THE BERNARD SHAW LIBRARY PLAYS PLEASANT BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin in 1856. Although essentially shy, he created the persona of G. B. S., the showman, satirist, controversialist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into English: Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities. After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day: on Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews, which were collected into several volumes, such as Music in London 1890–1894 (3 vols., 1931), Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols., 1931). He also wrote five novels, including Cashel Byron’s Profession (published in Penguin), and a collection of shorter works issued as The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales (also in Penguin). He conducted a strong attack on the London Theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British theatre. His many plays fall into several categories: ‘Plays Pleasant’; ‘Plays Unpleasant’; ‘Plays for Puritans’; political plays; chronicle plays; a ‘metabiological Pentateuch’ (Back to Methuselah) in five plays; and extravaganzas, romances and fables. He died in 1950. W. J. McCORMACK was formerly Professor of Literary History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of three Anglo-Irish biographies – Sheriden Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Clevedon Press, 1980), Fool of the Family; A Life of J. M. Synge (Weidenfeld, 2000), and Blood Kindred; Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics (Pimlico, 2005). BERNARD SHAW Plays Pleasant Arms and the Man Candida The Man of Destiny You Never Can Tell Definitive text under the editorial supervision of DAN H. LAURENCE With an introduction by W. J. McCORMACK PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com Plays Pleasant first published 1898 Published in Penguin Books 1946 Reprinted with a chronology and a new introduction, and with minor revisions, in Penguin Classics 2003 7 Preface: Copyright 1930, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1957, The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw. Armes and the Man: Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1931, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905, Brentano’s. Copyright 1958, The Public Trustee as Executor of The Estate of George Bernard Shaw. Candida: Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1931, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905, Brentano’s. Copyright 1958, The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw. The Man of Destiny: Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1931, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905, Brentano’s. Copyright 1958, the Public Trustee as Executor of The Estate of George Bernard Shaw. You Never Can Tell: Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1931, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905, Brentano’s. Copyright 1958, The Public Trustee as Executor of The Estate of George Bernard Shaw. Introduction copyright © W. J. Mc Cormack 2003 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED All business connected with Bernard Shaw’s plays is in the hands of The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London sw10 9sb (Telephone: 020 7373 6642) to which all inquiries and applications for licences should be addressed and fees paid. Dates and places of contemplated performances must be precisely specified in all applications. Applications for permission to give stock and amateur performances of Bernard Shaw’s plays in the United States and Canada should be made to Samuel French Inc., 45 West 25th Street, New York, 10010. In all other cases, whether for stage, radio or television, application should be made to The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London sw10 9sb, England. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 978-0-14-193673-4 CONTENTS Introduction Chronology Preface Arms and The Man An Anti-romantic Comedy Candida A Mystery The Man of Destiny A Fictitious Paragraph of History You Never Can Tell A Comedy Composition and Cast Lists Principal Works of Bernard Shaw INTRODUCTION LAUGHTER AND AFTER ‘He has no enemies and none of his friends like him’ (Oscar Wilde on Bernard Shaw) In July 1837, the very young Queen was making her way through outer north London when her horses bolted, sending the royal carriage off at a fearful pace. Dynastic crisis was averted near the Fox and Crown, its landlord grabbing the tackle to drag things to a halt. Victoria was just a month on the throne, having come of age one month before the death of her forgettable uncle King William IV. Had she died outside Mr Turner’s inn, no massive wave of national grief would have ensued. Victoria was a stranger in England, no one could remember having lived under a queen, and the crown was a far less popular institution than the Fox and Crown. Sixty years later in 1897, The Man of Destiny opened in a small theatre to the south of London. Born shabby-genteel in Dublin, Shaw was forty- one when the Dear Old Queen celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. Much had changed in the course of her reign, and indeed Shaw is proof of the changes which had come upon English literature and English politics. The theatre had been revitalized, largely through the contributions of two Irishmen – Shaw who was now launched upon a career which would stretch right into the middle of the twentieth century, and Wilde who passed the Jubilee in French exile, having been released from Reading Gaol in May 1897. Both were proclaimed socialists, both celebrated the New Woman, both could claim Sheridan and Goldsmith as their predecessors. A year after limited success in Croydon with The Man of Destiny, Shaw put together seven plays in a two-volume set, Plays Pleasant and Plays Unpleasant, despairing of commercial theatre producers. Some had not seen the London limelight at all – Mrs Warren’s Profession (an unpleasant play) was banned by the Lord Chamberlain until the 1920s, and Candida (a decidedly pleasant play, and more dangerous) had its first public production in Aberdeen. But Shaw was already well known as an author of sorts – especially for The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), and shortly for The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). The first of the Plays Pleasant to teach the London stage had been Arms and the Man (1894). Its title derives from John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid – ‘Arma virumque cano’. Of course, Shaw’s play is a burlesque of military valour, a sharp-edged attack on nationalist and imperialist ardour in the nineteenth century. By recalling his reference to Virgil – the laureate of Imperial Rome – we can begin to appreciate the cunning unity of these deceptively pleasant dramas. In the neighbouring play, ‘The Man of Destiny’ was Napoleon Bonaparte locked in conversational battle with a Strange Lady. The dialogue is the play, brilliant, paradoxical, psychologically astute. One hardly notices that Napoleon takes the Lady to be English only to discover her grandmother had been Irish (well, that’s what she said): NAPOLEON [quickly] Irish! [Thoughtfully] Yes: I forgot the Irish. An English army led by an Irish general: that might be a match for a French army led by an Italian general. With the benefit of Shavian hindsight, the little Emperor foresees the catastrophe of Waterloo and, beyond, death in exile in the month of Victoria’s second birthday. The great empires succeed each other, rather than suffer defeat. Power is never in exile. Napoleon needs no introduction. Yet it is characteristic of the gossipy and (at the same time) formal Irish that Shaw could draw on a string of associations to launch his Revolutionary Emperor on the English stage. Napoleon’s physician in St Helena had been Cork-born Barry Edmund O’Meara (1786–1836), who earned the approval of Byron for his integrity in looking after his charge. O’Meara’s son settled in Carlow, from whence Shaw’s mother hailed. Napoleon, we might also remember, had been cheered by the common people at Plymouth when the ship carrying him into exile took him on board. An Irish radical could easily claim acquaintance on such grounds. And Shaw’s mother – musically talented and domestically unconventional – held a place in his heartlessness. In complementary fashion, Napoleon’s attempt at coldness towards his Strange Lady has a filial ring to it. Shaw’s childhood and education had been hopeless – he went to the same school as I did (somewhat later). Only the National Gallery of Ireland, opened in 1864, provided him with intellectual stimulation. Art and music stood in for the raw materials of literature. But in order to write, he fled Dublin for London in 1876. A sliver short of his majority, he was no headstrong runaway. Indeed Mrs Shaw had moved to London four years earlier with her eccentric music teacher. Here, is the worst of all exiles – exile within the mother tongue – the young GBS embarked on a thankless sequence of novels. Balancing production with consumption, he also read voraciously in the British Museum where he began the ingenious dialectical exercise of interpreting Wagner in Marxist terms. The fiction sank without trace. In defiance of his natural shyness, Shaw joined the Fabian Society in 1884 and began the lifelong task of educating himself in public. For six years (1897–1903), he served as a local councillor in the London borough of St Pancras. Yet Shaw’s socialism was a middle-class affair, tempered by Irish contempt for class. By this time, the dramatist had burst out of the novelist’s chrysalis. His first play was Widowers’ Houses, produced in London in 1892 with slum landlordism as its theme. This was also the first of the unpleasant plays, and The Philanderer and Mrs Warren’s Profession followed quickly. Shaw deemed himself a hit, but who or what was he hitting? The unpleasantness of the new drama did not lie in its ‘social problem’ aspect, for the English theatregoer was familiar with stock complaints about asylums and wicked uncles. Shaw got closer, as only a chameleon foreigner could: his topic was hypocrisy, he assaulted his audiences, not the national conscience. The national conscience was a convenient myth, behind which individuals could hide. In my experience, the laughter which breaks out in an audience during the performance of a play by Shaw always has its nervous quality. There is amusement but also unease. His wit unsettles us. Some people may draw comfort from the hand-me-down explanation that the Irish are witty whereas the English are humorous. But this does not work for the group of four plays published in 1898 as the pleasant companions to Mrs Warren and Co. It’s the word – ‘pleasant’ – not one we associate with Shaw, and his use of it stirs up that unease again. We laugh nervously. On the first night of Arms and the Man in 1894, there was much confusion in the theatre. The pit and gallery began to laugh, with only some loyal Fabians desisting. Then the audience discovered that the play was mocking them; its mock-melodramatic opening had turned into disconcerting farce. Silence surrounded the customary call for the author to address his first pleasant audience. When someone started to boo, Shaw declared his sympathy with him. Theatre had begun to reverse generations of conventional expectation, and Shaw was its agent provocateur. W. B. Yeats was hardly a typical member of the public, but his reaction conveys the degree of anxiety generated by the New Man: ‘Presently I had a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing-machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.’ The implication that Shaw was mechanical intelligence as opposed to organic artifice ran deep among his enemies, many of whom – as both Wilde and Yeats testified – relied on his ability to hit the philistines for six. He seemed prepared for the twentieth century. Of the three, he alone looked to the future without apprehension. The Plays Pleasant enact this characteristic. One can range the characters chronologically in their settings. First we meet Napoleon in 1796, as he anticipates his own fate at the hands of an Irishman. Then there is a leap to very different kinds of soldiers, the chocolate-eating anti-hero of 1885 in Arms and the Man. The location is now Bulgaria, rather broadly depicted. The next movement crosses a nine-year gap until 1894 when we meet Candida in north-east London, Hackney to be precise. Finally, a two-year step unites us with the cast of You Never Can Tell at a coastal resort in Devon, the date being 1896. Shaw is very exact with these dates, inscribing each one in the opening stage-directions. It is a frightening acceleration of history. The locations are pretty dizzying too. Considered as a French general, Napoleon in Italy exemplifies the imperial, invasive power of the Revolution. Considered as a Corsican, he is more at home at Tavazzano on the road from Lodi to Milan. Emphatically, he is on the move, though brought up short by the mysterious Lady. Bulgaria in 1885 was ruled by Alexander Battenberg, who, in that very year, absorbed eastern Rumelia