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.