Shaw’s distinctness as a playwright in Mrs. Warren’s Profession is not exhausted by either his mixture of comic and tragic tones, or his evenhanded, if not downright ambiguous, presentation of both sides of a given issue; his distinctness is also defined by his bold and unsettling (not vulgar or obscene) treatment of sexuality. There is a momentary yet extraordinary sexual tension in the opening of the second act between Mrs. Warren and her daughter’s suitor, Frank, a tension that Shaw presents as arising on the instant and subsiding as quickly and spontaneously as it arose, just as such tensions rise and fall in life, without specific impetus and without furtherance. As Frank helps Mrs. Warren take off her shawl, Shaw’s stage directions indicate that he gives “her shoulders the most delicate possible little caress with hisfingers.” Mrs. Warren, while continuing her idle conversation with him, glances “back at him for an instant from the corner of her eye as she detects the pressure” (p. 47). Interestingly, when Shaw revised the text for a subsequent publication (and after more experience with staging his plays), he changed the stage direction to an action more readily detected by the audience: “gallantly giving her shoulders a very perceptible squeeze.” A camera could easily convey the action and its significance in the earlier version, but on stage the new formulation would be more clear to the audience.
As the scene progresses, what began as a silent, subtle exchange of sexual signals between Frank and his girlfriend’s mother becomes something more than mere naughtiness. Frank continues to flirt with Mrs. Warren by asking her to take him with her to Vienna, by teasing her with his playacting, and by using his wooing voice on her until finally he makes a cheeky remark that provokes her to pretend “to box his ears.” So far the bantering, though odd, seems not too far beyond the playful and harmless. But then Mrs. Warren looks at his “pretty, upturned face for a moment, tempted. At last she kisses him and immediately turns away, out of patience with herself” (p. 48). What motivates her to do this? Sexual competition with her Cambridge-educated daughter? An aging woman’s impulsive attempt to assert her continuing sexual attractiveness? A momentary surge of sexual appetite? This moment is genuinely Shavian because of its fidelity to the suddenness of human impulse and the mysteriousness of human motivation.
As rapidly as the impulse arises in Mrs. Warren, it subsides and changes into half-hearted regret: “There! I shouldn’t have done that. I am wicked. Never you mind, my dear: it’s only a motherly kiss.” (The spaced lettering in “a m” was Shaw’s way of telling the actor where the accent should fall in the delivery of the line.) Her self-reproach would be more convincing if she did not quite relish her own misbehavior so much, which relish the emphasis on “am” enacts. But even more Shavian (or ironic) is her use of the word “motherly” here. Her kiss is “motherly” only in the sense that Jocasta’s kisses to Oedipus were “motherly.” And her “motherly” kiss utterly undermines any “motherly” claims she makes upon Vivie in the final scene of the play. Shaw’s characters are complex and contradictory, and he gives them a moment-to-moment life on stage that is as unpredictable and funny and disturbing as that of anyone you are likely to meet on the planet Earth.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession would be the last play Shaw would write in Ibsen’s mood, meaning a play in which Shaw almost always compresses his humor into irony and allows darker human impulses to dominate the more genial ones. For example, Frank woos Vivie by playing a fantasy-game with her in which the two imagine themselves as the Babes in the Wood covered with leaves. What Shaw would later convert into the ridiculousness of human romantic impulse he here makes ironically sinister: The Babes in the Wood of legend were young brother and sister orphans whose bodies, after the two children were abandoned in the Wood and starved to death, were covered in strawberry leaves by the birds. Frank’s invitation to Vivie to get covered with leaves, therefore, suggests that their potential sexual relations would be a perverse death for Vivie. But Shaw simply did not have the gloomy Norwegian’s relentless appetite for unrelieved irony and darkness, though he admired the depths of human nature Ibsen’s genius allowed him to reach.
CANDIDA
After Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Shaw’s next four plays, including Candida (completed in 1894), more truly expressed his individual nature, personality, and idiosyncratic view of life. Shaw would later group Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written in 1893) with Widowers’ Houses and The Philanderer as “unpleasant plays.” He grouped Candida with Arms and the Man (1894; a satire of war as a force inimical to romance and sexuality), The Man of Destiny (1895; a one-act play about Napoleon’s involvement in a romantic intrigue), and You Never Can Tell (1896; Shaw’s response to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest) as “pleasant.” In 1898 he published these works, in two volumes, as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant.
Like most socialists, Shaw had difficulty recognizing or acknowledging evil in this world—beyond the capitalist system, that is—and the world he creates in his “pleasant plays” is largely devoid of evil and tragedy, though not of sorrow or seriousness. Shaw’s turning away from a preoccupation with evil and death (because neither can be helped) meant turning toward the comic spirit that insists the most important thing about human beings is not that we die, but that men and women are sexually attracted to one another, get married, and produce children—a process Shaw found a boundlessly fecund source of humor.
However, in the author of Candida one may find still the author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, but as if after a conversion. Where Mrs. Warren’s Profession presents George Crofts as a palpably repulsive “capitalist bully,” Candida portrays Candida’s prosperous father as a genial if scoundrelly businessman. The former acts the villain; the latter plays the comedy figure. With that shift, the banishment of outright evil, the play’s weather system becomes Shavian rather than Ibsenesque. Where Mrs. Warren’s “motherly” kiss of Frank provoked wonder and revulsion, Candida’s embodiment of young motherhood is her sexual attractiveness. And that change makes all the difference in the play’s atmosphere, which is not unpleasant but pleasant. Shaw has not abandoned seriousness, but he has become more his true self, expressing his serious ideas through the genre that suited his personality and temperament, comedy, just as Molière had before him.
Candida is the wife of a Christian socialist parson, the Reverend James Morell (pronounced “moral”), the mother of three children, and the object of amorous worship by high-strung eighteen-year-old poet Eugene Marchbanks, who enters the Morell household as an invader, unconsciously intent on winning Candida’s affection away from her husband. Eugene’s contesting of Morell’s right to his wife tests the apparent happiness of the marriage, for the reverend finds himself wilting when the young poet imputes smug dullness to him and implies that his wife sees what a fool he is and despises him for it. And he becomes genuinely perturbed when she says something that seems to confirm Eugene’s implication. The final scene in the play, in which Candida solicits bids for her care from her two wooers, is one of the most suspenseful in dramatic literature, for Shaw has cunningly made us care equally for each of the three actors in the contest so that we do not see how to choose. How Shaw resolves the impasse, the paradox according to which Candida makes her choice, I will leave the reader to delight in discovering.
I suggested earlier that in moving from Mrs. Warren’s Profession to Candida, Shaw had moved into a different weather system, from a frosty-ironic Ibsenesque climate to a more balmy and clement Shavian one. Nevertheless, Shaw did not discard the Ibsen influence altogether, for in many ways Candida responds to Ibsen’s pre-feminist play A Doll’s House. When at the end of Ibsen’s epoch-making play, his heroine, Nora, walks out of her home and leaves behind her husband and children—in order to fulfill her duty to herself as an individual, to get experience, and to decide for herself what she thinks about life, religion, and morality—she slams shut the door of her house of illusions, her doll’s house, her unreal life. Shaw was so impressed by Ibsen’s courage in making his dramas out of his
characters’ struggles with the major social and moral issues of his time that he wrote the first sustained critical examination of Ibsen’s plays both as works of art and as social criticism, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).
A Doll’s House particularly made its mark on Shaw not only for its bold critique of the restricted roles of women inside the typical respectable middle-class marriage but also because of what Shaw noted as its technical innovation in the art of play-making. For Ibsen, having set up an elaborate situation involving financial fraud and blackmail, does not resolve the crisis in the usual manner, with suicide, but with a discussion between the husband and the wife. Shaw knew that he wanted to do his own version of Ibsen’s critique of modern marriage, and Candida was it. But in Shaw’s version the modern husband suffers as much as the wife from unreality in a marriage based on illusions. Candida reveals that her husband’s public success as a forward-thinking socialist preacher has come at a cost to the women in his family—his mother, his sisters, and his wife—all of whom have guarded him from the quotidian bothers, worries, and responsibilities of life, so that he may win glory and be worshiped in the public arena, a truth the young poet had intuited. Shaw suggests that Morell is as much of a doll living in a doll’s house as any wife. But the revelation does not lead to his exiting the house. Instead the young poet slams the door on domestic solace in favor of pursuing the adventure of his life into the unknown region of poetic ambition. And there Shaw leaves the play poised between the two values of domestic love and a poet’s destiny. The play celebrates but separates the two realms. And they will not be brought back together until several years later in Man and Superman.
Shaw bases the separation on a mystery, each realm’s unknow ability to the other. The final stage direction tells us that after Eugene leaves, Candida holds out her arms to Morell and “they embrace.” But then Shaw adds a direction only for the readers of the play, “But they do not know the secret in the poet’s heart” (p. 190). Of course, no audience has this stage direction available because it cannot be acted. The secret in the poet’s heart is a secret between the playwright and the reader. It is Shaw’s invitation to the reader to imagine the separate-ness of the realm of the poet, the line he follows out into the unknown night of poetic creation, the mystery of that craft, while the couple’s realm is the circle their arms trace, their embrace, the mystery of marriage. Shaw subtitled the play “A Mystery” for a number of reasons. One reason was that he intended Candida as his equivalent to the Virgin Mother of medieval and Renaissance paintings. Another was because in the Middle Ages a mystery play was a play that celebrated one of the many mysteries of faith—for example, how a virgin could also be a mother. Such plays were sponsored by one of the town guilds of craftsmen—that is, men who had mastered a particular craft or mystery, such as wheelmaking.
A quarter century after the play was written, some students at Rugby wrote to Shaw in order to discover the secret in the poet’s heart. Shaw wrote back to them—he was always kind and considerate to children, as childless people like himself so seldom are—inviting them to submit their theories. Their proposals, charmingly articulated, ranged from the cliché that Eugene wanted to put “an end to his miserable existence,” to the ridiculous suggestion that Eugene planned to come back after Morell was dead, to the impertinent, “There is no secret, and it is only mentioned for the purpose of puzzling the reader.” Shaw was much amused and replied in a mock lament for the vanished spirit of Rugby. He dubbed all the proposals “wrong” and “pure sob stuff,” except for that of the “soulless wretch” who called the secret “a spoof secret.” He explained patiently that he meant the poet to be going to meet his writer’s destiny, into the night where “domestic comfort and cuddling” have no place. He ends by deferring his authorial authority: “It is only my way of looking at it; everybody who buys the book may fit it with an ending to suit his own taste.” So he returns the play to the realm of mystery again.
But the secret in the poet’s heart is not the only mystery in the play. In truth, it is full of mysteries of all sorts, most of them revolving around Candida’s character, motivation, and inner life. How is it that Candida’s father, Burgess, speaks like an uneducated man with a thick local accent (which Shaw phonetically reproduces), while Candida herself talks grammar and speaks beautifully with no discernable accent? Why does Candida love and marry such a foolish man who knows himself so little? When she becomes so distracted while listening to Eugene recite his poetry, is it because the poetry is jejune or because she cannot really appreciate the poetry? Who imagined a spiritual resemblance between Candida and Titian’s Virgin of the Assumption and hung an autotype of her on the wall in homage to Candida? What does Candida mean when she says to her husband that if she knew she would prevent Eugene’s learning about sexual love from a prostitute by teaching him herself, she would do so as willingly as she would give her “shawl to a beggar dying of cold”—that is, if her love for her husband were not there to restrain her? (After hearing Shaw read the play aloud, Shaw’s socialist friend and co-founder of the Fabian Society, Beatrice Webb, called Candida “a sentimental prostitute.”)
Many have fallen under the mysterious spell of Shaw’s idealized virgin mother, the epitome of womanly grace in strength, simultaneously both a husband’s fantasy figure of a wife and a boy’s Oedipal dream-mother. Indeed, Vladimir Nabokov fell under her spell, for though he found little to value as literature in modern drama, he made an exception (in his essay “The Tragedy of Tragedy”) of “Shaw’s brilliant farces, (especially Candida).” No doubt its depiction of an amorous affiliation between an eighteen-year-old poet and a thirty-three-year-old married woman particularly engendered admiration in the author of Lolita. The playwright who succeeded Shaw in dominating British theater during the 1940s and ‘5os, Terence Rattigan, named seven Shaw plays as the most popular with general audiences, Candida coming first—not surprisingly, since Candida’s taking male weakness as such a focus makes it Shaw’s most Rattigan-like play. And in the 195os American playwright Robert Anderson wrote Tea and Sympathy, which is in effect a version of Candida.
THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE
In his still pertinent 1936 essay on Shaw in The Triple Thinkers, Edmund Wilson suggests that while Shaw’s political ideas were “confused and uncertain,” he was always “a considerable artist.” And like any fine artist, Shaw never could leave a theme or situation until he was satisfied that he had painted it from every interesting angle. So it is that the basic dramatic situation of Candida—an apparently comfortable marriage between a clergyman and his attractive wife upset by the intrusion on the domestic hearth of an unconventional outsider—replicates itself in The Devil’s Disciple (1897), but with a major shift in period and place (to the American Revolution and New England), and with various adjustments in the postures and positions of the three protagonists. For example, the clergyman, Anthony Anderson, has married a handsome but considerably younger wife, Judith, who unconsciously longs for a more romantic connection to a man. The titular hero, Dick Dudgeon, unwittingly fulfills her unrecognized desire: When British soldiers arrive to arrest Anderson in his home for the capital offense of rebellion against the crown, Dick substitutes his neck for the Parson’s in the noose. But due to a last-minute rescue of Dick from the scaffold by his rival, Minister Anderson, now transformed into a militia captain, Dick’s heroic self-sacrifice comes to naught, and Judith keeps with her newly attractive husband.
Shaw subtitled the play “A Melodrama,” to make clear that he was both employing and making fun of the conventions of the genre. The hero of such a melodrama attains his heroic stature precisely by going to his death for the sake of another (or for the other’s wife, with whom the hero is secretly in love). But Shaw gets to eat his cake and have it too by mocking the conventions of melodrama, yet exploiting their capacity to thrill and please: While he allows his hero to offer himself in sacrifice, he precisely prevents his hero from actually sacrificing himself. When the heroine,
Judith, visits Dick in prison, under the assumption that out of love for her Dick is sacrificing his own life to help her husband save his, Shaw also prevents her from having the satisfaction of hearing a declaration of his undying devotion to her—indeed, she gets a denial and then an evasion, which she misinterprets as love, much to the comic delight of the audience. Best of all, as Martin Meisel points out in his Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre, while traditionally the ne‘er-do-well hero of melodrama, no matter how much of a scalawag and delinquent he is, has a sentimental reverence and loving soft spot for his dear mother, Shaw makes clear that rebellious Dick and his bitter, hard-hearted, puritanical mother heartily hate one another. (The otherwise excellent 1959 film version with Kirk Douglas failed Shaw only by giving Dick a visible pang of regret when his mother is forced to leave her home by the terms of her husband’s will . )
Shaw’s concerns in The Devil’s Disciple extend further than the playful upending of generic expectations. When it was published in 1901, Shaw grouped it with two subsequent plays, Caesar and Cleopatra (written in 1898) and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899), and called the volume Three Plays for Puritans (1900). He did so because the three have a number of elements and aspects in common. All are set in contexts where empire clashes with native resistance: the American Revolution, the Roman conquest of Egypt, and the British presence in Moorish Africa. (Shaw does not, however, sentimentalize or reduce these clashes to melodramatic struggles between wicked oppressors and saintly colonials: He subjects both groups to humorous and ironic treatment.) All three plays culminate in trials in which the distinction between judicial vengeance and true justice is at issue. Shaw also used the colonial context as a metaphor through which he could explore the borderline between adolescence and adulthood. Indeed, all three plays involve a young man or young woman’s conversion to adulthood through a confrontation with an adult who has great power, beauty, charm, or maturity.
Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Page 3
