In Widowers’ Houses, his ending took him seven years.

As stated, Widower’s Houses began life as a collaboration between Shaw and William Archer to adapt a French comedy, whose inciting incident is the discovery by a young man that the inheritance of the woman he loves was acquired immorally. In the original, his dilemma was resolved by the intervention of a major national economic crisis, so that the heroine’s father might be ruined and the problem removed. In the first Archer–Shaw version (originally titled ‘The Way to a Woman’s Heart’) the hero has to confront his problem, which he does by literally pitching the father’s money into the river at Remagen (hence the second Shaw–Archer title ‘Rhinegold’). In the final and completed Shaw version, however, the hero does not behave heroically, not least because the heroine chooses to behave in a most surprising way.

By the end of the first act of Widowers’ Houses, young Harry Trench has become engaged to Blanche Sartorius, whose brisk and unsentimental attitude to things (including Dr Trench himself) we have learnt to enjoy and admire. We have also discovered that there is a problem with the means by which Blanche’s father amassed his fortune. In the second act, Trench discovers that Sartorius is a slum landlord, and, like the heroes of both Ceinture Doree and ‘Rhinegold’, proclaims that he cannot possibly accept this tainted treasure, proposing to his fiancée (without, being a Victorian gentleman, entirely explaining why) that they live off his income alone.

Then two unexpected, but by no means implausible, things happen. The first is that Blanche refuses to abandon her inheritance, on the impeccably feminist grounds that it’s her money not his, that she does not wish to be absolutely dependent on her husband, and that if (as she suspects) this is an excuse to renege on his commitment to her then this is ‘so like a man’. The second is that Sartorius reveals that Trench’s own income comes from mortgages on Sartorius’ property – in order to free himself of it he would have not only to impoverish his wife but bankrupt himself.

This situation is left unresolved at the second interval, but given a further twist in Act III, when Sartorius is faced with a choice rich in irony – if he improves his hellish properties he might make a killing from compulsory purchases by (yes, here they are again) the London County Council, but he can only do so by risking Trench’s capital and thus his livelihood. The only way this conundrum can be resolved is if Trench overcomes his scruples and marries Blanche after all.

Now this doesn’t quite work in plot terms; basically, Trench faces the same moral dilemma twice, though in the second case it is not so much a dilemma as a fait accompli. But anyone who has attempted to make such material work will recognize that Shaw has presented a complicated financial plot in a way that is plausible, intriguing of itself, and consistently clear; at each stage, the plotting faces the characters with unavoidable practical choices rich in moral meaning; and at the climax of the play he has complicated an already potent situation with a surprising, ironical, and yet plausible twist (the fact that in order to make an even fatter profit out of compulsory purchase, it suddenly becomes in Sartorius’ interests to become a model landlord). All of which communicates Shaw’s message, that capitalism has made everyone complicit in its evils whether they like it or not; and that the alternative is not to attempt to live an individually moral life, but to change society. Which Trench cannot do, so we, by implication, must take on the task.

Having brought that off, there is a sense of Shaw giving up: in order to top and tail Trench’s surrender, he must bring Trench and Blanche back together, which he does in a long speech by Blanche in which the text is abuse and the subtext animal sexuality (‘It suddenly flashes on him’, Shaw instructs the Trench actor disarmingly, ‘that all this ferocity is erotic: that she is making love to him’). Silent until the embrace, Trench informs her re-entering father that he’ll ‘stand in, compensation or no compensation’. So the challenge that in Ceinture Doree is avoided, and in ‘Rhinegold’ confronted, is here surrendered, from which Shaw invites us to draw the obvious conclusion.

The Philanderer is different from the other two Plays Unpleasant, but less different in its first version than the one Shaw published. The opening love triangle was drawn from Shaw’s own life, with the current lover (Grace Tranfield) based on the actress Florence Farr (who played Blanche in Widowers’ Houses), and the spurned ex-lover, Julia Craven, being an unflattering portrait of Jenny Patterson (who had taken Shaw’s virginity eight years before). By the end of the second act, Grace has rejected the idea of marriage to Charteris on good ‘New Womanly’ grounds (‘I will never marry a man I love too much. It would give him a terrible advantage over me: I should be utterly in his power’). While in order to evade his earlier entanglement, Charteris is busily organizing the marriage of Julia into the sub plot (a Dr Paramore, whose main function is to diagnose Julia’s father as terminally ill with a liver disease of his own discovery, and to be most put out when he discovers that there’s nothing wrong with his patient after all).

The original third act is four years later. Paramore has indeed married Julia, but fallen out of love with her, and wants a divorce so he can marry Grace. Shaw assembles the characters (rather clumsily) for precisely the kind of detached discussion of the iniquity of the marriage laws which he ascribes erroneously to Ibsen and (on his good days) equally erroneously to himself. It is agreed that Dr and Mrs Paramore should be divorced abroad, and there is a neat (if psychologically implausible) coda between Julia Paramore and Charteris, in which it is revealed that they have been having a secret liaison for most of the course of her marriage. Now she is free of Paramore, she insists that if Charteris wants to continue the affair, they will have to wed (‘No more philandering and advanced views for me’). But Charteris’ magnetism is too much for her, and despite his refusal, she ends the play in his arms.

Assured by Lady Campbell that this wouldn’t wash, Shaw’s substitute last act is continous with the second. Again, all the characters assemble at Dr Paramore’s consulting rooms, but this time merely to witness the success of Charteris’ scheme to marry Julia off to the doctor. Grace repeats her refusal to marry Charteris, Shaw half heartedly offers and withdraws the possibility of Charteris marrying Julia’s sister, and the final question posed by the play is whether Charteris will congratulate Julia on her engagement (why would he not?). And like Widowers’ Houses, the play ends with a virtually impossible stage direction: ‘Charteris, amused and untouched, shakes his head laughingly. The rest look at Julia with concern, and even a little awe, feeling for the first time the presence of a keen sorrow’.5

So for the second time in a row, Shaw has the problem of a denouement of which the whole point is that a situation doesn’t change. In both cases – though to a much greater extent in The Philanderer – this makes for an unsatisfactory and strangely perfunctory close. In his third play, one would expect Shaw at the very least not to make the same mistake again. But for whatever reason, that is precisely what he does do – with the significant difference that, on this occasion, he makes it work.

Like Widowers’ Houses, Mrs Warren’s Profession was based on two previous stabs at the same story.