Plays Unpleasant
Authors: George Bernard Shaw
THE BERNARD SHAW LIBRARY
PLAYS UNPLEASANT
âHe 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
âShaw 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
âIn 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
âAn important writer and an interesting socialist and critic⦠Thank God he lived' Peter Levi,
Independent
âHe 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
âHis 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 â 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: 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 1890â1894
(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: âPlays Pleasant'; âPlays Unpleasant'; âPlays for Puritans'; political plays; chronicle plays; âmetabiological Pentateuch' (
Back to Methuselah
) in five plays; extravaganzas; romances; and fables. He died in 1950.
DAVID EDGAR
was Britain's first professor of Playwriting Studies, at the University of Birmingham. He has written widely on theatre, most recently editing and introducing
State of Play
, a study of contemporary British playwriting. His original plays include
Destiny
(1976),
Maydays
(1983) and
Pentecost
(1994) for the Royal Shakespeare Company and
Entertaining Strangers
(1987) and
The Shape of the Table
(1990) for the National Theatre. His adaptations include Dickens'
Nicholas Nickleby
(RSC, 1980) and
Albert Speer
(National Theatre, 2000), based on Gitta Sereny's biography.
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
PLAYS UNPLEASANT
WIDOWERS' HOUSES
THE PHILANDERER
MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION
Definitive text under the editorial supervision of
DAN H. LAURENCE
with an Introduction by
DAVID EDGAR
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published in Penguin Books 26 July 1946
Reprinted with a new Introduction in Penguin Classics 2000
13
âWidowers' House' first produced in London, 1892; in New York, 1907
âThe Philanderer' first produced in London, 1905 (West End, 1917); in New York, 1913; in Berlin, 1908
âMrs Warren's Profession' first performed (privately) in London, 1902; (publicly Birmingham, 1925;
London, 1925; first produced in America, 1905; in Berlin, 1907.
âPlays Unpleasant'. Copyright 1931, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1958, The Public Trustee as
Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw.
âWidower's House'. Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1930, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905,
Brentano's. Copyright 1957, The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw.
âThe Philanderer'. Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1930, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905,
Brentano's. Copyright 1957, The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw.
âMrs Warren's Profession'. Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1930, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright
1905, Brentano's. Copyright 1957, The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw.
Introduction copyright © David Edgar 2000
All rights reserved
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London SW10 gSB (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. Accounts
showing the receipts at each performance should accompany payments.
Applications for permission to give stock and amateur performances of Bernard Shaw's plays in the United States of
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84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 gSB, England.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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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 âunpleasant' he was seeking to make a firm distinction between plays that exposed social evils (slum landlordism, the marriage laws and prostitution) from the âpleasant' plays which he published simultaneously, and which deal with âromantic 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 provoke
1
. 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 âsyphylis' 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 â control by local authority licensing â 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 was
2
). 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 â or despite â 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 â Arms and the Man, Candida
and
You Never Can Tell â Plays Unpleasant
could be retitled âPlays 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 â in Egon Friedell's phrase â 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 âfalse 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 âQuintessence 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 âconservatism' or âtraditionalism'). In
A Doll's House
, the idealized institution is marriage, the idealizer Torvald Helmer, and the ârealist' (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, ânow 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 â if (as Shaw argues) the final argument between Nora and Telvig is a âdiscussion', 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: âWe 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, âShakespeare 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, âIf the audience gets its strip tease it will swallow the poetry'). It is doubly surprising that Shaw would think this, as when he wrote âThe 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 â even at the outset of his career â 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 (âThere 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 âA 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 âan 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 âprofession' 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.