Bernard Shaw’s Plays—Not in This Family

Abstract

The plays of Bernard Shaw feature new, sometimes daring ideas intended to jolt the audiences of his day into recognizing the multifarious problems of their society and acting accordingly. Shaw frequently employs interior authors, characters who create works that in many ways underscore his own message, to deliver his strongly held opinions on everything from family life to the Life Force. This chapter not only considers Shaw’s interior authors but also examines the nexus of censorship and modernism in one facet of his oft-censored plays: his creation of characters who either self-censor their own published or highly publicized work, or who are censored themselves by their fellow characters. I identify Shaw’s interior authors as Mrs. Clandon in You Never Can Tell, John Tanner in Man and Superman, Fanny O’Dowda in Fanny’s First Play, the Brothers Barnabas in Back to Methuselah, and the eponymous protagonist of Saint Joan. I also discuss Shaw’s secondary or exterior authors who write, although their works are not central to their respective plays. Chapter 3 considers censorship and modernism in You Never Can Tell, Man and Superman, and Fanny’s First Play.

Bernard Shaw, author of five unpublished novels filled with dramatic lines and speeches, admitted that he turned to the writing of dramas to right a wrong noted by J.T. Grein, impresario of the Independent Theater: no “native dramatic masterpieces,” he observed, “exist at present by any English author. Labeling this void “a national emergency,” Shaw proposed that Grein should “advertise a play by me,” which Grein did, and Widowers’ Houses, begun seven years earlier in collaboration with William Archer,¹ was soon on the boards of the Independent Theater (CPP 1:17–18). After three failed attempts at reaching audiences through a combination of honing his Socialist message and teaching himself playwriting, Shaw had produced what he eventually labeled “Plays Unpleasant.”² Realizing that he must make his message more palatable to contemporary audiences, Shaw turned to writing “Plays Pleasant,”³ which continued to promote his message but in a fashion more appealing to the London theatergoer. The play featuring his first dramatic interior author became the fourth drama, You Never Can Tell, in this social justice experiment, while an exterior author appears in another of Shaw’s “pleasant” plays, Candida.

Exterior Authors

In addition to depicting dramatic characters who meet the definition of “interior author,” Shaw also creates “exterior authors,” characters who discuss writing pamphlets, poems, or books, but whose authorship is either in doubt or not central to the drama and does not form a meta-narrative about the writing process or reflect its author. Nevertheless, these exterior authors continue to reveal Shaw’s fascination with authorship and thus become part of his pronouncements on writing. While many of Shaw’s plays introduce authorial figures, four plays with exterior authors are worthy of consideration and will be discussed briefly: Candida (1894), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), The Doctor’s Dilemma, (1906), and Pygmalion (1914).

Candida (1894)

Candida introduces the eighteen-year-old Eugene Marchbanks, an “uncommon” and “unearthly” figure who most characters refer to as “a poet.” Indeed, he styles himself a poet, with Candida noting his “poetic attitude” (CPP 1: 574). Under this “aesthetic” pose, Marchbanks takes liberties with his position as a friend of the Morell family and attempts to woo the much older, happily married Candida, often indulging in what she terms “poetic horrors” as a result of his revulsion at the household tasks that she willingly performs. Although Marchbanks reads his own verses to the daydreaming Candida (CPP 1: 572), Shaw only refers to these poems in stage directions and snippets of dialogue, so the audience never hears Eugene’s words. Candida repays his heartfelt recitation by paying little attention to his lines and admitting that she has little “appetite” for poetry. The young man does succeed in momentarily shaking the confidence of the polished, self-assured Reverend James Morell, Candida’s husband; nevertheless, Candida quickly reassures him of her love, leaving the young Marchbanks and his broken “poet’s” heart to fly “out into the night,” alone (CPP 1: 594).

Charles Berst concedes that although Shaw intended Marchbanks to portray “the poet,” his poetic sensibilities, what Candida calls his “moonshine,” are hardly poetical: “his spirit is more poetic than his talent.”⁴ Similarly, Mary Christian terms Marchbanks a recognizable theatrical type, the stage poet. However, although his unheard verse is considered “slight” and “flawed,” he exhibits “painful sincerity” and has brief flashes of insight into several of the other characters.⁵ Yet Shaw’s young “poet,” more poetic in style than artistic in substance, does not qualify as an interior author.

Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

“I am an author myself,” announces Shaw’s Caesar in response to criticism of his allowing the famed library of Alexandria to burn (CPP 2: 219). He further contends that the books in the library contain the “shameful” history of mankind and that the Egyptians should not “dream” their lives away by reading books. The entire episode is an unusual one, in which Shaw depicts Caesar as an anti-hero who defies expectations, even subverting the conventional identity of the author as a lover of books. Shaw drops the reference to Caesar as an author until the aesthete Apollodorus praises Caesar as a “creative poet artist” for his intention to found a new, more noble kingdom for Cleopatra that will leave the machinations of Rome and Egypt behind (CPP 2: 270). Shaw explains his slight portrayal of Caesar as artist in his “Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra” at the end of the published play, in which he denigrates the writings credited to Caesar: “Caesar was an amateur stylist writing books of travel and campaign histories in a style so impersonal that the authenticity of the later volumes is disputed” (CPP 2: 301).

However, John Bertolini offers a hypothesis that extends the identity of Shaw’s Caesar as an author, suggesting that authorship is a Shavian metaphor for fatherhood.⁶ Indeed, as seen repeatedly, Caesar serves as a father-figure to Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemy, thus subtly presenting the image of author throughout the play. However, as Shaw offers no depiction of Caesar in the act of writing or struggling with the creative process, this characterization of the historian of the Gallic Wars does not meet my definition of an interior author, and therefore Caesar remains an exterior author, one whose written work is not central to the drama. Interestingly, Shaw’s portrayal of Caesar follows his pattern of establishing historical figures as authors only to repudiate them, as he does with Napoleon in The Man of Destiny (1895) and Catherine the Great of Russia in Great Catherine (1913), one-act plays where authorship is only briefly mentioned and never developed.

The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906)

The Doctor’s Dilemma: A Tragedy continues Shaw’s meditation on writing, again employing several variations on authorship as a backdrop in this drama illustrating his perennial suspicions of the medical community of his day. Shaw prepares the reader for this unflattering depiction of doctors with a lengthy preface that accuses the medical profession of substandard practices and provides a list of fourteen “Conclusions” made necessary because of the impenetrable “jargon” practiced by medical writers. Shaw claims that these writers must “invent a new language of nonsense for every book they write” because they do not understand their own content and thus are forced to rely on linguistic inventions to cover their own inadequacies (CPP 3: 317).

Dr. Colenso Ridgeon, who represents the benighted medical writer, has authored pamphlets about his medical discoveries which fill a small drawer, writings that are roundly dismissed by his colleague and friend, Sir Patrick Cullen (CPP 3: 331). Sir Patrick intimates that Ridgeon’s innovations are deceptive, even fraudulent, thereby preparing the audience for Shaw’s portrait of the doctor as an artist figure and his linking of Ridgeon with the play’s actual artist, the duplicitous Louis Dubedat. Shaw portrays Dubedat as a brilliant artist flawed by dubious business practices, such as accepting a patron’s money and not delivering the painting or selling a work multiple times. Bertolini suggests that by linking the artist and the artist figure, Shaw is expressing his own continual misgivings about “the nature of art and the role of the artist.” The many accoutrements for and analogies to writing, the frequent mention of an illiterate newspaper man, and Dubedat’s “scrawlings” and sketches illustrate both Shaw’s obsession with and concerns about writing.⁷

However, Shaw’s plot twist at the beginning of Act V offers the most unusual interpretation of authorship. Jennifer Dubedat, widow of Louis, who died because Ridgeon did not administer a potentially lifesaving medication to his consumptive artist patient, appears at the gallery opening of Dubedat’s paintings with a copy of her newly published book about her late husband’s life, The Story of a King of Men. By His Wife. Her book, which celebrates Louis as a great artist and a great man, paints a contrary portrait of Shaw’s character, vilified by Ridgeon as “a clever brute” (CPP 3: 429) because of his chronic business dishonesty and his sordid relationships with women. Ridgeon arrives at the art opening and surprises Jennifer, who tells him that she has remarried because Louis disliked widows and that she is happy once again. This revelation and her admission that she knew all along that Louis was “the brute” that Ridgeon believes he killed, thus negates Ridgeon’s motives for withholding his treatment from Dubedat: so that his wife would be free of her duplicitous husband, and, more selfishly, so that he could marry her himself (CPP 3: 432). Bert Cardullo believes that this admission reflects Shaw’s subtitle, “A Tragedy,” and that the play is essentially tragicomic, with four acts of comedy and a one of tragedy.⁸ Jennifer’s book serves as the catalyst for this “tragic” sequence but is completely unexpected, never an integral part of the plot until the last act, which critics such as William Archer deemed expendable. As we never witness her struggles as a writer or understand her experience of the writing process, she joins Ridgeon as an exterior author.

Pygmalion (1914)

Next, Shaw’s ever-popular Pygmalion introduces two exterior authors, although not writers of traditional forms such as novels, dramas, or poetry. Henry Higgins announces himself as the author of “Higgins’ Universal Alphabet,” while his friend Colonel Pickering has authored “Spoken Sanscrit” (CPP 4: 680). Both men, specialists in their fields, appear to be more linguists than writers or artists. Although Pickering receives no further designation as a writer, Shaw first identifies Higgins as “the note taker” (CPP 4: 674), and the suspicious crowd in Covent Garden alternately labels him as a “detective,” “busy body,” and “copper’s nark” (CPP 4: 674). The arrogant Higgins attempts to identify himself as an artist writer, explaining to his housekeeper that his alliterative speech is the mark of a poet. However, the perceptive Mrs. Pearce dismisses his claims with a brusque, “[W]hatever you choose to call it” (CPP iv, 703). Higgins’s mother, identified by Bertolini as more of an author than her son because of her writing paraphernalia,⁹ refers to Eliza Doolittle, Higgins’s protégée and pupil, as a “triumph of your art” (CPP 6: 733). Nevertheless, these casual remarks are the only references to Higgins as a writer or artist. Joan Templeton explains that Higgins is a “‘phonetics enthusiast’ whose project of turning a cockney street girl into a lady represents the claims of snobbery more than ‘art.’”¹⁰ Scholars concur with the designation of Higgins as a teacher rather than an artist/writer. Although Bertolini suggests that Higgins attempts to play the role of “creator”—of himself as preeminent scholar and of Eliza as a lady who can successfully emulate a duchess—Jean Reynolds emphasizes Higgins’s longstanding role as a teacher and his teacher-pupil relationship with Eliza. She further credits Higgins with possessing an “integrity” that is integral to that relationship;¹¹ as he reveals to Pickering, “teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred” (CPP 4: 702). Throughout the play, Shaw paints Higgins as a teacher, a “creator of elegant speech” whose office is a “laboratory” (CPP 4: 684), and introduces him at the Embassy ball and on other occasions as “Professor” (CPP 4: 740). Thus, Higgins is a creator not of written words, but of pupils, in this case, “a lady.”

These exterior authors remind the reader that even when creating characters who are not as concerned with writing as was Shaw, the writing process, with all of its struggles and demands, is never far from his thoughts.

Interior Authors

Shaw’s fictional authors may be considered reflections of their creator and his milieu. They also mirror, as Bertolini points out, “Shaw’s preoccupation with his authorial self, especially in relation to other writers, and each play reflects on the means by which the artist creates and on the artist’s responsibilities as a creator, as an establisher of order, or as a reformer of morals.”¹² Nevertheless, these authors, like their creator, often swim against the tide of the moral and social justice standards of Shaw’s day. As discussed below, in You Never Can Tell, for instance, Mrs. Clandon, author of the acclaimed Twentieth Century Treatises, presents suggestions regarding family life that would liberate other women, while her own children admonish her and condemn her ideas as hopelessly out-of-date. John Tanner’s “Revolutionist’s Handbook,” printed as an addendum to Man and Superman, sets him at cross purposes with his extended family and with Roebuck Ramsden, who forbids their mutual ward, Ann, to read the book. Shaw’s rebellious daughter, Fanny O’Dowda, shocks her eighteenth-century father and the London critics with her realistically feminist, socialist play about the modern life of women. In Shaw’s utopian Back to Methuselah, the Brothers Barnabas self-censor their own book about the evolution of humanity that leads to a very long life once they realize that the world is not ready for this revolutionary step. Lastly, Joan the Maid, considered by many to be Shaw’s Christ figure, becomes the Word made Flesh through her voices, and singlehandedly transforms religion and political alliances. All of these fictional authors firmly believe in their revolutionary ideas but face stinging rebukes from family and friends, and thus, according to Celia Marshik’s formula¹³ (see Introduction p. 13) and that of other critics, they are “modern” in their individual ways.

You Never Can Tell (1895–96)

Shaw’s first attempts at deploying drama to illuminate what he recognized as the “unpleasant” traditional social ills—slum landlordism, philandering, and prostitution (more specifically, a lack of career choices for women)—did not produce his intended result of educating his audiences. The public stayed away en masse from Widowers’ Houses and The Philanderer, and almost never saw Mrs. Warren’s Profession as a result of the infamous censorship battles surrounding Shaw’s anti-type of the “tart with a heart” plays. After concluding that he could only attract his target audience—as well as evade the censor—by producing more felicitously themed dramas, Shaw turned to what he later labeled “Plays Pleasant” (CPP 1: 371–84). Of the four plays in that collection, You Never Can Tell features a “symbolically censorious gesture”¹⁴ that inaugurates the Shavian parade of internal authors who censor themselves or who are themselves censored, and who are closely identified, even defined, by their works. Moreover, Shaw himself experienced a form of censorship when rehearsing You Never Can Tell prior to its 1899 premiere.

In the play itself, Shaw clouds censorship in the guise of farcical comedy, although he routinely disparaged the genre as “mechanical and inhumane.”¹⁵ However, in reinterpreting the drama of the period, Shaw was skilled at writing in the very genres he sought to dismantle. Complete with mistaken identity, the search for a father, unlikely coincidences, and the perils of romantic love, Shaw’s early attempt at humor and satire features a dysfunctional family on holiday at a seaside resort in Devon, a setting that possibly bears some resemblance to Shaw’s own early life.¹⁶ Although a note of Shavian dissonance forms a somber undercurrent as Shaw explores the reasons for a marital breakdown,¹⁷ the overall mood remains comic as the late Victorians, even the supposedly enlightened ones, are critiqued. The mother, Mrs. Lanfrey Clandon, “a veteran of the Old Guard of the Women’s Rights movement” (CPP 1: 679), has kept her three children away from their father for eighteen years because he was potentially abusive to the now-almost-twenty-year-old Gloria, a New Woman in the making, and to the eighteen-year-old twins, Dolly and Phillip (CPP 1: 688–89). Mrs. Clandon, a “celebrated authoress of great repute—in Madeira” (CPP 1: 675), marshals her talents to create a guide to family life, The Twentieth Century Treatises, on Cooking, Creeds, Clothing, Conduct, Children, and Parents. A book now republished in many iterations, it has helped “liberate” other women.¹⁸

Often called a “satirical comedy of social protest,”¹⁹ You Never Can Tell is also a play constructed on tensions, as Shaw walks a thin theatrical line in making a statement about the need for allowing women more freedom in society and loosening the restrictive bonds of contemporary marriage within a carnivalesque atmosphere that would please the West End theater crowd. Within this overarching tension, Shaw builds his play on the obvious strains within the family: wife and husband disagree about his treatment of the children; the children demand to know the true identity of their absentee father; and daughter and mother debate the lack of the daughter’s education about love and marriage—a missing chapter of Twentieth Century Treatises. Tensions about money also permeate the play: the young dentist scrapes to pay his rent; the son muses that his unknown father may be wealthy; and the suddenly reappearing father is continually identified by his wealth. Interestingly, the male characters worry the most about money, perhaps echoing Shaw’s own concerns about finances and his impoverished early years. Lastly, Shaw depicts the wider societal tension of gender politics, as only in the Shakespearean “green world” of a seaside resort can Shaw upend gender hierarchies, as “emotional, subservient men contrast with powerful, independent women,” a situation that would never translate to the “real” world of patriarchal Victorian England.²⁰

Even though her children often mock her work, Shaw intends Mrs. Clandon’s identity as an author to be taken seriously. She supports her family well on the proceeds of her Twentieth Century Treatises and also corrects the proofs of “the new edition of Twentieth Century Woman” on stage. Dorothy Hadfield explains Mrs. Clandon’s dual role, which is a singular one in Shaw’s oeuvre: “Mrs. Clandon remains unique in her position as both active mother and working woman. She is mother, master, and money maker all in one.”²¹ In his letters, Shaw explains the genesis of this strong female character; “Mrs. Clandon is a composite of the advanced woman of the George Eliot period, with certain personal traits of my mother.”²² Thus identified with a famous woman author and his own artistic mother, this Shavian interior author holds the stage as an “intelligent, interesting and attractive woman of forty”²³ who has raised her children according to her Twentieth Century principles (CCP 1: 684, 687, passim). Although Shaw does not provide them, he reveals the context of the treatises through her children’s numerous, often taunting references to them. Mrs. Clandon, well past her revolutionary prime, derives much of her identity from her Treatises, which are sadly out-of-date despite their Twentieth Century name.

Problems arise when the twins demand to know the identity of their father, who (conveniently) lives in the same seaside town under the family’s real name of Crampton. These complications and their eventual denouement form the basis of the plot; however, Shaw soon suggests that Mrs. Clandon’s views on the family as presented in her “celebrated” works have generated tension in her own home. After describing their mother’s books to Valentine, a young dentist, the twins condemn their mother’s published philosophies:Verse

Verse Dolly. No household is complete without her works. We came to England to get away from them…. Phillip. No family should be without them. Read them, Mr. Valentine: they’ll improve your mind. Dolly. But not til weve gone, please. Phillip. Quite so: we prefer people with unimproved minds. Our own minds have resisted all our mother’s efforts to improve them. (CPP 1: 675)

The children continue this mildly censorious banter and use their mother’s own words against her as they quote repeatedly from her seemingly open-minded but outdated texts (depending on one’s perspective) to obtain information about their own family (CPP 1: 687). Similarly, the supposedly living proof of the validity of Mrs. Clandon’s theories of parenting and domestic life, her daughter Gloria, reproaches her mother and her treatises by stating that an important chapter is missing, the one about love and emotions: “You taught me nothing: nothing.” To which her mother weakly replies, “My child: I did my best” (CPP 1: 741, 743). Mrs. Clandon, who has spent her life “devoted to the Cause of Humanity” (CPP 1:747), is apparently accustomed to the barbs of her twins but not to the stinging words of her elder daughter. Here the budding New Woman denigrates the outdated and incomplete “gospel” of the Old Guard, a ploy Shaw frequently favored. In case the audience missed Mrs. Clandon’s role as an “old-time radical,” Shaw has her reject socialism as a “fallacy” (CPP 1: 704), a surefire Shavian hint that the character is in for a hard time.

Thus, Mrs. Clandon is revered by the public but not by the people she loves most, her own family, who, to her great surprise, employ a slight but hurtful form of censorship against her revered Treatises.²⁴ In You Never Can Tell, Shaw deploys weapons he will later use against the British censor: humor and satire. He introduces humor primarily through the cheeky twins and satire through both Gloria, fashioned after an appealing version of the “heavy female” of melodrama and farce, and Bohun, barrister-son of the influential and indispensable waiter, fashioned after the “heavy man.”²⁵ Thus, as Peter Gahan avers, Shaw, with his vast knowledge of theatrical history, creates a comedy about comedy²⁶ while also taking a swipe at the British patriarchal class structure, as the lowly waiter proves the wisest of the group.

However, the “pleasant” aspects of Shaw’s drama do not lessen his perennial rebellion against those social ills that he believed were dangerous enough to risk scrutiny by the censor, nor do they dissimulate his fixation on censorship itself. After the repeated banning of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Shaw “longed to ask [the Examiner of Plays] how he could defend his license for Man and Superman, The Philanderer, Candida, and even the innocently popular You Never Can Tell. There is not one of my plays that is not boiling over with sedition, blasphemy, and even impropriety.”²⁷ In You Never Can Tell, these traits appear as the familiar theme of the young rejecting the theories (here called Treatises) of their elders and seeking answers to the perennial questions about love and family.

You Never Can Tell holds a remarkable place in Shaw’s canon for two reasons. First, this play was Shaw’s early attempt at writing for the commercial theater. In a letter to William Archer, Shaw explains: “Although what you say … about my plays being kept off the stage because they are not toffish is roughly true, yet this does not apply to ‘You Never Can Tell,’ which was deliberately manufactured to admit of enough Saturday to Monday millinery & champagne to pass muster” (CL 2: 362). Relatedly, despite his contract with the popular Haymarket Theater— for what Michael Holroyd terms a “moderate play for the West End, cut in its new style²⁸—the actor-manager Cyril Maude and his cast repeatedly asked Shaw to omit or to rewrite ten minutes of the end of Act II, in which the Life Force begins its work on Gloria and Valentine, implying that the scene was impossible to play as written. After numerous attempts at guiding the cast, Shaw refused to adapt the scene and eventually withdrew the play. This attempt by Shaw to maintain his artistic principles at any cost may be interpreted as either an act of self-censorship in defiance of the demands of those entrusted to perform his play, or as an act of artistic censorship by the Haymarket cast. Whatever the case, the loss of this production cost Shaw dearly financially, artistically, and emotionally. According to Holroyd, the loss was not only a “setback to his career” but also prompted Shaw to fear that “his plays, in so far as they were original, were unactable.”²⁹ Shaw would have to wait until the great successes of his years in repertory at the Court Theatre (1904–07), which included many performances of You Never Can Tell, to have this fear assuaged.³⁰ This episode may be at least partially responsible for Shaw’s subsequent comments about You Never Can Tell, which range from “the dullest trash I’ve ever read” to “a frightful example of the results of trying to write for the theatre de nos jours.”³¹ After the play’s later successes, however, Shaw was less acerbic, labeling the play “a poem and a document, a sermon and a festival, all in one.”³²

However, if, as widely reported, the character of Phil carries autobiographical traits of Shaw and his relationship with his mother, then Phil’s rebukes to Mrs. Clandon and about her books illustrate that Shaw himself could inflict as well as receive censorship.³³ Thus the stigma of censorship mars both this early play and its playwright, an example of the damage that can be done to careers and to psyches by such admonitions, ranging from mild reproofs to actual censorship. In addition, in creating a “comedy about comedy,”³⁴ Shaw adds a modernist flair to his “pleasant” play, as he humorously spoofs the standard character types and comedic ploys of traditional farce. Thus, Shaw’s “innocently popular” play provides its author with a chance to test the viability of presenting censorship, even in a minor form, as a dramatic ploy to portray the harm done when one’s work is censored. Although family tensions and reproaches eventually soften and dissolve into farcical merriment, the actual reunion of the family remains in doubt. Shaw gives that wise waiter the last word: “You never can tell.”

Man and Superman (1903)

Another book authored by a Shavian character, written to teach people how to live progressively in their own time, proves an anti-type to Mrs. Clandon’s Twentieth Century Treatises. The author of “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” Jack Tanner, Shaw’s next interior author, appears on stage only after his book has been thoroughly condemned by the prime representative of the society the book decries, Roebuck Ramsden. Shaw does not portray Tanner as a struggling writer attempting to create his masterpiece, but rather as a confident author proud of his work and prepared to defend it. Through Tanner, Shaw presents a meta-narrative of the aftermath of the writing process, suffering the censorious “slings and arrows” of everyone who reads or even hears about the treatise, a position Shaw himself frequently held. As none of the other characters supports his work, Tanner alone defiantly lauds his own handbook, insisting that all should read it and live by its premises.

Tanner’s words proclaim that one should “discard the existing social order and try another” (CPP 2: 273). The book becomes the complicating factor in the inciting action of the play following the death of Mr. Whitefield, who has designated Jack Tanner, the revolutionary, and Roebuck Ramsden, “the president of highly respectable men” (CPP 2: 533), to be co-guardians of his daughter Ann Whitefield and her sister Rhoda, thus creating a complicated, contentious, and apparently wealthy extended family. Shocked that his friend Whitefield would appoint Tanner, Ramsden cites Jack’s book as the reason for his displeasure: “I have in my hand a copy of the most infamous, the most scandalous, the most mischievous, the most blackguardly book that ever escaped burning at the hands of the common hangman. I have not read it: I would not soil my mind with such filth; but I have read what the papers say of it. The title is quite enough for me” (CPP 2: 538). Ramsden, “the advanced thinker” (CPP 2: 534), censors Jack’s book based only on its title and on press reviews! During their ensuing uproar, Ramsden throws his copy of the “Revolutionist’s Handbook,” a gift from a “foolish Lady,” in the trash (CPP 2: 545). Jack responds, “Why, youre ashamed to buy my book, ashamed to read it: the only thing youre not ashamed of is to judge me for it without having read it; and even that only means that youre ashamed to have heterodox opinions” (CPP 2: 547). Ramsden consequently forbids their mutual ward to read the book, and Tanner counters that Whitefield appointed Jack as co-guardian after learning about his advanced views (CPP 2: 542). Tanner then dives into the trash and retrieves the copy for Ann, who confesses that she has not read it. “Then read it at once and decide,” Tanner fumes. Then comes Ramsden’s most censorious moment: “If I am to be your guardian, I positively forbid you to read that book, Annie [He smites the table with his fist and rises]” (CPP 2: 552–53). Ann eventually persuades both men to act as co-guardians and calm is restored—until the book becomes contentious once again, as Jack questions Ann about the reason for her mother’s poor opinion of him. Ann replies: “It was that dreadful book of yours. You know how timid mother is” (CPP 2: 598). Margery Morgan hints that ironically the wealth amassed by Ramsden, Malone, and even Ann (through inheritance from her father) becomes the “property” that Jack calls to be redistributed in his “Revolutionist’s Handbook” (CPP 2: 787).³⁵

Thus, Roebuck Ramsden, Mrs. Whitefield, and even Ann herself roundly censor Jack’s book without having read it. These volatile exchanges about “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” which take place during Act I and early in Act II, highlight the silliness of the two men’s arguments in the face of the Vital Woman—possibly the mother of the Superman—who will use them both to get her way. At this point the book itself—but not necessarily Jack’s radical views—virtually disappears until the end of the play. Tanner has succumbed to the will of the Life Force after a trip to the mountains, being captured by brigands who are actually Anarchists and Social Democrats, and a fabulous dream (Act 3) complete with Don Juan and the Devil, a dialectical “dream” inserted into an otherwise bourgeois comedy.³⁶ By virtue of Act III, Man and Superman becomes the first of Shaw’s plays to be constructed as “a drama of ideas,” often considered Shaw’s most characteristic dramatic invention, as both he and the audience realize that “ideas are fun to play with on stage.”³⁷ Each ensuing event helps Jack accept his fate as a mere function of the Life Force, and in the end he finally agrees to marry Ann. However, Jack the Revolutionary cannot simply accept a conventional wedding with all its sentimental trappings:

I beg that no man may seize the occasion to get half drunk and utter imbecile speeches and coarse pleasantries at my expense. We propose to furnish our own house according to our own taste; and I hereby give notice that the seven or eight travelling clocks … and the other articles you are preparing to heap upon us will be instantly sold, and the proceeds devoted to circulating free copies of the Revolutionist’s Handbook. (CPP 2: 732)

Minor Characters Who Write

Thus the “Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion” goes underground for three acts but never fully disappears because of its fictional (and literal) author’s worldview, which permeates the play. During this interlude, Shaw introduces two other would-be writers: Octavius Robinson and Hector Mendoza. Early in the play, the young Octavius confesses to Tanner, “I want to count for something as a poet: I want to write a great play” (CPP 2: 575). Although two other characters refer to Octavius as a poet, no poems or plays by him appear in the play; one may thus consider the young man’s “desire” as a pose, an identity common to many young men of the idle rich class. Perhaps Octavius’s wish for such an identity functions only as a backdrop to “set up” Tanner’s great speech on the true nature of an artist (CPP 2: 557). Similarly, Hector Mendoza, the suave, principled brigand of Act III who creates hilarious “doggerel” love poems to his Louisa, also serves primarily to introduce that act’s crucial dream sequence. Both men “write” as a token of love for a woman, but because both only talk about writing, they serve as mere functionaries in Shaw’s dramatic scheme and cannot even be classified as exterior authors.

Man and Superman, with its philosophical dream sequence, took Shaw two years to write, and the rewards were slow in coming, with only two performances of Robert Loraine’s production at the Court Theatre in 1905, where the play was received politely.³⁸ Nevertheless, in 1911, the play ran for 167 performances, well in excess of the one-hundred-performance benchmark for success in London’s West End.³⁹ However, both the Epistle Dedicatory and The Revolutionist’s Handbook confirm Shaw’s intention that his “book” be read in its entirety in addition to being performed, thus giving the work another level of public exposure in relation to Shaw’s creation of the Life Force.

Revolutionist’s Handbook

Shaw’s addenda deserve critical attention, in particular Jack’s controversial manifesto. Shaw frames his play with The Epistle Dedicatory and the “Handbook,” both of which provide the reader with insights into Shaw/Tanner’s views on contemporary life and its discontents. Shaw presents his hero not only as an advanced thinker, as evinced by his speech and general appearance, but he also told A.B. Walkley that he had given proof of his man’s genius by including “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” at the end of the play (CPP 2: 516). Scholars have offered varying perspectives on the “Handbook” and its connection to the play. Lawrence Switzky quotes Martin Puchner’s praise of the “Handbook” as an “exemplary manifesto” that combines “propaganda and art, more effective than the years of propagandizing Shaw had done in The Saturday Review or the Royal Court experiment.”⁴⁰ Conversely, Frederic Berg calls Tanner “a foolish pamphleteer” and sees “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” “as the product of Tanner’s shortsighted personal aims;” while he actually has “integrity and honor; he means to do the right thing but he never understands what is really happening” in the play.⁴¹ In the same vein, Holroyd contends that Tanner “can contribute more to evolutionary advancement through the production of children than political Handbooks,” and that the “Handbook” “brings present and future, pessimism and optimism, the Devil and Juan together on to common ground.”⁴² However, Morgan delivers the cruelest cut of all, as she terms the “Handbook” “as much a rich man’s toy as his motorcar.”⁴³ In short, Shaw’s evidence that his hero is a man of genius remains controversial. Perhaps, as Bertolini suggests, the inclusion of the “Handbook” as part of the volume containing Man and Superman is “one of his best jokes,” as he responds to Walkley’s challenge to write a play about Don Juan:

I am sorry to say that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as a man of extraordinary genius, and then leave his works entirely to the reader’s imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to yourself ruefully that but for the author’s solemn preliminary assurance you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable barrenness, this feeble evasion. I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists’ handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if you care to read it. (CPP 2: 516)

Modern

This “proof,” whether the “exemplary manifesto” of a genius or the work of a “political pamphleteer,” proves radical enough to accomplish Shaw’s purpose of condemning the ideas and standards of the older generation, represented by Ramsden, and placing Tanner in the exclusive company of Shaw’s censored authors. But does Tanner qualify as a modernist? His work is censored by family, friends, and peers for its refutation of traditional ideas and values, and hence meets Marshik’s definition of a modernist. In Tanner, Shaw combines a “member of the Idle Rich Class,” an author with “advanced views” (which he terms revolutionary), a “shatterer of creeds and idols,” Ann’s “silly boy,” and a potential father for the Superman, thus creating a multifaceted character worthy of the slippery “modernist” label.⁴⁴ Tanner’s participation in the play’s extensive discussions about marriage, family, a woman’s right to choose her own destiny, and the idealism and hypocrisy of his own class also add to his modernist credentials. This self-described revolutionary who succumbs to marriage is an important facet of Shaw’s early modernity, a man who challenges yesterday’s “advanced thinkers” and can potentially create higher life forms by attracting a vital genius for a mate. In fact, Man and Superman remains “a prime textual exhibit for any demonstration of the transition between the Victorian and modern eras.”⁴⁵ Accordingly, Bertrand Russell proclaimed “Shaw changed the language we speak during the period from 1885 to 1914.”⁴⁶ Thus, “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” so central to Shaw’s drama and its significant place in his ouvre, remains censored by those who never read it and anticipates the revolutionary “love story” of another interior author, Fanny O’Dowda, whose play is also given in its entirety and who also falls victim to a capricious form of censorship.

Fanny’s First Play (1911)

Written in the midst of Shaw’s battles with the censor, Fanny’s First Play was apparently licensed without incident. A frame play with outer and inner parts (actually, two family dramas) written at different times introduces Fanny O’Dowda, a Cambridge student who persuades her father, the wealthy and “one-hundred-year out-of-date” Count O’Dowda, to stage a private production of her first attempt at playwriting as a present for her nineteenth birthday. This performance, whose invited audience consists exclusively of the most well-known London theater critics, reveals Fanny’s liberated worldview, fostered by the Cambridge Fabian Society, an outlook certain to shock and disillusion her father, who prefers eighteenth-century culture and ideas to contemporary society. The outer frame shows the Count welcoming the critics to his villa outside London and preparing them to witness an anonymous play, hiding from them the fact that his daughter is the author.

Fanny’s Play

The inner play, the work of Shaw’s interior playwright, consists of the enlightenment of two young people, Margaret and Bobby, whose families long to see a love match between them. Both young people have had unintentionally liberating experiences that transform their lives and that, once revealed to their parents, shock the older generation to their core, much as their author Fanny understands that her feminist play—which topples gender and class barriers and features suffragettes, prostitutes, and counts disguised as butlers—will change her relationship with her own father forever. Fanny’s fictional families, the Gilbeys and the Knoxes,

… want to keep the news of their children’s disgrace quiet… Bobby remains sullen and introverted, but Margaret, whom Ervine calls ‘one of the finest young women in all Shavian drama,’ is in a mood to publicly celebrate her deliverance—both from jail and from conventional morality…. Mr. Knox has switched from ordering his daughter out of the house to begging her… ‘not to let it out.’ Margaret brings down the second-act curtain by threatening to destroy her father’s respectability. She will publish the revolutionary Word: “I’ll tell everybody.”⁴⁷

Thus, another Fabian feminist breaks the spell of parental authority and repression, as she threatens to defy the family’s authority and openly proclaim her liberation, in what Holroyd terms “an expression of the Life Force.”⁴⁸

Shaw also adds a touch of socialist leveling, as the young characters, including the middle-class Bobby and Margaret, the butler Juggins (revealed as the brother of a Duke), Darling Dora, and Duvallet, who met during their respective stays in Wormwood Scrubs and Holloway Prisons (CPP 4: 405), gather in the Knoxes’ kitchen to celebrate their reunion and freedom, in contrast with the convention-bound older generation who attempts to cope with the near-scandalous developments wrought by their children and their new friends.

At the conclusion of Fanny’s play, the critics debate the author’s identity, stating that a play can only be judged after knowing its author, and offer a catalog of choices representing the leading playwrights of the day, including Shaw himself. Prefiguring the idea of the “death of the author” in postmodern criticism, Shaw mocks the critics for their inability to evaluate a work on its own merits without knowing the author’s identity. “To read critically is the lesson Shaw, the critic as artist, wanted to teach his critics in his parody of them in Fanny’s First Play.”⁴⁹ So when Count O’Dowda firmly insists that the true author does not wish to be revealed, Trotter, the leading critic (patterned after A.B. Walkley), must surmise that not only is Fanny the author, but she is a suffragette as well. The stunned Count laments that Fanny will never return to his eighteenth-century lifestyle in Venice, and the other critics rush to change the subject by going onstage to congratulate the cast. According to Barbara M. Fisher, “Shaw contrived in the framing section of Fanny a Criticism of the Criticism. Spicing the pot au feu is an in-house critique of current theater coverage and a lampoon of several London drama critics.”⁵⁰

Easy or Complex?

Shaw’s self-described “pot boiler,” expanded at the request of Lillah McCarthy for her new theater venture, The Little Theatre, was actually Shaw’s first genuine popular and commercial success.⁵¹ Yet Gahan maintains that Shaw’s supposed “easy play” is in reality a complex, multifaceted work operating on many levels: the rebellion of children against parents, the conflict between aesthetic and ethical themes, the revolts featured in both the frame and inner plays, and the “self-reflexive level at which the play concerns itself with drama.” In effect, the play is “a drama about drama.”⁵² Gahan also finds many allusions to the works, life, and theories of John Ruskin in Shaw’s deceptively simple play. Ruskin was an advocate for women’s education (Fanny was a student at Cambridge) and rejected the “art for art’s sake” school of aesthetics (represented by the disturbed Count O’Dowda); moreover, “Juggins” was one of Shaw’s pet names for Ruskin.⁵³

These allusions to the work of the premier art critic writing during Shaw’s own time as art and music critic add to the complexity of Shaw’s deceptively named “Easy Play.” Shaw’s slight-of-hand subtitle provides little cover when one traces the meta-dramatic convolution of an author creating an interior author, the central character in the outer frame, whose artistic creation, the inner play, becomes a major component of that outer frame.⁵⁴ Additionally, the central character of the inner play reflects the interior author. In his preface to Fanny’s First Play, Shaw offers a reliable model for breaking restrictive family bonds and becoming one’s own person: “Do something that will get you into trouble” (CPP 4: 345). Shaw illustrates this advice by creating a play wherein Fanny destroys her father’s illusions about her political and aesthetic views (Fanny herself is a suffragette and has possibly been in jail), and by having his interior author create a parallel character, Margaret Knox, who similarly lands in prison after her epiphany about life’s possibilities. Fanny’s actions produce serious doubts about the future relationship of father and daughter.

Censorship

Another dramatic level features Shaw and his characters taking not-so-subtle swipes at the censor and censorship, as Shaw engages in censor-baiting in both the frame and inner plays. Illustrating that various methods of the suppression of texts and ideas coexist with official governmental censorship, Shaw creates one of his famous father-daughter relationships, wherein the conventional father, Count O’Dowda, a self-described eighteenth-century patrician, rejects his progressive daughter’s play for striking at “the very horror of the very soul,” for breaching “decencies too subtle to be put into words” (CPP 4: 434, 433). Representing suppression by the critics, Trotter, after seeing the play, asks the author, “Any reason you should stuff naughty plays down my throat?”—a scathing verbal “review” of a first dramatic effort. Moreover, in one of only two Shaw plays featuring women writers,⁵⁵ Fanny flirts with censorship herself by introducing a prostitute in her play. Prostitution was one of the red flags for censors and discussing or featuring prostitution virtually guaranteed that the “offending” play would likely be banned. In creating Dora Delaney, a prostitute with redeeming qualities and a healthy sense of self-worth, Fanny mirrors the work of her own creator, who famously produced his version of the melodramatic “tart with a heart” in Mrs. Warren and Femmy Evans. In addition, by asking her father to produce her play privately as a birthday present, Fanny parallels Shaw’s experiences of staging his plays in private theaters, in part to avoid scrutiny by the censor.

Just in case we missed the comments on the climate of censorship that existed when Fanny was written, Shaw throws a critical bomb at his own playwriting character’s career and pens a verse prologue spoken by “Fanny” that explicitly mirrors the opinion of the critics:

• It’s really Fanny’s play; and I am Fanny.

• I wrote the play. It was my very first.

• (I had to write it or I should have burst:

• I couldnt help it). Now from what youve read of it,

• You know, perhaps, that all the critics said of it

• That, though my first might fairly good be reckoned,

• Heaven forbid that I should write a second!⁵⁶

Thus, rejected by her father and the critics, Fanny’s production and the frame surrounding it apparently bring her dramatic career to a close—but not before Shaw roundly caricatures those who would silence the young in a manner consistent with his own definition of, and experiences with, censorship. Additionally, Fanny and her heroine Margaret prove soundly modern, in the conventional sense of the word, as the play offers an extended, up-to-date discussion of class, gender, and personal responsibility throughout the frame but especially in Fanny’s play itself. Here the debate over children’s right to control their own lives ends with the young trumping parental privilege, thus attacking the ideal view of family life. Furthermore, by promoting topical and intellectual subject matter through discussions of suffrage issues, the play explodes the melodramatic character of the hero and heroine, as all the young people prove brave and strong in their own way. At the same time, the self-reflexive nature of the play-within-a-play structure creates a modernist, even postmodernist,⁵⁷ critique of Shaw’s own art form, while opening the fourth wall with the Prologue and foreshadowing the work by a pair of internal authors in a play with Brechtian qualities.

The three plays discussed in this chapter illustrate the increasing importance of the interior authors in Shaw’s work from the beginning of his transition from page to stage. His fascination with writing about writing continually increases into his major dramas of the 1920s, as he employs the interior authors to document his growing belief that society cannot continue to exist without a guiding intelligence, in Shaw’s mind, the Life Force.