What lends The Devil’s Disciple its genuine distinction is that it plays with the theme of the Double (which probably explains why Alfred Hitchcock once thought of turning it into a film). The alliterating names of the twin protagonists, Dick Dudgeon and Anthony Anderson (the name—of Teutonic/Scandinavian origin—means “other son” or “son of another”) signal their doppelganger relationship: Each embodies an unrealized aspect of the other’s inner self. Despite his defying King George and apparently breaking all conventions and rules, Dick Dudgeon has the impulse to sacrifice himself and to care for others that marks a born minister. He also finds himself mysteriously drawn to the integrity of Minister Anderson’s hearth—and perhaps envies the minister his wife’s “most ungodly allowance of good looks”—when he visits the minister’s home. Anthony Anderson meanwhile finds himself instantly converted to a man of action when he learns that the British soldiers came to his home to arrest him and not Dick Dudgeon. Shaw contrives the action so that Dick Dudgeon puts on the minister’s coat when he is arrested just as Anderson will then wear Dick’s coat when he leaves to join the rebel militia. Shaw said that all his plays were in one way or another about conversion. Here the man of action becomes passive in allowing himself to be arrested while the man of peace goes to war in order to save his double. Shaw modeled the way the theme of the Double is embodied—in an exchange of coats—on the similar transaction between Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities, written by one of Shaw’s favorite authors, Charles Dickens. Indeed, so intentional was this allusion that posters for the early productions of the play closely resemble posters for the contemporaneous standard theatrical version of the Dickens novel, renamed The Only Way.
But Dick Dudgeon and Anthony Anderson are not the only doubles in the play. The minister’s protected and foolish wife, Judith, has a counterpart in the genuinely suffering serving girl, Essie. Judith misunderstands her attraction to her husband and therefore has to undergo a trial of authentic suffering in which her conceptions of goodness and badness are painfully transformed. Essie’s instinctive and immediate attraction to Dick is exactly the impulse within Judith that she rigorously suppresses. Shaw points out how Essie represents Judith’s repressed self by systematically paralleling the two women’s struggles with tears. Each of the three acts ends with Essie in tears; and these three episodes surround episodes in the second and third acts when Judith breaks down crying. In the first act, Judith tries to convince Essie that she should not ever mention Dick’s name or admit him into her presence. Judith likewise tries to prevent her husband from leaving her alone in their home with Dick. All the episodes of crying involve anxiety over Dick’s safety, and with each woman he alternately approves the tears or orders that they be stopped. In observing these parallels, we see Judith gradually become more like Essie, and therefore more her true self.
Though Shaw’s female characters cannot have the same impact on contemporary audiences that they had in his time—when Robert Louis Stevenson read Shaw’s novels, he remarked to his and Shaw’s friend, William Archer, “I say, Archer, what women!”—they nevertheless receive remarkably sympathetic and individualized representation in the plays. And so does the cause of equality for women, but never in the agit-prop way. An episode from The Devil’s Disciple illustrates the point. Shaw presents Dick’s mother, Mrs. Dudgeon, as a rather unpleasant and unsympathetic character: a hypocritical puritan who has suppressed her own romantic and sexual desires for the sake of respectability and propriety with the result that she is bitter, bullying, unkind, reproachful, and even cruel to those who come within her power—Essie, for example. Yet Shaw uses Mrs. Dudgeon as the vehicle to make the point that the legal system always favors men and therefore treats women unjustly. Mrs. Dudgeon’s husband leaves their house and land to his son, Dick, which means that if she wants to stay in her own house, she would be living in the house of a son she can no more stand than he can stand her. To his wife he leaves an annuity of fifty-two pounds a year. At the reading of the will, she complains bitterly at the unfairness of this disposition of property, especially because, she claims, her husband had no money of his own when they married and she brought him a marriage portion that he now uses for her annuity. She asks if she has any legal redress, and Lawyer Hawkins replies that she has none because “the courts will sustain the claim of a man—and that man the eldest son—against any woman, if they can” (p. 236). Thus does Shaw highlight the law’s systemic bias against women in favor of men, but note that he does not allow the audience or readers to click their tongues complacently at a social injustice with easy sympathy for the victim. The victim is unsympathetic and pointedly so. The will is poetic justice, but social injustice. And Shaw’s whole strategy bends to make us separate principles from personalities, so that we must think for ourselves about the principles, and not just ride the hobbyhorse of our personal prejudices. In short, it is the difference between dramatic art and propaganda.
MAN AND SUPERMAN
Though Shaw’s initiation to sex did not come until comparatively late in life, at age twenty-eight, he made up for lost time by subsequently juggling several amorous relationships, some active, some epistolary—a state of affairs reflected in The Philanderer. He finally married an Irish millionairess, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, in 1898. Various biographers say various things about the sexual status of the marriage—that it was abstemious by agreement or that it began with relations but continued without them. My own opinion is that no one knows or can know the truth of it and, as the saying goes, whereof we do not know, thereof we cannot speak. What we can say is: After Shaw’s marriage, he wrote Man and Superman, a play about sex and marriage that is full of the charm of sexual attraction between men and women, and the play makes that attraction palpable on stage.
It took Shaw a year to write Man and Superman (1901: published, 1903; performed 1905), and well it should have, even for a man to whom, as Clive James said, writing must have been like breathing. For Shaw attempted in this big-in-every-way play to enter the arena with Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Goethe’s Faust, to give an account of the cosmic purpose and destiny of the human species, and to do so through the traditional form of comedy—that is, the story of a couple’s overcoming the obstacles to their marrying—but raised to the status of epic drama. In itself that is a comic idea. But Shaw means it seriously: He subtitled the play “A Comedy and a Philosophy.” Actually, it expounds the philosophy of comedy, which is that human beings have a justification for being alive, and that justification is striving to understand themselves so they can change into something better. The long-range means of development is evolution, but the short-range means is marriage or procreation. A man and a woman seek one another out as sexual partners, whether they realize it consciously or not, so that together they can produce a superior child. Evolutionary instincts push particular males and females together, in spite of parental, social, tribal, religious, political, or any and all artificial barriers, including personal friction between the couple, because their future child wills itself to be born healthier and smarter from them. Shaw was not a Darwinian evolutionist; he preferred Lamarck’s more poetic vision of evolution, that evolution follows from a creature’s will to survive and change itself in response to its environment. Shaw the optimist about human destiny found Darwin’s vision of will-less adaptation too bleak because it was too mechanical. (Currently science tells us Darwin was right and Lamarck was wrong, but then Shaw’s view was always more a faith than a theory, though he himself called it science.) Shaw called his own version of evolution the working of the Life Force within us, driving us to think more so that we can be more than we are now. Comedy was an ideal means for Shaw to propound his view of evolution because comedy always ridicules people for behaving mechanically, inflexibly, unyieldingly, or Darwinianly, whether in thinking or doing. Comedy defines humanity as flexibility. Only in heroic tragedy do people die for unbending principles, and receive a
pproval for doing so.
Comedy as a genre was ideally useful to Shaw from two other angles. It allowed him to synthesize two traditions from dramatic literature: the Don Juan tradition, and the tradition of the battling couple. To take the latter first: The protagonist and antagonist of Man and Superman, John Tanner and Ann Whitefield, descend directly from Petruchio and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew and from Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. That is, before the couples finally give in to marriage, they spar and argue, insult one another, struggle against their fates, flirt with and charm one another as much as they exasperate and terrify one another—like most couples. In addition, Shaw drew upon several “gay couples” (as they were called) in post-Shakespearean plays: Mirabell and Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World, for example, and Sir Peter and Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Shaw borrows different elements from these couples but renovates the tradition by making the woman the avid and determined pursuer in the love chase and the man the unaware and apparently unwilling prey. Shaw cited Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It as a model for his heroine as an aggressor in courtship, but he also intuited that a woman chooses a man for the kind of children he will father and for the kind of father he will be, and that goal makes her pursuit transcend the personal.
The Don Juan tradition served Shaw well. The legend of Don Juan combines two apparently unconnected motifs. Don Juan is a man attractive to and attracted by many women whom he feels compelled to seduce. Don Juan also invites to dinner a stone Statue of an outraged father he (Don Juan) has slain in a duel, and receives in return an invitation from the Statue to dine with him in Hell. When Don Juan refuses to repent his wickedness, the Statue drags him to his damnation. The motif of the seducer anxious to spread his seed as widely as possible (insuring the survival of his genes) connects itself to the motif of damnation in that both motifs are concerned with the issue of individual mortality and immortality, with an anxiety about the future. So it is that Shaw presents us with John Tanner, an apparently anti—Don Juan, a man who believes himself not made to marry, a man who believes Ann Whitefield has designs on his best friend, Octavius, but not on himself. Yet he also does everything a male can do to impress Ann Whitefield with his qualifications for fatherhood. And in the course of the play, though he runs away from her, he comes to understand when she catches him that there is such a thing as a father’s heart as well as a mother‘s, and that he has one and therefore must marry Ann—for, as Benedick says when he capitulates to love, “The world must be peopled.”
In the detachable third act of the play, known, when it is performed separately, as “Don Juan in Hell,” John Tanner, having fled to the Sierra Mountains in Spain to escape Ann’s pursuit and capture of him, dreams of himself as Don Juan debating with the Devil whether he (Juan) should stay in Hell or move to Heaven. Doña Ana and the Statue of her father are the audience and sometime participants in the debate. Hell, it turns out, is not unlike the world we all know—a place where people love beauty and romance, seek pleasure, and pursue happiness, and deceive themselves about reality when it interferes with such goals. The Devil is the promoter of Hell as a paradise where the aesthetic reigns supreme. Heaven, by contrast, is the place where the Real reigns, where people work to make life more intensely self-conscious. After a seventy-five-minute discussion that is by turns witty, profound, hilarious, and dizzying about the purpose of life and the operation of the Life Force, about whether Man is primarily a creator or destroyer, about the roles of romance and sex in marriage, Don Juan finally argues himself into leaving Hell and heading for Heaven. The Statue looks upon this decision with regret since from his perspective Heaven is “the most angelically dull place in all creation.” But Doña Ana does not; she is inspired by Don Juan’s decision and goes off in pursuit of “a father for the Superman.” Through his dream Tanner tells himself that by marrying Ann he will make his contribution to “helping life in its struggle upward.” Once he understands that he can marry, Shaw’s new Don Juan seeks not a personal genetic immortality through the seduction of many women but the evolutionary improvement and immortality of the species by marrying one woman and becoming a father.
Shaw’s plays are full of ideas, ideas of every color on the spectrum from dangerous to preposterous, from wonderful to thrilling, and, as Jacques Barzun says, it is never a question with Shaw of agreeing with all his ideas but of being moved by the vision. It is a vision that is always a play of contrary ideas, and therefore a mirror of life itself—ideas dramatized always with graceful wit, genial humor, and fearlessness, but also with the great feeling and emotional fervor that comes with thinking that life, and how it goes, and where it is headed, matter. Not for Shaw the despairing gaze into the abyss—laughter, rather, and the imagining of hope.
JOHN A. BERTOLINI was educated at Manhattan College and Columbia University. He teaches English and dramatic literature, Shakespeare, and film at Middlebury College, where he is Ellis Professor of the Liberal Arts. He is the author of The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw and editor of Shaw and Other Playwrights; he has also published articles on Hitchcock, Renaissance drama, and British and American dramatists. He is writing a book on Terence Rattigan’s plays.
MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION
PREFACE
MAINLY ABOUT MYSELF
THERE IS AN OLD SAYING THAT IF A man has not fallen in love before forty, he had better not fall in love after. I long ago perceived that this rule applied to many other matters as well: for example, to the writing of plays; and I made a rough memorandum for my own guidance that unless I could produce at least half a dozen plays before I was forty, I had better let playwriting alone. It was not so easy to comply with this provision as might be supposed. Not that I lacked the dramatist’s gift. As far as that is concerned, I have encountered no limit but my own laziness to my power of conjuring up imaginary people in imaginary places, and making up stories about them in the natural scenic form which has given rise to that curious human institution, the theatre. But in order to obtain a livelihood by my gift, I must have conjured so as to interest not only my own imagination, but that of at least some seventy or a hundred thousand contemporary London playgoers. To fulfil this condition was hopelessly out of my power. I had no taste for what is called popular art, no respect for popular morality, no belief in popular religion, no admiration for popular heroics. As an Irishman I could pretend to patriotism neither for the country I had abandoned nor the country that had ruined it. As a humane person I detested violence and slaughter, whether in war, sport, or the butcher’s yard. I was a Socialist, detesting our anarchical scramble for money, and believing in equality as the only possible permanent basis of social organization, discipline, subordination, good manners, and selection of fit persons for high functions. Fashionable life, though open on very specially indulgent terms to unencumbered “brilliant” persons (“brilliancy” was my speciality), I could not endure, even if I had not feared the demoralizing effect of its wicked wastefulness, its impenitent robbery of the poor, and its vulgarity on a character which required looking after as much as my own. I was neither a sceptic nor a cynic in these matters: I simply understood life differently from the average respectable man; and as I certainly enjoyed myself more—mostly in ways which would have made him unbearably miserable—I was not splenetic over our variance.
Judge then, how impossible it was for me to write fiction that should delight the public. In my nonage I had tried to obtain a foothold in literature by writing novels, and did actually produce five long works in that form without getting further than an encouraging compliment or two from the most dignified of the London and American publishers, who unanimously declined to venture their capital upon me. Now it is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing, provided it is a novel at all, and not merely an ineptitude. It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing; but I pledge my credit as a critic that this was not the case with mine. I might ha
ve explained the matter by saying with Whately, a “These silly people don’t know their own silly business”; and indeed, when these novels of mine did subsequently blunder into type to fill up gaps in Socialist magazines financed by generous friends, one or two specimens took shallow root like weeds, and trip me up from time to time to this day. But I was convinced that the publishers’ view was commercially sound by getting just then a clue to my real condition from a friend of mine, a physician who had devoted himself specially to ophthalmic surgery. He tested my eyesight one evening, and informed me that it was quite uninteresting to him because it was “normal.” I naturally took this to mean that it was like everybody else’s; but he rejected this construction as paradoxical, and hastened to explain to me that I was an exceptional and highly fortunate person optically, “normal” sight conferring the power of seeing things accurately, and being enjoyed by only about ten per cent of the population, the remaining ninety per cent being abnormal. I immediately perceived the explanation of my want of success in fiction. My mind’s eye, like my body‘s, was “normal”: it saw things differently from other people’s eyes, and saw them better.
This revelation produced a considerable effect on me. At first it struck me that I might live by selling my works to the ten per cent who were like myself; but a moment’s reflection showed me that these would all be as penniless as myself, and that we could not live by, so to speak, taking in one another’s washing. How to earn my bread by my pen was then the problem. Had I been a practical commonsense moneyloving Englishman, the matter would have been easy enough: I should have put on a pair of abnormal spectacles and aberred my vision to the liking of the ninety per cent of potential bookbuyers. But I was so prodigiously self-satisfied with my superiority, so flattered by my abnormal normality, that the resource of hypocrisy never occurred to me. Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million. The question was, how to get the pound a week. The matter, once I gave up writing novels, was not so very difficult. Every despot must have one disloyal subject to keep him sane. Even Louis the Eleventh had to tolerate his confessor, standing for the eternal against the temporal throne. Democracy has now handed the sceptre of the despot to the sovereign people; but they, too, must have their confessor, whom they call Critic. Criticism is not only medicinally salutary: it has positive popular attractions in its cruelty, its gladiatorship, and the gratification its attacks on the great give to envy, and its praises to enthusiasm. It may say things which many would like to say, but dare not, and indeed for want of skill could not even if they durst. Its iconoclasms, seditions, and blasphemies, if well turned, tickle those whom they shock; so that the critic adds the privileges of the court jester to those of the confessor. Garrick, had he called Dr. Johnson Punch, would have spoken profoundly and wittily, whereas Dr. Johnson, in hurling that epithet at him, was but picking up the cheapest sneer an actor is subject to.
Man and Superman and Three Other Plays Page 4
