Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1971 Shavian Shakespeare: Shaw's Use and Transformation of Shakespearean Materials in His Dramas. Lise Brandt Pedersen Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Pedersen, Lise Brandt, "Shavian Shakespeare: Shaw's Use and Transformation of Shakespearean Materials in His Dramas." (1971). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2159. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2159 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. I I 72- 17,797 PEDERSEN, Lise Brandt, 1926- SHAVIAN .SHAKESPEARE:' SHAW'S USE AND TRANSFORMATION OF SHAKESPEAREAN MATERIALS IN HIS DRAMAS. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, XEROXA Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan tT,TITn ^TnoT.r.a.A'TTAItf U4C PPPM MT PROPTT.MF'n FVAOTT.V AR RECEI VE D SHAVIAN SHAKESPEARE: SHAW'S USE AND TRANSFORMATION OF SHAKESPEAREAN MATERIALS IN HIS DRAMAS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Lise Brandt Pedersen B.A., Tulane University, 1952 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1963 December, 1971 ACKNOWLEDGMENT I wish to thank Dr. James T. Nardin for his generous assistance and guidance in the preparation of this dis­ sertation. I also wish to acknowledge gratefully that all excerpts from the plays, prefaces and other works of Shaw are quoted with the permission of the Society of Authors, on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate, and that all excerpts from the plays of Shakespeare are from Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by G. B. Harrison, copyright 1948, 1952, and 1968 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., quoted with the permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received. University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company I TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENT................................. ii ABSTRACT....................................... iv CHAPTER I SHAW'S SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM .......... 1 II FIVE SHORT DRAMATIC WORKS EXPRESSLY LINKED TO SHAKESPEARE................. 40 III JULIUS CAESAR, CLEOPATRA, AND JOAN OF ARC IN SHAW AND SHAKESPEARE............ 73 IV THE RELATIONSHIPS OF ANDREW UNDERSHAFT TO RICHARD III AND EDMUND . 109 V THE RELATIONSHIPS OF SERGIUS AND DON JUAN TO H A M L E T ......................150 VI THE RELATIONSHIP OF HEARTBREAK HOUSE TO KING L E A R ..................... 201 VII THE RELATIONSHIP OF PYGMALION TO THE TAMING OF THE S H R E W ..................242 VIII CONCLUSION ............................. 261 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................... 268 VITA 274 ABSTRACT This dissertation is a study of George Bernard Shaw's use of characters, situations, plots, and themes parallel to certain characters, situations, plots, and themes of Shakespeare's plays and of the philosophic differences which Shaw felt to exist between the two playwrights, as those differences are revealed by Shaw's treatment of these Shakespearean materials in his plays. First, an analysis of Shaw's Shakespearean criticism reveals that Shaw consis­ tently criticized Shakespeare on the following grounds: (1) that Shakespeare usually accepted the conventional moral­ ity of his time instead of working out an original morality or philosophy; (2) that Shakespeare's plays are romantic and pessimistic, rather than realistic and optimistic; (3) that as a result they glorify sexual love, suicide and self- centered individualism; (4) that Shakespeare's characters are motivated in accordance with a romantic, rather than a real­ istic, conception of the world; and (5) that Shakespeare's powerful blank verse is often used to cover up a lack of meaning in the plays. An analysis of five short dramatic works overtly linked iv to Shakespeare (the "Macbeth Skit," The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, The Admirable Bashville, Shakes versus Shay, and Cymbeline Refinished) and two major ones (Caesar and Cleopatra and Saint Joan) indicates that each of these works embodies in dramatic form one or more of these five funda­ mental criticisms of Shakespeare. Next, a comparison of Shaw's Andrew Undershaft with Shakespeare's Richard III and Edmund reveals that these characters are very much alike in a number of important ways but that they differ in several respects which reflect some of Shaw's five fundamental criti­ cisms of Shakespeare: Undershaft is not presented as a villain, though Richard and Edmund are; Undershaft does not flout a morality in which he believes, as they do, but he substitutes for the received morality an original morality which he considers better; and Undershaft's actions do not merely serve his personal aims, as theirs do, but are de­ signed to effect an improvement of society. A similar comparison of Shaw's Sergius and Don Juan to Shakespeare's Hamlet reveals that these figures also are alike in a number of important respects. Shaw's treatment of Sergius differs, however, from Shakespeare's treatment of Hamlet in that, though Sergius, like Hamlet, accepts the received morality of his society, Shaw provides him with a foil, the realist Bluntschli, who demonstrates an original morality which is better suited to the facts of life. Don Juan needs no such foil because he himself has a purposeful and realistic opti­ mism which contrasts sharply with the romantic pessimism and despair of Hamlet. A comparison of Heartbreak House and King Lear indicates that they share a number of parallels in character, situar tion, technique and theme but that whereas King Lear conveys, at least to Shaw, a feeling of pessimism and despair, Heartbreak House concludes with a strong suggestion that improved religious and economic systems will replace those that have been destroyed. A comparison of Pygmalion and The Taming of the Shrew reveals that though there are many simi­ larities in the basic plot of the two, the differences in the methods used by the leading men to transform the leading women and the differences in the final attitudes of these men and women to one another reveal that Shakespeare accepted the traditional morality of his time whereas Shaw rejected it and substituted an original morality. Thus, Shaw's plays do show many parallels to the works of Shakespeare. Further, in Shaw's transformation of the material he borrowed from Shakespeare he reveals the philo­ sophic differences between himself and Shakespeare which he had analyzed earlier in his Shakespearean criticism. CHAPTER I SHAW'S SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM "Better than Shakespear?” is the question George Bernard Shaw raised about his Caesar and Cleopatra in the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans in 1900, and at that time he answered the question in the negative, asserting that he did not "profess to write better plays" than Shakespeare but only to "have something to say" which Shakespeare did not say.^ Five years later, however, when Shaw summarized his views on Shakespeare for The Daily News of London in April, 1905, he included as number 9 the following assertion: Not, as has been erroneously stated, that I could write a better play than As You Like It, but that I actually have written much better ones, and in fact, never wrote anything, and never intend to write anything, half so bad in matter. (In manner and art nobody can write better than Shakespear, because, carelessness apart, he did the thing ^Complete Plays With Prefaces (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1962), III, lii, lvi, lix. Except where otherwise noted, all references to Shaw's plays and prefaces are to this edition. References to the plays will be made parenthetically in the text. 1 as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty.)^ Nevertheless, in spite of these rather direct invitations to critics of the drama to make a comparison between his plays and those of Shakespeare, and in spite of the sensational effect produced by much of Shaw's Shakespearean criticism in the columns of The Saturday Review and elsewhere, no detailed comparison of more than a very few of the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw has yet been made. The reasons for the neglect of Shaw's suggestions in this regard are probably the same as the reasons for the relative neglect of all of his Shakespeare criticism: the audacity of most of Shaw's strictures on Shakespeare has led many critics to ignore them as irreverent jests or to try to explain them away as grounded in motives which rob them of validity as serious criticism. One explanation advanced for somerof Shaw's Shakespearean criticism is that it is aimed not at Shakespeare but at the adaptations and mutilations of Shakespeare by such actors and producers as Augustin Daly, ^Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw's Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1961), p. 4. Beerbohm Tre6, and Sir Henry Irving,^ and therefore actually constitutes praise of Shakespeare's plays and reproach only of those who feel the need of "improving" Shakespeare, an undertaking which, in Shaw's words, . no doubt presents itself to the adapter's mind as one of masterly amelioration, but which must necessarily be mainly one of debasement and mutilation whenever, as occasionally happens, the adapter is inferior to the author.^- Certainly it is one of the purposes of some of Shaw's Shakespearean criticism to put an end to such practices, but that explanation does not apply to the large body of criticism of the plays in the form in which they have come down to us.