INTRODUCTION

Shaw claimed that he wrote Widowers’ Houses with the sole purpose of inducing people to vote on the progressive side at the next London County Council elections. For many critics (and some devotees) of Shaw’s work, this boldly utilitarian statement of aims applies to most of the canon. But, for Shaw himself, Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs Warren’s Profession stand apart from his later plays, in purpose, content and form. Indeed, in defining these three plays as ‘unpleasant’ he was seeking to make a firm distinction between plays that exposed social evils (slum landlordism, the marriage laws and prostitution) from the ‘pleasant’ plays which he published simultaneously, and which deal with ‘romantic follies’ and the individuals who struggle against them. In this he anticipates critics who regard the plays unpleasant as, at best, an apprenticeship and, at worst, a false start.

Certainly, the writing and production history of these plays was disagreeably tortuous. Widowers’ Houses was conceived as a collaboration between Shaw and the critic William Archer to rework a recent Parisian success (Emile Augier’s Ceinture Doree), on the principle that Archer could do the story and Shaw the dialogue. Claiming to have run out of plot by the beginning of Act III, Shaw read out the story so far to Archer, who hated its construction, characterization and jokes, and washed his hands of it. There things remained, until seven years later, when J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre was looking for a follow-up to its brave British premiere of Ibsen’s Ghosts. For this purpose, Shaw dusted off, completed and titled Widowers’ Houses, which premiered in December 1892 to the cheers of the politicos in the audience, and the boos of everyone else.

The second play in this volume also suffered from an ending problem; having read out the first draft, Shaw was advised by Lady Colin Campbell to burn the third act on the grounds of the moral outrage it would undoubtedly provoke¹. Even revised, Shaw couldn’t find a producer for the play (Grein, for whom it was written, was the first to turn it down). The play was eventually produced by the amateur New Stage Club in 1905, going on to receive its professional premiere at the Royal Court Theatre two years later, to indifferent reviews.

But the problems with The Philanderer were as nothing to those of the third play. Although the word prostitute does not appear in Mrs Warren’s Profession (any more than the word ‘syphylis’ appears in Ghosts), Shaw knew perfectly well that the play would be denied a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, whose power to censor plays in the English theatre, granted by Sir Robert Walpole to suppress the political satires of Henry Fielding, is the subject of his specific preface. (Shaw’s proposed alternative to this arcane system – control by local authority licensing – seems a risky strategy, particularly if the voters failed on all occasions to take Shaw’s electoral advice).

Thus it was not until 1902 that Mrs Warren’s Profession received two private club performances in London, to an apparently bemused audience (Grein reporting that some of the audience failed to pick up what the Profession was²). According to Shaw’s preface, those who were not confused were outraged (William Archer accusing Shaw of wallowing in pitch, Grein himself announcing that Shaw had shattered his ideals). Subsequently, the play was performed in New Haven (where the theatre’s license was revoked), New York (where half the cast were arrested) and in Kansas City (where the actress playing Mrs Warren was summoned to the police court for indecency). The play was eventually performed professionally in England in 1924.³ Because of – or despite – this checkered history, none of the Plays Unpleasant has entered the main Shavian canon. True, the fiftieth anniversary of Shaw’s death in 2000 saw revivals of both Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession; and a version of The Philanderer with the original last act was presented at the Hampstead Theatre in 1990. But compared to three of the four Plays Pleasant – Arms and the Man, Candida and You Never Can Tell – Plays Unpleasant could be retitled ‘Plays Undone’.

Why should this be? Is it, as conventional wisdom has it (and the preface appears to confirm), that the Plays Unpleasant are arid agitprop while the Plays Pleasant (and the string of subsequent successes, from Major Barbara via Man and Superman to Pygmalion) are essentially agreeable if quirky romantic comedies, from which – in Egon Friedell’s phrase – you can suck the theatrical sugar from the pill of propaganda, and put the pill itself back on the plate?⁴ Or is it, as I believe, that Shaw’s mistaken view of his own work led him to accept a fundamentally false dichotomy between the didactic and dramatic elements of his plays, rejecting what he had learnt in at least two of the Plays Unpleasant, and thus confirming the ‘false start’ thesis which has consigned one partially and one almost entirely successful political play to the fringes of the repertoire?

Shaw’s mission statement as a dramatist was an essay about another one. The ‘Quintessence of Ibsenism’ was initially written as a paper for the Fabian Society, delivered in July 1890. As revised over the years, it became certainly the best essay by one playwright about another; it is actually one of the best pieces of sustained dramatic criticism ever written. Shaw defines Ibsenism as a confrontation with Idealism, which he defines as the tendency to mask the shortcomings of existing institutions by pretending that they are perfect and celebrating them as such (we might more easily call this ‘conservatism’ or ‘traditionalism’). In A Doll’s House, the idealized institution is marriage, the idealizer Torvald Helmer, and the ‘realist’ (Ibsen’s term for the anti-idealist) is Nora, who realizes that her family life has been a fiction and so walks out on it, slamming the door behind her. In The Wild Duck, the idealist is a man who believes that honesty is always the best policy, and thereby destroys a family and kills a child.

In addition to describing what Ibsen is saying, Shaw also describes how he thinks it is done. He argues that Ibsen’s great innovation as a playwright was the discussion: while pre-Ibsenite (and by implication pre-Shavian) plays consisted of exposition, situation and unravelling, he argues, ‘now you have exposition, situation and discussion: and the discussion is the test of the playwright’.

In fact, this argument seems a little dubious in Ibsen – if (as Shaw argues) the final argument between Nora and Telvig is a ‘discussion’, then this applies to every non-violent climactic scene in dramatic literature. But much more importantly, it implies that the discussion as a dramatic element is distinct from the traditional dramaturgical tools of emplotment, that somehow all the storytelling stops for the discussion to take place (as when Shaw contentiously claims that Nora unexpectedly stops her emotional acting and says: ‘We must sit down and discuss all this that has been happening between us’).

Now, of course, the discussion in this sense happens in Shaw, but it doesn’t always happen, and when it is fully integrated into the plot it is almost always better. And this misunderstanding of Ibsen and his own art implies an even more profound mistake in Shaw’s thinking: the idea that great drama is an escape from and not a development of pulp drama; so that, for example, ‘Shakespeare survives by what he has in common with Ibsen, and not by what he has in common with Webster’. In the political theatre, this misconception leads to the idea of the sugar of entertainment somehow being suckable off the pill of propaganda (or, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘If the audience gets its strip tease it will swallow the poetry’). It is doubly surprising that Shaw would think this, as when he wrote ‘The Quintessence’, he was just about to embark (or in the case of Widowers’ Houses) had already embarked on, the creation of plays in which the political message was integral to the plot.

Shaw was (on occasion) happy to acknowledge Ibsen’s influence on his work; he was less happy to admit the influence of the well-made play. One immediate effect of this influence is the location, look and milieu of the plays: although the settings are intriguingly various (moving from outside to inside, cleverly exploiting different times of day) the dominant milieu is the familiar one of the servanted classes at home. Despite their subjects, we never visit a slum tenement or a brothel in Widowers’ Houses or Mrs Warren’s Profession; we never meet a victim of Sartorius’ or Kitty Warren’s grisly trades. But more fundamentally, the influence of contemporary popular drama gave Shaw a template of emplotment into which he could insert a contrary set of meanings, by the simple device of denying the audience’s expectations of where the plot would lead. In all of the Plays Unpleasant, Shaw sets up a moral dilemma for his central characters, absolutely in the manner of the Scribean well made play, if not in two of the three cases with its usual matter. What he then nearly does in Widowers’ Houses, fails to do in The Philanderer, and triumphantly succeeds in doing in Mrs Warren’s Profession is to defy the audience’s expectations of how the plot will be resolved, without losing plausibility or denying its own terms.

Before seeing how Shaw does this, it’s worth looking at the opening of the plays, to see how skilfully – even at the outset of his career – Shaw establishes his characters, their situation and their dilemmas. Again, his beginnings distinguish Shaw from his mentor: however brilliantly he manages his denouements, Ibsen was usually pretty hamfisted with his exposition (The Wild Duck is by no means the only play in which the first act consists largely of one central character telling another central character what they both already know). The opening of Widowers’ Houses on the other hand tells us within seconds who Cokane and Trench are by the simple expedient of hearing them discuss what sights they wish to visit on the current stage of their improving continental tour (‘There is a very graceful female statue in the private house of a nobleman in Frankfurt. Also a zoo. Next day, Nuremberg! Finest collection of instruments of torture in the world’), in the same way that, in Candida, we learn all we need initially to know about the politics and personality of the Rev. James Morrell by hearing him finalize his upcoming diary engagements. This cunning use of Baedeker as a clue to character is then reiterated, not only to establish the next set of characters, but also to remove two of the subsequent assembly from the stage so that a proposal of marriage can take place under the pressure of their imminent return. And just as this device is in danger of wearing thin, Shaw introduces another, when Sartorius (for reasons about which we are already intrigued) asks that Trench write a letter to his relatives soliciting approval of his engagement to Sartorius’ daughter, a task which falls to Cokane, who then calls upon Sartorius’ assistance to complete it. Thus Shaw can map both the spoken and unspoken assumptions of three of the main characters concerning an as-yet-unrevealed skeleton in one of their closets, by the expedient of having one draft a letter on behalf of another in collaboration with the third.

Shaw does not pose himself nearly as much of an expositional challenge in The Philanderer, though it has to be said that he none the less starts the show with a bang. The initial stage direction reads ‘A lady and gentleman are making love to one another in the drawing room of a flat in Ashley Gardens’, from which Shaw goes on to chart Leonard Charteris’ politics, attitude to marriage and questionably-concluded liaison with a third party, in preparation for the entry of that third party, whose opening line unconsciously expresses the very attitudes that Charteris has been repudiating a few moments before. But most elegant of all is the opening duologue of Mrs Warrren’s Profession, in which a middle-aged man attempts to find common intellectual and cultural ground with what he and we see as ‘an attractive specimen of the sensible, able, highly-educated young middle-class Englishwoman’, who chooses to defy his expectations of such a person, thereby effortlessly establishing not only what sort of person she is, but (via his assumptions) what sort of person he is as well. In addition, Shaw has set up a series of vital trails and teasers for the future (including Vivie Warren’s ignorance of her mother’s occupation and intention to become an actuary).

By the end of the first act of both Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, then, Shaw has established his agenda, not by stating it, but by posing what is in fact the same question: how does one of the central characters earn their living and what effect will the answer have on the rest? Because he is more skilful by then, Shaw has inserted a false trail into his third play: for a moment, we are fooled into thinking that the big secret is not Mrs Warren’s profession but Miss Warren’s parenthood (and if we’re really clever we note that ‘profession’ can mean assertion as well as occupation, and thus could well apply to both scenarios). But, in fact, the third play like the first is about a presumably virtuous younger character having to confront their dependence on the wickedness of an older one, and the question Shaw poses at the end of each play is how they and the rest respond to this knowledge in practical terms.

For it is in the endings that Shaw’s meaning is revealed. The whole art of the stage is dedicated to concealing a single dirty little secret: that we know how most plays end before they begin. In tragedy, this is because the audience typically know the story already; in comedy it is because, from V century Athens to the end of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of comedies consisted of two young people overcoming parental or quasi-parental obstacles to their union, and getting married. Even in our century, with its bewildering array of new genres, we find that while we may not know the outcome of the story (who did it) we certainly know the ending of the plot (the murderer will be unmasked). Be the milieu the western, the thriller, the spy story or the romance, we will know from the outset who is the villain, who is the victim, and who is the hero, and thereby pretty much how the thing will turn out.

What Shaw took from Ibsen was the blindingly simple idea that this doesn’t have to be the case. As he put it in the ‘Quintessence’, the new drama ‘arises through a conflict of unsettled ideals’, and the question which makes the play interesting ‘is which is the villain and which the hero’. But by setting his plays within familiar theatrical milieus, Shaw gave himself an additional theatrical weapon. In Ibsen, there are no familiar landmarks to help us decide what kind of territory we’re in. In Shaw, we think we know where we are (six of the seven Plays Pleasant and Plays Unpleasant appear to promise a betrothal) but in fact we find we are somewhere else. In Ibsen we don’t know who the hero or the villain is, so we have to work it out for ourselves; in Shaw, we think we know but we find we’ve been deceived.

No wonder then that the inexperienced Shaw had trouble with his endings. Only in his third play does he bring off the reversal he has been striving for in both the others. In The Philanderer, his first, implausible but dynamic, ending was jettisoned in favour of a kind of evasion. In Widowers’ Houses, his ending took him seven years.

As stated, Widower’s Houses began life as a collaboration between Shaw and William Archer to adapt a French comedy, whose inciting incident is the discovery by a young man that the inheritance of the woman he loves was acquired immorally. In the original, his dilemma was resolved by the intervention of a major national economic crisis, so that the heroine’s father might be ruined and the problem removed. In the first Archer–Shaw version (originally titled ‘The Way to a Woman’s Heart’) the hero has to confront his problem, which he does by literally pitching the father’s money into the river at Remagen (hence the second Shaw–Archer title ‘Rhinegold’). In the final and completed Shaw version, however, the hero does not behave heroically, not least because the heroine chooses to behave in a most surprising way.

By the end of the first act of Widowers’ Houses, young Harry Trench has become engaged to Blanche Sartorius, whose brisk and unsentimental attitude to things (including Dr Trench himself) we have learnt to enjoy and admire. We have also discovered that there is a problem with the means by which Blanche’s father amassed his fortune. In the second act, Trench discovers that Sartorius is a slum landlord, and, like the heroes of both Ceinture Doree and ‘Rhinegold’, proclaims that he cannot possibly accept this tainted treasure, proposing to his fiancée (without, being a Victorian gentleman, entirely explaining why) that they live off his income alone.

Then two unexpected, but by no means implausible, things happen. The first is that Blanche refuses to abandon her inheritance, on the impeccably feminist grounds that it’s her money not his, that she does not wish to be absolutely dependent on her husband, and that if (as she suspects) this is an excuse to renege on his commitment to her then this is ‘so like a man’. The second is that Sartorius reveals that Trench’s own income comes from mortgages on Sartorius’ property – in order to free himself of it he would have not only to impoverish his wife but bankrupt himself.

This situation is left unresolved at the second interval, but given a further twist in Act III, when Sartorius is faced with a choice rich in irony – if he improves his hellish properties he might make a killing from compulsory purchases by (yes, here they are again) the London County Council, but he can only do so by risking Trench’s capital and thus his livelihood. The only way this conundrum can be resolved is if Trench overcomes his scruples and marries Blanche after all.

Now this doesn’t quite work in plot terms; basically, Trench faces the same moral dilemma twice, though in the second case it is not so much a dilemma as a fait accompli. But anyone who has attempted to make such material work will recognize that Shaw has presented a complicated financial plot in a way that is plausible, intriguing of itself, and consistently clear; at each stage, the plotting faces the characters with unavoidable practical choices rich in moral meaning; and at the climax of the play he has complicated an already potent situation with a surprising, ironical, and yet plausible twist (the fact that in order to make an even fatter profit out of compulsory purchase, it suddenly becomes in Sartorius’ interests to become a model landlord). All of which communicates Shaw’s message, that capitalism has made everyone complicit in its evils whether they like it or not; and that the alternative is not to attempt to live an individually moral life, but to change society. Which Trench cannot do, so we, by implication, must take on the task.

Having brought that off, there is a sense of Shaw giving up: in order to top and tail Trench’s surrender, he must bring Trench and Blanche back together, which he does in a long speech by Blanche in which the text is abuse and the subtext animal sexuality (‘It suddenly flashes on him’, Shaw instructs the Trench actor disarmingly, ‘that all this ferocity is erotic: that she is making love to him’). Silent until the embrace, Trench informs her re-entering father that he’ll ‘stand in, compensation or no compensation’. So the challenge that in Ceinture Doree is avoided, and in ‘Rhinegold’ confronted, is here surrendered, from which Shaw invites us to draw the obvious conclusion.

The Philanderer is different from the other two Plays Unpleasant, but less different in its first version than the one Shaw published. The opening love triangle was drawn from Shaw’s own life, with the current lover (Grace Tranfield) based on the actress Florence Farr (who played Blanche in Widowers’ Houses), and the spurned ex-lover, Julia Craven, being an unflattering portrait of Jenny Patterson (who had taken Shaw’s virginity eight years before). By the end of the second act, Grace has rejected the idea of marriage to Charteris on good ‘New Womanly’ grounds (‘I will never marry a man I love too much. It would give him a terrible advantage over me: I should be utterly in his power’). While in order to evade his earlier entanglement, Charteris is busily organizing the marriage of Julia into the sub plot (a Dr Paramore, whose main function is to diagnose Julia’s father as terminally ill with a liver disease of his own discovery, and to be most put out when he discovers that there’s nothing wrong with his patient after all).

The original third act is four years later. Paramore has indeed married Julia, but fallen out of love with her, and wants a divorce so he can marry Grace. Shaw assembles the characters (rather clumsily) for precisely the kind of detached discussion of the iniquity of the marriage laws which he ascribes erroneously to Ibsen and (on his good days) equally erroneously to himself. It is agreed that Dr and Mrs Paramore should be divorced abroad, and there is a neat (if psychologically implausible) coda between Julia Paramore and Charteris, in which it is revealed that they have been having a secret liaison for most of the course of her marriage. Now she is free of Paramore, she insists that if Charteris wants to continue the affair, they will have to wed (‘No more philandering and advanced views for me’). But Charteris’ magnetism is too much for her, and despite his refusal, she ends the play in his arms.

Assured by Lady Campbell that this wouldn’t wash, Shaw’s substitute last act is continous with the second. Again, all the characters assemble at Dr Paramore’s consulting rooms, but this time merely to witness the success of Charteris’ scheme to marry Julia off to the doctor. Grace repeats her refusal to marry Charteris, Shaw half heartedly offers and withdraws the possibility of Charteris marrying Julia’s sister, and the final question posed by the play is whether Charteris will congratulate Julia on her engagement (why would he not?). And like Widowers’ Houses, the play ends with a virtually impossible stage direction: ‘Charteris, amused and untouched, shakes his head laughingly. The rest look at Julia with concern, and even a little awe, feeling for the first time the presence of a keen sorrow’.⁵

So for the second time in a row, Shaw has the problem of a denouement of which the whole point is that a situation doesn’t change. In both cases – though to a much greater extent in The Philanderer – this makes for an unsatisfactory and strangely perfunctory close. In his third play, one would expect Shaw at the very least not to make the same mistake again. But for whatever reason, that is precisely what he does do – with the significant difference that, on this occasion, he makes it work.

Like Widowers’ Houses, Mrs Warren’s Profession was based on two previous stabs at the same story. In his first version of what was to become Yvette, Maupassant has a girl respond to the discovery that her mother is a courtesan by suicide. In the actual Yvette, the girl becomes a kept woman herself. Armed with these two alternatives, Shaw was again eager to come up with a third.

As in Widowers’ Houses, Shaw saves his major revelation for the second act, with the third providing another turn to the screw. In Act II, Kitty Warren tells her daughter that she was forced by circumstance into prostitution, thus converting Vivie from a conservative contempt for such self-serving excuses to a wholehearted acceptance of her mother’s argument that society offered her no choice (or rather that the only other choices were worse). In Act III, however, Vivie discovers a new piece of information – that Mrs Warren is still running brothels, even though there is no longer any material imperative for her to do so. Sickened by this revelation, Vivie runs off to London and the small accountancy firm she now runs with her friend Honoria Fraser, in Chancery Lane, to make her own way in the world.

Having written two last acts without enough material to fill them, one might expect Shaw to end it there. In fact he adds a fourth act, in which Mrs Warren follows Vivie to London, to plead for acceptance from her daughter once again. The difference of course is that, unlike Harry Trench, Vivie Warren has actually spurned the tainted treasure, and this act is about the cost, not of doing the wrong thing, but of doing the right one. For that reason it can be, and is, driven not by plot but by character. In Act II, Mrs Warren’s arguments are cogent and convincing; in Act IV they are neither, but they are compelling, because they are about her limits as a human being and her fears of growing old alone. In Act II, Vivie can respond joyously to her mother’s strength and courage; now, rejecting her, she must be sarcastic and cruel. Modern as well as contemporary critics have seen Vivie transformed (in Chesterton’s words) into ‘an iceberg of contempt’⁶. But this surely is Shaw’s point: that if the logic of capitalism traps all but the bravest into complicity, then the price of escape is the sacrifice of the best bits of oneself.

Shaw was not the last political writer to explore this paradox. At the end of her last scene with her daughter, Mrs Warren cries ‘Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!’, in direct anticipation of the message of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Good Person of Setzuan. In fact, Brecht wrote a rather silly essay on Shaw in 1926, in which he described him as a terrorist and said that he agreed with Shaw’s opinions about evolution even though he didn’t know what they were.⁷ He was not to know the debt he would owe to Shaw as a political writer.

As Eric Bentley points out, Shaw’s claim that ‘my procedure is to imagine characters and let them rip’ is disingenous; in Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, the plot was a given, and Shaw’s procedure was not to destroy but to upend it.⁸ The crucial discovery that Shaw made in his early plays was that by placing realistic political content into recognizable theatrical structures he could effect the reversals he sought by allowing his characters to stage a double revolt – against their allocated office in life (as wife, daughter, servant) but also their expected role in the plot (as hero, victim or villain). When Shaw’s great argument scenes work, they do so because both things are happening – the story is forcing the character to question their office, while at the same time the character is challenging their role in the plot. This is what Shaw means when he writes in the Mrs Warren preface that ‘the real secret of the cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage’. So, in Arms and the Man, Raina’s failure to sustain the role of sensitive heroine allows Bluntschli to prise her away from her office as dutiful fiancée. But something even more complicated and interesting occurs at the end of Mrs Warren’s Profession.

As I pointed out above, the plot of Mrs Warren’s Profession is effectively concluded by the end of Act III. Not only romantic but also structural logic demands therefore that something else will happen in Act IV, which can only be that Vivie Warren changes her mind and returns to her mother’s corrupt embrace. The fact that she refuses to do so is a dramatic surprise as well as a psychological shock. Vivie Warren’s refusal to accept the office of daughter to a woman she despises is underlined by the heroine’s refusal to do what the structure expects of her, which is to turn again. It is the last act which makes Mrs Warren’s Profession not only a great but also a complete political play.

Shaw’s current charge against his polemical plays was that by dealing with the pressing political issues of his day, they inevitably date. By 1895, he resolved to write no more ‘blue-book’ plays on current social problems, arguing that in periods when political institutions lagged behind cultural changes, it was natural for the imagination of dramatists to be set in action on behalf of social reform, but that even then ‘the greatest dramatists shew a preference for the non-political drama… for subjects in which the conflict is between man and his apparently inevitable and eternal rather than his political temporal circumstances’.⁹

For me this dichotomy is false. In all three Plays Unpleasant, but particularly in Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw wrote of the conflict between youthful ideals and economic realities, the drawbacks of promiscuity and the perils of matrimony, the duties of women to others and themselves, the necessity for and the costs of revolt. What could be more eternal than that?