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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

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 into the state. Rumelia sounds no closer to reality than the Ruritania of Anthony Hope’s escapist novel, The Prisoner of Zenda (1893). But the bloody complexities of Balkan politics had impacted on British affairs in these years. It was Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria which drew W. E. Gladstone out of retirement in 1875, to chide Prime Minister Disraeli for his complacency. Arguably, this decision produced the great Gladstonian conversion to Irish Home Rule and the crisis of 1891 when Charles Stewart Parnell died amid heated debates about divorce, morality and Catholicism. That brings us to a dentist’s surgery in torrid Torbay, the setting of Act One in You Never Can Tell. But before the audience has settled into its seats, the English riviera is disclosed as the resort of Madeirans, recycled ex-patriots as it were. Perpetual mobility.

That leaves Candida, which (like the poor) is always with us, unquestionably the best play of the four. In a typically prolix stage-direction, Shaw sets the scene in ‘the north east quarter of London, a vast district miles away from the London of Mayfair and St James’s, and much less narrow, squalid, fetid and airless in its slums’. Here the Fabian local councillor is clearly audible, attacking Mayfair not for exploiting slums but for being (in a spiritual sense) a slum in itself. The great feature of Shaw’s suburban setting is Victoria Park, splendidly visible to the Reverend James Mavor Morell from his windows. The action is about to begin, all three Acts taking place inside the parsonage. So – in keeping with Shaw’s own principles – let us turn face-about and concentrate on Victoria Park.

A few years after the young Queen’s narrow escape outside the Fox and Crown, thirty thousand residents petitioned her, seeking recreational facilities which might, in time, be named in her honour. In 1845, the park was opened though plans for luxury housing (the price still paid for a public amenity) did not come to fruition. Nevertheless, about seven hundred fruit trees were axed, to cheat local children of apples and general enjoyment of the new open spaces. Ornamental trees were planted instead, and Shaw’s stage-setting describes the scene fifty years later. ‘Wherever the prospect is bounded by trees or rising green grounds, it is a pleasant place. Where the ground stretches flat to the grey palings, with bricks and mortar, sky signs, crowded chimneys and smoke beyond, the prospect makes it desolate and sordid.’ Desolate? It was dense with dumb humanity!

The turn-around in Victoria’s reputation in the first ten or twelve years of her reign is well exemplified in the creation of Victoria Park, Hackney. Her reign was copper-fastened in similar acts of honorific commemoration from Hong Kong to western Canada by way of Australia. Relentlessly, Victorian civil servants and military governors inscribed her name in town charters, and even on the waters of the Zambezi River. This was imperial mobility at its most seductive. There was of course another side to the Victorian miracle, painfully disclosed at home in housing inquiries. The Fabians were only the latest campaigners against Victorianism.

The perpetuation – even growth – of social injustice over which the Queen long presided is skilfully examined in Shaw’s plays. Unlike Brecht or even late O’Casey, he deals in individuals. Candida is a strong woman, owing more to the actresses of the age than to the presiding monarch. In a preface to Plays Pleasant which Shaw wrote later, he perceived that ‘the modern Kaiser, Dictator, President or Prime Minister is nothing if not an effective actor’ or, perhaps, actress. Drawing on Marx, and anticipating Walter Benjamin by more than a generation, Shaw pinpointed the dangerous mutual exchangeability of drama and politics while appearing to buffoon about the Balkans.

As Europe discovered to its surprise in August 1914, the Balkans were no laughing matter. Little in English literature had prepared the citizens of London for the Zeppelin raids. No one had imagined the sound in Kent of guns in France. Shaw attends to these matters in perhaps his greatest play, Heartbreak House (first produced in New York in 1920). Saint Joan (1923) delves into the history of Anglo-French relations; it explores the mystery of faith in a new century of barbarous idolatry. But the essentials go back to the 1898 two-volume set and, more particularly, to the pleasant plays.

That is to speak of Shaw’s success, Shaw’s greatness. We still have to live with the laughter, inquire into its origins and signification. To do so may involve taking the religion of Candida seriously rather than its politics. Dismissive of creeds and particularities, Shaw was not the ecumenical atheist he sometimes played. His religious instincts lay in the deep soil of protestant dissent, the religion of Milton and Blake. Like Joyce, he adopted the Satanic motto, Non Serviam (I will not serve). A certain heartlessness in the adult Shaw is protective and elusive; we can study its twin more readily in young Stephen Dedalus’s refusal to pray for his mother. And the laughter which breaks out in the Shavian Balkans is heard again in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and (more disturbingly still) in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus (1947).

To be ready for the new century was one of Shaw’s strengths in the eyes of the late Victorian theatregoer. No more fustian instead of courage, no more limpidity paraded as good manners. As with Freud’s revelations, Shavian form and dialogue were appreciated while also being secretly feared. The stage-set became a consulting room where only the analysts spoke, but only spoke the anxieties of absent patients. If this was a virtue in 1897 it carried its own virus, an affinity with the terrors to come – dictatorship, sadistic cruelty, war, the Balkan atrocities of the 1990s. We revel in the early plays, we admire Major Barbara (1905), we sit in awe of Heartbreak House and Saint Joan, we applaud the award of the Nobel Prize (1925). One reason for our loud commendations lies in the certainty that we must dislike what comes next.

As for the later Shaw, it is best that we keep thinking. His foresight did not equal the self-questioning which suddenly illuminates the little general at Tavazzano in the pleasant play of 1897 – the year of Dracula and its pre-emptive assault on modernity. The new men of destiny were no longer to be actors, but sorcerers and directors of crowd scenes. Millions died between Fanny’s First Play (1914) and Great Catherine (1919). The rise of Hitler and Stalin posed challenges to wit, which wit could not answer. Nevertheless, unwittingly and modestly Shaw’s fortunes prospered under the Reich, at least to the extent that his Geneva (1938) with its lampoon of Hitler was kept on the German stage at Goebbels’ express desire. Only one play was banned, a pleasant one: Arms and the Man went too far even for an indulgent dictator.

Shaw died in November 1950, having fallen out of a hedge at the age of ninety-four. The post-war fate of well-made plays was not proving to be happy. It was his fellow-Dubliner, Samuel Beckett, who found the alternative with, first, Waiting for Godot (in French 1952), and more devastatingly, Endgame (1957). The latter succeeded in conveying the impact of comprehensive terror – including the threat of a nuclear holocaust – on western civilization. Shaw’s example, however, was not entirely ignored. In America, Arthur Miller’s courageous exploration of private and public bad faith from All My Sons (1947) to The Crucible (1953) would have been impossible without the precedents of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. Thus, for a new millennium of comprehensive bad faith in international affairs, Shaw may have lessons to teach, however obliquely. As the old Victorian-Edwardian trouble-spots erupt again and again – Afghanistan, the Balkans, and ‘Mesopotamia’ – we look back in anguish. Shavian laughter demands we keep our wits about us. No less so than Wilde’s, his pleasant drama had been an art of provocation.

W. J. Mc Cormack
Tyrone Guthrie Centre
County Monaghan
December 2002

CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BERNARD SHAW

LIFE

1856 Born in Dublin on 26 July

1871 After only short periods of schooling, started work as an office boy in a Dublin firm of land agents

1873 Mother and sisters moved to London

1876 Joined mother in London; she taught singing and his sister Lucy sang professionally in musical plays

1879 While working for the Edison Telephone Company began to meet the earliest British socialists, including, in 1880, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter (later Mrs Webb) who became lifelong friends

1879–81 Wrote five novels, four published serially in magazines

1884 Joined the Fabian Society, which advocated gradual progress towards socialism, and began giving lectures both to the Fabians and on their behalf. At about the same time, met the hugely influential theatre critic William Archer who helped Shaw to find work as a critic. First meeting with William Morris whose disciple he became

1885 Appointed as a book reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and music critic for the new Dramatic Review

1886–9 Art critic for The World

1888–90 Music critic for The Star (under the pseudonym ‘Corno di Bassetto’)

1889 Attended English première of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

1890–94 Music critic for The World (writing as GBS)

1891 Published The Quintessence of Ibsenism

1892 Widowers’ Houses (his first published play) given a private performance by the Independent Theatre in London

1894 Arms and the Man produced at the Avenue Theatre in London; then by actor–manager Richard Mansfield in New York

1895–8 Drama critic for The Saturday Review

1897 Encouraged by the success of The Devil’s Disciple in New York, gave up most of his work as a critic

1897–1903 Elected borough councillor for the London borough of St Pancras

1898 Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant published. Married Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Began concentrating on his writing as playwright and essayist

1899 The newly founded Stage Society produced You Never Can Tell, followed by Candida and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1900

1904–7 Granville Barker and Vedrenne take over the (Royal) Court Theatre in a challenge to the commercial West End theatre system. Eleven Shaw plays produced at the Court including the newly written Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara and The Doctor’s Dilemma

1905 Bought a country home at Ayot St Lawrence, approximately 25 miles north of London (retaining an apartment in Adelphi Terrace, off the Strand)

1910 Misalliance produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre

1913 Androcles and the Lion at St James’s Theatre. World première of Pygmalion in Vienna (in German), followed by a production in Berlin

1914 Pygmalion produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, at His Majesty’s Theatre. Common Sense about the War published

1920 Heartbreak House produced at the Royal Court. Completed Back to Methuselah, a five-part cycle of plays, transforming the biblical version of creation and human destiny into post-Darwinian science fiction

1924 Saint Joan produced at the New Theatre

1925 Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. First English public performance of Mrs Wanen’s Profession (banned by the censor since 1898)

1928 Published The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

1929 The Apple Cart, produced at the first Malvern Festival, organized by Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre with Shaw as its figurehead

1931 Visited Moscow, and met Stanislavski, Gorki and Stalin

1932 Too True to be Good produced at Malvern. Published fable of The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God following a visit to South Africa

1933 Travelled to India, Hong Kong, China, Japan and the USA

1936 Celebrated 80th birthday. Gave up driving

1938 Awarded Oscar for the best screenplay for Gabriel Pascal’s film of Pygmalion. Geneva (featuring caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini called before the International Court of Justice at the Hague) transferred from Malvern to Saville Theatre, and then to St James’s Theatre

1939 Ceremonially presented with the deeds of a site (in South Kensington) for the National Theatre of Great Britain

1943 Death of Charlotte Shaw

1944 Published Everybody’s Political What’s What?, an instant bestseller

1946 On his 90th birthday, honoured with the freedom of both Dublin and the borough of St Pancras

1950 Died on 2 November

1955 Alan J. Lerner based the book and lyrics of the musical My Fair Lady closely on Pygmalion

TIMES

1856 End of the Crimean War. Sigmund Freud born

1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Spcecies published.
Construction of the Suez canal started

1861–5 American Civil War

1866 The Fenians, Irish Republicans, opposed the English occupation of Ireland

1867 Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ published

1870 Education Act made primary schooling compulsory in England and Wales

1871 Year of political change in Europe: Italy and Germany both unified

1883 Death of Marx. The left-wing Fabian Society founded

1886 Home Rule for Ireland first proposed by Gladstone’s Liberal government; the Conservative Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister

1887 Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee

1892 Keir Hardie elected as first Independent Socialist Member of Parliament

1895 Oscar Wilde imprisoned for homosexual offences. Lumière brothers patented cinematograph

1897 Irish Literary Theatre founded by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn

1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War in South Africa

1901 Death of Queen Victoria, accession of Edward VII

1907 Rudyard Kipling the first British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

1911 Members of Parliament paid a salary for the first time.
Women’s Freedom League founded

1914–18 First World War

1916 Easter Rising by Irish Nationalists in Dublin

1920 League of Nations created. Government of Ireland Act, partitioning Ireland

1922 Continuing civil war in Ireland

1924 First Labour government in Britain, under Ramsay Macdonald; replaced by the Conservative Unionists, under Stanley Baldwin. Death of Lenin

1920 Women over twenty-one in the United Kingdom given the vote.

1929 New York Stock Exchange crash led to world economic depression. Election of second Labour minority government in Britain (which became a multi-party national government in 1931)

1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany

1939–45 Second World War

1945 Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, won the election, replacing the wartime leader Winston Churchill

1946 First meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations

1948 British National Health Service founded

PREFACE

(1898)

READERS of the discourse with which the ‘Unpleasant’ volume commences will remember that I turned my hand to play-writing when a great deal of talk about ‘the New Drama’, followed by the actual establishment of a ‘New Theatre’ (the Independent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that the New Drama, in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination. This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence.