In his first version of what was to become Yvette, Maupassant has a girl respond to the discovery that her mother is a courtesan by suicide. In the actual Yvette, the girl becomes a kept woman herself. Armed with these two alternatives, Shaw was again eager to come up with a third.

As in Widowers’ Houses, Shaw saves his major revelation for the second act, with the third providing another turn to the screw. In Act II, Kitty Warren tells her daughter that she was forced by circumstance into prostitution, thus converting Vivie from a conservative contempt for such self-serving excuses to a wholehearted acceptance of her mother’s argument that society offered her no choice (or rather that the only other choices were worse). In Act III, however, Vivie discovers a new piece of information – that Mrs Warren is still running brothels, even though there is no longer any material imperative for her to do so. Sickened by this revelation, Vivie runs off to London and the small accountancy firm she now runs with her friend Honoria Fraser, in Chancery Lane, to make her own way in the world.

Having written two last acts without enough material to fill them, one might expect Shaw to end it there. In fact he adds a fourth act, in which Mrs Warren follows Vivie to London, to plead for acceptance from her daughter once again. The difference of course is that, unlike Harry Trench, Vivie Warren has actually spurned the tainted treasure, and this act is about the cost, not of doing the wrong thing, but of doing the right one. For that reason it can be, and is, driven not by plot but by character. In Act II, Mrs Warren’s arguments are cogent and convincing; in Act IV they are neither, but they are compelling, because they are about her limits as a human being and her fears of growing old alone. In Act II, Vivie can respond joyously to her mother’s strength and courage; now, rejecting her, she must be sarcastic and cruel. Modern as well as contemporary critics have seen Vivie transformed (in Chesterton’s words) into ‘an iceberg of contempt’6. But this surely is Shaw’s point: that if the logic of capitalism traps all but the bravest into complicity, then the price of escape is the sacrifice of the best bits of oneself.

Shaw was not the last political writer to explore this paradox. At the end of her last scene with her daughter, Mrs Warren cries ‘Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!’, in direct anticipation of the message of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Good Person of Setzuan. In fact, Brecht wrote a rather silly essay on Shaw in 1926, in which he described him as a terrorist and said that he agreed with Shaw’s opinions about evolution even though he didn’t know what they were.7 He was not to know the debt he would owe to Shaw as a political writer.

As Eric Bentley points out, Shaw’s claim that ‘my procedure is to imagine characters and let them rip’ is disingenous; in Widowers’ Houses and Mrs Warren’s Profession, the plot was a given, and Shaw’s procedure was not to destroy but to upend it.8 The crucial discovery that Shaw made in his early plays was that by placing realistic political content into recognizable theatrical structures he could effect the reversals he sought by allowing his characters to stage a double revolt – against their allocated office in life (as wife, daughter, servant) but also their expected role in the plot (as hero, victim or villain). When Shaw’s great argument scenes work, they do so because both things are happening – the story is forcing the character to question their office, while at the same time the character is challenging their role in the plot. This is what Shaw means when he writes in the Mrs Warren preface that ‘the real secret of the cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage’. So, in Arms and the Man, Raina’s failure to sustain the role of sensitive heroine allows Bluntschli to prise her away from her office as dutiful fiancée. But something even more complicated and interesting occurs at the end of Mrs Warren’s Profession.

As I pointed out above, the plot of Mrs Warren’s Profession is effectively concluded by the end of Act III. Not only romantic but also structural logic demands therefore that something else will happen in Act IV, which can only be that Vivie Warren changes her mind and returns to her mother’s corrupt embrace. The fact that she refuses to do so is a dramatic surprise as well as a psychological shock. Vivie Warren’s refusal to accept the office of daughter to a woman she despises is underlined by the heroine’s refusal to do what the structure expects of her, which is to turn again. It is the last act which makes Mrs Warren’s Profession not only a great but also a complete political play.

Shaw’s current charge against his polemical plays was that by dealing with the pressing political issues of his day, they inevitably date. By 1895, he resolved to write no more ‘blue-book’ plays on current social problems, arguing that in periods when political institutions lagged behind cultural changes, it was natural for the imagination of dramatists to be set in action on behalf of social reform, but that even then ‘the greatest dramatists shew a preference for the non-political drama… for subjects in which the conflict is between man and his apparently inevitable and eternal rather than his political temporal circumstances’.9

For me this dichotomy is false. In all three Plays Unpleasant, but particularly in Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shaw wrote of the conflict between youthful ideals and economic realities, the drawbacks of promiscuity and the perils of matrimony, the duties of women to others and themselves, the necessity for and the costs of revolt. What could be more eternal than that?

Notes

1. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love, p283.

2. Quoted in Margery M. Morgan, The Shavian Playground (1972), p37.

3. Having finally abolished stage censorship in 1968, we can feel agreeably superior to the censors on both sides of the Atlantic from the turn of the last century. But the device used by the Kansas City authorities was the same as that used by Mary Whitehouse to prosecute Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain in 1981, a campaign supported by the then leader of – as it happens – the Greater London Council. And as I write, the Mayor of New York is direatening to wididraw funds from an art gallery presenting the British exhibition Sensation, and the state of Kansas has removed the Darwinian dieory of evolution from the state education curriculum.

4. Quoted in Eric Bentley, ‘The Making of a Dramatist’, in R. J.