THE BERNARD SHAW LIBRARY

MAJOR BARBARA

‘He did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity’ Thomas Mann

‘Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles, questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe from him’ Michael Holroyd

‘In his works Shaw left us his mind…Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense’ John Carey, Sunday Times

‘An important writer and an interesting socialist and critic…Thank God he lived’ Peter Levi, Independent

‘He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade’ John Campbell, Independent

‘His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity, but they were also hits – and still are’ Paul Johnson, Daily Mail

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: in 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 (23 vols., 1931). He also wrote five novels, including Cashel Byron’s Profession (published by Penguin), and a collection of shorter works issued as A Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales (also in Penguin).

Shaw conducted a strong attack on the London Theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British Theatre. His many plays (the full canon runs to 52) fall into several categories: ‘Plays Pleasant’; ‘Plays Unpleasant’; ‘Plays for Puritans’; political plays; chronicle plays; ‘metabiological Pentateuch’ (Back to Methuselah) in five plays; extravaganzas; romances; and fables. He died in 1950.

MARGERY MORGAN is an Emeritus Reader in English of Lancaster University. She formerly taught English and Drama at the universities of London (Royal Holloway), Monash (Australia) and Lancaster. Her various publications relating to Shaw include The Shavian Playground (1972) and File on Shaw (1989). More recently she has worked on biographical studies of Granville Barker, and Katherine Read, the eighteenth-century portrait painter.

DAN H. LAURENCE, editor of Shaw’s Collected Letters, his Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Shaw’s Music and (with Daniel Leary) The Complete Prefaces, was Literary Adviser to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. He is Series Editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin.

BERNARD SHAW

MAJOR BARBARA

Definitive text under the editorial supervision of

DAN H. LAURENCE

with an Introduction by MARGERY MORGAN

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First produced 1905 at the Royal Court Theatre, London

First published in its original form as a stage play in 1907

Screened by Gabriel Pascal in 1940 and first shown in 1941

The screen version first published in Penguin Books in 1945

Original stage version first published in Penguin Books 1960

Published with a new Introduction and editorial matter 2000

In Great Britain all business connected with Bernard Shaw’s plays is in the hands of The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 9SD (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.

In the United States of America and Canada applications for permission to give stock and amateur performances of Bernard Shaw’s plays should be made to Samuel French, Inc., 25 West 45th Street, New York, New York, 10036. In all other cases, whether for stage, radio, or television, applications 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: 978-0-14-192942-2

Introduction

Preface to Major Barbara

First Aid to Critics

The Gospel of St Andrew Undershaft

The Salvation Army

Barbara’s Return to the Colors

Weaknesses of the Salvation Army

Christianity and Anarchism

Sane Conclusions

MAJOR BARBARA

Principal Works of Bernard Shaw

Introduction

Why Are the Many Poor? was the title of the first tract issued by the Fabian Society, revised by Bernard Shaw for a third edition in 1889. The problem of a huge slum population, malnourished, disease-ridden, and growing in numbers much faster than other sections of the population, continued to haunt British minds through the last decades of the nineteenth century and up to the First World War. Faced by current statistics, Shaw and Wells were among those who found themselves weighing up the argument for sterilization of the unfit; and even such benign reformers as William Booth of the Salvation Army did not dismiss out of hand the option of setting up concentration camps to isolate the irreclaimable (unemployable) residuum of the poor and control their breeding. Major Barbara and the policy of the (Royal) Court Theatre, where it was first staged, struck out in a different direction. They must be counted among factors in the climate of thought and feeling that led to a landslide vote for the Liberals in the 1906 General Election. This ushered in the pre-war programme of legislation on which the welfare state was to be built. Public service broadcasting and, after the Second World War, the Arts Council and a publicly subsidized sector of the theatre, and then the Open University followed, in time, as parts of the deal.

At the beginning of the twentieth-century – as at the end – nearly all West End theatres were part of an entirely commercial system. Although the spectacular musical had not yet invaded the area, let alone overrun it, there was very little opportunity for serious plays of quality to be seen by discriminating audiences, and no predictability of high standards in performance. Offering political plays to audiences seeking light entertainment would have been as offensive as talking of money at the dinner table. Nearly all the ‘new’ plays put on were adaptations of recent successes in the fashionable boulevard theatres of Paris. Classics of the drama, Shakespeare at least, could be seen, though the managements that made this possible were dogged by the fear of bankruptcy if they did not recoup their losses by touring tried-and-tested money-spinners. The great temptation was to let plays that proved popular continue to run and run until interest was exhausted. (The perpetual run, today’s monument to financial success, was still unknown, like the permanent economic boom.) Artistic success depended upon the talented stars – often actor-managers, the best of whom were able to secure from their companies at least competent support for their own performances. Among some Liberals interested in the arts, a National Theatre to conserve the best of English drama within the theatrical repertoire and encourage new achievements was a cherished but vaguely defined aim.

A small committee had set itself up in 1899 to discuss and further this project. It included William Archer (the critic who had helped Shaw to his first regular appointment as a journalist), his classicist friend Gilbert Murray, the Shakespeare scholar A C Bradley and a young actor determined to get things moving faster: Granville Barker, hailed by Shaw in this same year as a heaven-sent interpreter of his still generally unperformed plays. It was Granville Barker’s enthusiastic assistance that enabled the much better known Archer to circulate selectively a privately printed blueprint, with financial estimates, for setting up and running the kind of theatre they thought attainable, though not ideal, and which they would recommend to cities throughout Britain and the Empire, not to London alone.

It was Barker who initiated the plan of taking the Royal Court Theatre, in Sloane Square, away from the stranglehold of West End theatre landlords, for a practical demonstration of the work such a theatre could deliver. Shaw poured scorn on the notion when the young man first explained it to him, but he was soon persuaded to go along with it. The sympathetic lessee of the theatre put in his own business manager J E Vedrenne to hold the purse strings, and a substantial donation from Mrs Shaw brought the available funds to a sufficient level for a start to be made and also put her husband, with his portfolio of published but unproduced plays, at the centre of the new enterprise – to make history as the Vedrenne-Barker Management (1904–1907). Shoe-string production, depending heavily on the interest of the dramatic material and the quality of the acting which served it, and the box-office takings the policy could attract, would determine how long the non-profit-making experiment could continue.

It was soon agreed that the encouragement of new drama should be given priority, and productions of Shakespeare should not, at this point, be included in the programme (though this was something Barker would return to, in later years); this decision foreshadowed the Arts Council-backed specialization of the same theatre through the second half of the twentieth century. Gilbert Murray’s verse adaptations of Greek tragedy fell into both ancient and modern categories (their feminism was recognized) and would balance Shaw’s contribution. Like Shaw, Murray was welcomed into the theatre as adviser on the production of his own work. (This was an interlude between his retirement from his professorial chair at Glasgow University on health grounds and his return to Oxford University, briefly to a Fellowship, before his appointment as Regius Professor of Greek in 1908.) Critics sometimes referred to the Sloane Square theatre as an outpost of the Fabian Society. To the principals it was a democratic forum open to anyone who cared to come: from the King to the galleryites. The type of play Shaw was concerned with was socially and politically interventionist, approaching audiences as citizens capable of thought and prompting them to think imaginatively to some purpose.

Conditions which would allow actors to give of their best and extend their art in the service of the play were paramount in Barker’s mind: adequate rehearsal time to develop ensemble playing and give imaginative depth to the performances; avoidance of long runs which might lead to mechanical and slovenly acting. True repertory programming, now familiar practice at the (Royal) National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), was judged to be more confusing for the public than they could risk initially. So they compromised with matinee performances of new plays and then short evening runs of those pieces that had proved their worth. As for his personal role, Barker’s wish was to abandon acting and concentrate on being director of plays – a new thing in England, a continental importation – as well as general artistic director of the company, but he recognized financial imperatives: that he take leading roles in Shaw’s plays (which the author would to a great extent direct) and further roles within his range which were otherwise difficult or expensive to cast. Eventually, n plays by Bernard Shaw were premiered, five being given evening runs. Major Barbara was the first conceived and written specifically for a Vedrenne-Barker season. (The Voysey Inheritance, specially written by Barker, and allied to this Shaw play in some of its themes and the dialectically opposed central characters, also won its way into the evening bill.)

Bernard Shaw and Gilbert Murray had known each other since 1895, when Murray was a remarkably young Professor of Greek at Glasgow and already a friend of Archer. All three were Ibsen enthusiasts, as were Murray’s wife and her mother, the Countess of Carlisle, ‘the radical Countess’ as she was sometimes called, mistress of the magnificent Castle Howard (Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead’) through her artist-husband, and in her own right a ‘proud daughter of the Stanleys’, as Shaw described her to the actress Janet Achurch. Politically in the Whig tradition, like Lady Britomart in the play (which was nicknamed ‘Murray’s Mother-in-law’ backstage), she had assisted Shaw’s candidature for St Pancras Borough Council by the loan of motors on election day. She was an imperious advocate of female suffrage and a leader in the Temperance Movement (one of the most visible contemporary measures for attacking poverty). Her daughter, Lady Mary Murray, held to the same principles with equal dedication.

The ambience of passionately disputatious affection – all in the family – at the Court Theatre, where the trinity of intellectuals were working together and enjoying their success, gives the play a particular, attractive flavour. The nature of their relationship extended into the performances, when Granville Barker, for whom Shaw had written the part of Cusins, wove an impersonation of Murray into his playing and borrowed a pair of the professorial glasses for the purpose. There is photographic evidence that Louis Calvert, playing Undershaft, was made up to look like Shaw – who claimed that people who thought so did not know the Turkish Ambassador. This blatant disingenuousness was offered in a letter to Murray assuring him that the actresses playing Lady Britomart and Barbara showed no resemblance to Lady Carlisle and Lady Mary Murray, who would both be with him at a matinee performance on 8 December 1905.

When it had entered Shaw’s mind to write a play about a woman saint, Lady Mary had seemed a possible model for his heroine. Then his critical attitude to her husband’s political views – and interest in the opportunities of public service and political action his position gave him – took over and altered the original design. Gilbert Murray’s particular cause was not poverty but the ending of war. Never a pacifist in the conscientious objector’s sense, he believed in the development of international law and became a leading campaigner for the League of Nations, which he continued to serve to the end of his long life. Shaw was undoubtedly goaded (as others were) by Murray’s high-minded faith in the law-abiding rationality of mankind into an opposing attitude of brutal realpolitik, insisting on the necessity of a substantial power-base within society if benevolent reforms were to be secured. Long before Saint Joan, Shaw’s notion of sainthood took the androgynous form of the warrior woman, Major Barbara/Britomart; it may also have been an unconscious symbol of the citizen in the highly civilized society of the Liberal idealist – which D H Lawrence, as one most notable literary instance, was to make a principal target.

The persistent and widespread notion that plays were trivial compared with poetry and serious novels, and that the theatre was vulgar, long prevented general recognition that Major Barbara was the earliest of the great achievements of literary modernism in Britain: ahead of Ulysses, of Lawrence’s two-part novel The Rainbow / Women in Love (riven by the First World War) and the major poetry of Yeats and then Eliot. Surface differences are obvious; the relatedness corresponds to a shared consciousness of the ending of the Christian era and a responsive reconstructing of provisional mythologies from fragments of old systems.

Shaw and Murray were at one in their rejection of supernatural religion and viewed their own age as post-Christian. Murray, as a student of ancient Greek drama and culture, was closely associated with the ‘Cambridge anthropologists’ (Frazer, Jane Harrison, Cornford); he was a comparative religionist, advocate of the theory that the classical drama of Euripides in particular incorporated relics of earlier rituals, and inclined to believe that a year-daimon (who dies and is reborn annually) was a feature of some early Greek cults. The group was certainly influenced by Nietzsche’s imaginative relating of Apollo to Dionysus in what would serve as an allegory for the late nineteenth century and beyond. (Cusins, in Shaw’s play, hails Undershaft as Dionysus; he himself, facing the prospect of rebirth as Undershaft in his turn, and knowing that he – like Apollo – must strive to hold the forces of chaos under discipline, is nicknamed Euripides. The youthful Barker was Apollo behind the mask.)

Major Barbara was, and still is, a forward-looking play, futurist before the Futurists. It is a New Year play. First performed at a matinee on 28 November 1905, it was set during three days of January 1906. The first, limited six-week run of evening performances, started on I January. At the dramatic climax an old faith perishes as ‘the millennium of Bodger and Undershaft’ is proclaimed; and at the end of the play the heroine has become a child again, clinging to her mother’s skirts before setting out with her Dolly on her renewed mission to transform souls.

Both Shaw and Barker, neither of whom had had much formal education, turned readily to draw on Murray’s advice and scholarship when writing their plays. The most obvious internal evidence of this is the frequent use of classical names by Shaw across the range of his dramatis personae in play after play, starting with Proserpine in Candida. More deeply embedded are the elements of Greek mythology which he treats with varying degrees of playfulness. This is nowhere more evident than in Major Barbara, prefaced in print by an acknowledgment to Gilbert Murray in enigmatic words (‘The play, indeed, stands indebted to him in more ways than one.’). Surviving correspondence between the two men shows the Greek scholar putting forward criticisms and suggestions, the playwright altering his text accordingly while defending the fundamentals. Murray’s chief criticism of the last Act was that the debate seemed over-weighted on Undershaft’s side. Shaw made adjustments, yet admitted to thinking that Undershaft, older and more experienced than Barbara and Cusins, was mainly in the right. Indeed, the character shifts between the roles of mephistophelian tempter, devil’s advocate and persona of the author, so contributing to the slipperiness of the argument which is part of its fascination.

The play’s action traces Barbara’s Christ-like progress through betrayal and passion (her cry, ‘My God: why hast thou forsaken me?’ was not lost on the audiences, though it had slipped past the censor), visitation of Hell and Heaven, resurrection and ascension (‘She has gone right up into the skies.’) – and so to rebirth. The theme of transformation (or conversion) runs through a process of revising Christian ritual and liturgy – General Confession, Creed, hymnology, doctrines of the deadly sins and the works of mercy – culminating in a new Trinity – with the mother goddess standing a little to the side. Where classicists might see Demeter, Persephone and the Prince of Darkness, Wagnerites would identify Wotan, Brynhilde and Siegfried. Certainly Undershaft, Barbara and Cusins, holding together in a tense and conditional synthesis at the end of the play, are icons of power and wealth, political justice, and respect for individual souls equal as children of one Father (or Mother as Shaw preferred in his 1896 essay ‘On Going to Church’). Yet Shaw, the best-known of contemporary Wagnerites, introduces into his handling of mythic characters a comic colouring from burlesque and pantomime traditions: Britomart sets Undershaft in the comfortably domestic world of the gods in carpet-slippers; taken together, there is even a hint of the ogre and the dame of pantomime. This is not mythology used to sanctify the religion of art.

Max Beerbohm’s review of the original production noted that Shaw had based his characters on observation, but that his manner of drawing some of them was ‘exaggerated’. (Silly-ass Cholly is, of course, a version of the traditional Fool.) Shaw had stated the obvious in 1894: that his dramatic method was never realistic; he was a realist only ‘in the platonic sense’. Indeed Major Barbara is only superficially allied to drawing-room comedy (in Act I) and Dickensian realism (in Act II). Philosophical fable and game, morality play and grand opera were genres to which he readily turned here as elsewhere. He had previously written a philosophic debate in operatic mode as a detachable dream scene in Man and Superman. Only after the production of Major Barbara did this get its first staging: under the title Don Juan in Hell. The debate occupying most of Act III in the Salvation Army play is integral to the plot, yet is recognizably Shaw’s second essay in the same genre: a virtuoso performance concerning Heaven and Hell, set between the two in a metaphysical space that, in this instance, is a corpse-strewn, embattled fortress. (No matter that Perivale St Andrews garden city is not Heaven but a Utopia, unsatisfactory as the rest.) The whole armoury of Shaw’s polemical devices and verbal strategies is let loose in Act III, as in part of Act II, in a fireworks display – Olympian lightning flashes and thunderstrokes, in which Blakeian inversions and aphorisms impact like bullets. Danger is in the air when the distinctions between metaphor and actuality are under such pressure (‘Don’t…reason with them. Kill them’; ‘The ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it’; ‘Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done’; ‘Dare I make war on war?’). Undershaft is a master of the demagogue’s language of violence; he trafficks in dynamite, after all. Indeed, the entire play is a minefield to be negotiated with the utmost alertness.

It is hard listening for audiences unused to having so much demanded of them, now as in 1905, and a mere passive reception gives no entry into the passionate excitement the play can hold for those who rise to the challenge of the hard questions it posits and find their way through its many layers of irony. Although Major Barbara

MAJOR BARBARA

MAJOR BARBARA

Contents

Introduction