a completely satisfactory asylum for the affections. It
is this positive element in my philosophy that makes Arms & the Man
a perfectly genuine play about real people, with a happy ending and hope &
life in it, instead of a thing like [Gilbert's] Engaged which is nothing
but a sneer at people for not being what Sergius
& Raina play at being before they find one another out."
July
Responding to
negative reviews of Arms and the Man, Shaw in his long essay "A
Dramatic Realist to His Critics" (New Review) declares that his
play amounts to a "comedy of the collision of the realities represented by
the realist playwright with the preconceptions of stageland."
Whereas stage life "is artificially simple and well understood by the
masses" and is thus not only "totally unsuggestive
of thought" but "constantly in conflict with the real knowledge which
the separate members of the audience derive from their own daily
occupations," real life is so poorly understood "that no sort of
consistency is discoverable in it"; on the contrary, "it is credible,
stimulating, suggestive, various, free from creeds and systems—in short, it is real."
September
Arms and the Man becomes the first Shaw play to be presented
in
December
Shaw
finishes writing Candida, designing it partly as "a counterblast to
Ibsen's Doll's House, showing that in the real typical doll's house it
is the man who is the doll." In structure the play is a traditional
romantic comedy involving a ménage à trois,
with a guest / intruder becoming infatuated with a handsome married woman.
Marital conventions voiced by the husband, an urbane but conventional preacher,
are attacked both by the guest, a fiercely perceptive young poet, and by the
down-to-earth wife he is entranced with. After an auction scene in which the
two males express their contending claims, the woman sits her two
"babies" down and explains that her spoiled and confident husband needs
her much more than the youth does, and incidentally shatters the poet's notion
of ideal domesticity. What Shaw detects in Ibsen's realistic plays, "a
conflict of unsettled ideals," occurs prominently in Candida: the
two contestants for Candida's love misconstrue her true nature because of
contrasting, but no less delusory, ideals of marriage and womanhood. Shaw
conceived of her as the ultimate mother-woman, "the Virgin Mother and
nobody else": a "calm dispassionate queen who hands out her favours to those who need her most." The play will not be given a full production in
1895
January
Shaw's first drama criticisms for the Saturday Review appear,
beginning his full-fledged "siege laid to the theatre of the XIXth Century by an author who had to cut his own way into
it at the point of a pen, and throw some of its defenders into the moat” (“The Author’s Apology,” preface to Dramatic
Opinions and Essays, 1906). His weekly reviews will continue until May
1898.
March
On
the occasion of the death of E. F. Smyth Pigott,
Examiner of Stage Plays since 1874, Shaw writes in the Saturday Review that
it has been "frightful" to see "the greatest thinkers, poets,
and authors of modern Europe—men like Ibsen,
Wagner, Tolstoi, and the leaders of our own
literature—delivered helpless into the vulgar
hands of such a noodle as this amiable old gentleman," and predicts that
his successor will be the same kind of incompetent. George Redford, a bank
manager and friend of Pigott, is appointed and lasts
until 1911.
March-April
Richard
Mansfield tentatively accepts Shaw's Candida, but rejects it when
rehearsals convince him that it is "not a play" but "three long
acts of talk—talk—talk."
His letter, highly symptomatic of the theatrical milieu in
May
Contributing
to a symposium on the question, "Should social problems be freely dealt
with in the Drama?" ("The Problem Play," Humanitarian),
Shaw acknowledges that "a drama with a social question for the motive
cannot outlive the solution of that question." However, since "the
huge size of modern populations and the development of the press make every
social question more momentous than it was formerly," we are
"witnessing a steady intensification in the hold of social questions on
the larger poetic imagination." The great example is Ibsen, turning
deliberately from "dramatic poems on the grandest scale" to "the
most obviously transitory social questions, finding in their immense magnitude
under modern conditions the stimulus which, a hundred years ago,
. . . he would only have received from the eternal strife of man with
his own spirit. A Doll's House will be as flat as ditchwater when A
Midsummer Night's Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have
done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which
is always intensely utilitarian."
June
Reviewing
two plays by Victorien Sardou, Shaw pins the term
"Sardoodledom" on well-made plays which are no more than
"claptraps" contrived for suspense and easy gratification.
July
In
response to Max Nordau's attack on artists in Degeneration (1893;
English translation, 1895), Shaw replies at length in "A Degenerate's View
of Nordau," revised as The Sanity of Art in 1898. He eloquently
proclaims his basic humanistic and evolutionary aesthetic: "The claim of
art to our respect must stand or fall with the validity of its pretension to
cultivate and refine our senses and faculties until seeing, hearing, feeling,
smelling, and tasting become highly conscious and critical acts with us. . . .
Further, art should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and
sympathy, greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control, precision of
action, and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty,
injustice, and intellectual superficiality or vulgarity. . . . The great artist
is he who goes a step beyond [serving the demands of the physical and moral
senses] and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than
have yet been perceived, succeeds after a brief struggle with its strangeness,
in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race. This is
why we value art: this is why we feel that the iconoclast and the Philistine
are attacking something made holier, by solid usefulness, than their own
theories of purity and practicality."
October
Arthur
Wing Pinero's comedy The Benefit of the Doubt is performed badly, but it
evokes Shaw's well-qualified praise (along with an object lesson for other
conventional playwrights) in the Saturday Review: "This time Mr Pinero has succeeded. The Benefit of the Doubt is
worth The Profligate, Mrs Tanqueray,
and Mrs Ebbsmith
rolled into one and multiplied by ten. . . . Mr
Pinero, concentrating himself on a phase of life and sentiment which he thoroughly
understands, has extracted abundant drama from it, and maintained it at an
astonishingly high and even pressure for two hours, without for a moment being
driven back on the woman with a past, the cynical libertine peer, the angel of
purity, the Cayley Drummle
confidant, or any other of the conventional figures which inevitably appear in
his plays whenever he conceives himself to be dealing as a sociologist with
public questions of which he has no solid knowledge, but only a purely
conventional and theatrical conceit. In The Benefit of the Doubt he
keeps within the territory he has actually explored; and the result is at once
apparent in the higher dramatic pressure, the closer-knit action,
. . . and the comparative originality, naturalness, and free development
of the characters. . . . Consciously or unconsciously, he has this time seen
his world as it really is: that is, a world which never dreams of bothering its
little head with large questions or general ideas."
November
Shaw
finishes his short play The Man of Destiny: A Trifle. He wrote his
“beautiful little one act play for Napoleon and a strange lady” for the
American actor-manager Richard Mansfield and as a lure for Ellen Terry, but
In answer to a query about Mrs Warren's Profession from the critic
Golding Bright when the Independent Theatre was considering it for production,
Shaw first describes it in terms of his intentions : "The play is a cold
bloodedly appalling one; but not in the least a prurient one. Mrs Warren is much worse than a prostitute. She is an
organism of prostitution—a woman who owns
& manages brothels in every big city in
1896
May
Shaw
finishes writing You Never Can Tell, having begun it in mid-1895 and
interrupted it by starting The Devil's Disciple in April. A
"humanized" farcical comedy aimed at the
In the Saturday Review, Shaw clarifies
his objections to farcical comedy (notably Oscar Wilde's The Importance of
Being Earnest): "Beware how you laugh when you do not enjoy. To laugh
without sympathy is a ruinous abuse of a noble function; and the degradation of
any race may be measured by the degree of their addiction to it. In its subtler
forms it is dying very hard: for instance, we find people who would not join in
the laughter of a crowd of peasants at the village idiot, or tolerate the
public flogging or pillorying of a criminal, booking seats to shout with
laughter at a farcical comedy, which is, at bottom, the same thing—namely, the deliberate indulgence of that horrible,
derisive joy in humiliation and suffering which is the beastliest element in
human nature."
June
Informing Golding Bright that Mrs Warren's
Profession no longer has a prospect of being produced by the Independent
Theatre, Shaw states: "The facts are rather funny, in a way. My first
three plays, Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs Warren's Profession were what people call
realistic. They were dramatic pictures of middle class society from the point
of view of a Socialist who regards the basis of that society as thoroughly
rotten economically and morally. In Widowers' Houses you had the rich
suburban villa standing on the rents of the foul rookery. In The Philanderer
you had the fashionable cult of Ibsenism and 'New Womanism'
on a real basis of clandestine sensuality. In Mrs
Warren's Profession you had the procuress, the organizer of prostitution,
convicting society of her occupation. All three plays were criticisms of a
special phase, the capitalist phase, of modern social organization, and their
purpose was to make people thoroughly uncomfortable whilst entertaining them
artistically. But my four subsequent plays, Arms & the Man, Candida,
The Man of Destiny (the one-act Napoleon piece) and the unnamed four act
comedy just finished [You Never Can Tell], are not 'realistic' plays.
They deal with life at large, with human nature as it presents itself through
all economic and social phases. . . . These later plays are of course
infinitely more pleasing, more charming, more popular than the earlier three.
And of course the I.T. now wants one of those pleasant plays to make a popular
success with, instead of sticking to its special business & venturing on
the realistic ones. . . . You must understand, however, that we are all on the
friendliest terms, and that I am rather flattered than otherwise at the
preference of my friends for those plays of mine which have no purpose except
the purpose of all poets & dramatists as against those which are exposures
of the bad side of our social system."
November
Shaw
describes his rhetorical modus operandi in a memorable way that applies
to his writings as well as his speeches: "When I first began to promulgate
my opinions, I found that they appeared extravagant and even insane. In order
to get a hearing, it was necessary for me to attain the footing of a privileged
lunatic, with the license of a jester. Fortunately the matter was very easy. I
found that I had only to say with perfect simplicity what I seriously meant
just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh. My method is to take the utmost
trouble to find the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity.
And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest" (Chap-Book).
December
Shaw
declares in the Saturday Review: "No great play can ever be written
by a man who will allow the public to dictate to him." The business of the
playwright is "to strive incessantly with the public; to insist on earnest
relations with it, and not merely voluptuous ones; to lead it, nerve it,
withstand its constant tendency to relapse into carelessness and vulgar
familiarity; in short, to attain to public esteem, authority, and needfulness
to the national welfare (things undreamt of in the relations between the
theatrical profession and the public today), instead of to the camp-follower's
refuge of mere popularity."
1897
January
Shaw writes to Ellen Terry: "The theatre is my battering ram as much
as the platform or the press: that is why I want to drag it to the front. My
capers are part of a bigger design than you think: Shakespear,
for instance, is to me one of the towers of the Bastille, and down he must
come."
February
Shaw
puts the finishing touches on The Devil's Disciple, written for the home
of popular melodrama, the Adelphi Theatre. As Shaw says in 1930, "The play
was stuffed with everything from the ragbag of melodrama: reading of a will,
heroic sacrifice, court martial, gallows, eleventh-hour reprieve, and all
complete with . . . just that little bit of my own that made all the
difference” (letter in George W. Bishop, My Betters, 1957). The Shavian
"bit" is the play's reversal of Sidney-Carton motives for the hero's
willingness to be hanged for another man; he is not doing it for the man's
doting wife or as a heroic self-sacrifice, but because his own nature dictates
it. Originally a "devil's disciple," he evolves into a preacher
because he proves superior not only to religion, morality, and love but also to
gentility (embodied in General Burgoyne)—to
Shaw, "the whole ideal of modern society." The play is accepted by
Richard Mansfield in
April-May
Rehearsals
of Shaw's You Never Can Tell, accepted for production at the Haymarket
Theatre, disrupt the acting company and Shaw considerately withdraws the play.
June
On
the occasion of a revival of T. W. Robertson's "epoch-making play," Caste
(1867), Shaw reflects in the Saturday Review: "A very little epoch
and a very little play, certainly. . . . I see now clearly enough that the
eagerness with which it was swallowed long ago was the eagerness with which an
ocean castaway . . . would pounce on a spoonful of flat salutaris
and think it nectar. After years of sham heroics and superhuman balderdash, Caste
delighted everyone by its freshness, its nature, its humanity." The
touches of nature, "in the windows, in the doors, in the walls," were
then "inexpressibly welcome because they were the most unexpected of
novelties." These marks of cup-and-saucer drama "are now spurned
because they are commonplaces."
July
Shaw
comments in the Saturday Review on the evolution of audience reactions : "The most advanced audiences to-day,
taught by Wagner and Ibsen . . . , cannot stand the drop back into decoration
after the moment of earnest life. They want realistic drama of complete brainy,
passional texture all through. . . . The decorative
play, with its versified rhetoric, its timid little moments of feeling and
blusterous big moments of raving nonsense, must now step down to the
second-class audience, which is certainly more numerous and lucrative than the
first-class, but is being slowly dragged after it. . . . And so even the
second-class public, though it still likes plenty of pictorial beauty and
distinction . . . in the setting, and plenty of comfortable optimistic
endearment and cheap fun in the substance, nevertheless needs far more
continuous drama to bind the whole together and compel sustained attention and
interest than it did twenty years ago."
1898
April
Shaw
publishes Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, with stage directions designed
to enhance the readability of the plays and with explanatory didactic prefaces.
His rationale is that "in the present condition of the theatre it is
evident that a dramatist like Ibsen, who absolutely disregards the conditions
which managers are subject to, and throws himself on the reading public, is
taking the only course in which any serious advance is possible." Shaw
labels the first three plays "unpleasant," he says in the preface,
because "their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face
unpleasant facts." And though his next plays are "pleasant"
romantic comedies, they embody his "conception of romance as the great
heresy to be rooted out from art and life-as the root of modern pessimism and
the bane of modern self-respect." Three Plays for Puritans (1901)
will print the rest of his plays of the 1890s.
December
Shaw
finishes his chronicle play Caesar and Cleopatra, having begun it on
Shakespeare's birthday in April. The script far exceeds the prevailing norm for
length, but he has planned Act III to be completely removable. Conceived partly
as a counter to Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, the drama
reflects the German historian Friedrich Mommsen's portrait of a Caesar who came
to spurn vengeance rather than Plutarch's more bloodthirsty conqueror, and
offers a teenager sadly in need of a father-figure in place of a mature vamp.
In his attempt to revive the genre of heroic drama, Shaw designed the play to
highlight the qualities of the person he considered "the greatest man that
ever lived," an antitype of the prevailing "gentlemanly hero,"
including provocations for several long speeches. (He does the same much later
with the more naive Joan of Arc.) His Caesar is "heroic in the true human
fashion: that is, touching the summits only at rare moments, and finding the
proper level of all occasions, condescending with humour
and good sense to the prosaic ones, as well as rising to the noble ones."
Caesar's attitude toward vengeance is expressed in one of his noblest moments:
"And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the
name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create
a race that can understand." The play will not be performed in
1899
July
Shaw completes Captain Brassbound's
Conversion, whose protagonist Lady Cicely is expressly designed for Ellen
Terry; in fact, he wrote it "to please her and not as a matter of
business." She is not to play the role until 1906, the first major
November
The
Stage Society, following the pattern of J. T. Grein's
Independent Theatre, begins its forty-year existence by presenting Shaw's You
Never Can Tell. The Society will subsequently provide first hearings in
1900
May
Shaw begins planning a play provisionally entitled The Superman,
"an immense play, but not for the stage of this generation," and
starts writing the Don Juan in Hell dream scene.
1901
January
In a letter to an actor, Shaw sums up his theatrical fortunes so far:
"In short, for the last eight or nine years, I have written a play
whenever anyone asked me to—ten in all. Not
one of these plays has been produced by the people for whom they were written:
in fact, except for a few scratch matinees, a provincial tour which had to take
a play of mine because it could get nothing else, a flutter at a suburban
theatre, and the shows of forlorn hopes like the Independent Theatre &c
&c, they have not been produced at all. . . . So I published the plays, and
gave up the theatre as a bad job."
1902
January
Shaw's most impressive anticapitalist propaganda
play, Mrs Warren's Profession, is produced by
the Stage Society for two performances nine years after its completion. The
Independent Theatre had refused to produce the play, and its producer J. T. Grein now finds it "unnecessary and painful" in
performance. The drama forcefully depicts a smug, energetic "New
Woman" working, smoking, and dallying with infatuation until she is shaken
by learning the source of her income: her rarely present mother is a wealthy
brothel manager. She scorns the dowdy woman but is further shaken when her
mother explains that she escaped an exploitative job necessitated by poverty,
and avoided marriage within her class, by becoming a prostitute and finally
rising to the position of chief madame. This poisons
love for the daughter (who also hears that her boyfriend may be her
half-brother), and at the finale she isolates herself from both people who care
for her. Shaw states in a programme note to the first
West End production in 1926: "when a woman of bold character and
commercial ability applies to herself the commercial principles that are
ruthlessly applied to her in the labour market, the
result is Kitty
Shaw publishes The Author's Apology from Mrs Warren's Profession. Besides describing the play's
rationale at length, he generalizes eloquently: "I am convinced that fine
art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective means of moral propagandism in the world, excepting only the example of
personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the
stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made
intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom
real life means nothing. . . . So effective do I find the dramatic method that
I have no doubt I shall at last persuade even London to take its conscience and
its brains with it when it goes to the theater, instead of leaving them at home
with its prayer book as it does at present."
June
Shaw
finishes writing Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, complete with preface and
"Revolutionists' Handbook and Pocket Companion." It is published in
August 1903, but the "Comedy" will wait for performance until 1905,
the "Philosophy" until 1907, and the whole drama until 1925. The
four-act play, considered by some the greatest English-language comic drama of
the century, is not only richly iconoclastic and rhetorically riveting, but
highly innovative in form. Its hour-and-a-half dream sequence commonly referred
to as "the Don Juan in Hell scene" is an actionless
argument between the Devil and Juan, a spokesman for Shaw's religion of
Creative Evolution, set in a Hell which is a kind of rest home for romantic
idealists. The scene is completely detachable so that the "Comedy,"
itself over three hours long, can be performed without it (Shaw specified minor
changes that make it self-contained). The modern drawing-room comedy of manners
is Shaw's first in a series of highly discursive plays. It is so mainly because
of its reformist hero's propensity to sermonize eloquently against reigning
conventions, including marriage, and to explain at length his radical views on
unmarried pregnancy, the "struggle between the artist man and the mother
woman," and the effect of the "Life Force" on unwary males. But
he is a true comic protagonist: his volubility only makes him more susceptible
to the conventional but crafty lady determined to marry him, especially when he
blindly urges her to defy her (helplessly passive) mother and come with him on
a long excursion. Even when his chauffeur makes him realize that she is the
pursuer and he the pursued, which sends him fleeing for
London Times
critic A. B. Walkley sums up the progress of English
drama from Robertson to Shaw in “Modern English and French Drama” (reprinted in
Drama and Life in 1907). He credits Robertson with “the first
intelligent employment in
1903
January
Shaw
declares in a letter to William Archer that the "extraordinarily happy
command of classes & grades of civilization" in his plays deserves
greater appreciation. "The one overwhelming characteristic of my plays is
the friction between people on different planes of thought, of character, of
civilization & of class prejudice," whereas that of "the ordinary
Pinero-Jones-Grundy play [is] that all the characters are on exactly the same
planes in these respects."
September
A
trial matinee of Shaw's Candida in New York, mounted at their own
expense by Arnold Daly and a young actor, gains such a positive reception that
additional performances are arranged so that the play is finally given over a
hundred times. The Man of Destiny sometimes supplements the evening.
Shaw responds to fellow Fabian John Burns's
praise for Man and Superman (copying it to Sidney Webb): "I'm glad
you like the Superman: it has relieved me of a great deal that has been on my
chest for a long time. However, it is not really pessimistic: quite the
contrary. All that it says is that we shall not get any further until we get
rid of property and of promiscuous breeding in that hopeless little
rabbit-hutch the British home. . . . I am going to see whether I cannot sink
those two rotten old ships Property and Promiscuity with pedigree dynamite.
That may succeed or it may not succeed; but the attempt is not pessimism: there
is more life left in the old dog than that gentlemanly fatuity."
1904
April
Shaw's
Candida receives its first public performance for six matinees at the
October
The
most important theatrical development in early modern British drama, the Vedrenne-Barker management at the Court Theatre, begins
with the performance of Gilbert Murray's version of Euripides' Hippolytus
for six matinees. Early in 1904 Harley Granville Barker, William Archer, and
Murray had issued Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre (privately
printed), the ideas of which underlie this effort. Strongly backed by Shaw, the
theatre manager John E. Vedrenne and Granville Barker
leased the Court to present plays whose "advanced" content and
dramaturgy made them unlikely to be produced in the
November
Shaw's
new disquisitory drama about the relations between
the Irish and English, John Bull's Other Island, is presented at the
Court. (Although written partly for the opening of the Abbey Theatre in
Shaw responds to the critic A. B. Walkley, who charged him with "wilful,
perverse disregard of anything like construction" in John Bull's Other
Island: "I never achieved such a feat of construction in my life. Just
consider my subject—the destiny of nations!
Consider my characters—personages who stalk on
the stage impersonating millions of real, living, suffering men and women. Good
heavens! I have had to get all
1905
January
Arnold Daly, following his success with Shaw plays in September 1903 and a
year later, gives You Never Can Tell its American premiere and scores
another success. With revivals of his previous Shaw offerings starting in
September and the premieres of John Bull's Other Island and Mrs Warren's Profession in October, Daly
helps makes the year a notable one for the growing acceptance of Shaw in
May
Shaw's
Man and Superman is performed as a three-act comedy (without the dream
scene) at the Court 14 times. Granville Barker is made up to resemble Shaw for
his role as Tanner. With John Bull's Other Island and You Never Can
Tell, the Comedy of Man and Superman becomes one of the plays most
frequently presented during Shaw's reign at the Court.
September
Shaw's
Man and Superman (the Comedy) is performed in
October
Shaw's
Mrs Warren's Profession is performed in
November
One
of Shaw's most powerful and challenging plays, Major Barbara, written
expressly for the Court, enters its repertory. Subtitled "a
discussion" and culminating in a brain-racking argument between the
principal characters, with the demonic munitions-maker triumphant, the play
stirs fierce controversy among critics. Shaw struggled through its composition
from March to October, and will never be fully satisfied with the last act. The
first two acts, a comedic reunion of an imperious upper-class woman and her
long-estranged titan-of-industry husband, with her children and their beaus
looking on, then a melodramatic portrayal of unfortunates at a Salvation Army
shelter, with the affluent characters arguing over the means of saving their
souls, grip the audience and critics. But the conversions that follow, showing
the evangelist daughter and her scholar-humanist fiancé overcoming "an
abyss of moral horror" and allying themselves
with "Undershaft" (the "Prince of Darkness") because he
represents reality and raw power, prove well-nigh unendurable—to some extent even to Shaw. Curiously, Shaw tells
Beatrice Webb that his central theme is "the need for preliminary good
physical environment before anything could be done to raise the intelligence
and morality of the average sensual man." But the doctrine that
"poverty is the worst of crimes" is preached by a character who
ruthlessly liberated himself from poverty to become an arch-capitalist, and the
play revolves around the effects of his insidious charisma and persuasiveness,
which are sufficient to compel the much more humane characters to abandon their
benevolent missions and join his "factory of death" (the gentle
scholar must even take his surname). Shaw told the actor who played the role
that it will be "TREMENJOUS"; "Undershaft is diabolically
subtle, gentle, self-possessed, powerful, stupendous, as well as amusing and
interesting. There are the makings of ten Hamlets and six Othellos
in his mere leavings" (July 1905 letter). In January 1906 he responds to
Archer's review ("the worst you ever wrote") by proclaiming "It
is a MAGNIFICENT play, a summit in dramatic literature." The holograph
manuscript is published in Early Texts: Play Manuscripts in Facsimile.
A month before the premiere of Major
Barbara, Shaw had written to the model for the new Undershaft, the
classical scholar Gilbert Murray, "I want to get Cusins beyond the point
of wanting power. . . . The fascination that draws him is the fascination of
reality, or rather—for it is hardly a
fascination—the impossibility of refusing to
put his hand to Undershaft's plough, which is at all events doing something,
when the alternative is to hold aloof in a superior attitude and beat the air
with words. . . . I have taken rather special care to make Cusins the reverse
in every respect of the theatrical strong man. I want him to go on his quality
wholly, and not to make the smallest show of physical robustness or brute
determination. His selection by Undershaft should be a puzzle to people who
believe in the strong-silent-still-waters-run-deep hero of melodrama."
Shaw also explains the "daimonic" finale:
"As to the triumph of Undershaft, that is inevitable because I am in the
mind that Undershaft is in the right, and that Barbara and Adolphus
[Cusins] . . . are very young, very romantic, very academic, very
ignorant of the world. I think it would be unnatural if they were able to cope
with him. Cusins averts discomfiture & scores off him by wit & humorous
dexterity; but the facts are too much for him; and his strength lies in the
fact that he, like Barbara, refuses the Impossibilist
position . . . even when the alternative is the most sensationally anti-moral
department of commerce." During rehearsals Shaw threw more light on the
finale when he instructed the actress playing Barbara when to show that she is
her mother's daughter: "It comes very natural to her to order people
about. There is a curious touch of aristocratic pride at the very end, where
she says she does not want to die in God's debt, and will forgive him 'as
becomes a woman of her rank' for all the starvation & mischief he is
responsible for. Barbara has great courage, great pride & high temper at
the back of her religious genius; and you need not hesitate to let them flash
through at moments."
December
The
first book about Shaw is published: H. L. Mencken's George Bernard Shaw: His
Plays. It touches off a international flurry of full-length studies written
before the war, chief among them Holbrook Jackson's Bernard Shaw (1907),
G. K. Chesterton's George Bernard Shaw (1909), Julius Bab's Bernard
Shaw (1910; in German), Renée M. Deacon, Bernard Shaw as
Artist-Philosopher: An Exposition of Shavianism
(1910), Archibald Henderson's George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works: A
Critical Biography (1911; authorized by Shaw), Charles Cestre's
Bernard Shaw et son oeuvre (1912), Augustin Hamon's Le Molière du XXe
siècle: Bernard Shaw (1913; translated in 1915 as The Twentieth Century
Molière: Bernard Shaw), and Joseph McCabe's George Bernard Shaw: A
Critical Study (1914).
1906
February
Asked to comment on the question "What Is the Finest Dramatic
Situation?" (for Strand Magazine), Shaw points to the contemporary
examples of Granville Barker's The Voysey
Inheritance, St John Hankin's Return of the
Prodigal, and his own Candida and asserts that "the best plays
consist of a single situation, lasting several hours. . . . This expansion of
the old momentary claptraps, introduced by tedious explanations between
servants, and followed by a final act which was seldom more than a more or less
adroitly covered up collapse into episodes of sufficient significance,
richness, and variety to form whole plays, is the most hopeful sign about our
modern drama."
March
Shaw's
Captain Brassbound's Conversion has its first
April
In a three-week triple bill,
J. M. Barrie includes a one-act called Punch: A Toy Tragedy. The main
character is Superpunch—made
up to resemble Shaw.
October
Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra has its English-language world premiere in
A two-volume selection of Shaw’s articles
from the Saturday Review is published with his prefatory note, “The
Author’s Apology.” His concerted aim, he says, was to compel the theatre to
take itself seriously as “a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an
elucidator of social conduct, an armoury against
despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of Man.”
November
Shaw's
highly discursive exposé of the medical profession, The Doctor's Dilemma,
which he dubbed "a tragedy" despite the farcical cast of its death
scene, is staged at the Court 50 times. Shaw composed the play "at
hurricane speed" (between August 11 and September 3) to keep the theatre
flourishing. While depicting a cross section of physicians from the comedic
underside, the play focuses seriously upon the inventor of an antitoxin for
tuberculosis which can kill if it is not properly administered. Since he must
choose between patients competing for the time-consuming treatment, he is faced
with a severe ethical crisis when an attractive woman begs him to save her
husband, a Bohemian artistic genius (and "disciple of Bernard Shaw").
The doctor decides to play God and get his way by putting the artist in the
hands of a bumbling colleague, who in effect kills him; but he has his
comeuppance later when he learns that the woman has already remarried. Shaw
explains in his preface that the play demonstrates the crying need for public
control of the medical profession; its present state is one reason he subtitled
the play a "tragedy." The other reason pertains to the irresponsible
artist: "'a man of genius who is not also a man of honor' is the most
tragic of all themes" (March 1918 letter to Archibald Henderson). The
holograph manuscript of the play is published in Early Texts: Play
Manuscripts in Facsimile.
Shaw forewarns the critic A. B. Walkley that the "scientific side" of The
Doctor's Dilemma is "correct and up to date." The hero is based
directly upon Dr Almroth Wright, recently knighted
for his opsonic discovery, the description of which in Act I "
is accurate in every detail." Moreover, "the situation of the
doctor having more cases than he could treat, and consequently having to choose
whom to cure & whom to let go, actually existed last year." The
blunders of the physician who causes the artist's death are founded on
confusion between vaccines and anti-toxins; he "imagines that vaccines
stimulate the phagocytes instead of buttering the baccili.
His cardinal error is sufficiently explained in the play."
1907
February
The
Court gives Shaw's second play, The Philanderer, its first public
performances.
June
Reviewing
Shaw's collected drama criticism in The Fortnightly Review, St John Hankin takes issue with current critics who seem to have
learned nothing since the mid-nineties, as evidenced especially in their naive
reviews of Ibsen revivals and of Shaw's recent plays. They seem "quite
unconscious" of the fact that Ibsen is acknowledged as "the most
famous dramatist whom the nineteenth century produced," and that Shaw is
"indisputably the most distinguished living English dramatist. His plays .
. . are read and discussed and defended and attacked wherever men of letters are
gathered together who take any serious interest in the theatre."
The dream scene of Shaw's Man and Superman,
entitled Don Juan in Hell for separate production, is staged for eight
matinees at the Court. Set in an afterlife of "utter void," the long
one-act is a fantasy that develops into a pure discussion drama. Shaw will
later refer to it as his "beginning of a bible for Creative
Evolution." The four principals—Juan,
Doña Ana, her father (bedecked as a statue), and the Devil—engage in a concerted argument about the main
issues in that philosophy, with Juan passionately upholding the creed of
aligning oneself with the élan vital or Life Force and the Devil
advocating a hedonistic life contemplating ideals of beauty and love that are
no longer contradicted by brute realities. (The two sides mark "the
difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament.") Juan
provokes Ana to shed her earthly illusions and help the Life Force in its
struggle upward as only a mother-woman can: by heading for heaven to locate
"a father! a father for the Superman!"; the
Devil, clearly bettered in the debate although his rebuttal speeches are
stunning until the last phase, wins the pleasure-seeking Statue as a
consolation prize. A highlight of the discussion is Juan's pointed recollection
of an attempt to cut short an affair with a seductive woman: "whilst I was
in the act of framing my excuse to the lady, Life seized me and threw me into
her arms as a sailor throws a scrap of fish into the mouth of a seabird."
The same, in effect, happens to his 20th-century counterpart in the Comedy.
Shaw had specified that the stage designer for the production must create
"a really artistic fantastic picture, with top lighting in the manner of
[Gordon] Craig, and cunning costumes—a violet
velvet Don Juan . . . , a crimson scarlet Mephistopheles, a masterpiece of
white marble sculpture, and a radiant female"—else
"the thing will be unendurable" (December 1905 letter). He later
commends Charles Ricketts for fulfilling this task brilliantly.
Shaw’s one-act Napoleon play, The Man of
Destiny: A Trifle,
is finally given a full production in
The Vedrenne-Barker
management at the Court ends, but moves into West End theatres (the Savoy and
Haymarket) for performances of a few plays, among them Shaw's Getting
Married in 1908.
October
A
letter to the London Times protesting the censorship of plays, prompted
by the refusal to license Granville Barker's drama Waste, is signed by
71 writers, among them W. S. Gilbert, Arthur Wing Pinero, J. M. Barrie, Shaw,
W. B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, John Galsworthy, and Somerset Maugham.
This, and the deputation to the Prime Minister's office that followed, is the
first step in a concerted campaign, tirelessly stage-managed by Shaw, to end or
significantly revise the governmental examination of plays.
Yeats reports to Florence Farr that he saw
Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra twice in one week and was “delighted and
what I never thought [to] be with a work of his, moved. There is vulgarity,
plenty of it, but such gay heroic delight in the serviceable man. Ah if he had but style, distinction, and was not such a barbarian
of the barricades.”
November
Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra is finally produced in
December
Shaw's
Arms and the Man is performed in
1908
May
In an interview before the opening of Getting Married, Shaw declares
that he is going to be revenged upon critics for "their arrant
Philistinism, their shameless intellectual laziness, their low tastes, their
hatred of good work, their puerile romanticism, their disloyalty to dramatic
literature. . . . There will be nothing but talk, talk, talk, talk, talk—Shaw talk. The characters will seem to the wretched
critics to be simply a row of Shaws, all arguing with one another on totally
uninteresting subjects. The whole thing will be hideous, indescribable—an eternity of brain-racking dullness. And yet they
will have to sit it out" (Daily Telegraph).
Shaw's Getting Married, a "disquisitory play" with a vengeance, is staged at the
Haymarket and manages a run of 54 in spite of (or by now, perhaps because of)
its discursiveness. Shaw wrote it between August 1907 and March 1908, finally
rejecting its provisional title, "Any Just Cause or Impediment?" A
seriocomic analysis of the institution of marriage in England, the three-hour drama
obeys the classical unities of time (a wedding day) and place (an oversized
kitchen), but its structure is argumentative rather than "well made"
to an extent unequaled at the time except in the dream scene of Man and
Superman. Critics greet it with what Shaw calls a "torrent of
denunciation" largely because of its torrent of talk. The many fascinating
characters, from a bishop and a beadle to a general and a clairvoyant, exist
primarily as conflicting viewpoints on and exemplars of the institution of marriage
and divorce. (The greengrocer / alderman's contention that "Marriage is
tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and
don't expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear
thinking about" fails to stem the debate.) The group has assembled before
a wedding when the young couple informs them that they have learned about the
deficiencies of present marriage laws, especially the provisions for divorce,
and are changing their plans. Led by the broad-minded bishop, the kitchenful of people try to agree on a marriage contract
which will accommodate a wide range of views—except
for celibacy, advocated by the bishop's assistant—and
allow for divorce on reasonable grounds. Their prolonged attempt finally has no
effect whatever on the couple; they abandon the
debate, work out a contract that satisfies them, and get married offstage. A
highlight of the play is the impassioned aria of the clairvoyant to men in
general, concluding: "I gave you your own soul: you ask me for my body as
a plaything. Was it not enough? Was it not enough?"
November
Admonishing an actress playing Ann in a touring
production of Man and Superman, Shaw instructs her in the
"particular kind of English ladylikeness" she must strive for:
"No matter how improperly she may behave, an English lady never admits she
is behaving improperly. Just as there are lots of women who are good-hearted
and honest and innocent in an outrageously rowdy way, so there are ladies who
do the most shocking things with a dignity and gentility which a bishop might
envy. . . . Ann's dignity, her self-control, her beautifully measured speed,
her impressive grief for her father, which absolutely forbids her to smile
until she is out of mourning, a sort of rich, chaste, noble self-respect about
her . . . must be splendidly and very firmly handled on the stage in order to
give effect to her audacity" (letter to Frances Dillon).
1909
May
In a plea for a national
theatre, Shaw contends: "The theatre is literally making the minds of our
urban populations to-day. It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of
points of honour, of conceptions of conduct, of
everything that finally determines the destiny of a nation. And yet it is
openly said that the theatre is only a place of amusement. It is nothing of the
kind; a theatre is a place of culture, a place where people learn to think,
act, and feel; more important than all the schools in Christendom" (
July
A
governmental revaluation of the function of the Lord Chamberlain's Office as
examiner of plays begins with meetings of the Joint Select Committee of House
of Lords and House of Commons on Stage Plays. Similar committees had met in
1892 and 1906 with negligible results, but this time dozens of well-known
writers are clamoring for reform. Shaw is to be interviewed on July 30; in
preparation he draws up an 11,000-word statement to supplement and clarify his
answers to the questions they have posed, almost surely the most thoughtful
analysis of the existing censorship and possible alternatives ever written. The
statement is not admitted into evidence (which would have mandated its
appearance in the Select Committee's transcript of proceedings); after
protesting repeatedly and being refused, Shaw prints it in his Preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco
Posnet (published in 1911). It states, "I am
a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been gained by
my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals," and
insists on "those rights of liberty of speech and conscience which are
matters of course in other professions." After fifteen meetings the
Committee publishes its half-a-million-word final report. Shaw calls it an
example of "the art of contriving methods of reform which will leave
matters exactly as they are," but it does lessen the powers of the
Examiner of Plays and incorporates other suggestions from Shaw and his allies.
August
Shaw's
one-act The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet is performed at the Abbey after the Lord
Chamberlain's Office refused to license it in England. Written in three weeks
early in 1909 on commission to benefit a children's charity, the
"religious tract in dramatic form" (of a creative evolutionist) was
censored for blasphemy. Shaw used the decision as another means of prompting an
inquiry into the policy of censorship. Partly to point up its absurdity, he has
the play performed in
After putting Shaw's The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet into
rehearsal, Lady Gregory is informed by Dublin Castle officials that producing
it will violate the restrictions placed upon the Abbey Theatre by the Patent,
and will thus nullify their license. Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and Shaw determine
to take the risk and go ahead with the performance. When the audience finds the
play innocuous, the Castle capitulates silently.
November
Shaw begins writing Misalliance, evidently
inspired by hearing Granville Barker read his newly completed play The
Madras House. At about this time he also finishes writing a long preface to
a volume not published until 1911, Three Plays by Brieux, in which he
proclaims the basic aesthetic principle underlying his drama: “Life as it
occurs is senseless: a policeman may watch it and work in it for thirty years
in the streets and courts of Paris without learning as much of it or from it as
a child or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux. For it is the business
of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily
happenings, and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes
significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous
confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies. This is the highest function that man can
perform—the greatest work he can set his hand to; and this is why the great
dramatists of the world, from Euripides and Aristophanes to Shakespear
and Molière, and from them to Ibsen and
Brieux, take that majestic and pontifical rank which seems so strangely above
all the reasonable pretensions of mere strolling actors and theatrical
authors.”
1910
February
Shaw's
Misalliance: A Debate in One Sitting, a seriocomic exploration of
relations between parents and children, enters the repertory at the Duke of
York's with eleven performances. It is severely criticized for the apparent
formlessness of its "debate." In Shaw's opinion, the main reason is
that the producer Charles Frohman "cut out what he considered the highbrow
parts and made the rest unintelligible," and revivals faithful to the play
in 1930 and 1953 will be better received. As in Getting Married, the
unities of time and space are observed and the structure is that of an
argument. But in this play striking things happen to introduce new points of
view, notably a plane crash into the greenhouse that brings an attractive,
aggressively independent Polish acrobat, and a stickup by a young intruder with
melodramatic notions who intends to avenge his mother by killing the master of
the house. Moreover, looking forward to Heartbreak House, infatuations
and flirtations galore (including several directed at the acrobat) alternate
with brief discussions on an array of topics ("Let's argue about something
intellectual," a character says; one of the many topics is the superman,
which evokes the comment, "Read Whatshisname"). The title relates to
a topsy-turvy sentiment of the play's elder statesman, who objected to a young
man marrying his daughter "on the ground that a marriage between a member
of the great and good middle class with one of the vicious and corrupt
aristocracy would be a misalliance."
Count Leo Tolstoy responds to Shaw’s gift of
an inscribed volume of Man and Superman with praise for Don Juan’s
speeches and the “attitude towards civilisation and
progress” shown in “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” but urges him not to “speak
jestingly of such a subject as the purpose of human life, the causes of its
perversion, and the evil that fills the life of humanity today.” Shaw retorts
that making people laugh in the “most earnest moments” of the play is a valid
strategy: “Why should humour and laughter be
excommunicated? Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes,
would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?”
Tolstoy replies that he “received a very painful impression” from these words.
November
Shaw's
one-act featuring a confrontation between Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, The
Dark Lady of the Sonnets, is performed at the Haymarket for two matinees.
He wrote it as an appeal for the establishment of a national theatre, which is
the appeal that Shakespeare makes (in vain) to the Queen.
1911
April
Shaw's
Fanny's First Play is produced, its author unidentified, at the Little
Theatre, then is transferred to the Kingsway for a total run of 623. The play,
its author also unidentified, presents Fanny's Ibsenite
drama of youthful rebellion from conventions and ensuing self-discovery, partly
designed to bring her father up-to-date. (It is performed in his elegant
country house.) A framework of "Induction" and Epilogue—sometimes omitted in performance—presents the wrongheaded anticipations and
reactions of her father and the invited audience of four prominent drama critics.
Her father, an aesthete completely unfamiliar with current drama, is roundly
shocked; the critics, three of them caricatures of living men and one
representing "the man in the street," voice conflicting extreme
opinions. They inevitably discuss Shaw as the possible author: "A giant
brain . . . but no heart"; all his characters are "mere puppets stuck
up to spout Shaw"; "All he wants to do is to insult everybody all
round and set us talking about him." Shaw calls the play a
"potboiler," and it turns out to be his first commercial success.
December
Shaw states that Synge's satirical dramas have a "joyousness and a wild
wealth of poetic imagery" (Gaelic American).
1912
July
Shaw writes to the actress Pat Campbell, "My plays must be acted, and
acted hard. They need a sort of bustle and crepitation of life which requires
extraordinary energy and vitality, and gives only glimpses and movements of the
poetry beneath. The lascivious monotony of beauty which satisfies those who are
slaves of art instead of masters of it is hideous in my plays."
December
Writing
to his French translator, Augustin Hamon, about his script of Man and Superman, Shaw
suggests using Bergson's term, l'élan
vital, for Life Force. He adds: "It is quite probable
that if I had heard the expression . . . when I was writing Man and Superman,
I would have called the Life Force, the Life Impulse." He also comments
that he was the first to use the word "superman": "Everybody
uses it now. But for a year or two a few men of letters here persisted in
ignoring it and using such alternatives as Overman
and even Beyondman. Exactly the same thing would
happen to us if we attempted to ignore Bergson's term; we should be forced
eventually to adopt it."
1913
August
Shaw's expanded edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism is
published. Much commentary from the perspective of two decades later is
appended, including analyses of the late plays and the seminal essay "The
Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays." The "novelty" that Shaw
identifies is the discussion, which "conquered
September
Shaw's
Androcles and the Lion: A Fable Play, written during January 1912, is
staged and has a run of 63. Shaw will comment much later that he wrote it
"as a sample of what children like in contrast to
Anticipating Saint Joan (December 1923)
on a trip to Orleans, Shaw writes to Pat Campbell: "I shall do a Joan play
some day, beginning with the sweeping up of the cinders and orange peel after
her martyrdom, and going on with Joan's arrival in heaven. I should have God
about to damn the English for their share in her betrayal and Joan producing an
end of burnt stick in arrest of Judgment. 'What's this? Is it one of the
faggots?' says God. 'No,' says Joan 'it's what is left of the two sticks a
common English soldier tied together and gave me as I went to the stake; for
they wouldnt even give me a crucifix; and you cannot
damn the common people of England, represented by that soldier[,]
because a poor cowardly riff raff of barons and bishops were too futile to
resist the devil.' That soldier is the only redeeming figure in the whole
business."
1914
April
Shaw's
Pygmalion: A Romance, written in June 1912, starts a run of 118 at His
Majesty's Theatre, his first success in the
1916
March
Shaw begins writing Heartbreak House, tentatively entitled "The
Studio in the Clouds," with the war pervading his consciousness to the
extent that he speaks of "creeping through a new [play] (to prevent myself
crying) at odd moments, two or three speeches at a time." He will not
complete it until mid-1917, and then he will wait until after the war to have
it produced. (Shaw apparently misleads people, among them his
chosen biographer Archibald Henderson, into believing he had written the play
before the war, which accounts for the statement in several sources that he
began it in 1913.)
A 1910 comment by Henry James about Shaw is
reported in the
November
When Frank Harris comments that Shaw’s plays are not
passionate or sexual the dramatist replies in a letter: “I know of no writer
who has dealt as critically with sex as I have. Archer’s early complaint that
my plays reeked with sex was far more sensible than the virgin-eunuch theory
which the halfpenny journalists delight in. . . . You had better avoid the
subject, as you will certainly botch it frightfully.”
1917
July
After a performance of The Outcry by Henry James, Shaw responds to an
actress who deplored its failure: "Nothing can make H.J. intelligible on
the stage. The difficulty is not in the least that his dialogue is artificial
and affected and involved: it is not more so than Congreve's now appears. . . .
It is simply that he uses sounds that are not intelligible to the ear, though
they are quite lucid on paper. . . . I did not, with all my literary expertness
and knowledge of James's style, catch more than two thirds of the dialogue as
it was spoken, though I could have read it without difficulty."
October
After completing Heartbreak House, Shaw replies to his puzzled Swedish
translator, Hugo Vallentin: "You say you do not
understand it; but there is nothing to understand beneath the surface: it is a
picture of a certain sort of life that our civilization tends to produce among
people of extraordinary vitality and sensibility. . . . The only part of
society which is not a quicksand is the life of the equestrian country house
class and the frankly autocratic Crown-Colony-Governing-Class extolled by the
daughter of the house who happens to be born conventional. The old Captain is
your prophet Jeremiah bawling the judgment of God on all this insanity. And you
have the undercurrent of sex continually reproducing quicksand as fast as the
welter tries to consolidate itself. . . . I think what makes it puzzling is
that the people seem to be so interesting and attractive and novel at first
sight that one is led to expect great things from them; and when they are all
reduced to absurdity, and even the solution of blowing them to bits misses
fire, the spectator feels baffled and disappointed, as if something very
promising had been wantonly spoilt."
1918
March
In
New York Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession is
revived by the Washington Square Players, this time free of police raids.
Shaw begins writing his dramatic magnum opus,
the five-play cycle Back to Methuselah; he will finish it (and its
30,000-word preface) two years later.
1919
August
Among Shaw's many deploring retorts to statements of his aspiring (but
eventually stillborn) biographer, Thomas Demetrius O'Bolger,
is the following: "My plays are no more economic treatises than Shakespear's plays. . . . It is clear that Widowers'
Houses and Major Barbara, being dramas of the cash nexus (in plot),
could not have been written by a non-economist. It is also clear that Mrs Warren's Profession is the work of an
economist. There is an economic link between Cashel Byron [in the novel Cashel
Byron's Profession], Sartorius, Mrs Warren &
Undershaft, all of them engaged very capably in infamous activities
prosperously and proudly. But would anyone but a buffle
headed idiot of a university professor, half crazy with correcting examination
papers (another infamous activity pursued under economic pressure) immediately
shriek that all my plays were written as economic essays, and that I did not
know that they were plays of life, character, and human destiny as much as Shakespear's or Euripides's?"
1920
February
Just before a revival of Pygmalion in the
April
St John Ervine generalizes about Shaw in the North American Review:
“when all the discount is made that can be made for possible charlatanry in
Shaw’s character, there remains this indisputable fact that he has left a mark
on the thought and life not only of the English-speaking world, but of the
whole of Western civilization, which cannot be eradicated. We may go to the
theatre to laugh at Bernard Shaw, but we remain to think with him.”
November
Shaw's Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English
Themes, written in 1916-17, is produced at last
after having been published in September 1919. The recently incorporated
Theatre Guild of America presents the play (uncut, at Shaw’s insistence) in
This comic tragedy—which
he will also dare to call his own King Lear in his 1949 puppet play Shakes
versus Shav—is
uncharacteristically enigmatic as well as sad. The portrayal of "cultured,
leisured
When St John Ervine in a review of Heartbreak
House contends that Shaw's choice of actress for the heroine was
"seriously miscast" (Observer, October 1921), Shaw responds
that the part "fits her like a glove." Ellie Dunn is not the ingenue, a "sweet little sexual attraction," but
"the heavy lead"; her part is written "with obvious operatic
solos in it," and the objection to her "recitations" and
"pontificating" are oddly misplaced when "Hector declaims all
through" and the Captain "prophesies like a Druid," and no one
objects. Moreover, the complaint that Ellie does not seem to be "in her
element" in the play is misguided: "I took the greatest care that she
should not be—that she should be in the
sharpest contrast to all the heart-breakers, and that when she is lured into it
she should walk over Hector and Hesione straight to
the Captain, the positive efficient man on whose shoulders the whole structure
is carried." The actress presents Ellie "precisely as I planned her:
as the strong respectable woman of the play, virginal by contrast with the
demon daughters, and yet audaciously passionate and imaginative."
1921
June
Shaw's most imposing and imaginative work, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch, is
published. The book sells very well, but the huge drama will not be performed
until February 1922. Composed of five full-length plays, the whole spans 35,000
years, from the Garden of Eden ("In the Beginning") to postwar London
("The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas") to 2170 A.D. ("The Thing
Happens") to 3000 A.D. ("The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman")
and finally to 31,920 A.D. ("As Far as Thought Can Reach"). Shaw
advertised it as his "scientific, religious, and political testament as
well as his supreme exploit in dramatic literature," and linked it to the
"beginning" of his bible of Creative Evolution, the Don Juan in Hell
scene of Man and Superman. The central line of action is touched off
when two contemporary believers in that creed discuss their "gospel":
in order to attain genuine knowledge and power, men and women must will
themselves a life span of at least 300 years. Two politicians, a young rector,
and a parlormaid listen, wondering at the advocates'
sanity. However, 250 years later, "The Thing" has happened: a few
people have unconsciously willed themselves into longlivers.
The President of the land learns to his dismay that the Archbishop and four
other famous people who had been reported drowned in past ages are all one and
the same man: the rector, 283 years old but looking 50. Moreover, their
Domestic Minister turns out to be the former parlormaid,
who has also lived several lives. In the next 35 millennia life evolves so that
seventeen-year-old children emerge from eggs and reach maturity in four years.
As they grow into "Ancients," they are destined to live forever,
barring an accident, and to spend their time in a state of contemplation that
becomes more profound and ecstatic as they progress toward the goal they
visualize: a bodiless "vortex of pure thought." The mythical figure
of Lilith is attributed in part one with creation: by a mighty effort of
imagination and will she divided herself into Adam and Eve. At the end of the
drama she is pleased with the present results of her deed, and urges man onward
toward "the whirlpool in pure intelligence" and whatever lies beyond
that. "It is enough that there is a beyond." In a postscript to a
1945 revised edition Shaw declares that the play "is a world classic or it
is nothing."
1921
October
The Macdona Players, led by the actor-manager Charles
Macdona, secure the touring rights for Shaw’s plays,
form the Shaw Touring Repertory Company, and produce thirteen of his plays in
the provinces and
1922
February-March
To Shaw's great surprise, the New York Theatre Guild mounts a production of
the full play-cycle Back to Methuselah at a special Shaw Festival in the
Garrick Theatre. The five parts of the twelve-hour performance are presented
over a two-week period; in nine weeks the whole is performed 25 times. The
"fanatic" who proposed the event, Lawrence Langner,
is followed by Barry Jackson, founder of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre; his
group presents the cycle beginning in October 1923 for four performances in
1923
June
Responding
to Archer’s preference for “constructed” plays in his recent book, The Old
Drama and the New, Shaw declares: “The plain fact is that there are two
sorts of plays: natural growths and constructions, just as there are two sorts
of flowers, natural ones and artificial ones. . . . When you are writing a play
it is of the first importance that you should not for a moment allow your
attention and interest to be diverted from the interest proper to drama: that
is, an interest common to yourself and your audience. Now the interest of
carrying out a scenario is like the interest of piecing together a jigsaw
puzzle: it has nothing whatever to do with dramatic interest, and though it is
absorbing to the operator, it is unbearably dull to the looker-on. You must
always go where the dramatic interest takes you; and if you do this you will
find that the dramatic interest, a live thing, will organize itself so marvellously (like the natural flower) that the final
result will be held up by critics as a triumph of construction.”
December
Shaw's
compelling historical drama, Saint Joan, is staged in New York by the
Theatre Guild, has a run of 214, then in March 1924 starts a run of 244 in
London. The play transforms many critics' opinions of Shaw as a playwright
incapable of writing serious drama, and largely accounts for his being awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925 after several previous nominations.
Written in four months after a long period of gestation, the play is firmly
based on Jules Quicherat's transcription of Joan's
trial and rehabilitation—that is, on recorded
history rather than legend. (Because of this Shaw will say
that he is "not inordinately proud of it" because "it was very
easy to write" [February 1924 letter].) Still, the play is suffused
with Shavian ideas: as a "genius," Joan "has a different set of
ethical valuations" than other people and manifests "an appetite for
evolution"; her trial was conducted not by villains but by men with just
as good intentions as hers; she was burnt not only for her heretical
Protestantism and Nationalism, but also "for what we call unwomanly and
insufferable presumption"—her form of
classic pride or hubris, conveyed by direct allusions to Aristotelian theory.
He also subtly undercuts the validity of Joan's voices and the miracle of the
changing wind. The three-and-a-half-hour drama traces her full career in three
contrasting movements: as Shaw describes them, "the romance of her rise,
the tragedy of her execution, and the comedy of the attempts of posterity to
make amends for that execution." In effect he burns Joan again to force
people to ask themselves, "Must then a Christ perish in torment in every
age to save those that have no imagination?" Several reviewers object to
the partly farcical Epilogue, and T. S. Eliot remonstrates that Shaw had
committed "the greatest sacrilege" against Joan by turning her into
"a great middle-class reformer." But Pirandello calls the play
"a work of poetry from beginning to end."
1924
January
On
the occasion of the production of Saint Joan, Luigi Pirandello offers
his perspective on Shaw’s career: “I have a strong impression that for some
time past George Bernard Shaw has been growing more and more serious. He has
always believed in himself, and with good reason. But in a number of plays,
after his first successes, he did not seem to believe very much in what he was
doing. This, at least, may properly be suspected, since it cannot be denied
that in his eagerness to defend his own intellectual position against the
so-called ‘bourgeois morality,’ he not infrequently abandoned all pretensions
to seriousness as an artist. Now, however, he seems to be
believing less in himself, and more in what he is doing.” The strongest
evidence is his portrait of Joan, which reflects a “new tolerance and pity”
that “rise from the most secret depths of poetry that exist in Shaw.” In sum,
“There is a truly great poet in Shaw; but this combative Anglo-Irishman is
often willling to forget that he is a poet, so
interested is he in being a citizen of his country, or a man of the twentieth
century society, with a number of respectable ideas to defend, a number of
sermons to preach, a number of antagonists to rout from the intellectual
battlefield” (New York Times Sunday Magazine).
March
Shaw tells his biographer Archibald Henderson, "My plays are sui
generis; and to say that they are comedies or tragedies or tragi-comedies
or dramas is like saying that I am a Caucasian: it says nothing about them that
does not apply to thousands of plays not a bit like them" (Table-Talk
of G.B.S.).
December
A
New York revival of Shaw's Candida, starring Katharine Cornell, starts
as a matinee and ends as a regular offering with a run of 143.
1925
July
Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession is
performed in
October
The
whole of Shaw's Man and Superman is performed for the first time when
the Macdona Players present it at the Regent Theatre
in a repertory season.
1926
April
Shaw outlines the structure of some of his disquisitory
dramas in the Fortnightly Review, echoing his chapter "The
Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays" in his 1913 revision of The
Quintessence of Ibsenism. Like Ibsen's A Doll's House, Candida
has its discussion of ideas at the end of the last act, but that element
"soon spreads itself over the whole play." In those plays "you
have action producing discussion; in The Doctor's Dilemma you have
discussion producing action, and that action being finally discussed. In other
plays you have discussion all over the shop. Sometimes the discussion
interpenetrates the action from beginning to end. Sometimes, as in Getting
Married and Misalliance, the whole play, though full of incident, is
a discussion and nothing else. . . . The public now demands a case and an
argument, vehemently conducted."
November
Shaw
is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925. He first refuses the money
(about £7000), but upon learning that it would simply revert to the Nobel fund
he uses it to help establish an Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation, largely to
finance English translations of Swedish literary works.
1929
August
Barry
Jackson opens the first annual Malvern Festival, set in a resort town in
western
1932
February
Shaw's
Too True to be Good, another "political
extravaganza" but more of a fantasy than a realistic debate over issues,
is performed in
Writing to the drama historian Allardyce Nicoll some time later,
Shaw comments on "the great length to which Too True carries my
practice of making my characters say not what in real life they could never
bring themselves to say, even if they understood themselves clearly enough, but
the naked soul truth, quite objectively and scientifically presented, thus
combining the extreme of unnaturalness with the greatest attainable
naturalness. . . . The highest drama is nothing but a striving towards this
feat of interpretation."
September
Shaw
is unanimously elected President of the newly formed
1933
November
Shaw's
On the Rocks: A Political Comedy is presented in
1935
February
Shaw's
"vision of judgment," The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles,
is performed in
March
Shaw
suggests the permeation strategy of his last three plays in responding to
Joseph Wood Krutch's assertion that spectators will spoil their enjoyment if
they search for their serious meaning, since none exists: "People come to
a play as they come to all forms of art, to have their minds agreeably occupied
in their hours of leisure." As for speculating on the meaning of his
plays, "I can only say that I object to it strenuously. . . . If I have
ulterior designs, if in occupying the playgoer's mind agreeably I take
advantage of his pre-occupation to extirpate his worn-out convictions and
substitute fresh ones: in short, if I not only occupy his mind but change it,
then the last thing I desire is that he should be conscious of the operation. .
. . I like my patients to leave the hospital without a suspicion that they have
been operated on and are leaving it with a new set of glands" (Malvern
Festival Book).
1936
November
After
remote productions in
1938
August
Shaw's Geneva: A Fancied Page of History (another "political
extravaganza") is performed at the Malvern Festival. Transferred to
November
Shaw views a West End performance of
1939
February
Shaw explains the origin of the term “Shavian” in a letter to the biographer
Hesketh Pearson: “The word Shavian began when William
Morris found in a medieval MS by one Shaw the marginal comment ‘Sic Shavius, sed inepte.’
It provided a much needed adjective; for Shawian is
obviously impossible and unbearable.”
August
Shaw's 'In Good King Charles's Golden Days': A True History that Never Happened is performed at the Malvern Festival. In two
1945
December
A virtual Shaw boom begins in
1946
July
Maxwell
Anderson reads his essay on Shaw, printed as "St. Bernard" in Off
Broadway (1947), at a celebration of the playwright's ninetieth birthday in
September
Writing
in the London Observer in his ninetieth year, Shaw looks back on his
first years of playwriting in reaction to Allardyce Nicoll's assumption that in the evolution of English drama
he developed in the school of Pinero, Jones, and Wilde and "learned my art
from them." He retorts that he was "furiously opposed to their method
and principles," those of the well-made play, and "went back to Shakespear, to the Bible, to Bunyan, Walter Scott, Dickens,
and Dumas père, Mozart, and Verdi, in whom I
had been soaked from my childhood. Instead of planning my plays I let them grow
as they came, and hardly ever wrote a page foreknowing what the next page would
be." In sum, "I did the old stuff in the old way, because, as it
happened, I could do it superlatively well."
1949
August
Shaw's
Buoyant Billions: A Comedy of No Manners (written in 1947) is performed
at the only postwar Malvern Festival after having its premiere in
1950
April
Sean
O'Casey apotheosizes Ibsen and Shaw as the two dramatists who "brought a
dead drama back to a serious and singing life again. The zeal for the theatre
that had eaten them up gave them the courage and strength to drive, helterskelter, the foolish, fustian plays that had
cluttered the stage for so long. . . . The previous playwrights had made a
simpering whore of the drama, and it took Shaw and Ibsen—though they didn't make her a lady, thank God—to change her into a vigorous, dignified, and
intelligent woman, able and ready to give an answer for the hope that was in
her" (New Statesman and Nation).
May
Shortly
before his death, Shaw responds to Terence Rattigan's contention that his plays
are "plays of ideas" and thus not plays (New Statesman and Nation)
by reminding him of the great tradition of theatre to which he belongs,
including opera. "Opera taught me to shape my plays into recitatives,
arias, duets, trios, ensemble finales, and bravura pieces to display the
technical accomplishments of the executants, with the quaint result that all
the critics, friendly and hostile, took my plays to be so new, so
extraordinary, so revolutionary, that the Times critic [A. B. Walkley] declared they were not plays at all as plays had
been defined for all time by Aristotle." But "I was, and still am,
the most old-fashioned playwright outside
September
Shaw's
Farfetched Fables is performed 30 times by the Shaw Society in
November
Shaw
dies on November 2 at age 94 from complications incurred after breaking his
leg. Shortly afterwards his amusing short play Why
She Would Not is discovered. The 20-minute "comedietta"
is first kept from being published or performed because executors of his estate
assume it is incomplete. However, scholars subsequently determine that both
internal and external evidence point not only to its completeness but also to
Shaw's desire to make it public.
1951
April
In T. S. Eliot's influential essay "Poetry and Drama," the author
introduces the complexities that may beset any poet attempting to write verse
dramas by tracing the problems he encountered in composing his first three
full-length plays. Among other observations, he declares that "if we are
to have a poetic drama, it is more likely to come from poets learning how to
write plays, than from skilful prose dramatists learning to write poetry."
He pronounces Shaw the greatest prose stylist among modern dramatists and
admits that when he wrote the prose speeches of the knights in Murder in the
Cathedral he "may, for aught I know, have been slightly under the
influence of St. Joan [sic]."
October
The
dream scene of Shaw's Man and Superman, entitled Don Juan in Hell for
separate performance, is given a single staged reading in Carnegie Hall, New
York, with Charles Boyer as Don Juan and Charles Laughton as The Devil. It
excites such enthusiasm that it is presented in commercial theatres 105 times
and subsequently recorded.
1954
August
Ronald
Duncan's verse comedy The Death of Satan is performed at the Devon
Festival of the Arts. This little-known play is noteworthy for its variations
on the Don Juan in Hell scene of Shaw's Man and Superman. Set in Hell as
a dingy men's club reading room, the first scene reveals Byron, Wilde, and Shaw
playing poker, as they will for all eternity, using the Ten Commandments as
chips. Don Juan broods about his lost love, Dona Ana, and the Devil broods
about his inability to torment his modern guests. He sends Juan to earth to
find out why, and learns that people have rationalized sin out of existence.
The news causes Satan to die of remorse.
1956
The English dramatist and critic John Whiting
comments on Shaw: "the plays are the work of a great artist. We are made
aware of an argument, but it is the argument of a man, not of a sect; of a
single human voice, not the crowd. He was a virtuoso, with Picasso and Yeats,
the great example in his time of the supremely unselfconscious artist."
However, Whiting grants Shaw only a "single masterpiece," Heartbreak
House, and even that, "with its extraordinary overtones of the present
time, its uneasiness and chill, does not quite convince."
March
Sean
O'Casey's collection of reprinted and new essays, The Green Crow, is
published in
June
Samuel
Beckett comments briefly on Shaw, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey in a letter to Cyril
Cusack, who had asked him for a tribute to G.B.S. for a centenary programme: "I wouldn't suggest that G.B.S. is not a
great play-wright, whatever that is when it's at home. What I would do is give
the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the
Hawk's Well, or the Saints', or a whiff of Juno, to go no further. Sorry."
August
Shaw's
last play, Why She Would Not, is published in the London Magazine,
making it available to a wide audience.
1957
November
In Thoughts in the Wilderness, J. B. Priestley says that one reason
why Shaw was such a fine dramatist is that he never seemed to be
"emotionally committed" to his ideas. "Because he could hold his
beliefs in his own peculiar fashion, keeping them free of negative emotions, he
was able to create his own kind of comedy, good enough to put him among the
world's great dramatists. This comedy of his has light without heat. The
superbly theatrical wit crackles and dazzles and strikes without wounding.
Behind the cut-and-thrust of the talk . . . is a vast golden good humour. The master quite early of a magnificent debating
style, he heightened it and orchestrated it to provide us with this comedy of
argument, the Mozartian opera of witty debate."
1977
June
In the Guardian, John
Osborne rants at the critic Michael Billington: to call Shaw “'the greatest
British dramatist since Shakespeare' is close to having a critical brainstorm,
as well as perpetuating an exam-crazy classroom myth. . . . He writes like a
Pakistani who had learned English when he was twelve years old in order to
become a chartered accountant. . . . From childhood I have read these plays,
watched them, indeed toured as an actor and stage manager in
them on one-night stands. . . . By the time I was 25 I had been in . . .
Arms and the Man, Candida, You Never Can Tell, Devil's
Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, Major Barbara and,
perhaps worst of all, Chekhov-for-philistines, Heartbreak House. . . .
Try learning them, Mr Billington; they are posturing
wind and rubbish."