Shaw's “Shakespear”
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SHAW’S “SHAKESPEAR” THE INFLUENCE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ON THE DRAMATURGY OF BERNARD SHAW DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Edwin S. Williams, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2006 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Sebastian Knowles, Adviser Professor Christopher Highley ________________________ Professor Mark Conroy Adviser English Department Graduate Program ABSTRACT George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) had a lifelong fascination with William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616). First as a student and critic, and then as a playwright, Shaw saw in Shakespeare both a dramatic idol and teacher – and a competing rival to be challenged, and overcome. This feeling that Shakespeare was an opponent to be defeated is made most explicit in the miniature play Shaw originally intended to be his final dramatic statement, at the end of his professional life: Shakes Versus Shav (1949), a novelty marionette play, in which puppet figures of Shaw and Shakespeare literally fight, or spar, comparing their dramatic achievements, with puppets representing and quoting some of their iconic characters. The onstage fight is warm-hearted, the competition good-natured, and the respect mutual, between the two playwrights. Of course – Shaw himself wrote this text, and so was able to manipulate this brotherhood, according to his own needs, and assert his ownership of the competition on his own terms. Shaw’s pleas, in that and many other plays, to Shakespeare to clear out of the way and allow his own body of work to have its due credit, without suffering under Shakespeare’s shadow, is the critical problem I am exploring, following his earlier boast of having taught Shakespeare’s characters some reason, to go with their deep feeling. This chronological suspension and confusion illustrates a paradoxical attitude towards his dramatic predecessor – simultaneously resenting and revering him – that colored Shaw’s ii career. His words in his Preface to this puppet play express his paradox: “Enough too for my feeling that the real Shakespeare might have been myself, and for the shallow mistaking of [my interest in him] for mere professional jealousy.” In my work, I am examining Shaw’s feelings of being a reincarnation of a playwright for whom he had both great regard, and of whom he wrote severe criticism. And in the larger context, this interaction between the two playwrights could be seen as part of Shaw’s attempted mission to affect, or influence, early 20th-Century modernism, by asserting the possibility of theatre as an agent for political action. iii Dedicated to my beloved wife, our pugs, and the Beatles, who have always been beside me while I study, write, and teach iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my adviser, Sebastian D. G. Knowles, for his intellectual support, encouragement, enthusiasm, and good humor which made this dissertation possible, and for his patience in correcting both my stylistic and theoretical errors. I also wish to thank Christopher Highley, for his support and kindness throughout my graduate school work. I am grateful to my other teachers at The Ohio State University, including Mark Conroy, Jon Erickson, John N. King, James Phelan, and Phoebe Spinrad. And also, to my friends and colleagues Matthew Delconte, Christopher Manion, and Warren Benson McCorkle, Jr., who’ve accompanied me through our graduate school work. v VITA November 2, 1962 ……………………… Born – Montgomery, Alabama, USA 1985 ……………………………………. B. A. English, University of Maryland (BC) 1999 ……………………………………. M. A. English, The Ohio State University 1999 – present ………………………….. Graduate Teaching Associate and Lecturer, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ……………………………………………………………………….……… ii Dedication …………………………………………………………………………… iv Acknowledgments …………………………………………………………………… v Vita ………………………………………………………………………………….. vi Chapters: 1. Shaw’s “Shakespear”: Owning the Bard ……………………………………... 1 2. Shaw, Shakespeare, and the New Woman …………………………………… 61 3. Shaw, Shakespeare, and the Strong Man …………………………………… 142 4. Shaw, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and the Breaking Heart …………………….. 217 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………257 vii CHAPTER 1 SHAW’S “SHAKESPEAR”: OWNING THE BARD Enough too for my feeling that the real Shakespear might have been myself, and for the shallow mistaking of it for mere professional jealousy. (Preface to Shakes Versus Shav, 1949) “Shakespear might have been myself”: a remarkable revelation from a writer in the second-to-last year of his long life, looking back over the many years of rivalry he created between himself and William Shakespeare, about whom he wrote both savagely derisive, and splendidly appreciative criticism – but always with both a comic attitude and a sincere intelligence. When I was twenty, I knew everybody in Shakespear, from Hamlet to Abhorson, much more intimately than I knew my living contemporaries. That is a comment by George Bernard Shaw, taken from his review in London’s The Saturday Review of the September 22, 1896 opening performance of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline at the Lyceum Theatre in London, starring Sir Henry Irving and Dame Ellen Terry. Here is the longer passage, culminating in that statement: There are moments when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this “immortal” pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible 1 unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers. With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity. To read Cymbeline and to think of Goethe, of Wagner, of Ibsen, is, for me, to imperil the habit of studied moderation of statement which years of public responsibility as a journalist have made almost second nature to me. And then, immediately after the impassioned music of that outburst, Shaw paradoxically voices a much more charitable view of the playwright he saw as his particular personal challenge – rival, mentor, opponent, secret sharer in the mirror, simultaneously target for satire as well as object of veneration. But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespear. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more. His gift of telling a story (provided some one else told it to him first); his enormous power over language, as conspicuous in his senseless and silly abuse of it as in his miracles of expression; his humor; his sense of idiosyncratic character; and his prodigious fund of that vital energy which is, it seems, the true differentiating property behind the faculties, good, bad, or indifferent, of the man of genius, enable him to entertain us so effectively that the imaginary scenes and people he has created become more real to us than our actual life – at least, until our knowledge and grip of actual life begins to deepen and glow beyond the common. George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) had a complex lifelong fascination with William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Quoted above is one of his most notorious commentaries (or criticisms) of Shakespeare, but there were many others, as Shakespeare preoccupied Shaw throughout his long life, including Shaw’s ten-plus years as a theatrical critic, and his fifty-plus years as a playwright. This sensitivity to Shakespeare’s works made Shaw a better writer, either by challenging him to overcome his predecessor, or by opening new 2 veins of humanity for Shaw to activate in his own time. Shakespeare was indispensable to Shaw – but, he would have to have his Shakespeare his own way. The Anxiety of Bardolatry Throughout his career, Shaw mingled jokes and insults at Shakespeare’s expense with passages of adoration. He also parodied Shakespeare, rewrote several of Shakespeare’s plays (and realized them correctly, he thought), and even made Shakespeare a character in three dramatic pieces, including his penultimate theatrical statement. With his multitude of other interests and concerns – artistic, social, political, historical, and dozens of other categories – Shaw kept confronting Shakespeare (and the culture’s reverence of Shakespeare, “bardolatry” as Shaw termed it) continuously. Seeing himself as following in the line of playwrights influenced by Shakespeare, he simultaneously celebrated the tradition while iconoclastically rebelling against that unavoidable influence. Harold Bloom’s influential 1973 The Anxiety of Influence captures the strange tension Shaw felt about his predecessor: Poetic Influence – when it involves two strong, authentic poets – always