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Stanley Weintraub

KING MAGNUS AND KING MINUS. A PLAY AND A PLAYLET

Satirizing moral double standards that reached into the royal family, Bernard Shaw in December 1936 published a playlet in a London newspaper on the imminent abdication of Edward VIII--a mediocrity and the "Minus" of the title. The ageing playboy king was about to relinquish the throne for "the woman I love"--in the playlet his much-married mistress "Daisy Bell." Taking sides on the controversy would make, or unmake political careers. Shaw reached back in the debate--the king against the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury--to recall the threatened abdication of his imagined King Magnus in the futuristic 1929 THE APPLE CART. In Shaw's playlet, never reprinted, the king comes off as less a fool than he really was, in order to provide a counterweight to his adversaries, and threatens, like Magnus, to shed his crown and run for a seat in Parliament--and become (should he win) prime minister himself. Churchill and other political intimates advised the king to read Shaw's playlet before he acted precipitately, but Edward was not as clever as GBS had made him, which was, very likely, to England's gain.