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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

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  Plays Pleasant first published 1898

  Published in Penguin Books 1946

  Reprinted with a chronology and a new introduction,

  and with minor revisions, in Penguin Classics 2003

  7

  Preface: Copyright 1930, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1957, The Public Trustee as Executor

  of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw.

  Armes and the Man: Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1931, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905,

  Brentano’s. Copyright 1958, The Public Trustee as Executor of The Estate

  of George Bernard Shaw.

  Candida: Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1931, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905, Brentano’s.

  Copyright 1958, The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw.

  The Man of Destiny: Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1931, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905,

  Brentano’s. Copyright 1958, the Public Trustee as Executor of The Estate of George Bernard Shaw.

  You Never Can Tell: Copyright 1898, 1913, 1926, 1931, 1933, 1941, George Bernard Shaw. Copyright 1905,

  Brentano’s. Copyright 1958, The Public Trustee as Executor of The Estate of George Bernard Shaw.

  Introduction copyright © W. J. Mc Cormack 2003

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  All business connected with Bernard Shaw’s plays is in the hands of The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London sw10 9sb (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.

  Applications for permission to give stock and amateur performances of Bernard Shaw’s plays in the United States and Canada should be made to Samuel French Inc., 45 West 25th Street, New York, 10010. In all other cases, whether for stage, radio or television, application should be made to The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London sw10 9sb, England.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193673-4

  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.