G. B. Shaw: A biographical outline

George Bernard Shaw, Irish writer, critic, wit, public figure, and socialist, was born on the 26th of July, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland, and died on the 2nd of November, 1950, in Ayot, St. Laurence, England. Posterity has recorded his plays, most of which became famous, not only in the English-speaking world, being especially outstanding through the various experimental techniques used and the unfailing social criticism that inspired them. G. B. Shaw grew up in an Irish Protestant family; it is from his father, a clerk in the government, that he inherited a remarkable sense of humour (“Shaw was a great humorist rather than a profound teacher…” – Harry Blamires, A Short History of English Literature, p. 334), while his mother, a professional singer, bequeathed him an uncommon love of literature and music.

When he was only fifteen years old, Shaw left school and went to work for an estate agent, collecting rent. The little money he got enabled him to buy books and music scores, and he managed to find time to read and write. His first published work (1875) was a letter to the editor on the subject of American evangelists, to the effect that religion, and in particular sudden conversions, could do little to improve people’s lives. He followed his mother, who had left his father, to London in 1876, where they hoped for a better life. Shaw’s departure from Ireland did not affect his lifelong allegiance to his native land; his writings stand proof for the fact that he often derived inspiration from the peculiar beauty and the many-sided, oddly appealing, violence of the island. In London he began a programme of voracious reading – especially in the reading-room of the British Library. He also became interested, and subsequently active, in socialism, after hearing a speech by Henry George, a socialist and political-economist. Shaw proceeded to read Marx’s and Engels’ works. G. B. Shaw became a socialist in 1882, then, in 1884, joined the Fabian Society, and was a member of its Executive Committee for many years. As a pamphleteer, he spoke at busy street corners, proclaiming the message of socialism; as a socialist militant, he may have made more than one thousand speeches. Thus, he was able to get first-hand, practical knowledge of what would capture people’s attention, and what would entertain them long enough to get a message across. In the mid-1880s he made friends with William Archer; sharing the same intense love of the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen; Archer and Shaw would often plan on working jointly on a dramatic project, but they finally failed to write any play. What Shaw did produce, as a result of the Scandinavian dramatist’s direct influence, was The Quintessence of Ibsenism (written in 1891), an appraisal and eulogy of Ibsen’s creative genius, no less than a Shavian dramatic manifesto. Archer helped his friend to find work as a journalist, in which capacity Shaw used the pen name ‘Corno di Bassetto’. He worked for The Star from 1888 to 1890, and quite soon became a reputed music critic. Between 1895 and 1898, G. B. Shaw wrote dramatic criticism for The Saturday Review, using his initials, G.B.S., to sign the articles. These articles were later assembled into the three-volume collection entitled Our Theatre in the Nineties, published in 1932. Unfortunately, his deep appreciation of music was on a par with sheer underestimation of dramatic poetry. While in London, Shaw wrote a few novels; although not commercially successful, they foreshadowed much of his vigorous, unflagging political and social writing to come. His first published novel was Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886), followed by An Unsocial Socialist (1887); he would return to novel writing later in his career, publishing The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, a socio-political parable, in 1932. His social, political, moral and even economic opinions were expounded in the Prefaces to the plays he published, but also in such popular (as well as highly controversial) works on a number of social, political and ethical issues such as Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928, 1937), and Everybody’s Political What’s What (1944).

After the false start as a novelist, Shaw turned to writing drama. Many critics consider his early (or ‘nonage’) writing as a mere continuation of his newspaper days, with special stress placed on social and art criticism, but not as much attention paid to the dramatic text. Much of his early playwriting was deemed too bitterly and violently critical to initially gain censorship imprimatur. Some of Shaw’s early plays could only be stage produced at a later date, e.g. ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ (written in 1893, and publicly performed in England as late as 1924), and ‘The Philanderer’ (written in 1893, and performed in 1905). He allegedly tried to write his plays in terms of the novel, competing in realism with the novelist. The first Shavian play that was staged in England was ‘Arms and the Man’ (1894), with the protagonist, Bluntschli, as the very image of self-preservative wisdom. By the turn of the century G. B. Shaw established himself as a force in the English theatre. In 1897 Shaw married a wealthy woman, Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Then he began devoting his energies to the art of producing theatre, which resulted in such successful productions as: ‘Candida’ (1897), ‘The Devil’s Disciple’ (1897), ‘The Man of Destiny’ (1897), ‘You Never Can Tell’ (1899), and ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion’ (1900). (“All these plays can fairly be criticized for incidental weaknesses, but they were so very much superior to the average “commercial play” of the period that it seems incredible that they gained their first real fame, not on the boards – ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ was actually banned by the censor – but by the publication in 1898 of the two volumes of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. Shaw is probably the only dramatist in the world’s history who became famous in print first, then in the theatre afterwards; and this reversal of the usual procedure had itself a profound influence on the dramatic literature of the twentieth century” – George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, p. 902). Shaw’s plays have been grouped together because they tackled themes, mostly social ones, which G. B. Shaw continued to develop and refine throughout his career. In his dramatic writing, Shaw scathingly censures routine, the customs and manners of the petty bourgeois, and eulogizes those who embark on actions or careers of their own, observing a code that defies accepted standards; Shaw soon became a public figure, a widely acclaimed “enfant terrible”. (As a matter of fact, G. B. Shaw is as well-known for his eccentricities as he is for his plays). He drew huge audiences into topical debates – the famous Shavian debates, political in the main, demanding them to intelligently consider unpalatable issues, be they in artistic disguise. A spokesman against conventionalities, Shaw seems to be ‘condemned’ to domineering intellect. Despite the appearance of an accomplished comic apparatus, what Shaw’s plays endeavour to do is make the public think. “It might be argued that Shaw’s serious judgement on his age is at once most powerful and most palatable in dramatic terms when it is allegorized behind the witty comedy of wayward love relationships (…) However that may be, Shaw certainly gave the English theatre a much-needed shot in the arm from the needle of his intellect.” (Harry Blamires, A Short History of English Literature, p. 334). G. B. Shaw became reputed as a maverick and iconoclast through the highly popular productions of his plays at the Royal Court Theatre, between 1904 and 1907, e.g. ‘Man and Superman’ (first performed in 1905, only subsequently published – 1908 – although it is obviously a play to read rather than a play to watch); the title is an direct allusion to the Nietzschean idea that humans can attain a far superior, godlike state if they discard the accepted morals dispensed by the church and state. In the play, Shaw advocates a new kind of religion or ethic, proceeding from creative evolution; society, he believed, was goaded into reaching ever newer levels of evolution through the incarnation of “life force” in geniuses. ‘Man and Superman’ (1903) is at bottom a play about the eternal pursuit of the male by the female. This comedy includes the famous “Don Juan in Hell” scene (an episode that is often acted separately), and the “Revolutionist’s Handbook”. Other plays produced at the Royal Court Theatre by Harley Granville-Barker and J.E. Vedrenne were ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ (written for the Abbey Theatre at Yeats’s request, in 1904), ‘How He Lied to Her Husband’ (1904), ‘Major Barbara’ (1905) and ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’ (1906). In 1909, the censorship board denounced Shaw’s plays as immoral for the second time. His 1913

play ‘Pygmalion’ is considered his comic masterpiece; the anecdote Shaw drew on is said to have been derived from Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle. ‘Getting Married’ (1911), ‘Misalliance’ (1914), and ‘Androcles and the Lion’ (1916) are plays in which, some critics consider, “his comic genius gets bogged down by windy rhetoric, farcical incident or empty paradox” (in George Sampson’s words – in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, p. 905).

Such later Shavian plays as ‘Heartbreak House’ (1920), ‘Back to Methuselah’ (1922), and ‘Saint Joan’ (1923) were universally considered pieces of superb comedy, revolutionary in form and technique, bearing a heavy influence on the production of theatre in the 1920s. “His great strength lies in a mastery of comic invention which bears comparison with the best of Congreve, Wycherley, Sheridan and Oscar Wilde” (G. Sampson, op. cit., p. 903). Later works, such as ‘The Apple Cart’, produced in 1929, were not the object of the same interest as Shaw’s earlier works, perhaps because of their experimental dramatic nature. On the other hand, the use Shaw made of language (and more specifically, dialect idiosyncrasies) in order to delineate and particularize his characters – in plays like ‘Pygmalion’, ‘Widowers’ Houses’, ‘Major Barbara’, ‘Candida’, ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’, ‘Arms and the Man’, ‘The Devil’s Disciple’, ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion’, ‘Man and Superman’, ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, ‘Fanny’s First Play’, ‘O’Flaherty V.C.’, ‘The Apple Cart’ and ‘Geneva’ – is really remarkable. “A writer… creates his characters’ speech according to the needs of the dramatic art, each character having his idiolect, which consists of both authentic dialectal peculiarities and a number of substandard ones… [We have to understand] what the dramatist tells us about language, the message he attaches to this communication” (Horia Hulban, Dramaturgia între limbă şi stil, Editura NEURON, 1994, pp. 234-235).

The other dramatic works that G. B. Shaw wrote were: ‘The Admirable Bashville’ (1901), ‘Passion, Poison and Petrifaction’ (1905), ‘The Interlude at the Playhouse’ (1907), ‘Getting Married’ (1908), ‘The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet’ (1909), ‘Press Cuttings’ (1909), ‘The Fascinating Foundling’ (109), ‘The Glimpse of Reality’ (1909), ‘The Dark Lady of the Sonnets’ (1910), ‘Fanny’s First Play’ (1911), ‘Overruled’ (1912), ‘Great Catherine’ (1913), ‘The Music-Cure’ (1913), ‘O’Flaherty, V.C.’ (1915), ‘The Inca of Jerusalem’ (1916), ‘Augustus Does His Bit’ (1916), ‘Jitta’s Atonement’ (1922), ‘Too True to be Good’ (1931), ‘Village Wooing’ (1933), ‘On the Rocks’ (1933), ‘The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles’ (1934), ‘The Six of Calais’ (1934), ‘The Millionairess’ (1935), ‘Cymbeline Refinished’ (1937), ‘Geneva’ (1938), ‘In Good King Charles’ Golden Days’ (1939), ‘Buoyant Billions’ (1948), ‘Farfetched Fables’ (1948), ‘Shakes versus Shaw’ (1949), ‘Why She Would Not’ (1950).

A polemist and a man of rare intellect, Shaw is, above all, the committed, complex artist: “Shaw’s instinct as artist is often sounder than his polemical purpose, and his humour saner than his seriousness” (Harry Blamires, A Short History of English Literature, p. 334). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, but chose to give the money to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation, an organization dedicated to the study and promotion of Nordic authors. He used some of his earnings to travel (to Russia, in 1931, and then around the world, in 1932).

As a dramatist, Shaw succeeded in copiously surpassing his contemporaries (e.g. O. Wilde, J. M. Synge, W. B. Yeats), becoming the most outstanding prose dramatist of the 20 th

century – although some criticized him for being a mentor and a propagandist who used the theatre only as a rostrum fit to send an ideological message. Yet, most of his artistic creations are still produced and enjoyed today. “The achievement in prose drama of George Bernard Shaw (…) can most readily be appreciated if we consider first of all the state of the London theatre in the eighteen-nineties, the enfeebled melodramatic and farcical traditions he had to break away from. If the best drama of today is both worth seeing on the stage and reading as literature, we owe the fact primarily to the work of Shaw in drama and criticism, only secondarily to the achievements of Yeats, Synge and Oscar Wilde” (G. Sampson, op. cit., p.

901). His Collected Letters, edited by Dan H. Lawrence, were published in 1066-1968. G. B. Shaw, a strict vegetarian and a teetotaller (he did not even drink coffee or tea), lived to be ninety-four. Numerous biographies about G. B. Shaw have been written, the most notable being G. K. Chesterton’s (1909), Frank Harris’s (1931), Hesketh Pearson’s (1942), St John Ervine (1956), and Ivor Brown’s (1966).

Introduction

Motto: “A passion of pure political Weltverbesserungwahn (= “worldbetterment-craze”)… is my own devouring malady.” 1

This is the expression of a profession of faith, which very few people could afford because the very natural means to achieve it are denied to them. But when one is destined to be born an artist… When talking about an author of Shaw’s towering significance, one could rather resort to the metaphoric reductio ad absurdum: “Bernard Shaw has NOT existed… What really existed was a very clear-sighted, perceptive spirit, a spirit of bitter, unbearably cutting lucidity, and an impetuous will to establish a better order in the world. There also existed an energy, the vivid, light magic force of an elfish creature, a soul with plenty of room in it, resembling a mirror chamber in which the whole of humanity should be reflected, in the fullness of its worldly qualities – likeable or loathsome; magic mirrors out of which these images would have to be set anew in front of those who had inspired them, astounding them: ‘Could it really be that it is us we are looking at? Could that be really possible?’

That feat is fully understandable when coming from a creator of G. B. Shaw’s imposing personality and artistic scale; as, in spite of all the contradicting opinions as to his dramatic genius and the scope of his public personality, Shaw remains a universal spirit – and all that is unmistakably personal, in his own self-tormenting way of ceaselessly militating for the advancement of mankind (using, of course, an artist’s specific means); C. B. Purdom (a founder resident of Welwy-Garden City, father of Edmund Purdom, the well-known film actor) had such recollections regarding Shaw: “People who say Shaw was a humbug are talking nonsense. Beneath the buffoonery he was intensely serious. His life and writings are dominated throughout by his passionate interest in social reform and making a better world. He hated the folly and stupidity of mankind and created his ‘G.B.S.’ public figure to get attention for his views. He felt he had to shock the public, or entertain and amuse them, to arouse them from their apathy.” 2

Beyond the appearance of offhandedness that his message was mistakenly (yet most of the times rightly) perceived as possessing, Shaw proved immense understanding for the people’s problems and topical issues – from the helpless and the suffering up to the well-off, arrogant people. He always found something to say to everyone; but he launched all-out war on society as a perfectible system – and he did it openly and fearlessly.

George Bernard Shaw is inimitable, unmistakable, and he can hardly be ranked or catalogued – in a word, he has the quality of uniqueness. For the one who ventures to study the man and his work, it will suffice to read a few of his paradoxes. Consequently, they will understand that they have to cope with a master’s wit perfectly handling the magic of words, doubled by a refined analytical mind belonging to a man aspiring to get deep below the surface of things, into their innermost depths – especially in what represents their hidden, ‘seamy’ side, i.e. that which is so hard to confess. He is a nonchalant, more often than not a congenial cynic; George Bernard Shaw always wanted to call a spade a spade, even if that could hurt some people’s feelings. What he wants to do is dig up and expose deep layers of human conscience down to which the common understanding may not, more often than not, even penetrate. While trying to explain to us that what he is doing is madness, he knows he is mad about those streaks of madness which are hard to understand, and wants at all costs to make their sense (more) explicit by using an aphorism, a parable or a jest. And do you know why? He knows very well that he is in possession of a little secret, the possession of which was not granted to everybody… “Whether it be that I was born mad or a little too sane, my

kingdom was not of this world: I was at home only in the realm of my imagination and at my ease only with the mighty dead…”3

Such a beautiful confession indeed! It is not everybody’s lot to be able to create one’s own world, one could escape into and take refuge in… whenever one wants to watch the others at ease, analysing and dissecting them, laughing to tears at their ignorance, at the meanness of their aims, ends and ideals, at their fake values, at the failure of their hopes, under the grinding, crushing wheel of an adverse machine-like social system. After all, an author’s “illusions” are, or could be, as many pieces of a future ‘scientific psychology’ – in Shaw’s own words – of the whole human kind: “Every man who records his illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology which the world still waits for” (in the EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY preceding the play ‘Man and Superman’).

Who was George Bernard Shaw? His career and personality have aroused numerous queries; the dramatist himself considered he was equally an art critic, a musical and a dramatic, as well a literary critic, a novelist, and a dramatist, an atheist, a militant for the progress of human kind, a Fabian socialist, a preacher and a thinker, an instigator and a man of the world.4

Coming from an Irish puritan family, hence imbued with that quality of instinctive ‘saintness’ specific to the ‘Land of the saints’ or ‘of the Virgins’,5 G. B. Shaw set out to conquer England – also from his need to overcome a certain inferiority complex of a national, or rather regional origin; it would be useful to underline that his puritanism was rather of a moral order than genuinely religious: “My conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to a conviction of sin.”

As long as he lived he took part in the debates over the artistic, but also social ideas of the day, dealing with a wide variety of subjects and fields – writing political commentaries, economic treatises, religious essays, novels, plays, theatre and music criticism, art criticism. Here is an illustrative ‘summary’ by himself of Shaw’s ‘crusader activity’, with a brief account of his ‘didactic’ betterment programme, as appearing in a dedicatory epistle to his friend Walkley, which precedes the play ‘Man and Superman’: “It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of the New Journalism of that time, we two [i.e. Shaw and Walkley], cradled in the same new sheets, began an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by making it the pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion. You meant me to épater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer him to you as the accountable party. (…) The fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of twentieth century tumbrils. (…) But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable, fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none

the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty. The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you dont like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it…”

The main lines of his activity as a writer as well as a public figure can be synthesized as follows:

a) His faith in the ‘Life Force’, i.e. that ‘l’élan vital’ (v. Bergson,a) but also Lamarck,b)

as well as Schopenhauer’s,c) Nietzsche’sd) and William Butler’se) ideas),6 through which he rephrases in a personal key the idea of evolution; human mind is, along that spiral of the becoming, the highest evolutionary form.

b) Allegiance to a certain, ‘personalized’ type of ‘socialism’; this confirmed individualist who did not lack deep-rooted humanitarian beliefs, yet profoundly ‘undemocratic’ by his mistrust in the ‘whims of the masses’ (“He is a humanitarian, but not a democrat; his ideal state is one in which educated leaders are supported by popular franchise, but remain independent of the whims of the masses. Because of his belief in the planned state and his admiration of the superman, Shaw was frequently attacked as a sort of protofascist”7 – although he was, in fact, a socialist, be it a Fabian socialist f)), Shaw, the admirer of the

a) Bergson, Henri Louis (1859-1941): French philosopher, who tried to bridge the gap between metaphysics and science; dividing the world into life (or consciousness) and matter, Bergson rejected the Darwinian concept of evolution and argued that life possesses an inherent creative impulse (l’élan vital) which creates new forms as life seeks to impose itself on matter His main works are Memory and Matter (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907); he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1927.b) Lamarck, or Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829): French naturalist. In writing his Philosophie zoologique (1809), he was an early proponent of organic evolution (later known by the name of Lamarckism), although his theory is not widely accepted today. Basically, he suggested that species could have evolved from each other by small changes in their structure, and that the mechanism of such change (not now generally considered possible) was that characteristics acquired in order to survive could be passed on to offspring.c) Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860): German pessimist philosopher. His capital work, The World as Will and Idea (1819), theorizes the idea that will is the ultimate reality, i.e. the creative primary factor and idea the secondary receptive factor; according to his philosophy, happiness is only achieved by renouncing the will (as desire).d) Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900): German philosopher, poet, and critic. He is famous for repudiating traditional Christian values (especially Christianity’s compassion for the weak) and trying to replace them with the exalting of the ‘will to power’, the new concept of the superman (the Übermensch), who can go beyond the restrictions of ordinary morality. His principal works are The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1891), and Beyond Good and Evil (1886).e) William Butler, English philosopher and evolutionist, grandfather of Samuel Butler (1835-1902), the British novelist, famous for his satirical work Erewhon (1872), with its sequel, Erewhon Revisited (1901), both satiric attacks on contemporary utopianism (Erewhon is in fact nowhere reversed), and his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903), which is credited by most critics as being one of the masterpieces of Victorian literature.f) Fabian adjective: (1) relating to, or characteristic of the Fabians (members and supporters of, or else sympathizers with, the Fabian Society, an organization of socialists aiming at the gradual rather than revolutionary achievement of socialism); (2) employing a cautiously persistent and dilatory strategy to wear out an enemy. The term seems to have entered English in the late 18th or early 19th century: from the Latin word Fabianus „of Fabius, relating to, or resembling the delaying tactics of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus; i.e. cautious; circumspect”. The eponymous character was a Roman general and statesman (d. 203 BC), known as Fabius Cunctator. After Hannibal’s defeat of the Roman army at Cannae in 216 BC, Fabius successfully pursued a strategy of caution and delay in order to wear down the Carthaginian invaders, which earned him his nickname / cognomen, Cunctator, which means ‘delayer’), after whom the Fabian Society was also named.

Übermensch,g) still did believe in the ordering mission of society at large, seen as a ‘rationalizing’ principle, loosely opposed to destructive egotism (“Bernard Shaw said that he was not a humanitarian at all but an economist, that he merely hated to see life wasted by carelessness or cruelty. The truth is that Shaw only took this economic pose from his hatred of appearing sentimental”);8 in fact, his ‘socialistic’ ideas were a set of moral-rational ideas raised to a hypostatic plane and expressed in an abstract form, mainly originating in his own bitterness at seeing the world ‘as it is’: “He can only show the discrepancy between the actions of real people and the moral standards by which they ought to be measured; he can show that their realism is shortsightedness, that their wisdom is ignorance, that their certainties are illusions…”9 Shaw joined the Fabian Society as early as 1884.

c) Feminism with Shaw meant his faith in the necessity to accomplish and the ensuing beneficence of woman’s emancipation, largely echoing his admiration of Ibsen’s heroines (cf. Nora);h) his own heroines are fascinating beings, strong through their vivid, pervasive, unstoppable wit, but no less by the subtle, instinctual force of their spirit (although Shaw envisages and admires them as agents of the Life Force, as well).

d) Anti-scientism: Shaw strongly opposed the ‘slavish adulation of the scientist … plus the public acceptance of any doctrine alleged to be scientific”; this partly resulted in Shaw’s repugnance at being dictated to: a vegetarian, he militated against vaccination and vivisection.10

0.2. The scene of the dramatic world of his day, onto which this ‘enfant terrible’11

was so eager to step, was dominated by ‘the old school’ of playwriting and acting, which was ankylosed and many years behind other institutions. The ‘well-made play’ was far too conventional in its artificial realism, although H. Arthur and A. Pineroi) had had their notable creations, mainly in the field of the comedy, especially as considered under the angle of their moral purport. Oscar Wilde had tried his best with a view to ‘cleaning’ the atmosphere of the English theatre, by his witticisms doubled by his personal style, managing to a certain extent to recreate a modern tradition of the comedy of manners. In Shaw’s native Ireland there was a newly born tradition which started compelling recognition: that of a ‘national’ theatre, best represented by O’Casey’s bitter-sweet intertwining of tragedy and comedy, j) as well as Yeats’s ‘poetic drama’ (as part of the so-called Celtic Renaissance); Yeats said that: “The theatre began in ritual, and it cannot come to its greatness again without recalling words to their ancient sovereignty”.k) (12)

g) Übermensch (pl. Übermenschen): A German word, to be found especially in the writings of Nietzsche, who originally expounded this concept in Thus Spake Zarathustra, which expresses the ideal of a superior man living in the future, who can rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values; the term is actually the German word for superman (its literal meaning is “superhuman person, over-man”). Also called superman and overman.h) Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906): Norwegian dramatist and poet. After his early verse plays Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), he began the series of notable social dramas in prose, including A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and The Wild Duck (1886), which have had a profound influence on modern drama. Ibsen is widely credited with being the first major dramatist to write tragedy about ordinary people in prose. His later plays, such as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), are more symbolic, increasingly dealing with the forces of the unconscious, and were greatly admired by Sigmund Freud.i) Pinero [pi'niru], Sir Arthur Wing (1855–1934): English dramatist and actor. His most notable works include the farce Dandy Dick (1887) and the problem play The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893).j) O’Casey, Sean (1880–1964): Irish dramatist. His most notable plays include The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), which are realistic pictures of Dublin slum life.k) Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939): Irish poet and dramatist; His play The Countess Cathleen (1892) and his collection of stories The Celtic Twilight (1893) stimulated Ireland’s theatrical, cultural, and literary revival (also known as the Celtic revival). His collections of verse include Responsibilities (1914), The Tower (1928), containing the famous poems ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘Leda and the Swan’, and The Winding Stair (1929).

A new artistic, but also philosophical view was coming into shape at the time – regarding man, his place within the great whole, his limitations and also power, his relationship to the world itself; in the theatrical domain, European authors like Henrik Ibsen, A. P. Chekhovl) and A. Strindbergm) took a firm stand in reforming dramatic conceptions and way of writing, Ibsen, such as he is presented by Shaw in his Quintessence of Ibsenism, is intentionally and militantly opposed to the conventional contemporary theatre and playwriting, Shaw urging towards a type of ‘reforming naturalism’ (v. the emphasis placed on the ‘prose social plays’: “his own plays are naturalistic in the sense of dealing largely with contemporary situations and they are full of witty and entertaining discussions”).13 Shaw wrote that: “What we wanted as the basis of our plays was not romance, but a really scientific natural history…”14

Among his spiritual models (and forefathers), Shaw recognized Shakespeare, Bunyan,n) Dickens, and the Bible.

A man of extensive and brilliant wit – in that compared to Voltaire, gifted with a special skill of oratory, possessing sparkling intelligence and an argumentation full of spirit and self-control, G. B. Shaw was an inveterate iconoclast, unfailingly defending the untraditional point of view.15

Being a complex, contradictory personality, Shaw has been seen as the very prototype of the cynic (‘intellect without emotion’, ‘a giant brain but no heart’);16 he styled himself as a cool, ice-cold man, totally lacking pathos. In spite of all that, he constantly proved kindness and generosity – which can well be perceived as attributes of his genius-like stature. He hated the wars of any kind from the deepest of his soul: “During both world wars Shaw incurred public displeasure by speaking his own mind freely and caustically… He failed to view either war as a clear-cut struggle between black and white”.17

The most outstanding feature of this volcanic personality was his undeniable, universally recognized originality; with Shaw, it came from an inborn propensity. Among other things, Shaw succeeded in becoming the public figure and myth, because he was a man with inexhaustible resources of spontaneity and wit, à la Wilde one might say.18

His originality was also an imperative necessity for him; he had formed a view that, unless he could draw public attention, success would be denied to him. He cultivated the paradox, usually with his histrionic, ‘clownish’ figure in mind: “He had a dazzling virtuosity in handling paradox; in this, Shaw is the obvious heir of Oscar Wilde. If Shaw’s wit has worn a little thin, this is largely because its pleasures depend on some residual sense of shock when standard values and expectations are inverted.”19

His notable plays include The Countess Cathleen (1892; 1912) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902); Yeats was a founder of the Irish National Theatre Company at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.l) Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860–1904): Russian dramatist and short-story writer. His plays include The Seagull (1895), Uncle Vanya (1900), The Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Chekhov’s work portrays upper-class life in pre-revolutionary Russia with a mixture of naturalism and symbolism; it had a considerable influence on 20th-century drama.m) Strindberg, (Johan) August (1849–1912): Swedish dramatist and novelist. His plays include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Strindberg’s later plays are typically tense, psychic dramas, such as A Dream Play (1902). His satire The Red Room (1879) is considered Sweden’s first modern novel.n) Bunyan, John (1628-1688): English writer and preacher. A Nonconformist (i.e. Baptist), he was imprisoned twice for his spiritual creed, and especially for unlicensed preaching; during this time (1660-1672), he wrote his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding (1666), and began his major work, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-1684) – the complete title of which is The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come –, which allegorically presents man’s life as a toilsome pilgrimage. It proved a highly popular literary piece (cf. W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair), ever since read and enjoyed in every corner of the English-speaking world.

And also: “He jokes about the extraordinariness of his perfectly ‘normal’ eye-sight; its mental equivalent is just such a natural gift as El Greco’s astigmatism rendering what he sees surprisingly different from the way most of us customarily see it.” 20

A ‘raisonneur’ himself, Shaw belongs to the world of the theatre by his talkativeness, based upon paradox. All those gifts habitually appertaining to the parafernalia of the public figure – the wise man and the histrion, the paradox-addict throwing his witty verbal (but not only) contrivances to a public / an audience whom he was eager to persuade, preacher-like (as a matter of fact, he actually used this notion and the word as such!), conduced to the creation of the schematically conventional myth of ‘GBS’-the ‘monster’ (although many of his contemporaries denounced this idea as being a false image): “With masterly skill, with diabolical ingenuity, he created this papier mâché hobgoblin; and used it to terrify through fascination: the familiar phenomenon of the bird and the snake. GBS was a turnip ghost, a Halloween pumpkin, a funny-peculiar, an enormously inflated monster of a Tarascon fair, a Macy parade. GBS created an enormous vogue for Bernard Shaw. The human rabbits gazed stupent at the scarecrow… In his personal appearance, his individual attitudes, his public controversies and in his plays, he fostered the notion of himself as both the devil and the devil’s advocate. He carefully cultivated his eyebrows to twist upwards like Mephistopheles’ in ‘Faust’… Shaw’s work in the rôle of the clown, the buffoon, the harlequin… is a gorgeous self-portrait in artistic caricature. Was he a man or a myth? He was both.” 21 “…the ‘public’ figure GBS was certainly a puppet, an artificial creature, not the real Shaw at all – into whose mouth Shaw put what he wished the world to hear of his views in a colourful way… He played a game with GBS all his life; he manipulated him just as if he were pulling the strings of a puppet. There is no doubt that he played a role all his life as regards his public self”.22

Although, through his paradoxical manner, Shaw did a lot to promote this ‘myth’23

under the apparently joyous, casual mask of the histrion, under that ‘gaiety of mind’24 an excellent observer was in hiding.25 He had a searching mind: “he had a dissecting-room style’”;26 he was an artist of a highly consistent manner and conviction: “He was full of his subject and a master of language; he had a voice like gold and knew exactly how to use it. His musical ear, his wit, his richly-stored imagination were pressed into service in the most wonderful exhibition of public speaking ever staged as a free show in London. Whatever Shaw is, he is not erratic, he is the most carefully and conscientious and consistent artist that ever lived”.27

In spite of the fact that some even considered them to be tantamount to harshness, almost intolerance, the realism and objectivity of Shaw’s approach to the matter of his dramatic creation (“Whatever he borrowed was transformed into an imagination so extravagantly individual that it takes a strict dialectical framework to hold its anarchic energies. He joked about the extraordinariness of his perfectly ‘normal’ eyesight (…) rendering what he sees surprisingly different from the way most of us customarily see it…”)28

clearly belong to an artist in search for “something definite, concrete and personal;” 29 an artist who was in the appropriate position to declare that “my plays are sui-generis”.

Although G. B. Shaw’s appearing in the theatrical field was due to hazard, so to say (and, to be frank, also to an intellectual impulse towards self-expression) rather than to a native propensity (left alone his intellectual equipment proper), as one could rather imagine him a refined musician or a journalist, Shaw became a master and a champion of the theatre’s drawing nearer to the abstract, essentialized tendency / drive, by dint of his particularly strong ‘intellectual control’, as well as his worship of the Idea; as he possessed that “ability to make ideas work theatrically.”30

Finding his own way to the proximity of satire, Shaw conceived his creation as a possibility to cure society / the world of irrationality, of limiting, immobile conformism, of wickedness, meanness, waste – factors which are always at variance with the spiritual in man.

(“The theatre is my battering ram as much as the platform or the press”, in Shaw’s own words).31

It goes without saying that here, too, the histrionic raisonneur ‘pokes his nose’ by witty commentaries: “A general law of evolution of ideas is that every jest is an earnest in the womb of time”.32 Here is what he suggested as being the mission of comedy – wittingly starting from frustrations of his own biography, which time could hardly heal (in reference to his father’s drinking habits which were the bane of his childhood, in the preface to his novel Immaturity he said: “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance”), in which he actually extends the idea to the whole of the humanity living through his plays.

Once he managed to compel recognition, by forcing himself into being listened to,33

Shaw succeeded in providing the comedy of ideas (his own equivalent of the old ‘comedy of manners’, one may say), with a new brilliance, turning it into an institution in its own right: The Shavian Theatre. “He had embarked upon his mission of castigating the world into right thinking with the whip of satire: of collaring little romance-fed minds and forcibly feeding them on a hygienic diet. The stage seemed as good a place to spout from as the platform, and he attempted to make the play a self-sufficient vehicle for his ideas”.34

He used to announce – or rather herald – his profession of faith in the terms of the classical comedy, as meant to wither everything contemptible in the sphere of morals by means of well-directed humour, i.e. the Latin dictum ‘Castigat ridendo mores’, declaring, as Molière had used to: “My business as a classic writer of comedies is to chasten morals with ridicule”. The essentials of his satire are based on the manner of rational demonstration, used as a branding iron (“Perhaps the most characteristic Shavian quality is the ability to make people think, by compelling them to laugh. One of his key techniques is turning everything topsy-turvy and forcing an astounded audience to see ‘the other half of the truth’”.35

We can preliminarily conclude that the great qualities of Shaw’s dramatic work lie in the earnestness and the penetration of his own implication, going as far as the identification of the work with life itself (what he affirmed, he really did, and by affirming he believed in it; 36

with Shaw, the style of the work is the style of the man himself37 – cf. Buffons’ maxim.38

NOTES:

1. G.B. Shaw’s postscript to Frank Harris’ Bernard Shaw, London, 1931, p. 4282. A. Chapellow, Shaw, the Villager and the Human Being, p. 1923. G. B. Shaw, apud H. Pearson, Bernard Shaw. His Life and Personality, p. 74. A. Chapellow, op. cit., p. 332: “Shaw is a man who has ploughed many furrows. He

once told me that he had fifteen different reputations; and actually enumerated them: a critic of art, a critic of music, a critic of literature, a critic of the drama, a novelist, a dramatist, an economist, a funny man, a street-corner agitator, a Shelleyan atheist, a Fabian Socialist, a vegetarian, a humanitarian, a preacher and a philosopher; to this catalogue must be added, dating from 1931, a Marxian Communist.”

5. G. K. Chesterton, G. B. Shaw, p. 116. J. P. Hackett, Shaw: George versus Bernard, p. 20 – quoting Henri Bergson: “Life is

the effort made by energy to become free. It uses the powers and properties of matter, storing itself up and releasing itself in free action, and, in so doing, becoming ever more free. It first institutes movement in matter, and this movement having resolved itself into the solar system, among other things, life hits by lucky chance on the chlorophyllian function as a means of storing up energy and releasing it in spurts and bursts of ‘creativeness’. The impetus of life is finite, it has been given once for all, and must work its own way. It is slow stumbling worker even trying and failing and trying again.”

7. W. D. Heiney, Essentials of Contemporary Literature, p. 353-3548. G. K. Chesterton, op. cit., p. 689. E. Strauss, Bernard Shaw. Art and Socialism, p. 2410. W. D. Heiney, op. cit., p. 35511. Companion to Literature in English, Wordsworth, p. 84412. Apud B. Ford, The Modern Age (vol. VII), p. 21913. D. Daiches, The Present Age (vol. III), p. 14914. Apud B. Ford, op. cit., p. 21015. Sir Frederick Osborn declared: “Shaw dominated any gathering… Shaw was not a

good conversationalist in the sense of a bilateral one; after the preliminaries, he did all the talking. At these Fabian gatherings, and those of the Zetetical (debating) society, the discussions would always end the same way – with Shaw standing with his back to the fireplace and everyone listening to him. Occasionally Wells’s voice would be heard squeaking a disagreement on some point, but Shaw soon dealt with any point raised and went on with his discourse”; J. C. Wilson, a leading representative of the bookselling trade, which sold Shaw’s books said: “The secret of Bernard Shaw’s success was his complete self-control. There was no miracle about it. He had trained and disciplined himself to be supremely in command of himself. Amongst other things, he had trained himself to be an outstanding speaker and debater. He knew what he was going to say, from his point of view. It is a sign of genius to have a complete grasp of everything. There was a great thoroughness about him.” (apud Allan Chapellow, op. cit., pp. 189, 255). L. Hudson, in The Twentieth Century Drama, pointed out that Shaw was a “witty, fearless and iconoclastic Irishman”.

16. G. B. Shaw, ‘Fanny’s First Play’, p. 10917. D. W. Heiney, op. cit., p. 35618. V. A. Chapellow, op. cit., p. 17119. B. Bergonzi, The Twentieth Century, vol. 2, p. 314

20. M. M. Morgan, The Shavian Playground, p. 4: an allusion to his confession in ‘Plays Unpleasant’, “He (the physician) 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, and being enjoyed by only about ten percent of the population, the remaining ninety 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.” (p VI)

21. A. Chapellow, op. cit., p. 32622. A. Chapellow, op. cit., p. 19323. A. Caputti, Modern Drama, pp. 24 and 2924. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 125. J. P. Hackett, op. cit., p. 43, noticed that: “Shaw is a wonder as a first-hand observer

and honest recorder, and his works are the results, disguised as plays and so on, covering an immense variety of experience… When he hangs over everything freely, that is freely within the limits of his creed.”

26. J. P. Hackett, op. cit., p. 9127. A. Chapellow, op. cit., pp. 818, 13228. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 329. J. P. Hackett, op. cit., p. 2230. G. Rabkin, Drama and Commitment, p. 24031. Ellen Terry and G. B. Shaw, A Correspondence (Christopher St. John, editor), New

York, 1932, p. 11032. G. B. Shaw – in a chapter added to The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 191333. “He had set out to write serious drama and had been forced to make them funny in

order to get the public to listen to his ideas. Now at last he could do what came most natural to him: talk. The stage was his to talk from. And talk he did. In the plays which followed the advent of fame there is little story interest and scarcely any action.” (L. Hudson, op. cit., p. 22)

34. Ibid., p. 2335. M. S. Day, History of English Literature, vol. 2, p. 27536. “I am ashamed neither of my work nor of the way it is done. I like explaining its

merits to the huge majority who don’t know good work from bad. It does them good, curing me of nervousness, laziness and snobbishness. I write preface as Dryden did and treatises as Wagner, because I can; and I would give half a dozen of Shakespear’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.” (G. B. Shaw, On Diabolonian Ethics – Preface to ‘Three Plays for Puritans’, London, 1900)

37. “Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none; he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains… All the assertions get disproved sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility clean gone out of them, but the form still splendid. And that is why the old masters play the deuce with our sensibilities.” (‘Man and Superman’)

38. This is Buffon’s maxim in the original: “Le style c’est l’homme même”. Buffon: 1707-1788 – full name: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon – was a French encyclopaedist of natural history. A founder of palaeontology, he emphasized the unity of all living species, minimizing the apparent differences between animals and

plants; as principal author, he produced a compilation of the animal kingdom, the Histoire Naturelle (36 volumes, 1749-1789), containing the Époques de la nature (1777), which foreshadowed later theories of evolution.

1. About the dramatic character, or how to do ideas with emotion

Motto: The Father. “He who has had the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. He cannot die. The man, the writer, the instrument of creation will die, but his creation does not die.”1

1.0. The atemporal dimension

One of the distinctive features which are part of the well-made characters seems to be permanence,2 their capacity to propagate themselves in time, irrespective of the artistic Mentalities, fashions, caprices and requirements of a specific period; likewise, it is a fact that a character, a persona can win its ‘immortality’, in which case one may argue that characters have something in common with the fate and posterity of the gods or the civilizing heroes – by sapping the confines of tine – that is to say, verging on atemporality; in other words, they project themselves into eternity, in timelessness – due to the above-mentioned trends and currents of opinion. Certainly, the atemporal dimension of the dramatic character is not related in an aleatory, random manner to the cultural or historical background against which it was created and / or launched, as the dramatic character is, above all, the symbolic embodiment of a (general) human type of existence; using a paraphrase of Goethe’s words, with his famous dictum: “art is art because it is not life”3, we could say that the character is a character precisely on account of its / his not being a human creature. On the other hand, characters are endowed with their own, be it secondary, life – when their part is performed on the stage, through the agency of the actors and, in accordance with the way they are impersonated, they can diminish or augment their quality of ‘permanence’. But, first of all, the dramatic author can confer his dramatic character its / his atemporal dimension by his own craftsmanship.

In a concrete way, in the English drama of the Victorian period there were countless failures on the plane of artistic achievement, just on account of various shortcomings in point of dramatic mastery; there was even malicious demonstration of George Bernard Shaw’s success in the field of artistic achievement – and, implicitly, in so far as the delineation of his characters is concerned, as accountable for by the very fact that the drama of his day was lagging behind.4 The paradox is that G. B. Shaw (himself a ‘personage’, and consequently a permanence in the spirit of his day and in the public image) has never intended to make an aegis of ‘immortality’ for his characters, not even for those ones whose dimensions were already historic / classic, such as Caesar in his ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’, a consecrated myth of history – which he actually seems rather willing to “demythologise”; from this point of view, GBS seems to tread on the same ground as Henri Bergson: “Art as a whole aims at what is individual”.5 Shaw is not actually interested in what human existences share as universally valid, the constant part of then – he is rather concerned with the particular. This is not to say that Bernard Shaw’s characters lack the atemporal dimension. The paradox – again (as paradoxes are part of his dramatic craftsmanship) – is that by choosing his characters from the sphere of the individual, Shaw manages to attribute to them features of permanence, thus raising them above the common number. Alice Voinescu remarks, in Aspecte din teatrul comtemporan, that G. B. Shaw’s Caesar makes quite unexpected gestures, which go counter

his stature as a sovereign, yet he does it in a majestic manner: “Publicul s-a indignat că Cezar mănâncă seminţe – şi Shaw e acuzat de lèse-majestate, dar gestul acesta devine, în Cezar, cezarian, fiindcă în loc să devină o mişcare inconştientă, un mecanism vulgar, el devine un acompamiament viu al gîndului creator cezarian… Cezar singur se concentrează, în fiecare scuipătură zvîrle câte un gînd rutinier, câte o prejudecată militară, este un mecanism psihic care opreşte în loc izbucnirea duhului său răscolitor.”

Also, his characters may originate in some of the most shocking milieux: former prostitutes or procuresses, e.g. Mrs. Warren) or flower-girls (Eliza Doolittle), or as high as rich ladies of the genteel society, or even queens and empresses (e.g. Catherine the Great of Russia), from burglars and those whom G. B. Shaw calls, by a generalizing term, ‘the impecunious’ (dustmen, unemployed people, etc.) up to tycoons of industry (e.g. Andrew Undershaft), ministers (in both senses) or professors (Henry Higgins, Adolphus Cusins), members of the Cabinet or even kings (e.g. King Magnus).

Their force lies in their capacity of discerning reality and express their creeds boldly and peremptorily. Shaw’s characters, although selected out of the field of the individual with no claim to self-assertion, become, by dint of their conception and ideation, the exponents of a class, of a certain pattern or framework of behaviour. Shaw contradicts in all conscience a certain dramatic mentality while putting on an irreverent, non-conformist and sardonic attitude as to excessively romanticizing tendencies; he is utterly depressed at the idea of creating characters that are out of the ordinary train of life, yet lacking the human touch. Naturalness6 is the factor which endows GBS’s characters with life, and, at the same time, projects them unto the atemporal dimension. “He set himself fiercely against the remainders of Victorian stereotypes of human behaviour. Yet he was thoroughly ‘theatrical’ and he was also, in his own way, romantic and even sentimental – as, for example, the character of Eugene Marchbanks in ‘Candida’ fully reveals.”7

One could form a false image of Shaw’s alleged incapacity of bringing forth characters of great historic scope, if one obstinately had in mind the devices he has recourse to: debunking, de-romanticized view, anachronism8 – all these could be deemed as forcing the dramatic character into losing their artistic ‘permanence’, yet – and here is another paradox out of the multitude Shaw professed: he does not contradict a personality or a historical period, but only a number of modalities of delineation, of outlining them. With Shaw, Napoleon, Caesar, Catherine the Great or Joan of Arc, remain the same Napoleon, Caesar, Catherine and Joan of Arc that we all (think we) know; the things that disappear are the romanticizing vision, the heroical view, the excess of the imposing or the picturesque; permanence remains untouched, it is only the idealizing detail that vanishes. Shaw is manifestly preoccupied with the configuration and the presentation of reality in what it has natural and essential, correcting historical overloading. That is the main purport of S. Iosifescu’s remark: “Shaw only refuses a certain historical view, but not history. He eliminates polychromy and the sheer show, yet preserves the necessary ‘coloured patches’. He contradicts the historical background with a deliberate gesture by systematically exerted anachronism. He contests the hero who has been de-humanized through oversizing and rhetoric, but not the towering personality. The polemical reply to romanticism presupposes a common language. For Shaw, very much as for the romantics, history does exist; yet it is imperative to change the lenses.”9

It will be clear from all the above facts why there is such a wide multiplicity and unevenness in the field of the considerations regarding the Shavian hero: Shaw’s characters have by many been regarded as mere ‘puppets’10 and their author as a mere clown, ‘the national clown’ in Papini’s words. Yet, most critics and theorists have described the Shavian character as having plenty of strength and vitality, as taken out of the very essence of real life, and then engrafted upon the substance of the plays, spiritually enriched through the divine

spark of the artist’s genius, even when Shaw’s characters belong to the category of the commonest exponents (“the most ordinary individuals”11) of the social order.

Shaw himself believed in the idea of a character who should be able to transcend the limitations of the individual, thus acquiring an atemporal dimension; the condition for that is, as the dramatist noted in The Saturday Review, that one should go “straight to the core of humanity to get it and, if it is only good enough, why, there you have Lear or Macbeth.”12

Which is quite true, since “nothing can please many, and please long but just representations of general nature”, in Dr. Johnson’s words.

1.1. What is the dramatic character?

Motto: “…every action (and every idea it contains) needs a free human personality if it is to appear live and breathing before us. It needs something that will function as its motor pathos, to use Hegel’s phrase – characters, in other words.” (Luigi Pirandello – Spoken Action)13

Martin Esslin, in his semiotic approach to drama, describes the dramatic character as an ‘icon’, and his gestures as ‘index’ signs. Here we quote his remarkably penetrating definitions: “Yet in drama, as far as the human characters are concerned, there is no abstraction: there a lady appears and she is a completely concrete lady who is being shown to us as the icon – the iconic sign – for a fictional lady. The director who shows us an actress portraying Juliet or Ophelia is telling us: this is what Juliet or Ophelia looked like. The icon here at least aims at suggesting a complete identity in looks between ‘the signified’ (the actress) and the ‘signified’ (the fictional character)”14 and; “The gestures we use in real life, and which the actors imitate, belong to another category of signs: signs which point to an object, like the arrows on street signs, or the movement I make when somebody asks me: ‘Where is he?’, and I point with my finger in the direction of the person concerned. These are called ‘index’ signs, or also (when the derivation is from the Greek word for ‘showing’), ‘deictic’ signs. These signs derive their meaning from a relationship of contiguity to the object they depict.”15

The character is the linking bridge between the idea (the author) and the artistic emotion (the audience or the readers). The dramatist cannot directly address the audience or the reading public; hence, the character proves to be a kind of vehicle operating between the dramatic author and his audience / public. Consequently, the idea engenders emotions through the sole agency of the characters.

The dramatist has in stock certain scenic means and devices in order to make his ideas known; the conveyance of the latter is primarily based on a well-structured dialogue, which can succeed in turning the characters into credible ideas. We are using the word ‘ideas’ because, first of all, the characters represent the idea of what they are going to be, a set of intentions. There is a whole creative laboratory for the characters to come into being; it is this first step of the dramatic creation that Ibsen explicitly mentions: “(in the first draft) I feel as though I had the degree of acquaintance with my characters that one requires in a train: one has met and chatted, about this or that. With the next … I know characters just about as one would know them after a few weeks’ stay in a spa: I have learned the fundamental traits of their characters as well as their little idiosyncrasies, yet it remains possible that I may be quite wrong in some essential respect. In the last draft, I finally stand at the limit of knowledge: I know my people from close and long association, they are my intimate friends, they will not disappoint me, I shall always see them as I now do.”16 Gradually, the character-idea is fully

outlined, so that: “Before I write down one word I have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate to the last wrinkle of his soul. I always proceed from the individual. The stage setting, the dramatic ensemble, all that comes naturally and does not cause a worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity.”17

Shaw had a similar confession; first of all, he has an intuitive discovery of the character: “At first I hardly know the speakers and cannot find names for them. Then they become more and more familiar, and I learn their names. Finally I come to know them very well, and discover what it is they are driving at, and why they have said and done the things I have been moved to set down.”18

What are, in fact, the dramatic characters? What is it the author draws upon when starting to delineate a character? The dramatic characters are symbols, artistically embodied / generated, inspired from the real life, usually carrying an amount of condensed life experience – as can be also inferred from Edwin Wilson’s definition: “Though they often seen like real people, dramatic characters are actually created in the mind of the playwright. By carefully emphasizing certain features of a character’s personality while eliminating others, the dramatist can show us in two hours the entire history of a person, whom it could take us a lifetime to know in real life.”19

Eric Bentley, in his turn, defines the character by analogy with the dramatic action: “If the raw material of plot is events, particularly violent events, the raw material of character is people, especially what are regarded as their cruder impulses.”20 The critic goes on to explicit the manner in which the ‘raw material’ is refined through the ineffable means of creation, the way the character comes to be a ‘substitute’ for the model. Without the character, there is no possibility for the action to unfold (“A human being is the best plot there is. The dramatist who hangs his characters to his plot, instead of hanging his plot to his characters, is guilty of cardinal sin”, as John Galsworthy says).22

There is an intrinsic relationship between the idea, in its germinative stage, deep in the playwright’s mind, and the character. S. W. Dawson even insists upon there existing a relationship of identity between the character and the idea.23 The character is given the empowerment of saying what the author originally thinks.

With Shaw, this intrinsic binding, ‘irrational knot’, between his thoughts and his characters becomes obvious in his need to make them the messengers of his concepts concerning science, art, religion, sex, and so on,24 a process which is reflected in his vivid dialogues, full of spirit and argumentation. He becomes a preacher, and his dialogues are so to speak ‘sermons’. The dialogue has to possess strength, force and effectualness, so as to enable the dramatist to take support on the power of his argumentation. It is according to the way the dialogue is construed and structured that the voices of the characters will be outlined and interwoven; the idea is underlined in ‘The Play and the Reader’: “The dramatist’s ideas and attitudes can be articulated only through the voices of his characters, speaking in their own persons; on stage the dramatist has no voice of his own. Since the dialogue is the dramatist’s primary medium for revealing his characters to us, the credibility of these characters as human beings is necessarily measured chiefly by their speech. The dramatist, knowing that every individual possesses his own distinctive personality, knows also that that personality finds expression in an individualised tone of voice and in idiosyncrasies of vocabulary.”25

Still, the manner of delineating the portrait of his characters is of the dramatist’s choice – he may sketch it only, or insist on certain details, or merely suggest or imply it, or else, maybe, ignore it altogether: “Also, the playwright has wide latitude in what to emphasise and how to present the character. A stage character can be presented in different ways: (1) drawn with a few quick strokes, as a cartoonist sketches a political figure, (2) given the surface detail and reality of a photograph, or (3) fleshed out with the more interpretive and fully rounded quality of an oil portrait.”26

There are authors who avoid charactering their ‘personae’ directly, making use of a different strategy: the characters stand face-to-face and reciprocally expose their features.27

Obviously, the degree of success of this strategy is dependent upon the force of the dialogue.In gifting his plays with life, Shaw is more interested in expressing his ideas, with

superior precision, under the form of dialogues, rather than delineating his characters. They become instruments carrying ideas. He explained to Tighe Hopkins: “Sometimes, in spare moments, I write dialogues and these are all working up to a certain end (a sermon, of course), my imagination playing the usual tricks meanwhile of creating visionary persons… When I have a few hundred of these dialogues locked up and interlocked, then a drama will be the result”.28 The result of it was a rather harsh criticism aimed at Shaw.30 He was accused of egotistically using his characters as mere mouthpieces for his ideation message. We have not considered it necessary to further dwell upon the other ideas representing major issues in the emergence (more from the scenic point of view) of the character – namely, the fundamental link between the character (this time viewed under the angle of its achievement) and that tension – ‘sensitiveness’ in E. M. Forster’s words, or ‘emotion’ in Eric Bentley’s terminology – which actually makes the character take hold of the spectators’ or the reader’s consciousness.o) This may be defined as ‘pathos’, with no equivalent in everyday life, which is a paroxistic intensity of feeling. Eric Bentley comments on E. M. Forster’s words, trying to account for this frame of wind as equally related to the dramatic craftsmanship meant to bring it forth, to the actor’s stagecraft meant to impersonate it, to the reader’s ability to feel it: “…emotion is the element we live in as we read or watch or listen… The genius of the writer – in novel or play – will be found in the skill with which he projects and controls that constant sensitivity, that ceaseless readjustment, that endless hunger… He has to find the buried river of the emotions and then work as an engineer damming it here, deflecting it there, but always making the fullest use of its natural power.”30

Shaw’s paradoxicalness is prolonged to the level of the idea-character-emotion. At first sight, his characters, born under the moral sign of ‘what-you-should-or-must-not-do’ seem feelingless, arid, but, in a parallel to the unfolding of the action, their other component / key-element is disclosed: their pathos.31 Yet, in spite of all these determinations, the dramatic author (no less than the producer, actually) is no presence at all – they may remain hidden somewhere, or, more than that, they may turn into the spectators of their own play; they can hear themselves speaking through their characters, but unless these existed they could not even make themselves heard – and listened to. But the playwright’s satisfaction can be doubled by the fact that, when (s)he succeeds in captivating and fascinating the audience, (s)he may find, among the rows of spectators, co-characters of the play being performed. This generous idea is presented in ‘The Play and the Reader’: “Though [the dramatist’s] characters may be citizens of ancient Argos, or medieval Britain, or modern France, they will move across a three-dimensional stage, where their words and deeds enlist our minds and emotions as co-participants with the characters in the story. Further, as we sit in a darkened auditorium, we take part in a communal experience that has within it archetypal elements of ritual: in turn, we bring to this communal experience that psychological “set” which Coleridge described as our “willing suspension of disbelief”. We are, in fact, so eager to believe, to be enlisted as co-participants, that only the grossest ineptitude can destroy out willing suspension.”32

It seems that Shaw was fully aware of this power the dramatic author has to turn their own public or audience(s) into a gallery including the most representative characters, since they had numberless instances of not being able to resist the temptation of directly addressing

o) Forster, Edward Morgan (1879–1970): English novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and literary critic. His best-known novels, several of which have been made into successful films, include A Room with a View (1908) Howard’s End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924); in all of them the author stresses the need for sincerity and sensitivity in human relationships and criticizes English middle-class values.

the public – the readers, that is – through the pages of his prefaces. From this point of view, G. B. Shaw’s plays lend themselves quite easily to a semiotic text analysis. A dramatic text is imperfect, because it is unaccomplished. Roman Ingarden points out that drama stands for a whole world, realized by different means: (a) both verbal and visual means (stage directions) for the readers; (b) only by visual means (which is ‘decorum’, etc.), and (c) only by verbal means, apart from the spatial or temporal location /ambit of the action, that is narration, prefaces, epilogue33 when the author renounces his character’s function of conveying their ideas and they themselves become ‘preachers’ directly addressing the readers with a view to transmitting the vibration of their ideas and rousing their artistic emotions, in an unmediated way.

When the playwright authorizes his character to convey the idea, (s)he engenders the dramatic action and, in a way, comes to be de-personalised, ceasing to speak on their own behalf, but rather on behalf of a gallery of characters or even types. The consequence is that the dramatic action will take shape in accordance with the character: the dialogue will automatically help to generate the dramatic development; the author has to submit himself / herself, and abide by the convention of the dramatic act: to detach himself/ herself, having no right to express options in his / her own name (as it frequently happens in novel-writing or in storytelling). “The meaning of verbal utterances by the characters in drama can never merely be analysed in isolation from the dramatic context in which it occurs and the action it represents. As action, however, always springs from character, the meaning of a dramatic utterance must also always be understood in the light of the character from whom it emanates. A dramatist can never make a statement in his own name, utter his own opinion within the dialogue.”34

Detachment can be effected to such an extent that the playwright becomes at a certain moment incapable of mastering his / her characters; the latter acquire total independence as to their creator: “Once the characters are completely envisaged, they do things and utter opinions which may surprise the author almost as much as the reader or spectator who meets them for the first time between the covers of a book or on the stage…”35

The dramatic outlining of the character, their individualisation is effected not only by means of the dialogue; actually, some fragments of the dialogue uttered by the character do not even have to be taken as such – Martin Esslin warns us: “Nor can any words spoken by a character in a drama (thus) be taken at their face value. They are always the product of the character, the character’s motivations and the situation in which he finds himself. The audience is constantly compelled to question these motivations and to subject them to continuous analysis in the light of the developing situations.”36

There are authors – and Shaw is surely included in that group – who will do anything to clear up every doubt the public may have with regard to the characters’ essence as they appear on stage; they do it by presenting their own commentaries in connection with the play and its protagonists; these commentaries may come in the shape of prologues and epilogues, prefaces or afterwords, which makes the presence of narrative characters (story-tellers) necessary. Sometimes, the actors may be the performers of songs, obviously stepping outside their characters; some other times, the comment(ary) is entrusted to ‘voice-overs’: personae which are exterior to the plot itself.

The conclusion of this section is that the author, like a Demiurge, is gifted with the power to provide with the ‘breath of life’ the yet-non-created, the handful of clay, the idea, blessing them with the warmth of life, in the guise of a character; it is in its turn capable, like the Man / the Created One, in the Book, of transmitting and prolonging the breath – i.e. the emotion; and if S. W. Dawson had not stated that “character is the life”37 of any dramatic work of art, it is sure that we should have done that in his stead.

As far as the modalities of individualizing the dramatic characters are concerned, there are essentially two different devices (corresponding to the distinction drawn by R. Ingarden between Haupttext and Nebentext38) used as means of delineating it: by the agency of the text itself, substantiated by the dramatic dialogue (verbal signs) or by the agency of the stage directions (non-verbal signs). Consequently, the character mutually completes and is completed by the action; more than that, it cannot be otherwise delineated but in the process of its / his manifestation. Santayana notices that the “data, which are the ‘acts’, cannot exist without the ‘inferred principle’, which is the character.” The character is the motive / motor force of the action. Ideas trigger characters and characters trigger action.

With G. B. Shaw the characters are the exponents of a way of thinking. The storm of the ideas is so strong, so incredibly powerful, that the characters seem to withdraw in front of the action rather than support it; and, by this sustained boycott of the characters against the action, the author creates for himself a possibility to address the public / the reader much more directly, turning them into zealous co-participants in the action, which greatly enhances the author’s credibility. In his preface to Plays Unpleasant, Shaw declared: “I must, however, warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures. They cannot too thoroughly understand that the guilt of defective social organization does not lie alone on the people who actually work the commercial makeshifts which the defects make inevitable, and who often, like Sartorius and Mrs. Warren, display valuable executive capacities, and even high moral virtues in their administration, but with the whole body of citizens whose public opinion, public action, and public contribution as ratepayers alone can replace Sartorius’s slums with decent dwellings, Charteris’s intrigues with reasonable marriage contracts, and Mrs. Warren’s profession with honourable industries guarded by a human industrial coat and a ‘moral minimum’ wage.39

1.2. A Typological Approach to Dramatic Characters

1.2. 0. ‘Round’ versus ‘Flat’

It is often said in relation to Shakespeare’s characters that they have allegedly acquired their shape as a result of the application of a compositional technique which is completely specific – a fact which ought to confer to ‘a certain roundness and integrity’, or, in Maurice Morgan’s terms: “those characters in Shakespeare, which are seen only in part are yet capable of being unfolded and understood in the whole; every part being in fact relative, and inferring the rest.”40

Eric Bentley defines the same type of characters as being “mysterious” and “great” characters, and provides a metaphysical explanation of their becoming: “…The enigmatic nature of great characters also carries a cosmic implication: that life is but a small light in the midst of a vast darkness. (…) They represent the life of the plays – so luminous at the cen tre, yet shading off toward the edges into a metaphysical mystery”, so that “the final effect of greatness in dramatic characterization is one of mystery”. The result will be that “a mysterious character is one with an open definition – not completely open, or there will be no character at all, and the mystery will dwindle to a muddle, but open as, say, a circle is open when most of the circumference has been drawn.”41

‘Round’ characters are mainly present in traditional drama and they have an unmistakable quality: they are free and their mobility offers them the possibility to appear in original positions, hence being unpredictable and often surprising; they also utter frankly the great truths and ‘live’ as if they were part of the real life. Racine has brought onto stage an entire gallery of ‘round’ characters, and, in the field of the novel, Emily Brontë.

E. M. Forster opposes ‘round’ characters to ‘flat’ characters, as a counterpart of the distinction between individuals and types. In his definition, ‘flat’ characters are fixed and appear in foreseeable situations; ‘flat’ characters are immobile and, consequently, one can find out beforehand what they are going to do; since the element of surprise is absent. G. B. Shaw’s characters, like those of Dickens, are flat.

The type-character can be individualized through speech. “…It becomes clear that, within a coherent and recognizable setting, a dramatic type character can, with a few individual touches of speech, dress and manner, contributed by the actor or actress, become virtually a national figure. Many an indifferent play has been rescued by an actor giving to a meagre and lifeless part his own vigour and individuality. But the significant life of a dramatic character is independent of any particular performance, of any identifiable physical presence. It is in the language of the play, and the situations which that language creates (…).”42

Molière attained the ingenious combination of individuality and typicality, roundness and flatness. Alceste is intended to be the type of the ‘misanthrope’, but he also aspires towards the lofty ideals of mankind; and proves capable of falling in love madly with Célimène; Harpagon, in his turn, insists that he should be representative of the miser, but is eventually individualized by means of language.

G. B. Shaw’s characters quite often start from the traditional types (raisonneurs, cynics and realists, non-conformists, philistines) and they individualize themselves either within the situations they are placed in, or by being attributed a constant feature – e.g. Kitty Warren is cynical by the impudence of her admitting the ways of her profit-making; but she is endowed with the attributes of individualization due to the fact that she is a generous, magnanimous mother, well-intentioned towards her daughter.

Characters like Price, Rummy, Shirley and Billy Walker in ‘Major Barbara’ stand for the ‘impecunious’ type-character.

Traditional, and, nowadays, psychological drama give preeminence to individuals over types, insisting upon the idea that character should be placed above theme, plot and dialogue. In modern theatre – and Bernard Shaw is one of its representatives – idea (which means, theme, dialogue and plot) takes precedence over character. The character becomes a mere prolongation of the idea, to which, as a matter of fact, (s)he confers emotional power.

1.2.1. Types, Archetypes, Prototypes, Stereotypes

Upon a closer character analysis, most characters prove to be, in their essential nature, type characters, which means that – in a brief definition – their “motivation is clear and unambiguous”.42 One can speak of there being a number of type characters which have dominated the stage all through its history, ever since the Greek and Latin tradition, going on through the Commedia dell’Arte and reaching the contemporary drama: the jealousy-ridden husband, the young man tortured by love, the old man obsessed by avariciousness, the scheming servant, the nice-looking woman whose beauty is on the wane, etc. There have been periods when certain type characters prevailed over the others (the fop in the Restoration comedy, the revengeful type in Jacobean drama). Individual characters are often variations of these basic types. Henri Bergson notices that comedy, as an art that aims at the general, is the only literary species that gives general types.

In his study on character, Eric Bentley proposes a passage from typology to mythology, introducing, besides the category of the type, a new category – that of the archetype: “That the archetypes plunge us deep into myth44 is obvious: they are myth, and their creators are among the great myth-makers.”45 Margery Morgan noticed with Shaw: “…a

predilection for myth or a wish to establish the general validity and relevance of his fable by conforming it to a mythic pattern…”45

Henrik Ibsen, at the beginnings of his creation, tried to bring onto stage archetypal characters of great dimensions: Peer Gynt, Julian the Apostate. It may also be alleged that Hjalmar, the hero in ‘The Wild Duck’, represents the archetype of lower-middle-class idealist. Along the same lines, it is also true to say that the other colossus of European drama, Chekhov, made every effort, ever since the debut of his activity, to bring to life Russian-like archetypes of Don Juan and Hamlet… To archetypes, Eric Bentley opposes another category of type characters: non-archetypes, which may also be characterized by fixity; originating in Roman tradition; they can form the basis of a new mythology.

Besides these categories, Edwin Wilson introduces a new one: the prototypical characters. Ordinary people, instead of the traditional kings and queens, saints and other extraordinary characters; such examples of prototypical characters are Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman or Henrik Ibsen’s Nora Helmer: their personality stands for the essence of a certain group: Loman is the prototype of all salesmen, while Nora is the prototype of all emancipated housewives. E. Wilson gives an illustrative definition: “The ‘prototypical’ character is not a stereotype, but a fully rounded, three-dimensional figure. Rather than being notable as ‘worst’, ‘best’, or some other extreme, these characters are notable in the way they embody the characteristics of an entire group: not as a caricature, but as a complete picture of a person”.47

G. B. Shaw is an excellent designer of types, which are often endowed with individuality and wit. Critics are especially enthusiastic about his manner of delineating type characters, which is “Olympian, he presents them with the urbane detachment and serene amusement of a Chinese philosopher; there is not a trace of arrogance, not a single spiteful reference, as he sets his pious people on their feet and puts them to their pre-determined places; he respects the individuality of his cardboard creations even at their feeblest.”48

There will be no further dwelling on the types of characters that he conjures on the stage, as we shall deal with them in the content proper of the present paper. It will still be worthwhile underlining Shaw’s preference for prototypes, those everyday life characters representative of an entire category they belong to: burglars and pickpockets, no less than manufacturers, artists or mere street cleaners, brothel proprietors, etc. In his Caesar, Shaw even desired to bring onto scene the already existing ones; it is hard enough to destroy a myth and to replace it by another one, but if Shaw’s Caesar manages to compel recognition of his being that reflexive and enlightened person who influences the others, then he is the archetype of the visionary ruler / monarch.

Stock characters are not complete characters; they are not structured according to the model / pattern of three-dimensional characters: “…Rather they symbolize in bold relief some particular type of person or some outstanding characteristic of human behaviour to the exclusion of virtually everything else. They appear, particularly in comedy and melodrama, though they can be found in almost all kinds of drama.”49

The most famous examples of stock characters come from the tradition of the Commedia dell”Arte.50 Who fails to remember the type of the blustering soldier (with whom

we can go as far back in time as Plautus’ ‘Miles gloriosus’),p) nicknamed Capitano, or the lecherous elderly merchant nicknamed Pantalone (because dressed in pantaloons, but maybe also because representing an inhabitant of Venice, cf. the local nickname for a Venetian, Pantalone, arguably derivable from San Pantaleone), the lawyer nicknamed Dottore, who used to speak in pompous clichés, or among the serving persons – Harlequin? These characters have one exaggerated characteristic trait: boastfulness, greed, gullibility, pedantism, scheming, jealousy, etc. Basically, these stock characters can “be described as dramatic clichés contrasting with those characters who have undeniable individuality.”51 They developed as stereotypes52 since the time of the Italian comedy of the Renaissance.

Shaw openly confesses that he had based his characters upon the tradition of these stereotypes: “My stories are the old stories; my characters are the familiar Harlequin and Colombine, clown and pantaloon (note the harlequin’s leap in the third act of ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’); my stage tricks and suspenses, and thrills and jests are the ones in vogue when I was a boy, by which time my grandfather was tired of them. To the young people who make their acquaintance for the first time in my plays, they may be as novel as Cyrano’s nose to those who have never seen Punch; whilst to older playgoers the unexpectedness of my attempt to substitute natural history for conventional ethics and romantic logic may so transfigure the eternal stage puppets and their inevitable dilemmas as to make their identification impossible for the moment. If so, so much the better for me: I should perhaps enjoy a few years of immortality.”53 He does not do that out of sheer bravado, but simply out of an inner penchant for verisimilitude, out of his conviction that “a man’s heart seems to me much like a sponge: it sops up dirty water as well as clean.”54

Maybe, as the time passed, his conviction grew into ambition; the fact is, in ‘Fanny’s First Play’, we are informed by an alter ego of the author that he has never betrayed his convictions and the plays and characters he has created virtually reflect his most unflinching ideas: “Gunn: You’re going to say that the whole thing seems to you to be quite new and unusual and original. The naval lieutenant is a Frenchman who cracks up the English and runs down the French: the hackneyed old Shaw touch? The characters are second-rate middle class instead of being dukes and millionaires. The heroine gets kicked through the mud; real mud. There’s no plot. All the old stage conventions and puppets without the old ingenuity and the old enjoyment. And a feeble air of intellectual pretentiousness kept up all through to persuade you that if the author hasn’t written a good play it’s because he’s too clever to stoop to anything so commonplace. And you three experienced men have sat through all these, and can’t tell me who wrote it! Why, the play bears the author’s signature in every line.”55

It would be unjust to say that Bernard Shaw remains only the slave of a strict creed; beyond his attraction to the paradox, which verges on the implausible,56 even within to so intricate and complex domain of the characters’ world – a field in which only very few authors would dare to fool about, as Shaw does – there is a vocation for sympathy with his heroes, mainly for the second rank ones: stock characters, the stereotypes? J. P. Hackett observed a strong influence which the author conveys to his characters, with whom he is in confederation: “…those touches of human sympathy which flash out in delicious asides through the action of his plays, particularly among the minor characters. He is at home with everyone and even when he is going all out to mobilise humanity to march ahead with him under the banner of Creative Evolution, he is turning his head to shout after those going steadfastly in the opposite direction – Stick to it, boys, you are as just as I am (…)”57

p) Miles gloriosus Latin: ['mi:leis gl:ri'usus], pl. milites gloriosi ['mi:liteis gl:ri'usai] (in literature) a boastful / braggart soldier, especially as a stock figure in comedy (from the title of a comedy by Plautus); Plautus, Titus Maccius (c. 254–184 BC): Roman comic dramatist. His 21 extant plays are modelled on Greek New Comedy, especially that produced by Menander, and include Menaechmi (the basis of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors), Miles Gloriosus, Rudens, and Captivi.

It is precisely those stereotype characters that are closest to Shaw’s heart, as it seems; they teem in his dramatic works from one end to the other. It is only natural, on the one hand, since the real world is made up rather of egotistic cynics and frauds, philistines and non-conformists, philanderers and idealists, liberal women and the addicted to power, than of commonsensical persons of moral integrity.

1.2.2. Extraordinary Characters versus Exceptional Characters

The heroes in traditional drama (especially in tragedy) are predominantly extraordinary characters, selected from among kings and queens, with an uncompromisingly special destiny in a world which is the inevitable place of cruelty and despair. But the main feature of this type of characters – that of being of noble descent – makes them somehow impracticable for the modern theatre. Arthur Miller believes that man in the modern world lives the everyday tragedy of his victimisation in a society that destroys his feelings and will-power, making him the like of gadgets in the industrial world. It is hardly necessary for one to have the aura of grandeur and noble birth to see extreme situations; everything it takes is to have been born, as the destiny has in stock for anyone, at any time, the possibility to face unexpected events. In his essay Tragedy and the Common Man, A. Miller argues that there is a necessary relation of contiguity between the heroes having an origin and destinies out of the common range in the traditional theatre and the characters of obscure, despised origins, yet of special destinies, typical of our time: “Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the so-called nobility of his character, is really but a clinging to the outward form of tragedy… I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. (…) The tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of dignity… Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.”58

The distinction between traditional and modern measured against the scale of the dramatic character is operated in terms of extraordinary vs. exceptional. Here is E. Wilson’s apt definition of extraordinary characters: “The heroes and heroines of most important dramatic works of the past are extraordinary in some way. They are ‘larger than life’. Historically, major characters have been kings, queens, bishops, members of the nobility or other figures clearly marked as holding a special place in society. (…) Dramatic characters generally represent men and women at their worst or best, at some extreme of human behaviour (…) In virtually every instance with extraordinary characters we see men and women at the breaking point, at the outer limits of human capability and endurance (…) [They] have been exceptional not only by virtue of their station in life, but because they possess traits common to us all – ambition, generosity, malevolence, fear and achievement – in such great abundance.”59

A permanent feature of the extraordinary character is that “men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither” – in King Lear’s expression. There are countless examples of extraordinary characters: Sophocles’ Oedipus, Euripides’ Medea, Aeschylus’ Prometheus.

In modern drama these characters are being replaced by ordinary people, who, however, possess features of character as strong as the former’s, and have a similar response to extreme situations. The difference consists in the fact that exceptional characters reflect reality with much more verisimilitude.

G. B. Shaw seems to manifest even a certain predilection for creating exceptional characters, and we specifically mean Joan of Arc, the heroine in his ‘Saint Joan’ – a French

maiden who was to be burned at the stake for her courage, places herself at the head of the revolted people, believing that she had really listened to God’s words.

Shaw’s drama does not lack extraordinary figures, either: Caesar, Napoleon, Catherine the Great; but, as we were trying to demonstrate (in section 1.0.), the author prefers treating this category of heroes from a much more realistic angle, demythologising and debunking them, unburdening them from the romanticizing and idealizing overload, giving up the impression of grandeur in an attempt to present them as naturally as possible, and at the same time managing to preserve their aura of historical stateliness, so necessary for the individualization: “In Caesar…, however, he did initiate a new type of historical drama, in which historical characters were treated from an entirely modern angle.”60

1.2.3. Major versus Minor Characters; Protagonists versus Antagonists

Major characters are those who play the important part in the overall action of the play, while minor characters come to support the major ones, or even stand in contrast to them; they play only a small role within the entire scenic development. Major characters are thoroughly delineated, set out in the fullness of their complex personality, while minor characters are only sketched, only casually and fugitively shown, not being able to display more than a very restricted fragment of their personalities. For instance, in ‘Pygmalion’ Higgins, Eliza and Pickering are the major characters, while Mrs. Pearce, Doolittle, Mrs. Higgins, Mrs. Eynsford-Hill, Freddy and Clara are minor characters.

In tragedy61 minor characters may be reduced to mere types; they cannot be ‘round’, in E. M. Forster’s definition; Horatio, for instance, stands for the type of the devoted friend in ‘Hamlet’.

Eric Bentley makes two commentaries meant as evaluative assessments regarding the major and minor characters in a play, who, at the same time, represent type characters as well. The conclusion to draw is that the minor characters in a play, although insufficiently outlined, seconding and backing up the major ones, very much as in a ballet ensemble, complete the latter; but for the minor characters, the major characters could not exist. On the other hand, the major characters, when they draw upon certain types, can disclose unsuspected values, even attaining to that degree of typification which confers them the right to enlist themselves in the category of the archetypes.62

Sometimes, in a play a main character as protagonist may be placed in an antithesis to one of the secondary / subsidiary characters, who will function as his / her antagonist. In ‘The Devil’s Disciple’ for example, Dick Dudgeon is set in contrast to Judith, very much like Candida in the play of the same name, who is opposed to Marchbanks.63 The aim is to better emphasize the individual qualities of the characters, through the interplay of the contraries and their clashing.

Henri Bergson noted, as a particular, isolated case, that there are situations when a secondary character appearing in opposition to the protagonist tends to become the second protagonist of the play, obviously on a comparatively smaller scale.

But the world of the play cannot possibly be understood through the agency of only one character, say the protagonist; all the characters make their own contribution to outlining and defining a whole universe – which comes to support the classic idea that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”64 – in Shakespeare’s words.

1.2.4. The characters, images of the author and equally our own symbols

1.2.4.0. Conclusions to the general section on characters:

Motto: “… art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.” (‘Back to Methuselah’)65

On most occasions, Shaw by no means tried to concede the fact that his characters could represent him, although he did not have the courage to flatly deny it. In order to keep himself safe from the intruders’ indiscretion, he imagined an outer image of himself, a new ‘persona’: G.B.S. The critics’ opinions and views are contradictory as to it, but the idea seems to have aroused many people’s interest, in spite of the fact that there were rather diverging conclusions or proved utterly antagonistic. Some people reproached him with having allegedly been successful only in building symbols of characters impersonating real life people, with whom the author himself was said to have ‘elective affinities’; “Shaw’s chief failing as a dramatist was his inability to portray types with whom he had no sympathy, all his men and women betraying their blood relationship, just as his chief failing as a man was his inability to understand people with whom he did not agree.”66

Yet, there are some other critics who appear to be more reserved: “A frequent kind of artistic self-expression is the identification in ideal form of the artist and his heroes and heroines. But, as Shaw remarked concerning Shakespeare, self-betrayal is one thing and self-portrayal is another. (…) He is probably less identified with most of his fictitious characters than other great dramatists, and Shaw’s comparative aloofness from most of the creatures of his imagination is, if anything, probably an artistic liability. It will be an interesting task to trace the relations between the artist and his most important characters, to show their changes in the course of time, and, if possible, to explain the meaning of this development.”67

A majority of the critical instances treating Shaw’s work plainly affirm the fact that his characters are in fact his mouthpieces: “Shaw permits the characters, who are sometimes mere burlesques, to illustrate and comment upon the author’s theses. Often they are no more than his mouthpieces.”68

An honest man, as he always was, and a man true to himself, Shaw indirectly admits, through the agency of his characters – thus creating the image of the reflection of the character in the character – that his own characters represent him, are his deputies and harbingers (obviously, considering it appropriate to interpose a certain distance between him and the reader / spectator by using his ‘GBS’ mask): “Vaughan: …All Shaw’s characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw. It’s only the actors that make them seem different. Bannal: There can be no doubt of that: everybody knows it. But Shaw doesn’t write his plays as plays. All he wants to do is to insult everybody all round and set us talking about him.”69

It would however be a rather limited vision if we tried to judge characters in the drama by superimposing them on the image of their author. The greatest truth we can say about the dramatic character, and maybe the key to its / his permanence, is the possibility to identify them with an entire spiritual universe. It is precisely what E. Wilson underlines: “When well drawn, they present us with a vivid, incisive picture of ourselves (…) In short, we see ourselves in the revealing and illuminating mirror theatre holds before us. (…) But the dramatic characters impersonated by the performers are images of ourselves. In truth, therefore, the basic encounter of theatre is with ourselves. Sometimes, watching a theatre event, we see a part of ourselves on stage and realize for the first time some truth about our lives. This confrontation is at the heart of the theatre experience.”70

In a similar way, Shaw lets the reader know the same thing – through the agency of Tanner – underlining another great truth – namely, that the real artist’s task is to create

characters delineated as closely to the real model as possible; that is to say, to be as objective as he can: “Tanner: (…) The artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to this knowledge creates a new mind as surely as any woman creates a new man.”71 And Shaw has never betrayed this compelling creed.

1.2.4.1. We have tried to point out in this chapter the fact that George Bernard Shaw succeeds in committing to the stage a vast typology of dramatic characters / personae, belonging to a highly variegated, more often than not shocking, gamut of milieux. One should not also forgive that the author’s vitality and communicative zest are transferred onto his characters, thus conferring them force and undeniable individuality. But we are not trying to conceal his slight shortcomings. Basically, as Anthony Caputti remarked, Shaw appears as the type of the comic author, much more gifted for caricaturing characters in the monumental, genially spiritual manner of Dickens, one may say – yet, he was less bent on exploring, on sounding the tragic universe, the innermost depths of his characters, which by no means prevented him from being aware of his characters’ flaws and limitations.

As a result of this native propensity towards the comic aspects, his characters can sometimes make an impression of capitalistic clowns, selected out of the roguish category of the mainly uncultured, uncouth people or waggish impostors with swindling vocation – as deviating instances, opposed to that tradition: “In Shaw’s comedies, most of the clowns are not, as in Shakespeare’s comedies, uneducated artisans, peasants or vagrants, but on the contrary, representatives of worldly power and success… A sample of his ridiculous capitalists includes, among others, Burgess (‘Candida’), Crampton (‘You Never Can Tell’), Broadbent (‘John Bull’s Other Island’) and Mangan (‘Heartbreak House’)… His ridiculous elderly moralists, soldiers and diplomats, and, above all, his politicians whose practical success is matched only by their profound ignorance and stupidity.” 73

Another consequence of the author’s focusing more on the concrete side – but not that kind of stale, lifeless, unrealistic comic – is Shaw’s relative inability to implant his historical characters in their natural, normal past.74 Such extraordinary characters as Caesar and Joan of Arc are tailored to the canons and conventions of the contemporary drama (this is the convention that Shaw deliberately adopts – but not to the end of ‘destroying’ history, quite on the contrary, to make it contemporary to us).

This is not to say that Shaw was a botching novice in outlining his characters; on the contrary, after Shakespeare and up to the present, Shaw was the one who managed to successfully raise the standard of English drama, proving himself equally a master of the technique of the dialogue and the modalities of portraying the dramatic character; and, what he arrogantly but also clear-mindedly reproaches with Shakespeare, he imposes upon himself: “…Shakespeare, unsurpassed as poet, storyteller, character draughtsman, humorist and rhetorician, has left no coherent drama and could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his studies of character and society.” 75

Criticism attributes to Shaw, as a rule, more merit for his clear, unambiguous manner of debating ideas76 than the way in which he delineates his characters; for what can ideas represent without the characters, or the characters void of the emotion which they are to convey to the audience / the reader? “The point is simply that he, like most of the best of his contemporaries, resembles Shakespeare and the majority of other permanently interesting dramatists in resting his claim to attention, not on the basis of any new morality which he had invented, but upon his success in creating characters and arousing passions.”77 The Romanian novelist Liviu Rebreanu remarked that G. B. Shaw had “the gift to imbue (his heroes) with a symbolic, general loftiness.”78

NOTES:

1. Luigi Pirandello, Naked Masks: Five Plays by Pirandello (Eric Bentley, editor), p. 266-267

2. E. Wilson, The Theater Experiment - chapter ‘The Dramatic Character’, p. 227

3. Apud E. Bentley, The Life of the Drama, p. 38

4. It is J. W. Krutch who presents this idea: “Shaw happened to possess a certain kind of mind and, also, perhaps more importantly, found the theater in a peculiar situation. That theater was behind the times, and the times themselves were at one of the cultural crises, which are a recurrent phenomenon in all cultures. It is not that the ideas of the man in the street can never furnish the basis of any drama. The ideas of the Elizabethan man in the street had done so (…)’ (The American Drama since 1918. An Informal History, p. 20)

5. H. Bergson, apud E. Bentley, The Life of the Drama, p. 43

6. G. B. Shaw used to advise his friends to write as naturally as possible; here is what he wrote Archibald Henderson in 1905: “Be as accurate as you can: but as to being just, who are you that you should be just?… Write boldly according to your bent: say what you WANT to say and not what you think you ought to say or what is right or just or any such arid nonsense. You are not God Almighty; and nobody will expect justice from you or any other superhuman attribute. This affected, manufactured, artificial conscience of morality and justice and so on if of no use for the making of works of art: for that you must have the real conscience that gives a man courage his will by saying what he likes. Accuracy only means discovering the relation of your will to facts instead of cooking the facts to save trouble.” (apud Anthony Caputti, Modern Drama. Authoritative texts of…, p. 404)

7. D. Daiches, A History of English Literature (The Present Age), p. 150

8. On the issue of Shaw’s intentional anachronisms v. extensively R. Lupan, G. B. Shaw, pp. 172-173

9. S. Iosifescu, Reîntîlniri cu France şi Shaw, p. 187

10. William Archer was the first to call Shaw’s characters “puppets”, after the first night of ‘Widowers’ Houses’ (apud M. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw - vol. I: The Search for Love, p. 283; Holroyd paraphrases and completes Archer: “ingeniously animated puppets, embarrassing in their love-scenes though otherwise as agile as monkeys.”

11. As they are called by J. P. Hackett – Shaw – George versus Bernard, p. 151. This is an ample quotation from it: “All his dramatic work has to do with the slaves and gods and

their pictures, but there is no prescription. There may be only one Class II god as in ‘Arms and the Man’, or one Class I god as in ‘St Joan’, or there may be one of each as in ‘Man and Superman’ and ‘The Millionairess’. And even the gods are liable to show slavish traits at times and the slaves to give a gleam of god-like quality. He makes a play by taking a group of ordinary individuals Class I and Class II slaves – and turning them inside out. It is all done wittily, kindly, thoroughly, sometimes with the assistance af a Class II god and sometimes-but what’s the use of trying to take that wonderful process apart when it is there to be revelled in at the source, for two shillings a copy.”

12. G. B. Shaw apud M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. I, p. 394

13. L. Pirandello, apud E. Bentley – The Theory of the Modern Stage

14. M. Esslin, The Field of Drama – chapter IV, ‘The Signs of Drama: Icon, Index, Symbol’, pp. 47-48

15. Ibidem, p. 44

16. H. Ibsen apud E. Bentley, The Life of the Drama, p. 56

17. Ibidem, p. 58

18. G. B. Shaw apud M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. III, The Lure of Fantasy, p. 77

19. E. Wilson, op. cit., p. 214

20. E. Bentley, The Life of the Drama, p. 35

21. “The raw material of characters, then, is not very raw after all. It has already been worked over. It has already been turned into a kind of art: the art of fantasy. Life is a double fiction. We do not see others so much as certain substitutions for others. We do not see ourselves so much as others with whom we are identified. When Plato said we see not life, but shadows of life flickering in the firelight on the wall of a cave, he was an optimist or perhaps he made allowances for the extraordinary distortions and suppressions of shadow place.” – Ibidem, p. 36

22. J. Galsworthy, apud E. Bentley, op. cit., p. 55

23. S. W. Dawson, Drama and the Dramatic, p. 63

24. As J. P. Hackett extensively demonstrates: “He brings characters on and off, for the sole purpose of reviewing his interests discussing his problems and lecturing on his conclusions; they deliver themselves in mighty conversational mouthfuls two pages at a time (he must have loved pouring out his opinions like this from the day he learnt to handle a pen). He covers every ordinary human interest – sex, art and religion predominating; science is treated with what might always be described as deference, and it would appear that the doctrine of the man from the molecule has been accepted as basic truth beyond discussion. He launches out early with an attack on evangelicalism: ‘there arose a young man, earnest and proud of his own story, who offered up a long prayer in the course of which he suggested such modifications in the laws of nature as would bring the arrangement of the universe into conformity with his own tenets’, and thereafter sal-lies on similar lines dot the pages.” (op. cit., p. 86)

25. The Play and the Reader (S. Johnson, J. Bierman & J. Hart editors), chapter: ‘Introduction: the dramatic genre’, p. 6

26. E. Wilson, op. cit., p. 214

27. “Most characters reveal themselves through physical interaction and dialogue with other characters. It was easier to start with monologue, but unrepresentative. Because plays concern interrelationship, character analysis is bogus just for its own sake in isolation. You cannot discuss the part without seeing the whole. (M. Kelsall, Studying Drama -An Introduction, p. 50)

28. G. B. Shaw apud M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. I, p. 278

29. “Shaw has frequently been reproached with the habit of using all his stage characters simply as mouthpieces of his own opinions. This has become so much of a standard criticism that he has made fun of it in ‘Fanny’s First Play’, where he makes one of the critics say: “All Shaw’s characters are himself; mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw’. This criticism is undoubtedly sometimes observed, and Shaw certainly interferes frequently with his own plays…” (E. Strauss, G.B. Shaw – Art and Socialism, p. 11)

30. E. Bentley, The Life of Drama, pp. 36, 38

31. Twentieth Century Drama (R. Cohn & B. F. Dukore editors), p. 4

32. The Play and the Reader, p. 5

33. R. Ingarden, Von der Funktionen der Sprache in Theaterschauspiel, p. 405

34. M. Esslin – op. cit., chapter The Signs of Drama: The Words, p. 84

35. This is also the observation E. Strauss makes (op. cit., p. 14)

36. M. Esslin, op. cit., p. 85

37. S. W. Dawson – Drama and the Dramatic, p. 68

38. R. Ingarden, op. cit., p. 403

39. G. B. Shaw, Plays Unpleasant, p. XXV

40. M. M. Morgan, apud S. W. Dawson, op. cit., p. 46

41. E. Bentley, The Life of Drama, pp. 68-69

42. S. W. Dawson, op. cit., p. 50

43. Ibidem, p. 49

44. Drama, and especially tragedy, has the unique possibility to offer a mythical perspective to the world it presents / ‘recreates’, which is also the conclusion of F. Nietzsche’s study The Birth of Tragedy (in Works, vol. I, p. 92): “The myth by no means finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word”… “The structure of the scenes and the visible imagery reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself is able to put into words and concepts.’’

45. E. Bentley, op. cit., p. 53

46. M. M. Morgan, Shavian Playground, p. 29

47. E. Wilson, op. cit., p. 216

48. J. P. Hackett, op. cit., p. 86

49. E. Wilson, op. cit., p. 218

50. E. Bentley (op. cit., p. 52) points out that: “…the commedia dell’arte” was “the main carrier of the tradition of fixed characters… [through its] comic brio, verve and diablerie”. (Commedia dell’arte was an improvised kind of popular comedy in Italian theatres in the 16th-18th centuries, based on stock characters (Punchinello, Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon / Pantalone). The comic dialogue, action and situations were improvised, being adapted by the actors according to a few basic plot outlines (commonly love intrigues) and to topical issues).

51. D. W. Dawson, op. cit., p. 50

52. J. I. M. Stewart remarks that Shaw’s characters have a relation with the “popular theatrical stereotypes of the age” particularly the characters in the melodrama) in Eight Modern Writers, p. 137

53. Prefaces by Bernard Shaw, Preface to Three Plays for Puritans, p. 720

54. These are Mrs. Lynn’s words in ‘Overruled’, The Dramatic Works of Bernard Shaw, vol. 17, p. 238

55. Ibidem, ‘Fanny’s First Play’, pp. 107-108

56. C. K. Chesterton (in G. B. Shaw) remarks Shaw’s ease in reversing situations, changing modes and making everything appear possible: “G. B. Shaw calls a landlord a thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, ‘Ah, that fello hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means; it is all so fine spun and fantastical…’”

57. J. P. Hackett, op. cit., chapter VI, p. 151

58. A. Miller, The Theater Essays of…, pp. 3-5

59. E. Wilson, op. cit., pp. 214-215

60. L. Hutson, The Twentieth Century Drama, p. 22

61. D. W. Dawson noticed that there are certain plays – which with just reason happen to be tragedies- in which “only one or two characters really matter – the main plot of ‘The Changeling’ springs to mind, and there is the obvious case of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles” (op. cit., p. 36)

62. See below some of E. Bentley’s remarks to that effect: “…a fictitious character is a force in a story. We are accustomed to admitting this, but querulously, in the case of minor characters, whom we can belittle as only cogs in the wheel of plot. But it has always been legitimate for some characters in a play to be cogs of that kind. The messengers in Greek drama are never any more. The minor characters in Shakespeare do not more to meet the requirements of 20th century directors who wish them to have a ‘biography’ or ‘case history’ than project a single quality (tone, colour). They exist less as themselves than as part of a group, gang or partnership. Such characters resemble members of a ‘corps de ballet’ more than the people in a novel. Even the major Shakespearean characters are not what the modern novel reader might wish. They do not have a life story behind them… Many of Shakespeare’s personae are ‘unreal’… (op. cit., p. 45); and: “That the major characters that are types should be more complex than the minor ones is in itself neither surprising nor revealing, but it is a pointer toward a much larger phenomenon: they tend, in the hands of the masters, to become architects.(…) the archetype of character typifies larger things and characteristics that are more than idiosyncrasies.” (op. cit., p. 49)

63. This is A. Caputti’s observation (op. cit., p. 410)

64. S. W. Dawson adds to this idea another one, inspired by religion, “of the world as the theatre of God’s judgement”, with the commentary that: “we, as audience, are in a position to understand and to judge as none of the inhabitants of the created world can be” (op. cit., chapter 2, p. 25). This idea has seen ample expansion in European letters: on the frontis-pice of the Globe one could read ‘Totus mundus facit histrionem’ (“All the world plays the actor”). Calderon de la Barca speaks about ‘El gran teatro del mundo’ (“the great theatre of the world”), and gradually this idea reached the concept of ‘the world as a stage / as drama’.

65. Apud G. B. Shaw, Aforisme, paradoxuri, cugetări, p. 95

66. H. Pearson, B . Shaw – His Life and Personality, p. 165

67. J. P. Hackett, op. cit., p. 12

68. S. C. Chew, R. D. Altick, A Literary History of England, vol. IV,p. 1525

69. Bernard Shaw, op. cit., ‘Fanny’s First Play’, p. 110

70. E. Wilson, op. cit., pp. 227-228

71. The Complete Plays of G. B. Shaw, p. 341

72. “But he was always at bottom a comic artist, one who saw the limitations of even his most intelligent, most Shavian characters, and the inevitable comedy of the human mind applying itself to the intractable energy of life” (A. Caputti, op. cit., p. XX)

73. E. Strauss, op. cit., p. 24

74. “But the humour aid vitality belong to the dramatist’s world only, not to the world of his characters; Shaw had not historical imagination, and his way of making history live was to make all its characters into his own contemporaries, just as his way of putting the audience into sympathy with both sides of the conflict in which Joan was caught up was to make them debate questions of religion and politics in twentieth century terms.” (D. Daiches, op. cit., p. 151)

75. G. B. Shaw, Preface to Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant

76. B. Ford – The Penguin Guide to English Literature, vol. 7, The Modern Age, p. 212 : “The dialogue in which Shaw’s characters discuss the ideas about society and politics and justice which he wanted his audience to respond to, remains brilliantly clear? – D. Daiches, op. cit., pp. 149-150: “In his desire to shock rather than to lull, to provoke rather than to amuse, Shaw put into his characters’ mouths discussions in which hip characteristic wit and love of paradox were given full play.”

77. J. W. Krutch, op. cit., p. 25

78. L. Rebreanu, Candida, in Opere alese, vol. 5, p. 492.

2. Shavian Heroes

2.0. Motto: Archibald Henderson referring to Shaw’s type characters, said: “I venture the opinion that Shaw, whose plays have inaugurated a new epoch in the history of the theatre and the drama, begins where Molière leaves off. Shaw writes primarily not comedies of manners, but comedies of social character. In his plays appear no romantic lovers, no villains, no subjects for the psychiatrist and the abnormal psychologist. Shaw does not, like Molière, satirize generalized types of human frailty: the Miser, the Misanthrope, the Hypocrite, the Coxcomb, the Pedant, the Quack, the Parvenu, the Bore, the Coquette, the Blue Stocking. He portrays class types – what the French call ‘hommes-idées’, the Germans ‘Gedankenpuppen’ – representative of different strata of our so-called civilised society: the Cockney, the Chauffeur, the mechanic, the ship captain, the Salvation Army officer, the munition maker, the professional soldier, the brigand, the gentleman, the cowboy, the labour leader, the politician, the statesman, the king, the dictator, the genius, the saint. With Molière, the central figure is some distorted, abnormal individual – Tartuffe, Alceste, Harpagon, Don Juan – who is made to suffer through public ridicule. Shaw indicts a social class, conventions and institutions, political and social, secular and religious, philosophies of life, national hypocrisy, typology, or even an entire civilization. The characters of his plays are rendered ridiculous through the satiric exposure of their fallacious views, and shallow codes of conduct, which are attributed directly or by implication to the inherent defects of capitalist civilisation.”1

It is from this passage that our idea first sprang to write a comprehensive paper regarding the main types of dramatic characters in G. B. Shaw’s works. Here is a summary / chart of this attempt at drawing a typology of the Shavian dramatic heroes:

2.1. Cynics:2.1.1. The Machiavellian Cynic: Andrew Undershaft (in ‘Major Barbara’)2.1.2. The authoritative Cynic: Mrs. Kitty Warren (in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’)2.1.3. The ‘demythologising’ Cynic: Caesar (in ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’)2.1.4. The ‘demonstrative’ Cynic: Henry Higgins (in ‘Pygmalion’), Bluntschli (in ‘Arms and the Man’)2.1.5. The optimistic Cynic: Broadbent (in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’) 2.1.6. The Cynical Rogue: Charteris (in ‘The Philanderer’), Sartorius (in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’), Dubedat (in ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’)

2.1.7.The ‘realistic’ Cynic (= antiromanticism): Dick Dudgeon, General Burgoyne (in ‘The Devil’s Disciple’)

2.2. The Superman (cf. Nietzsche’s Übermensch):2.2.1. The Philosopher: John Tanner – Don Juan (in ‘Man and Superman’)2.2.2. The responsible Superman: Caesar (in ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’)2.2.3. The Hero: Dick Dudgeon (in ‘The Devil’s Disciple’)2.2.4. The ‘reflexive’ Superman: King Magnus (in ‘The Apple Cart’)2.2.5. The Magician of power / the Autocrat: Shotover (in ‘Hartbreak House’)2.2.6. The Incorrigible / the Unrepentant: Andrew Undershaft (in ‘Major Barbara’)2.2.7. The ‘Commonsensical’ Hero: Joan of Arc (in ‘Saint Joan’)2.2.8. The ‘degraded’ Superman: Napoleon (in ‘The Man of Destiny’)2.2.9. The ‘mimicking’ Superman: Joey Percival (in ‘Misalliance’)

2.3. Women Characters:

2.3.1. The ‘Unwomanly’ Woman: Mrs. Warren (in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’)2.3.2. Acquisitive Women: Blanche, Henrietta Jansenius (in ‘Widowers’ Houses’), Ann Whitefield (in ‘Man and Superman’)2.3.3 . Liberal Women: Lady Britomart (in ‘Major Barbara’)2.3.4. Tough Women: Mrs. Dudgeon (in ‘The Devil’s Disciple’)2.3.5. Mother-Women: ‘Virgin Mothers’: Candida (in ‘Candida’); ‘Maternal’ women: Gloria (in ‘You Never Can Tell’); others: Lavinia (in ‘Androcles and the Lion’)2 .3 .6 . Gentle Women: Nora (in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’), Lina Szczpanowska (in ‘Misalliance’)2.3.7. Others: (Histrionic): Raina (in ‘Arms and the Man’); (Philistine): Judith (in ‘The Devil’s Disciple’)

2.4. The Unadaptable Hero: 2 . 4 . 1 . The Ingenuous Scientist: Higgins (in ‘Pygmalion’) 2.4.2. The ‘optimistic’ Unadaptable: Kegan (in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’) 2.4.3. The ‘disguised’ Unadaptable: Barbara (in ‘Major Barbara’) 2.4.4. The Naïve: Jenny Hill (in ‘Major Barbara’)

2.5. Raisonneurs:2.5.1. The ‘cosmic’ raisonneur: Tanner (in ‘Man and Superman’)2.5.2. The detached observer: Androcles (in ‘Androcles and the Lion’)2.5.3. The unpretentious monarch: King Magnus (in ‘The Apple Cart’)2.5.4. Mystics of the Idea: Andrew Undershaft (in ‘Major Barbara’)2.5.5.The garrulous / Dionysian observer: Adolphus Cusins (in ‘Major Barbara’)

2.6. The Convert:2.6.1. The modern Faustus: Adolphus Cusins (in ‘Major Barbara’)2.6.2. The ‘double’ Convert: Barbara Undershaft (in ‘Major Barbara’)2.6.3. The twice-born: Eliza Doolittle (in ‘Pygmalion’)2.6.4. The rational Convert: Brassbound (in ‘Captain Brassbound ‘s Conversion’)2.6.5. The Convert ‘out of guilt’: Larry Doyle (in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’)2.6.4.‘Nursery play’ Converts: Raina (in ‘Arms and the Man’)

2.7. Rebels (cf. Lucifer).2.7.1. Non-conformists: Eliza Doolittle (in ‘Pygmalion’), Vivie Warren (in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’)2.7.2. The idealistic Rebel: Barbara Undershaft (first phase of evolution)2.7.3. The Anarchist: Mendoza (in ‘Man and Superman’)

2.8. The Libertine:2.8.1. The Hedonist: Doolittle (in ‘Pygmalion’)2.8.2. The Philanderer: Charteris (in ‘The Philanderer’)2.8.3. The Libertine of spirit: Higgins (in ‘Pygmalion’)2.8.4. The ‘Good-for-nothing’ young man: Frank (in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’)

2.9. Philistines:2.9.1. The social shark: Sartorius (in ‘Widowers’ Houses’), Broadbent (in ‘John Bull’s Other

Island’)2.9.2. The scientific prig: Ridgeon (in ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’), Stephen Undershaft (in

‘Major Barbara’)2.9.3. The intellectual Philistine: Cusins (in ‘Major Barbara’), Dubedat (in ‘The Doctor’s

Dilemma’), Morell (in ‘Candida’)2.10. Miscellaneous characters:

2.10.1 Idealists: the counterpart of the ‘realist’: The Gunner; the ‘contaminated’ idealist: Mazzini Dunn (in ‘Heartbreak House’); The Poet: Eugene Marchbanks (in ‘Candida’); The repressed idealist: Vivie Warren (in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’)

2.10.2 The ‘Impecunious’: Billy Walker, Price, Rummy, Shirley (in ‘Major Barbara’).

* **

2 . 1 . Cynics2 . 1 . 1 . The Machiavellian Cynic:

Andrew Undershaft is representative of a profession (v. Shaw’s previous novel, Cashel Byrons Profession, and the play ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’) to the extent to which this occupation / trade implies a moral code / a ‘creed’; very much like his Shavian predecessors, Undershaft is at loggerheads with the official morality by this very ‘creed’ though the society he lives in benefits by the products of his business / commerce, it officially condemns them. In the play, Undershaft takes advantage, through his firm, of the rest of the humanity by means of his money-motivated entrepreneurship – ammunitions (but also whisky – v. Bodger’s firm) being the parable-image of social evil engendering other (social and moral) evils: wars, vices, hatred, etc.

Undershaft is one of Shaw’s most powerful and impressive characters, through whom the Dionysian imageq) (taken over from Nietzsche2) is related to Blake’s conception of the devil.r)

Analysing the energetic-Dionysian component of the character, we can say the demonic side of Undershaft brings to light, as possible truth, but also as tools of destruction, gunpowder, fire and drink (all symbols of movement, violent change, upheaval, dancing, whirling motion, complete catharsis); in terms of Blakeian philosophy of poetic symbols, they stand for energy3; with Undershaft, they are beneficially associated to money (abundance: i.e. we can easily imagine the plenty of Bacchic / Dionysian grape-picking feasts); in social, human terms, it stands for social / human power and civilization. So, with Undershaft, implicit destruction – due to his trade – can be tantamount to the potentiality of a changing energy. If it were to compare him with the slum-landlord in ‘Widowers’ Houses’, Sartorius, and Mrs. Warren, Andrew Undershaft has a different position towards society; with him, the implicit faith that he is useful, by the kind of goods he deals in, to society on its evolutive way, helps him not to be ashamed ( in puritan terms). As an individual, he thus opposes the raw force of the universe gaining authority and confidence; the menace of the masses – conceived as being warlike through their very number, can be detected (quite paradoxically) in the very presence in the play of the Salvation Army – which is actually an army, having its banners, slogans, ‘weapons’ (be they only tambourines), uniforms, as well as

q) Dionysiac / dionysiac or Dionysian / dionysian means: (1) “of or relating to Dionysus”. (Dionysus or Dionysos was a Greek god, son of Zeus and Semele. His worship entered Greece from Thrace c.1000 BC. Originally a god of the fertility of nature, fruitfulness, and vegetation, associated with wild and ecstatic / orgiastic religious rites, in later traditions Dionysus is a god of wine who loosens inhibitions and inspires creativity in music and poetry, a bestower of ecstasy; also known as the god of the drama, and identified with Bacchus). (2) In the philosophy of Nietzsche, the terms Dionysiac / dionysiac and Dionysian / dionysian refer to to the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of human nature, i.e. the set of creative qualities that encompasses spontaneity, irrationality, the rejection of discipline, unruliness, etc. (Cf. Apollonian / apollonian).r) Blake, William (1757-1827): English poet, painter, engraver, and mystic. His literary works (i.e. collections of poems) include Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), and Jerusalem (1820). Blake’s poems mark the beginning of romanticism and a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment. His chief works in the visual arts (mainly watercolours and engravings) include pieces of a visionary nature, such as the illustrations for The Book of Job (1826), for Dante’s poems, and for his own Prophetic Books (1783-1804). Both his writings and his engravings were only fully appreciated after his death.

the Christian phraseology, full of warlike images. It may look strange, but such a militant group desiring Christian peace, has no other way than vindicating and getting it through fight.

Shaw described this character as: “Undershaft can even declare that his determinedly ruthless conducts satisfied the Kantian test,s) since the world would be an immeasurably better place if all the poor behaved exactly as he has. But firstly we must rid ourselves of the liberal belief that moral virtue by itself is ever capable of becoming a significant force in the world.”4

Undershaft himself voices his cynicism in passages like: ‘Come, come, my young friends: let us live in the real world. Your moral world is a vacuum; nothing is done there though a good deal is eaten and drunk by the moralists at the expense of the real world. It is nice to live in the vacuum and repeat the fine phrases and edifying sentiments a few literary people have manufactured for you: but you know as well as I do that your morality is tolerated by only on the assumption that nothing is to come of it. Your Christmas carols about peace and good will to men are very pretty; but you order cannons from me just the same, you ring out the old, ring in the new: that is, you discard muzzle-loaders and introduce breachloaders.”

Shaw used as the real life prototype for Undershaft the figure of the world-wide famous inventor of nitroglycerine, Alfred Nobel, drawing on his sardonic character; also a man of intellectual and literary allegiance, a humanitarian, even a Shelleyan radical, Nobel was nevertheless holding the conviction that “(his) home is where (his) work is” – and his work was to invent explosives. Another alleged prototype for the delineation of Undershaft was Alfred Krupp, the ‘prince of steel’ (and of cannon), who, like Nobel, paradoxically argued in the sense of the deterrent effect of explosives in modern wars. Both appeared to Shaw’s contemporaries as the embodiment of practical-mindedness indifferent to the real ends of its production.

Undershaft’s cynicism is associated to an arresting lack of hypocrisy; this demonic mood is the very prototype of the diabolical figures of scientists / inventors in the more or less parable-like literary or cinematographic productions of the latter half of the last century, presenting the apprentices of the atomic nightmare: “the more destructive war becomes, the more fascinating we find it”, he says. His pragmatism goes hand in hand with the lack of happiness – deriving from a sense of his own limitation: “I can make cannons; I cannot make courage and compunction.”

Undershaft’s cynical argumentation comes from Shaw’s ‘undemocratic’ conviction concerning the fact that the poor should not be idealised. “Unlike other writers who are sympathetic with the poor, Shaw does not sentimentalize or idealize them, his argument being that if poverty actually did improve people it would be the strongest argument for making poverty compulsory. Shaw insists rather that poverty is unequivocally demoralizing: its fruits are not simple piety, honest rectitude, and altruistic sentiment; they are more likely to be, at best, hypocrisy, cynicism and shattered self-respect; and, at worst, consciousless brutality.”5

Even democracy in its simplest form is, for Undershaft, a by-product of his own trade: “The ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it.”

s) Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804): German idealist philosopher. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) he sought to determine the limits of man’s knowledge, by countering Hume’s skeptical empiricism, while arguing that any affirmation or denial regarding the ultimate nature of reality (‘noumenon’) makes no sense. All we can know are the objects of experience (‘phenomena’), interpreted by space and time and ordered according to twelve key concepts. In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) propounding a system of ethics guided by the existence of an absolute moral law – the categorical imperative. Kant’s doctrine that reality consists not of appearances, but of some other order of being, whose existence can be inferred from the nature of human reason is called transcendental idealism, and the argument designed to make explicit the conditions under which a certain kind of knowledge is possible, especially those of Kant, is called transcendental argument. The adjective Kantian (used in reference to a philosophical theory) means “derived from or analogous to a position of Kant, especially his doctrines that there are synthetic a priori propositions which order our experience but are not derived from it, that metaphysical conclusions can be inferred from the nature of possible experience, that duty is to be done for its own sake and not as a means to any other end, and that there is a world of things-in-themselves to be distinguished from mere phenomena” (The NEW OXFORD Dictionary OF ENGLISH).

Undershaft may be said – and he actually insists on the idea that – he loves his enemies (as a cruel Shavian echo to the figure of Jesus Christ); cynically, he also says why: because they keep him in business. But he is not only a cynic – he also has a gift of the shocking, coherent argu-mentation; here are his words addressed to Barbara: “Your Christianity, which enjoins you to resist not evil, and to turn the other cheek, would make me a bankrupt. My morality – my religion – must have a place for cannons and torpedoes in it.” He finally warns her that she may eventually be bound to give up the Salvation Army and admit the part cannons, his cannons, must play in society.

There is an opposition between Undershaft and Cusins, which is added to that existing between Undershaft and Barbara; it is only one of the several clashing relationships between idealism and realism in the play; within the patterning of the play, the conflict appears as Barbara ceases to be the protagonist (in Act III), leaving her place to Cusins, for whom she has so far acted as a kind of substitute.

Undershaft even engendered proselytes among the characters of the plays Shaw subsequently wrote. As successors of Undershaft, Shotover and Mangan, the millionaire boss in ‘Heartbreak House’, have a money-oriented attitude unmitigated by any amount of irony. Mangan, as opposed to Undershaft, fails even to attach a symbolic-religious value to the fact of possession; Mangan does not have any religious sense in the heart; his acquisitive career lacks transcendence or the sense of synthesis. Brutish, he is attracted by money in a vile, purely terrestrial way. Undershaft’s cynicism is transferred to the whole of the play, including the idea of reflexively curing cynicism. This is the reason why critics have called ‘Major Barbara’ “a triumph of immoral purpose”, “a withering attack on the Salvation Army”, “an exultation of capitalism”, “an assertion that the destruction of some good things must accompany the destruction of the bad”.6

2.1.2. The Authoritative Cynic:

Mrs. Warren, the character in the play ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’, is, in the same way Undershaft was in relation to his trade, linked to her ‘profession’ (“a profession which society officially repudiates as a metaphor for the way in which that larger society is really conducted”, in Shaw’s own terms); beyond the void catch-phrases (white slavery, or ‘the Great Social Evil’, etc.) circulated in her time, Mrs. Warren actually finds for them a counterpart in logical explanation – v. the showdown opposing her to her daughter. The Ibsenite theme of social inheritance is successfully used in the play; cynically, she accounts for the ideals of the younger generations through their alleged ignorance of the world; “the sentimentally viewed ‘woman with a past’ turns into a promiscuous sensualist and a highly successful woman of business with much more genuine pride and impudence than conventionally mannered shame.”7 The play opposes a coarse mother and a cold daughter; when discovering the atrocious origin of her mother’s fortune (and the source of her own comfort and education), Vivie begins to despise her mother; yet the latter explodes into vehement cynicism and practicality: her main contention is that, although the trade is contemptible, she has to do it, as every healthy person hates the trade by which he or she lives – thus, Mrs. Warren’s cynicism has tragi-comic value; it may even arguably be said to be a tragedy based upon matter-of-fact dramatic exposure (cf. Ibsen’s lesson). Mrs. Warren’s cynicism is even attractive through its well-poised vulgarity, when she loses control of her words, she utters real metaphoric vulgarities; yet she is right in her cynical demonstrativeness: “God help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!” But one may say that “In her own way, Kitty is seeking after righteousness; but her way, isolating her qualities of energy and industry and strong-mindedness from her sensual warmth and zest for life, and forming her daughter’s character on

those chosen lines alone, is as tragically misguided as Sartorius’s spoiling of Blanche – and has produced another kind of ‘lady’.”8

2.1.3. The ‘demythologising’ Cynic:

Caesar is the image of Shaw’s wish and no less conviction that great men should really exist; it is only this way that man’s slow progress can be ensured, promoted and continued. This is the concept of ‘naturally great men’ sprung out of Shaw’s purely verbal imagination. Caesar could be but a great ‘talker’, and in many respects also a teacher (especially to Cleopatra, but not only); in other respects, he is an ‘author’ (a sort of alter-ego figure of the dramatist himself). The essence of the idealizing of the character derives from his romantic description traceable to the fact that Shaw read Mommsen’st) History of Rome (“the entire and perfect man”). Coming from the status of an apt politician and military leader, Caesar stands in front of the possibility to choose heroic, active life, precisely because the humans, the public (i.e. History) need that choice. As a hero, he was assisted by the lucky odds (v. the very etymology of the Greek word hieros, a ‘sacred’ person);u) his victories are as many miracles (see, later on in Shaw’s plays, the figure of the countrygirl inspired by the gods, Saint Joan). This does not let his pragmatic nature be warped by the possible ensuing romantic view / attitude, or pose. He remains a plain hardworking man, of remarkably simple habits: seen from the exterior, the very conventional image of the common man (v. the naïve, immature, a little idiotic surprise shown by Cleopatra when she realized that he is the great Caesar); inwardly, the cynical ‘superman’ has something of a dreamer, and his visionary raptures are considered by the others even bouts of madness. The philosopher he also is relentlessly seeks the advent of his own preeminently pragmatic system; his practical action may sometimes be destructive, but it is not carried out in ill-blood and hatred, and has no starchiness in it, self-righteous attitude pretending that form (e.g. juridical forms) can atone for ruin and destruction; whenever he kills, he does it in order to establish a superior social order (even from a strictly historical point of view, Caesar is the very image of dictatorship – this is actually the type of dictatorship which filled with pleasure the ‘undemocratic’ Shaw). His ambition itself lacks the vulgar roots of greed, domination, of enslaving other peoples for one’s own good / wealth; he does it all aiming at the idea of exploring (v. the scene of Caesar’s first encounter with the Sphinx). His exploratory thirst is that of a child’s: life seems permanently about to open its treasure-store. His greatness generates his stately stature as a historical figure, but no less his human flaws, the presence of which acts as guarantee of the non-conventionality of his ideal status (“We want credible heroes”, Shaw used to say).

Caesar’s parallel with Cleopatra is supported by Shaw’s anachronism / licence (the queen was not sixteen years old at the time, but twenty); moreover, her ‘sexlessness’ drives out any implications of a different nature than that subordinated to Caesar’s part as a cynical and ‘pedagogical’ superman: on a limited scale, he wants to make out of Cleopatra what he actually desires to see done at the full scale of human kind; a humanity he wants to drive as close as possible to a sort of commonsensical idealness deriving from responsibility. Caesar is also the voicing of Shaw’s confidence in (the Schopenhauerian) Will-power, in full anticipation of ‘Man and Superman’: “As for me, Cleopatra, my passion is for life, ever fuller and higher life; and that is what makes me different from other men.” (Although he is – cynically – aware of the cold

t) Mommsen, Theodor (1817–1903): German historian, noted especially for his three-volume History of Rome (1854-1856; 1885), and his treatises on Roman constitutional law (1871-1888). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902.u) The word hieros appeared in Middle English (the 14th century), with mythological reference, coming via Latin (heros), from Greek hērōs “sacred; hallowed, sainted”.

truths that: “To the end of History, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right, and honour and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.” According to Shaw’s doctrine of the Life Force, BY THE OPTIMISTIC EXPANSION OF THE EGO: THE SUPERMAN IS PLACED ABOVE THE REST OF HUMANITY, of the common people. From the merely human, individual point of view, his isolation (v. the opening scene, when he faces the Sphinx: “I have wandered in many lands, seeking the last regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as myself. I have found no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day’s deed, and think my night’s thought… Sphinx, you and I, strangers to the race of men, are no strangers to one another”) is absolute, godlike, self-sufficient; this scene is rounded off by the final one: his isolation remains unchanged; it seems that the world will not develop in the direction of taking up its own responsibility – the very ‘demythologising’ lesson Caesar is trying hard to inculcate in the other’s minds (to that effect, it will be relevant to recall that most illustrative figure of the ‘British native’, Britannus, so much like a modern Englishman – it seems, not only on account of the climate’s influence).

But, in spite of Caesar’s debunking, ‘didactic’ efforts, Cleopatra can be perceived as the instance of the failure of his ‘school-mastering’, a fact which can only increase the disheartened perspective on the typically cynical approach Caesar adopts as to his contemporary world; ‘Cleo’ is too narrow-minded and crudely unprepared, especially for the part the history of her land has chosen for her to play on that history’s own scene; the best thing she can do is to mimic her new master (easily, and rather primitively hypostasized as an idol, which she certainly will break upon the first favourable occasion).

2.1.4. The ‘demonstrative’ Cynic

2.1.4.1. Bluntschli: He is by far the best contrived creation in Shaw’s gallery of demythologising, debunking ‘wizards’: one can say that in creating Bluntschli the author used the convention of the ‘new / fresh eye’ in order to generate the ridicule (this is in a way Voltaire’s lesson as found in Candide); the adult world of warfare is presented as seen through the eyes of a child (be he a grown-up); out of the two elements of the Virgilian quotation, ‘Arma virumque cano’, it is only a half-grown, childish character that remains, and, instead of ‘arms’, chocolates. Through Bluntschli, as a part in the intricate machinery of playwriting as a childish activity (v. M. Morgan’s chapter entitled ‘Tales for the Nursery’), Shaw attacked insidiously and openly “every form of humbug and pretentiousness, including the unnaturalness of moral virtue that children… instinctively detect even in the social ritual of washing. It works through its appeal, beneath custom and prejudice, to the clear-eyed, unsentimental child that survives, however tenuously, in every adult…” 9

It is a “deliberate exploitation of the play aspect of theatre, in the sense of make-believe; Shaw was in effect reviving a medieval and Renaissance concept”10 – that of ‘ludus’. But Shaw also operates with ‘faux naïfs’: ‘simpletons’ (false simpletons, of course), as well as the image of ‘parental authority’ and the ‘teacher-pupil relationship’ used in demonstration. The contrast between the mercenary, Bluntschli (in whom the mercenary pose is seen as a source of total lack of implication, and bourgeois placidity, relating to the exercise of a common trade, but not in direct relation with cruelty, bloody violence), and the aristocratic Sergius is drawn in terms of the ‘impossibilist’ cynicism, which is consistently opposed to enthusiasm (as Shaw explained: “I have got clean through the old categories of good and evil…”). What Bluntschli demonstrates is that the ‘lofty’ ideals are actually rather farcical, being radically different from life itself. The weak man is usually (and quite naturally, he demonstrates) sensitive and romantic – “the chivalric ideal proves quite impracticable… the error lies in the falsehood of the idea”, as Shaw said).11

Considered as a paradigm of evolution from an inferior state (of childish innocence, as it were) through the efforts of a ‘teacher’ / demonstrative spirit, the play is quite similar in structure to ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’; Bluntschli (v. the name itself, cf. blunt) can be said to have anticipated Caesar in the part of the good nurse.

2.1.4.2. Higgins: The character was inspired by the figure of the philologist and phonetician Henry Sweet.v) Cynically, Higgins carries out a Frankenstein-type of experiment, being convinced that ‘the creature’ does not bother about its own feelings: “Pickering: Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girls has some feelings? Higgins: Oh, no, I don’t think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about. Have you, Eliza?”

In his capacity as an experimentalist, he creates a dummy figure in replacement of a real, life-bearing being (Eliza’s spirited, though vulgar personality); she is really too deeply anchored in the low, morally shallow social and spiritual milieu of the underworld. But what he finally manages to produce is a petrified, simplified social statue of Eliza, based merely on the laws of correct pronunciation. Higgins does not even think that, sooner or later, the action of the (Shavian) Life Force will tend to outline a genuine human being, an independently living woman. Higgins’s cynicism is measured against the standards of social conformity – according to which, for instance, his creation will be bound to have a marital finality (v. the myth of the ancient Pygmalion, re-phrased by Shaw’s dealings). The Miltonic bachelor stands firm in front of all the pressures having to do with sex which would be expected to occur in the logical pattern of his newly acquired state, as common thinking would have it.

Yet the violence of his cynic attitude is not exempted from a nuance of genuine humanity, to be traced in his sudden ‘humility’: “I have learnt something from your idiotic notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully and I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance, I like them rather.”

2.1.5. The ‘Optimistic’ Cynic:

Broadbent, a genial, humanly kind character, stands out through his amount of sympathy and comfort he can offer (e.g. to Nora). Paradoxically, this ‘sympathy’ is equalled by his insensibility, and also a bit of hypocrisy, although his cynicism is a mere approximation of ‘real’ cynicism, as he fails to see anything outrageous in the way he himself behaves, or in his expectations he has of others in point of moral behaviour.

Broadbent’s unshakeable optimism is only conceivable by his association with Larry Doyle – an association in which both elements are mutually interactive. His method is, by and large, that of morality drama.12

Broadbent has a rather foggy conception of his ‘mission’ in ‘John Bull’s other island’ (i.e. Ireland), as he is certain that he was elected to bring reason and order among the Irish, in spite of their obviously laughing behind his back. Yet, there is an amount of undeniable creative power in this Englishman, which comes from his simplicity and optimism arising from the reality that it is worth living rather than criticizing. (His is, we think, an arguably – and comparatively – spiritualized Englishness). One could also call him a ‘participative philistine’.

v) Although the author firmly maintains that “(…) Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins’s physique and temperament Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject. (…) Although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honours on him”.

2.1.6. The cynical rogue:

Charteris (in ‘The Philanderer’) is a rather engaging character, as his openness in exhibiting amorality and his natural selfishness may eventually appeal to the desire for the unconventional in us readers / spectators. A rogue character, he can vent his own, and also our, subversive vitality. The basically farcical conflict in ‘The Philanderer’ can be safely seen as a conflict between male and female selfishness; his philandering can claim a motivation, in terms of ‘emotional blackmail’.13 In much the same terms (v. also Shaw’s mock-biological theories in relation with Evolution and the Life Force, within which women were constantly presented as paragons of acquisitiveness), Charteris’s running away from women (v. also Shaw’s definition of ‘philandering’) is self-defensive; likewise, his seemingly permanent need to make sentimental conquests is dictated by the need to bolster up his ego.

Sartorius’s cynicism (in ‘Widowers’ Houses’) is essentially based on the logical power of the cold fact; the most dramatic point of the play is when the unscrupulous indecent rack-renter turns on the decent young man of means and proves to him that he is equally guilty, that his profit too is based on victimizing, be it indirectly, other people.

Dubedat (in ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’) plays the rôle of the ironist. It is true that his character is protean. Although he is an amoralist (though not in the preeminently vitalistic sense the term has with André Gide).w) He is not the type of the golden-heartened villain (cf. Brassbound), but rather an aggressive individualist, who strictly sticks to his own profit and business. A cool, egotistic man and a cheater, Dubedat could be associated with other Shavian rogues and philanderers (e.g. Frank), but he is by far their better in point of financial matters. As a ‘revolutionist’ (in Shaw’s words), he is definitely subversive; he lacks the quality of a Jack Tanner. Morally, Dubedat is a figure that Shaw intended as a condemnation of evil in society, the perfect opposite of Blenkinsop, the good man. But he is not only an expression of the existence of social evil, as he has deeply engrafted in him a moral irresponsibility and extreme egotism. His only quality seems to be his inclination as a comedian, supporting his cheekiness and faking expertise. Technically, Dubedat represents the very gist of the intellectual schema of the play, meant to expose the theatrical activity as play(ing), i.e. as the opposite of life, and the completely lucid awareness of the abstract. Dubedat really enjoys the plan to be killed rather than resent it.

2.1.7. The ‘Realistic’ Cynic:

In ‘The Devil’s Disciple’, Shaw himself offered the clues to his prototype characters as: “(The character of) A is an Ishmael better than his peoplex) and therefore rated as worse, and rating himself so; B is a high-minded moralist, the clergyman of the place. He is A’s sternest censor and opponent. A hates him and jives at him, but B steadily refuses to condescend to resentment; Z is B’s wife. She is very hard on A and will not forgive him on principle like her husband. She is obsessed with his wickedness and has no suspicion that this obsession is so near love that a touch will reveal her to herself as passionately attached to A.”14

w) Gide, André (Paul Guillaume) (1869–1951): French novelist, essayist, critic, dramatist, diarist, and translator, widely regarded as the father of modern French literature. Gide is famous for his exploration of the conflict between self-fulfilment and conventional morality. His most notable works include L’Immoraliste (1902, The Immoralist), La Porte étroite (1909, Strait is the Gate), Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926-1927, The Counterfeiters), as well as his Journal (1939-1950). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.x) In the Bible, Ishmael was the son of Abraham and Hagar, his wife Sarah’s handmaid, driven away with his mother after the birth of Isaac (Genesis 16:12). Ishmael (or Ismail) is also important in Islamic belief as the traditional ancestor of Muhammad and of the Arab peoples (v. the twelve Arabian tribes in Genesis 21:8-21; 25:12-18).

Dick Dudgeon has not indeed accomplished his heroic deed (taking Judith’s husband place to the gallows) for love of her (Judith embodying the love motif); he simply declares: “I had no motive and interest.” If his action allowed an explanation based on love – so, through plain human attraction, unmediated by superior ideals or intimate convictions – everything would have been too simple; what he had done was actually done because he felt that he had to do in that precise way. (“What I did last night, I did in cold blood, caring not half so much for your husband, or (ruthlessly) for you… as I do for myself”).

Dick is the foreshadowing of the ‘Superman’: instinct-driven actions have to be checked; the earnestness of the gestures not having an immediate, utilitarian aim is his lesson. His cynical attitude is also manifest as a combative stand against sex idolatry (in which he has, again, much in common with Tanner). His actions, like his figure, are only motivated by his eagerness to shock and pull down the old established institution of romanticizing (although, paradoxically, the play has been, and still is regarded as a melodrama!). He wants the simple coldness and frankness of the action accountable for by more or less smooth and mawkish prejudices – moral, religious, etc.: “The only aim that is at all peculiar to me is my disregard of warm feelings. They are quite able to take care of themselves. What I want is a race of men who can be kind in cold blood”, as Shaw himself declared.15

Richard represents the quintessence of the realistically cynical Shavian hero; very much as, later on, Caesar wants to teach responsibility to mankind, especially with regard to the various painful teachings of history, Dick Dudgeon wants to teach them how to make the good well – i.e. following their true nature, and digging out from their own selves their genuine function in life. The false ideals (“the barren forms and observances”, including those of arid Puritanism, are opposed to life as-it-should-be. Dick’s heroism is manifest not because he wants to display it, but because he really has it – his action coming, as it were, from nowhere. His unmotivated decision means that he belongs rather to the future (in Shavian evolutionary terms) than to a dead / fake past; his realism lies in his instinctive wish to disentangle himself from the present (cf. Lavinia in ‘Androcles and the Lion’). Both these characters come to confront death in a triumphantly beautiful expression of free will, rather than allow death to choose and grab them.

Similarly, the minor character of Gen. Burgoyne, brilliantly drawn by his unmistakably ‘Shavian’ replies, is the free-thinking gentleman of the mid-18th century, who was too much of an aristocrat not to be a liberal. When Richard rhetorically (and, of course, cynically) asks him, after being convicted for treachery, if he cannot be shot like a soldier, Gen. Burgoyne promptly replies: “Now you speak like a civilian. Have you formed any conception of the condition of marksmanship in the British army?”; or, when one of his subordinated speaks of crushing the enemy in America, Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England – snobbery and jobbery, carelessness and sloth. His realistically cynical conception of humanity is also genial (“It takes all sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers”), unlike his conception of history – one of the many humbugs created by man’s need of self-delusion.

2.2. The Superman:

2.2.1. The Philosopher: One of Shaw’s favourite declarations – or at least the conception the public conceived of his beliefs – was that he envisaged the despotism / dictatorship of a single Napoleonic Superman (in which idea the influence of his reading Nietzsche’s philosophical essays was prevalent and quite obvious), for the salvation of humanity.

According to Nietzsche’s doctrine, the mere achievement of dignity, beauty or triumph is strictly to be called a good thing, irrespective of what the traditional moral, religious, etc., concepts, convictions or institutions may argue. Shaw completed it with a ‘sui generis’ prolongation of Darwinism (cf. also the influence of S. Butler), within which a pseudobiological intertwining of concepts (Evolution, Life Force) acknowledges woman as primary pursuer of the design of development; correspondingly, man is seen as the pursued (and more conscious) member of the pair; if biologically the female principle has the better, conscience (truth, generosity, etc.) are man’s attributes. Within the framework of this conception, Shaw contrived the image (and gave the name of) the Superman.

‘Man and Superman’, the first in the series of his ‘plays of ideas’ – and the most characteristic of this Shavian pattern, especially by its third act, presents the character-prototype of Tanner – Don Juan. It is he who voices the nascent theories of Shaw regarding Life Force, the conflict between the artist-man and ‘Mother-Woman’, and the ideal itself of the Superman. Tanner’s theories are surrounded by an air of fundamental scepticism, conveyed by the playwright, which are not necessarily convincing in their capacity as ideas, but rather serving an excellent demonstration of the ludic type. If Tanner is convincing, he is so because he knows how to play with ideas. Through John Tanner, undoubtedly the most combative and assertive character of the play, the author supplies arguments for the course of ideas making up the backbone of the play (a ‘dogmatic play’).16 The final result is a Tanner-superman of ideas, who quite often sins by the absolute / the extremism of his ideal involvement. A sensitive, earnest, yet susceptible man, he strives to contradict the first megalomaniac impression: among other things, he gives advice to the others, although he himself is bound to be a victim. For Tanner is really the victim of the ‘eternal woman’ / the feminine principle; in the final act, Tanner is actually presented as a willing victim of this principle: he is giving himself up to Ann, the Possessive female element; in the last scene, their embrace can be seen as a culmination, with Tanner’s reaching love union; when accomplishing it, Tanner admits that his will is fragmented, divided by that feminine intrusion. The truth is that he is not subjugated by an individual Ann, but by Ann symbolising a compelling social pattern – it is the need for human association. The very theme of the play can be easily summarised as the gradual imposition of compromise on the Superman, with its deadly (in an ideal sense) effects; it is the theme of the (self-)betrayal of man who delivers himself to the (acquisitive) woman.

Actually, the ‘philosophical man’ is presented in the interlude, under the mask of Don Juan (the matrix impersonation of Tanner, and also his – archetypal – forerunner); in this dream-interlude, the philosophical (super)man, ‘he who seeks’, stands in contemplation in front of the great mystery of the Will (of the world), desirous to discover it, and likewise the appropriate means of fulfilling it – in order to turn it into action, as action alone is the test of man’s real value (“Of all other sorts of man I declare myself tired; they are tedious failures”, he says); from the high pedestal of that aspiration, the superman can even afford to scorn – or rather, treat unceremoniously – the mission of art and beauty (although, in the scheme of evolution as conceived by Shaw, the artist is himself an independent realization of the Life Force, on a higher plane than woman, as well).

Don Juan symbolizes the search of self-awareness and self-understanding; evolutionary morals – incarnated in him – will be assigned the task to oppose the conventional morals (represented, in the dream scene, by Dona Ana and the Statue). But the absolute quest for

perfection and happiness (within the superman’s own lines), through understanding, is in most situations conducive to frustration. In sharp contrast to the Superman, the philistine (defined along the biological lines, which are the very first plane in the underlying stratum of the manifestation of evolution in Shavian terms) has the upper hand over the intellectual aspect of human existence; in our case, sexual instinct has the better of intellectual power: the pursuit and submission of the intellectual Tanner by the predatory Ann; the message of the character is that biological progress has to precede intellectual development. This cannot be said to rule out the possibility that, in the ‘Superman’s (i.e. the prototype’s) future, he should renew the efforts of his mind to better results, by dint of a surplus of the rational in human existence – its real goal, in fact, as Shaw postulates (v. Juan’s words: “That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding”.

As far as John’s ‘donjuanism’ is concerned, it is not only the voicing of the archetypal image supporting Shaw’s image – and scheme – of the Superman, but there is also a certain degree of objectivity in Tanner’s character-drawing; we can even ascribe it – starting from autobiographical details – to the syndrome of donjuanism as described by Jungy) – “an intuition of displaced sexuality”. Yet, the plethora of the verbal flow in the play justifies some of the critics’ remarks concerning Shaw’s ‘undramatic verbosity’, although we can argue that, in fact, the energy in Juan’s and Tanner’s speech is a proof of the manifestation of the divine Will (cf. Scho-penhauer’s irrational impetus).

As the Shavian idea of donjuanism, the very opposite of ‘biological / life energy’ in Shaw’s opinion, deserves a broader presentation, let us pinpoint its essentials, as they appear in the EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY preceding ‘Man and Superman’: “Why are our occasional attempts to deal with the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law that regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen. (…) Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer. The women, “marchesane, principesse, cameriere, cittadine” and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex is aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group themselves pathetically to sing “Protegga il giusto cielo”: they grasp formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political parties are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as they are, than be brought to the bar of the Nonconformist Conscience by Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as it was in the tenth century. As a result, Man is no

y) Jung, Carl (Gustav) (1875–1961): Swiss psychologist. He collaborated with Sigmund Freud in developing the psychoanalytic theory of personality, but later criticised Freud’s preoccupation with sexuality and excessive emphasis on sexual instinct, as the determinant of personality, preferring to emphasize a mystical or religious factor in the unconscious. Jung founded analytic psychology, developing the concepts of the collective unconscious and its archetypes, of the extrovert and introvert personality as the two main psychological types, as well as of the four psychological functions of sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling.

longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events the enormous superiority of Woman’s natural position in this matter is telling with greater and greater force. (…) On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition. The secret of the prosaic man’s success, such as it is, is the simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic man’s failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which he strays in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is either a poet or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see that it does not pay to spunge and beg and lie and brag and neglect his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman’s reproach to your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages of gregariousness. (…) The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and not with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the serious business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious business of nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to protect themselves against a too aggressive prosecution of the women’s business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespear’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. (…) And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the tragicomic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which finally overtakes him. (…) No doubt there are moments when man’s sexual immunities are made acutely humiliating to him. (…) Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand, attach penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol of immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of God by taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman to dispense with without compelling himself to dispense with her. All in vain. Woman must marry because the race must perish without her travail. (…) It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits for the fly. But the spider spins her web. (…) Accordingly, we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the “self-sacrifice” (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and the like, as mere hors d’oeuvres”.

The same motif of the impetuous aspiration of the superman towards full understanding of the world shapes the mythopoetic-archetypal unfolding of allegories (‘voice’, rather than

characters) in Shaw’s ‘Bible of Creative Evolution’, as his play ‘Back to Methuselah’ was jokingly called. The seriousness of the hypotheses contended is backed by versions of humanity (cf. also today’s science fiction productions), the supreme instance / the authorial stance being the Philosopher and the Prophet; in this particular case, the analogy between God the demiurge and the artist is transparently implied. Starting from the primordial couple and Cain, the perpetrator of the first murder, the human race will have developed towards greater and greater responsibility; it will be paralleled by increased reflexivity, another attribute of the Superman. The rational typologies of the Shavian future in ‘Back to Methuselah’ constitute characters representative of a new, superior morality (that of responsibility), the fruit of rationality and the capacity for abstract thought; with the Longlivers, for example, old age stands for this augmented reflexive capacity, allowing them the objectivity needed to surpass human affection; in Part IV, The Elderly Gentleman, another ‘persona’ of the Superman, voices the tradition which has been taught to him – that of ‘mortifying the flesh’; the higher degree of abstraction will primarily mean the directing of human action, through the sublimation of the human passions, out of sterile individualism and egotism and towards a new social, altruistic conscience.

2.2.2. The Responsible Superman:

The essence of the issue at stake in Shaw’s delineation of his Caesar is whether there can be power without corruption or alienation of any other kind. Caesar’s election as Shaw’s historical ‘superman’ was done due to the emperor’s actual stature of a hero: he was in a way predestined to be chosen by Shaw, Caesar was a Shaw hero; a great military leader without being a soldier at heart, a great leader of his nation without being a ‘democrat’: Julius Caesar attracted Shaw no less by his positive than by his negative enormousness.17 We can substantiate our claim that Caesar is, with Shaw, a superman through the fact that the Shavian Caesar has virtue; he does not earn it – he is really (even in his own ‘undemocratic’, sometimes didactically dictatorial way) a good man. Thanks to his having more virtus / earnestness, Caesar is the superman-hero, or, to put it in the Calvinistic way (cf. Shaw’s Puritanism), he is one of the elect. In his ‘superman’ capacity, Caesar is superior to other men through a quality which, strangely enough, does not derive from his moral, but from his rational reservoir: he loves more by the very fact that he hates less.18

His mercy is rational, too: like Shaw, he seems to dislike waste (of human lives, material means, time, etc.); the only way in which he can conceive of, and indulge in, a massacre (forced upon him, as it seems) is by a sort of instinctual rationality: his great purpose is also that of the Evolution. As a superman, Caesar fills in the role of ‘man of destiny’; he aspires to reaching his mission by being not only a raisonneur, but also a (rational) teacher; his ‘schoolmastering’ is directed not only towards Cleopatra (in whom he sees the teachable, hence improvable offspring of a whole nation / civilization), but also towards educating / edifying the peoples (i.e. the germs of future history-making); along which Shavian conception he is, again, ‘undemocratic’. Caesar wants to teach them commonsense, not only (moral) responsibility. As we mentioned earlier, his two, polar encounters with the Sphinx mark the useless passing by of time, which failed to teach them practically anything; across this seemingly blank, colourless succession of unavailing centuries of history, the superman in Caesar instinctively longs for the possibility to leave a trace at least – in the people’s souls, if anywhere.z)

z) For the ‘didactic’ mission of the drama, see also ‘Pygmalion’; in one of the prefaces to ‘Pygmalion’ (1913), one of Shaw’s most famous plays, in which Professor Henry Higgins, the ‘Pygmalion’, transforms a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into a lady (a play later made into the world famous musical comedy “My Fair Lady”, and which seems to have been one of Shaw’s absolute favourites in point of ‘didactic tone’), Shaw said: “(…) I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that great art can

2.2.3. The Hero:

The character in ‘The Devil’s Disciple’, Dick Dudgeon, establishes himself as the prototype of the ‘new’ hero – he reaches this status taking support on a new kind of redemptive faculty: that of involving himself in life’s meandering course without being so to speak compelled by more or less official / universally accepted rules of conduct, or by the primitive, visceral need for mere survival. His action is that of a perfect puritan, in spite of his being at loggerheads with established religion; being totally gratuitous (in moral terms), his choice stands out as heroic. Dick, ‘the devil’s disciple’, has been brought up in a puritan background in which religion has gradually died away; being confronted with his mother oversized ego and passion of hatred, he has turned his starvation of religion into a ‘Diabolonian’ religion (v. Shaw’s preface). Thus, his heroic stature approximates the Wagnerite dimension Shaw was so familiar with – he turns himself into the heroic Übermensch (‘Our newest idol, the Overman, celebrating the death of godhead; (he) may be younger than the hills; but he is as old as the shepherds. Two and a half centuries ago our greatest English dramatizer of life, John Bunyan, ended one of his stories with the remark that there is a way to hell even from the gates of heaven, and so led us to the equally true proposition that there is a way to heaven even from the gates of hell. A century ago William Blake saw, like Dick Dudgeon, an avowed Diabolonian: he called his angels devils and his devils angels. (…) Have they [= those who consider him original] not heard the recent fuss about Nietzsche and his Good and Evil Turned Inside Out?”). So, Dick’s heroism is the sanctified aura of moral non-conformism; it is the power springing from the principle underlying his conscience that endows the man (i.e. Dick) with the positive force of heroic moral.

2.2.4. The Reflexive character:

As a Shavian ‘Superman’, and no less a Shavian ‘voice’, King Magnus in ‘The Apple Cart’ stands for conscience and virtue in his dealings with the Cabinet, that grouping of puppet-like, mean, caricaturized nonentity politicians. Very much like the other stances of the Shavian superman-type, King Magnus lets himself be victimized into submission by the female element – in his own case, the queen, Jemima (whose name can say alone a great deal about her domineering attitude – cf. also its sound reeking of trifling triviality).

Magnus’s quality of a (mock-)demigod is fatally – and tragically – restricted by his very royal office, e.g. he confesses, in ironically feigned resignation, not only that he is obliged to sign all sorts of documents in which he has no interest whatever, and which more often than not mean nothing to him – especially death sentences –, but also, even more tragically it seems, that he has no power to sign those death sentences he may think appropriate. Faced with the pestering bunch of the little fraud politicians, Magnus has to go through the ordeal of defending, through the weapon of reflexivity, the idea of monarchy – and, strange as it may seem at first sight, the idea of demagogueless democracy; but he does not do that for the sake of the institution of monarchy itself or for his own sake, but in an attempt to wittily counterattack the encroachment of these frauds’ ideas and declarations upon real democracy – a democracy of the spirit, of course. When, for instance, they try to insinuate the ‘theory of the great rubber stamp’ as the great political implement of future governing, wishing (especially Boanerges, the Minister of Trade) to have him concede his part as a mere political puppet, the reflexive King comes up with the commonsensical argument that a monarch, however foolish or mean he might be, is still God’s creation, a fragment of divine will: he is a living soul! Wanting to bully the King into absolute submission (they even want a dumb king!), and among other things advising him to keep for himself every possible dis-

never be anything else”.

agreement with their own position, they precisely give him excellent opportunities to expound his brilliant, absolutely memorable ‘counterattacks’, such as his theory regarding the export of poverty; his ironic darts directed at the merely subservient economic and cultural status of the England in the play – one of the largest producers of cream chocolates and toys; his earnest, grave fear of (real) revolution; the paradox that monarchs cannot afford to have a good reputation, although, fortunately, they can afford to speak out their mind; the insidious way of turning to derision the speeches written by his puppet-like ministers, although he reads them; his general fake-worried fear that too wide democracy could fare even worse than it did at the time; or the fact that he declares himself to be the advocate of the great abstractions. For indeed King Magnus is a great, superhuman champion of rationally conducted abstraction(s).

2.2.5. The Magician of power / the Autocrat:

Captain Shotover in ‘Heartbreak House’ is a magus, a magician of power – in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Prospero or in the way of Faustus. With him, pecuniary interest is only marginal. Like Undershaft, Shotover possesses a latent Dionysian energy symbolized by dynamite; to him, power is to manifest itself in a destructive way – it is the manner in which, he thinks, it is easier to master; he wants to reach a ‘seventh degree of concentration’, in order to discover ‘a mind ray’ that will explode the ammunition in the belt of the adversary. Yet, he is against the idea of destruction, of negation as such; also, he proves ambivalence of attitude, in a very commonsensical gesture – when, in Act I, face-to-face with Hector, they reach the common conclusion that in the universal intertwining of good and evil one can quite easily draw distinctions, without ever being able to separate them from each other.

Despite his superhuman stature, that of the Magus, Shotover is not exempted of the torments of imagination; prophetic insight and Dionysian ecstasy are associated in him. He writhes under the burden of the crushing spell of intoxication (as rum is perceived as a token of power – the power to change the stillness of the world); his dreams pile upon one another in a monstrous muddle, making his old age miserable. The whole of the play is placed under the sign of implacable reduction of the state of consciousness and sobriety to imaginative dream-life / drunkenness; Heartbreak House itself may be compared to a spellbound palace, where the office of the conjurer is filled in by the author himself, as one of the figures / ‘voices’ of the play. It seems that in the scenes and the imagery of intoxication Shaw drew upon the Shakespearean precedent in ‘The Tempest’ (e.g. Shotover’s dynamite pit is associated with Caliban’s cave, in a cultural archetypal reading); one can also argue that the scenic delineation of the character had strong cultural reminiscences of Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’ – v. the dream atmosphere realized also through the use of scenic music (mainly resulting in the ‘suspension’ of dramatic action, reflecting “the arrested life of a society about to break up, and from its ruin perhaps release the germ of a new order”).19

Shotover, as the dominant figure in the ensemble of ‘personae’ in ‘heartbreak House’, may also be considered a transformation from the human character into the (imperfect) variant of an archetypal sage; the vagueness of his determination is added suggestions taken over from ‘King Lear’ and Prospero in ‘The Tempest’; a superhuman, supernatural story-book character, standing at the centre of the gloomy atmosphere of Heartbreak House, the character of Shotover boils down to the admitting of the insidiousness of evil and the difficulty to establish its relationship to the good.

2.2.6. The Incorrigible / the Unrepentant:

Andrew Undershaft’s univocity of mind with regard to the typical career of an industrial baron / tycoon who started at the very lowest step of the social ladder, determined to escape the

indignities of poverty and setting up an empire of armament manufacturing, represents the ‘super-human’ description of his cynically cold-blooded personality. Judged in itself, there is nothing wrong indeed with his career – quite on the contrary, it is a manly, responsible attitude to oppose life’s hardships (v. his own name, Andrew, derived from the Greek root signifying ‘man’). His courage and self-respect single him out from the philistines making up the bulk of society, spineless and economically voracious, predatory, vulture-like beings, looking like birds of prey. His unrepentant cynicism, when for instance he rebukes the long-suffering, despised worker he meets in the Salvation Army barracks (“Shirley (angrily): Who made your millions for you? Me and my like. Whats kep us poor? Keepin’ you rich. I wouldn’t have your conscience, not for all your income. –Undershaft: I wouldn’t have your income, not for all your conscience, Mr. Shirley”) is so Shavian that his remark can be justly considered the Superman’s clear-sightedness with regard to all prejudices; it is a fully realistic approach to realities which depend upon man’s active participation. Unlike it, a weak, non-participative attitude, even in the guise of morality, is a shallow comfort, and really a cowardly, hence immoral attitude (cf. Nietzsche’s view of social and moral hypocrisies).

A Machiavellian character, Undershaft is (also along Nietzschean lines) the embodiment of the governing classes, which Shaw defined as a body of determined men with the courage to kill (v. also Caesar’s dimension as a superman). In the triad Mephistopheles–Dionysos–Undershaft (i.e. power–vocation-and-inspiration–arms), there is no place for the (un-Nietzschean) dimension of Christian love; in governing, it would be utter futility. Love and mercy, giving up force, even in response to force, could only be conducive, in Undershaft’s terms, to social failure, to ruin; since fabrication of goods is quite an honourable activity, why then should arms manufacturing be otherwise than honourable? “Undershaft inexorably insists (that) government and rule means killing; all political progress … rests ultimately on the willingness to kill.”20

According to Shaw’s view, Undershafts’s triumph is inevitable, as fully proved by his initiation of the two romantic ignorants, Barbara and Cusins, from innocence to experience; Undershaft accomplishes Barbara’s initiation towards the world of will in his capacity as a magus, an inspired shaman.

As a magician, Undershaft literally hypnotizes Barbara (v. the stage directions regarding Barbara in the scene of her conversion); as a matter of fact, the very armament factory she can now see seems to have magic, magnetic power over Barbara; through it, the Superior Will devours, so to say, its progeny, gnawing their indecision into total submission to its evolutive, unseen ends – actually, by transforming the two young people into its ‘instruments’.

2.2.7. The ‘commonsensical’ Hero:

Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’ was meant as a dialogue between ancient and modern worlds; the title character can be said to have raised herself, through sacrifice, to the figure of a Savior (cf. Jesus Christ).

Shaw’s Joan of Arc is a character in the making of which imagination holds an undeniably significant place; imagination is, if we come to think of it, also a distinct feature of the artistic genius; so, in Joan’s case, the association between (constructive) imagination and the larger world of the idea is but obvious (as will-power, courage and initiative, as fit expressions of the Idea, are also the attributes of the inspired individual: Joan is, if not a poëta, at least a ‘vates’, i.e. the – artistically – inspired individual); having said that, we have to underline her quality of being in-spired in a lucid manner. With Joan, G. B. Shaw’s interpretation of religion (i.e. in our case, Joan’s inspiration) as an active force went into the structural device of her ‘voices’. The voices enable Joan at first to prove her military and political genius (i.e. her inspiration as a leader) in a crisis of unprecedented gravity – although they fail her in the end. In the cathedral scene, which represents the bridge between the two phases of her short career, Shaw faces the Maid with

Dunois – which will prepare the way for the final catastrophe. The commonsensical dimension of her character is now to be enforced upon her by the cool facts prevailing over the diminishing quality of the voices. “Up to now she has had the numbers on her side; and she has won. But I know Joan; and I see that some day she will go ahead when she has only ten men to do the work of a hundred. And then she will find that God is on the side of the big battalions”, as Dunois said, referring to the nearing of the moment of truth – in terms of earthly, as it were, commonsensicality. It is this very commonsensical view that strengthens her mystical, superhuman bond with God – as a result of her increasing isolation from the other presences of her ‘worldly world’; so: “I see that the loneliness of God [i.e. hence, resembling her own] is his strength… Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God: His friendship will not fail me, nor his counsel, nor his love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare until I die…”

Yet, Joan’s very ‘voices’ are “rationalized”, as Shaw interpreted them as evidence of her vivid imagination, her instinctive genius. In a more simplified reading, the voices can be seen as the best metaphor-image of nascent nationalism at that time of history. Without being in any way an impostor, Joan replaces the people’s understandable fear in fight (“Our soldiers are always beaten because their are fighting to save their skins; and the shortest way to save your skin is to run away”) with the faith in commandments coming from ‘up above’; still, her patriotism – i.e. the most commonsensical virtue of a superhuman type character – is delivered in the predominantly religious forms of the period. Even her fanaticism is commonsensical, plain-spoken, hence righteous, expressing some sort of deeper, paradoxically rational creed.

2.2.8. Napoleon, or the undermining of the idea of Superman:

‘The Man of Destiny’ stages, in a ‘harlequinade’ (in Shaw’s own words), through the contrast opposing Napoleon and The Strange Lady, the same male vs. female conflict familiar in any of the Shavian schemes enacting the (Evolutive) Will. This time, it is a conflict between a man of action and a woman of glib tongue and plenty of words; the qualities of the male character are heightened by the general quasi-tragic atmosphere deriving from a universal passion: fear. The play is a little comedy about Napoleon, ‘the man of Destiny’, intended as a foreshadowing of Shaw’s following creation staging figures of ‘supermen’; “it is a kind of parody of ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ before it was written.”21

A recurrence of Napoleon is the character in ‘Back to Methuselah’; in the Oracle scene, he is a parallel to the significant couples in Shaw’s other plays (especially Bluntschli–Sergius in ‘Arms and the Man’), as the epic hero recedes to the stature of a mere clownish silhouette in the burlesque scene of the Priestess who shoots at him, but misses him, to his comical, peevish desolation. In that scene, the Neitzschean type, the Superman, dwindles to a concentrated Farcical Falstaffian sketch.22

2.2.9. The ‘mimicking’ superman:

The plane pilot in ‘Misalliance’, Joet Percival, presents a schematic, approximated image of the superman; he can only place himself at the extremities of the Nietzschean definition of humanity, through the tightrope metaphor (“a tightrope stretched between beast and superman”); as superman, Percival belongs to the brutish area, and as a gentleman he is a complete hypocrite23

(v. also the language he uses, literally stuffed with verbal clichés); if he acts superman-wise, he only does it as a mechanical action, in order to observe the furtherance of the plot necessities.

Percival is ‘heaven-sent’ in order to embark on a romantic quest (v. his name, including the Arthurian allusion of the Quest of the Holy Grail),aa) yet his would-be quest fritters away into nothingness, as the gang he leads can do nothing more than try to bully the failed assassin.

aa) Percival or Perceval was, in the Arthurian cycle, a knight in King Arthur’s court. This legendary figure dates back to ancient times, and is found in French, German, and English poetry from the late 12 th century onwards. Percival is the father of Lohengrin and the hero of a number of legends, most of which are associated with the Holy Grail. Also called Parsifal; the German equivalent of the name is Parzival.

2.3. Women Characters:

Motto: (including Shaw’s attempted definition of the ‘Unwomanly Woman) “The roman of chivalry has its good points; but it slowly dies of the Unwomanly Woman (….) When the woman appears and plays up to the height of their [i.e. the men’s] folly, intoning their speeches to an accompaniment of harps and horns, distributing lilies and languors to pilgrims, and roses and raptures to troubadours, always in the character which their ravings have ascribed to her, what can one feel except that an excellent opportunity for a good comedy is being thrown away?…”.24

2.3.1. The ‘Unwomanly Woman’:

This type character can be said to be a Shavian creation as specific to his character gallery as his ‘Superman’.

Mrs. Warren directly comes from Ibsen’s Nora (in that play, the type of the emancipated woman is presented, in revolt against the slavery of the bourgeois, male-dominated, family; it opposed the crude economic domination to the feminine principle, corresponding to the soul’s truth, i.e. the spiritualized principle). With Shaw, that comparatively remote Ibsenian model is rewritten as the exposure of more or less cynical and vulgar mechanisms, achieved through the concreteness of social and economic relevance – as expressed in the key question: where does the money necessary for respectability come from? (See also the first play of this kind of relevance written by Shaw, ‘Widowers’ Houses’, which indicted the profit wrung out the misery of the slum-dwellers). In a paralleled to Ibsen’s outlook, the idea of guilt is implicitly driven home to the audience by the author – these may resent, in turn, part of the guilt.

Why is Mrs. Warren ‘unwomanly’ – apart from the above social conditioning? She is so first of all because she is a businesswoman (cf. the reversal of gender aiming at bitterly comic effect, very much as it was used by Shaw in changing the grammatical gender in the title of the play ‘Widowers’ Houses’, as against the Biblical quotation). Mrs. Warren, a respectable woman belonging to a society into which she perfectly fits, had a blamable past; this idea of promiscuity is following her, but she has no other choice than assuming it: her past is still part of herself – and, in the scene in which she confesses the whole truth of her previous existence to Vivie, Mrs. Warren demonstrates that, since the individual material datum was imposed to her, she is unable to deny it. She is unwomanly by the matter-of-fact quality of her cynicism, deriving from the / her essential pragmatic views and ways. Then, she is unwomanly because she finds it impossible to grow out of her status of a ‘doll’ (cf. Nora); in her case, it is that her appearance of an automaton operated by adverse fate, her evolving to the character of a conscious woman is virtually blocked; paradoxically, her evolution (revealing the specifically Shavian morale, towards acquiring a certainty that she can tell the truth, although she cannot get rid of its consequences, as well) confirms her ‘unwomanliness’. The extolling of the morals of upstarting and being socially triumphant, the praise of the winner irrespective of their ways, that ‘reversed Nietzscheanism’ (reversed, in the sense that it is simplified) that she preaches to Vivie, adds its clayey, unwomanly par excellence, shade to her materially (and univocally) directed self-assurance. Unwomanly by the dehumanizing effect of the adverse fortunes of her life, Mrs. Warren only allows herself to be re-humanized (and, hence re-’womanized’) by her sincere grief at the recollection – and avowal – of her ill-fated past: (Compare her attitude in: “…you dont know all that that [ i.e. being rich] means: you’re too young. It means a new dress every day; it means theatres and balls every night; it means having the pick of all the gentlemen in Europe… It means everything you like, everything you want… And what are you here? A mere drudge, toiling and moiling early and late for your bare living and two cheap dresses a year. Think over it”, and: “You! You’ve no heart… What chance had I?… Do you think I was brought up like you? Able to pick and choose my own way of life? Do you think I did what I did because I liked it or thought it right?”

While Vivie Warren is presented more as the caricature than an illustration of the ‘unwomanly woman’ (into her character cool-headedness and pragmatic acquisitiveness of the executive kind were blended), Mrs. Warren is meant to represent the thorough-bred type: her possessiveness is thoroughgoing, it goes to the essentials of the matter; she likes making money and she likes the very idea of being fit to do that: it will also be true to say that she lacks the skills for doing most any other activity than the one she is doing. If she is also something of a sentimental woman, even romantic in her own way, this does not go beyond the idea she conceives of her daughter as the end and ideal of her existence.

As for Vivie’s ‘unwomanly’ pragmatism, it could only be called so in view of the fact that it clashes with the Shavian life Force theory, in which it is the comparatively biological function / activity that is ascribed to the woman – as opposed to spiritually creative work; and Vivie looks and sounds the very prototype of businesslike involvement, of work in the most earnest sense of the word; as a matter of fact, the world of the minor characters in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ is specifically devised to illustrate and give a generalizing touch to the title premise (v. also the idea of indictment of filthy gain): in an environment in which practically everybody is involved in more or less shady dealings, as Crofts, Frank have a contribution to emphasizing the idea that actually we all benefit from immoral earnings; against this background, Vivie’s own businesslike practices, though obviously contributing to her ‘unwomanliness’, are a perfect example of clean morality, they are so to say ‘venial’, which greatly atones for her ‘unwomanliness’, making it a positive element.

2.3.2. Acquisitive Women:

The best illustration of this character type is Blanche Sartorius in ‘Widowers’ Houses’. “Blanche is a misogynist’s portrait of a woman: a spoilt termagant, sexually attractive (hence enslaving), basically the enemy of man (whom she scorns and devours), with no moral sense or any but the most narrowly selfish interests. And the antiromantic nature of his heroine consorts with Shaw’s final choice of title for the play: the domestic situation of the widower’s daughter is significantly related to the theme slumlordism”.25

As a matter of fact, it is for such type of women as the category represented by Blanche Sartorius and Henrietta Jansenius that Bernard Shaw felt the need to coin the term ‘acquisitive women’. Henrietta, the first wife of Trefussis, makes their relation impossible; Blanche herself expresses her acquisitive, materialistic sense by marrying Trench, thus submitted to materialistic, capitalistic gain; symmetry is here, as elsewhere in Shaw’s earlier works, used for the sake of composition.

This type should not be mistaken for, but rather clearly opposed to, that other type of woman, representative of a new and saner world: the self-possessed, realistic and intellectual woman (the prototype of this heroine is embodied by Lydia Carew in the novel Cashel Byron’s Profession). Grace Transfield in ‘The Philanderer’ is used by Shaw as a polarity term in order to mark the Shavian womankind clashing with the male principle – in the play, it is represented by Charteris, as ‘the philanderer’ is rejected by Grace.

Blanche was to be completed and fully evolved to a perfect portrait of the acquisitive woman through the character of Ann Whitefield in ‘Man and Superman’. Blanche, as a first draft, is a perfectly enslaving woman, commandingly dealing in emotions (‘a landlady of emotions’); her sexual allegiance makes her a man-devourer, she is a ‘predatory woman’ with ‘a terrifying temper’, which made Wilde express his admiration in most congratulatory terms: “I admire the horrible flesh and blood of your creatures”. Using the filter of a sociologizing view, we can see Blanche Sartorius as the perfect embodiment of that society illustrative of the biblical quotation of the title: “Woe onto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for

a pretence make long prayers!”, graphical of the pact between the world of the new aristocracy and financial speculation, decoratively wrapped in sanctimonious, false moral.

Unlike her continuators, Candida and especially Ann Whitefield, there is no good humour in Blanche. The name itseltf, Blanche (i.e. ‘white’), suggesting the purity of ignorance, is used by Shaw as a matter of antiphrasis – in a similar way to Dickens’s use of irony in Little Dorrit.

Her fundamental acquisitive energy – an early foreshadowing of ‘life force’, in Shavian terms – inspires an ardent passion of possession; the woman is virtually transfigured into the maternal female presence (cf. the type character of the ‘maternal woman’); this unwomanly, acquisitively maternal passion of possession reaches its acme in the fierce emphasis Blanche lends to her final words to Harry: “How dare you touch anything belonging to me?”

In line with Shaw’s concept of the Life Force and Energy, the feminine type of logic is the subjective logic of pleasure, of the aesthetic, raised, by dint of the sway of Life Force / natural Energy, to the level of ‘practical morality’ (as the feminine mind “accepts the congenial as true, and rejects the uncongenial as false: takes the imaginary which is desired for reality, and treats the undesirable reality which is out of sight as non-existent, building up for itself in this way, when biased by predilection and aversions, a very unreal picture of the external world”).

One of Blanche’s successors is Ann Whitfield; she is identified with the idea of Woman; the Woman is the matrix of Will. Ann and Jack are opposed in this allegorical conflict between abstractions couched realistically, as personifications of Will vs. Intellect and, respectively, Energy vs. Individuality.

Ann is the image of the Life Force (“one of the vital geniuses”, as she is called by the dramatist); consequently, Tanner told her – in Act I – that she is nothing but duplicity, hypocrisy, calculation in reaching her end, i.e. to entrap the Man: “You seem to me to have absolutely no conscience – only hypocrisy; and you can’t see the difference”. Curiously enough, there is not even the slightest image of the Shavian ‘New Woman’ in ‘Man and Superman’ (for the ‘New Man’ we have Straker).

2.3.3. Liberal Women:

The most illustrative character in this Shavian group of dramatis personae is Lady Britomart. It is based on the real-life prototype of Gilbert Murray’s mother-in-law (Murray served as the prototype for Cusins), Lady Rosalin Frances, Countess of Carlisle, a descendant of a Liberal family and herself battling for temperance, reform and emancipation of women; she led the National Women’s Liberal Federation, she considered and managed her family’s estate as if it were her own fief, closely taking care of the farmers’ welfare and morals. Shaw placed her at the centre of the groups of characters in the play as Lady Britomart proves a real spokesperson in behalf of the liberty of speech, which she associates with democratic franchise. With Lady Britomart, ‘right’ is tantamount to ‘propriety’, and ‘wrong’ means ‘impropriety’: her moralism is a rationalization of her social position (and the prejudices and privileges associated with them) – for instance, when the question occurred whether there should be a legal separation from Undershaft as a result of conflicting interests over the Undershaft heritage, which was traditionally given to a found children, her response comes in terms of ‘moral disagreement’.

From a social point of view, Lady Britomart can be seen as representing “the hereditary British governing class in its most enlightened and liberal aspect, but also under its limitations. For, with all her admirable civic energy, her vision is circumscribed by two iron-clad principles – her conventional morality and belief in the divine right of the aristocracy to rule the country”.26

Her reformism does not prevent her from being a moral ‘tyrant’, and moral indignation means nothing without critical attitude and action. She seems to be rather partial to treating her children according to a liberal principle of equality (“my children are my equals”, she declares), but she finally proves to be a monster of authoritativeness, occasionally bullying Stephen; in spite of this,

she is a well-intentioned mother and loves her children, even if her maternal love seems rather stifling to their personalities (maybe because her love is now single-directioned, since she feels the intention of her children’s father to disinherit them as a serious threat: it is the instinctual reaction of the mother who tries to defend her little ones).

Her liberal mind seems to stop short of understanding the fact that the poor, and generally the lower classes, do not respect their governors (actually, their betters); as a matter of fact, this apparently ‘aristocratic’ view is very representative of the Shavian opinion of the part ‘the elect’ have to play as leaders of the lower ranks of society; what Lady Britomart fails to understand, while having the poor’s welfare at heart, is that poverty does not elevate – not even in the simplest of the principles of sound morality – but degrades you.

2.3.4. Tough Women:

There are few figures of tough women in Shaw’s plays, e.g. Mrs. Dudgeon in ‘the Devil’s Disciple’, or the minor character of Cleopatra’s nurse Ftatateeta, in Caesar and Cleopatra’.

Dick’s mother is a monstrous woman; she is so hardened by the residual tendency of Puritanism towards sternness, as to be able to declare that she hates her children, because the heart of man is irretrievably wicked. Puritan determinism drives her against her sons, as one of them is an outcast and the other an imbecile; she is the very image of the failure of protestant doctrine, based on excessive discipline and tight, hard-and-fast morality (v. her bitter words addressed to Anderson): “We are told that the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. My heart belonged not to Timothy, but to that poor wretched brother of his that has just ended his days with a rope round his neck – aye, to Peter Dudgeon… He warned me and strengthened me against my heart, and made me marry a God-fearing man, as he thought. What else but that discipline has made me the woman I am?” She thinks that she must be the supreme instance in judging her son’s ways, and since she was his ‘earthly creator’, then it lies with her and no one else to hate him – and drive him away from her: “Well, I am Richard’s mother. If I am against him, who has any right to be for him?”

Ftatateeta, Cleopatra’s nurse – and, in some ways, her coach, too – is another embodiment of disproportionate will, which she wants to impose on her royal ‘pupil’. She sees her mission as belonging to the sphere of the divine, as she is the teacher, traditionally appointed to transform her trainee into tomorrow’s partaker in the Gods’ will; her authoritativeness is extreme because it is unlimited. In this ‘nursery play’ Ftatateeta infects young Cleopatra with her ‘impersonal’, traditional one may say, poison, as the evil in her goes unchecked into her pupil’s heart. “No power is more absolute and tyrannical than that wielded in the nursery.”27

2.3.5. Mother-Women:

2.3.5.1. Candida (the ‘Virgin Mother’):

Candida is the true ‘Virgin Mother’, as Shaw himself admitted; this term, applying to a type character, was actually coined by the author in strict reference to Candida. ‘Candida’ presents a view antithetical to that of Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’: instead of the woman conceived as the plaything of man in a male-dominated world, Shaw underlines the opposite view, that of woman’s influence over men and her dependence on her own strength. She was apparently inspired by Shaw’s mother’s image; she stands for the sway of the material creative force (cf. Shaw’s theory of natural force / Energy) – primarily biological force, which is later on opposed, in her relation with Eugene Marchbanks, to the artist’s need for freedom; she may be viewed as a kind of ‘seducer’ using her feminine natural power. In the same way, Miss Proserpine Garnett, a

secondary character, nicknamed Prossy (cf. the mythological name Proserpine / Proserpina / Persephone – the (Roman and Greek) goddess of natural, earthly fertility and wife of Pluto, queen of the underworld, who was allowed part of each year to leave it: her story symbolizes the return of spring, and the life and growth of corn – implying, in the play, the caricature through the diminutival name), Prossy makes a couple with Candida, symbolizing the purely material, physical aspect of the relationship between the feminine and the energetic, being thus opposed to Candida’s comparative spirituality; or subservient placidity versus driving force.

Her affinity with Eugene Marchbanks represents the mother-and-son affection.28 Since she does not advance towards bodily relations with Marchbanks, the ‘Virgin Mother’ in her reduces Eugene to the status of a child, driving him away from the sin of ‘moral incest’. The ambiguousness of her relation to him is scenically represented by the presence of the figure of the Holy Virgin when they meet. Shaw conceived Candida as transcending both morality (i.e. her marital relation to Morell) and art (i.e. her relation to Eugene); the dominant, maternal Candida finds it in her heart to stick to the mother-like component of her personality in remaining with the one of the two men in her life whom she really thinks the feebler: her husband, Morell.

As far as her presentation is concerned, Candida’s portrait is brushed with the fine touches of the really radiant quality of candidness (v. the name itself), embodying the figure of Victorian domestic purity, although as a dramatic character she is less than candid and open, or the personification of honesty. Her double identity as a character is shared between idealization and realistic presentation. “The ‘Woman Question’ the play presents may well be interpreted as the enigma an ambivalent attitude creates. Eugene Marchbanks comes to distinguish between the actual woman and the ideal to which he still does homage at the close of the play.”29

From the point of view of the imagery Shaw uses in depicting Candida, there are two main groups of images worth mentioning: the former appertains to the Christian tradition, and the latter is suggestive of Dionysiac irrationality (the first one conveys the signs of her social being, v. leitmotifs like: heaven, hell, prayer, divine. etc., as the second one is related to her Life Force image, v. mad, giddy, drunk, hysterics, etc.).

The last scene in ‘Candida’, in which the wife declares her determination to remain with the strong man because he is the weak man, can be judged as inspired by a rather Quixotic attitude; yet, human sacrifice is the attribute of the ‘motherly’ description of woman in the Shavian typology; Candida’s clear-sightedness, though cynical by definition (the character clearly belongs to Shaw’s Life Force gallery!), expels any hint of the notion of idolatry – so, finally we may assert that ‘Candida’ is very much closer to Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’ than previously expected.

2.3.5.2. Lavinia in ‘Androcles and the Lion’ is the type of the mother-woman inspired by faith. She is made the spokeswoman for the idea in the play: the greatness of something higher than human strivings can make life bearable (“I think I’m going to die for God; nothing else is real enough to die for”, Lavinia says). By the sincere quality of her faith, she is not reduced to the status of a mere ‘mother-woman’, but, by engaging in a struggle against the principle of evil, she comes nearer to the altitude of the Shavian ‘Superman’, yet fundamentally differing from the real Superman by the disinterested and all-encompassing character of her allegiance to reach higher spheres of existence – in her own case, moral existence. Lavinia is engaged in a determined pursuit of the good, denying any right of worship to anything that means cruelty, suffering or death (v. in the play the ominous image of the votive statue of Mars, a maleficent symbol). Lavinia has many things in common with her weaker sister, Barbara Undershaft: they are both aristocrats turning their backs on their own class and way of life in an attempt to find a new moral basis for their action, and they both discover in the end that many of the things they have pursued

are not true. Yet, in spite of their apparent defeat, their maternal, congenial love of those in need redeems them and effaces their Quixotry.

2.3.6. ‘Gentle Women’:

Nora, a minor character in John Bull’s Other Island’, is one of the rather few examples of ‘gentle’ women in Shaw’s plays; a fact which could be accounted for by his comparatively greater partiality, and attraction, to the ‘unwomanly’ type – or the New Woman, a category much more suited for his day and the needs of modern theatre, he strongly believed.

Nora is radically different from the type of woman embodied by Ann Whitfield in ‘Man and Superman’ or Blanche Sartorius in ‘Widowers’ Houses’; she is a warm character, the very image of simple integrity of woman, she has a definite ‘charm’ (which one of the characters, Larry, jocularly interprets through her food diet: tea and bread-and-butter); as a ‘gentle woman’, she is seen with a comprehensive eye by the author himself. One of the basic devices he uses in defining Nora is the opposition he establishes between the character of Nora and that of Keegan (the religiously inflexible man), thus making up a parallel between sternness / authority (i.e. Keegan) and Nora’s gentleness, representative of generally human love.

The feminine figure which comes closest to the authentic ‘Superman-woman’ for whom Dona Ana (in ‘Man in Superman’) has cried ‘to the universe’ is the dazzling heavenly ‘invader’ Lina Szczepanowska in ‘Misalliance’. She intrudes into the stuffy atmosphere of the mansion, with a view to undertaking positive action, partly in response to Hypatia’s plea for ‘adventures to drop out of the sky’; she resembles a bird of good omen; she is the Life Force incarnate, a goddess whose profession ‘is to be wonderful’. Lina is the Saint Joan of ‘Misalliance’. “She comes into that stifling house as a religious force”, as Shaw wrote in a letter. As an invader into the established social order, Lina represents salvation coming from the future, not the past, and embodying Shaw’s preference for evolution – vs. revolution.

2.3.7. Others:

Raina (the heroine in ‘Arms and he Man’) is the type of the histrion, of the false naïve. The coaching she receives from the matter-of-fact mercenary Bluntschli is, paradoxically, an initiation into the exercise of creative imagination, as living actually does involve acting. If she can have a light conscience about the necessity to tell lies, everything seems perfect with her. Obviously the most chidlish, and the most genuinely histrionic character in this play belonging to the group of the ‘Tales for the Nursery’ (v. M. Morgan, op. cit.), Raina makes Bluntschli’s best pupil, achieving, through her show of naïvety, the transition between ‘nursery’ and marriage, from ig-norance to wisdom (or, better, shrewdness), from spoilt infancy to maturity. Funnily, her evolution to dis-idealized reality passes through her own white lies and pretence of naïveness. As a histrionic character, Raina “can take up her mask and drop it at a signal, without discomposure, because her play-acting is deliberate, gratuitous and self-delighting, not in the least compelled by fear or desperate necessity.”30 Raina mixes the pleasure of play-acting with the useful acquisition of expertise in Bluntschli’s debunking, ‘demythologised’ system of truths. Is seems that the author wanted to imply the feature of angel-like, jocular shrewdness through the name of the girl (v. the Slavic root rai ‘paradise’).

2.3.8. Conclusions: The range of the Shavian women characters is very broad, in keeping with the attraction Shaw always felt for women as vivid, intelligent, demonstrative, resourceful characters in the drama. It is obvious that – the allegedly naïve – Raina, Mrs. Andersen, a woman having a very high opinion of herself and not yet in possession of her maternal quality at its maturest point, perceptive, yet lacking the will and the force to change the things she can

perceive, the kittenish Cleopatra etc., all belong to the type-form of the possessive woman, while Candida, Lady Cicely (in ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion’) or Gloria are definitely related to the more genial principles of humaneness.

2.4. The Unadaptable Hero:

2.4.0. Preliminaries – drawn from Schopenhauer:

♦ The man of genius has a kind of abstract equanimity (Heiterkeit), conditioned by objectivity (vollkommenste Objektivität);

♦ Also, he has earnestness, the mainstay in point of ethics of the intellectual;♦ He mainly has abundant spirit (der Genius – a thing of inspiration coming from without,

as different from das Genie – the inner gift);♦ He is considerably different even from the wisest men whose intellect is focused on

practical things. The separation of intellect from willpower leads to a sort of madness (i.e. the opposite of wisdom). The genius uses his intelligence in a way that runs counter to practical things, namely with a view to conceiving their objective essence; he has a special power of concentration and a great passional availability;

♦ He is essentially a solitary man;♦ He has a childish behaviour (Genius is but “renewed puberty”) and sublime naïvety and

simplicity;♦ Schopenhauer said that “Genius contemplates a different world, ideally different from

the other people’s; yet the difference is that this world is reflected in his brain more objectively…”

Motto: Omnes ingeniosos melancholicos esse (“Geniuses are melancholic”) – (Aristotle)

2.4.1. The ingenuous scientist:The foremost image of the ingenuous scientist is, in ‘Pygmalion’, the phonetics professor

who, starting from the bet that he will be able to introduce a flower-girl into a royal garden-party without being found out, by changing her accent completely through a six-month’s study-course, creates a totally different (from a social, but also spiritual point of view)bb) human being. But

bb) Here is one of Shaw’s life-long obsessions, that with phonetics and the simplification of English spelling (he even bequeathed money to that purpose), also relating to the actual figure of Henry Sweet: “The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. They have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, the illustrious Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of Visible Speech, had emigrated to Canada, where his son invented the telephone; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a London patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. (…) When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. (…) He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools

Higgins is not only a man of science – he is also a ‘Miltonic poet’, and consequently, his part in the structure of the play is that of an artist. Apparently, he exploits the flower girl, not materially or emotionally, but intellectually and morally; he uses her as a speaking automaton in order to win the bet – and also for the sake of his experiment – and he does not care a bit for her feelings or for her fate after the bet is won. Yet it is the artist that gets the worst of the experiment: the creation rebels against her creator. She defends her newly evolved personality against his overbearing, bullying and engulfing personality, and leaves him with the conscience of his loss. The point is that this apparent inhumanity does not actually belong to Henry Higgins; one cannot blame him – as a ‘scientific artist’ – for hurting Eliza’s feelings, since he is in fact as irresponsible towards his ‘material creation’, which he really perceives as part of the environing strictly material reality, no more than one can accuse a child for breaking their toys. With Higgins, ingenuousness gets (dangerously) close to cruelty, and it happens quite naturally – v. the definition of genius as ‘belated childhood’.

Professor Higgins is the very image of the ingenuous scientist, having no heed for the things that do not come in direct contact with the activity in his laboratory; he lives under the permanent fascination of his activity, which can be characterized both as ‘esoteric’ and ‘ludic’. If we think of his isolation from the external world in terms of game-playing, we can easily discern in his playing with Eliza the type of irresponsible and enthusiastic game with the ‘human(ized) doll’ (like a little girl or boy who happens to tear a limb off a doll, just out of mere curiosity, without, seeming to consider the possible pain generated by her / his doing so). Very much as with Swift’s Laputans, who indulged in drug-like scientific research, the implicit message in the play is that the man of science, the real scientist should also see to outside world facts, belonging to the society he lives in. But, like the bladders which hit the scientists in Swift’s parable, the limitation Higgins subjects himself to, his self-confinement within the narrow circle of his preoccupations backlashes on him; he is suddenly shocked to find that teaching Eliza phonetics is not everything: she will also have to be taught grammar, good manners, but also, and more importantly, she will have to learn how to think in accordance with the mere patterns she has had her head stuffed with, and repeated like a machine; finally, Higgins comes to realize the strange thing that “her soul is the quaintest of the lot”. Acting as raisonneur in the scene of the encounter with the Eynsford-Hill family, during a garden-party, when Eliza astounds everyone present with the exotic parrot-like speech lacking any trace of real message, Higgins realizes (and here the aim of this convention of ingenuity imposed by Shaw is clear) the thinness of the conventional veneer of that instance of ‘polite’, and, at any rate, correct, piece of talk, with the sudden intrusion of the underworld upon the sham represented by the rules of polite conduct; suddenly, the ‘naïve raisonneur’ understands (on behalf of the audience) that such norms should rather take support on solid culture and commonsensical behaviour than the mere practising of void forms.

The other point about Higgins’s ‘naïvety’ is the outcome of the experiment itself; unable to predict its eventual development, Higgins-Dr. Frankenstein is taken by surprise: his robot-like creature has a soul, after all! Actually, he has carried out two experiments: on Eliza and on Doolittle. Through the two experiments, Higgins and Doolittle remain the same as they were, while discovering a new consciousness in judging people; although one of them starts an experiment (i.e. Higgins) and the other one is submitted to one (i.e. Doolittle), their revelations are rather undramatic, yet peculiarly interesting: the former learns that he has still to learn, especially as far as the human soul is concerned, and the latter becomes aware of the power of disseminating one’s morals (even when they happen to be profoundly amoral). So, when confronted with bare reality, the naïve genius proves no better than a dustman.

2.4.2. The optimistic unadaptable:

gladly. (…) His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language.”

In ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, the criticism of optimism (through the opposition Broadbent–Keegan) is done in a parallel to that of established religion: Keegan’s faith is the manifestation of the 19th century type of traditional moral; Keegan’s moral vision is impregnated with the dignity of the choosing between evil and good, between heaven and hell (in which context, the figure of Nora is reminiscent of Catholic Ireland – standing for the symbolic character of Faustus’ betrayed Marguerite). Keegan is the embodiment of the preacher whose efforts are vain, the ‘vox in deserto clamantis’, starting from his good faith, strengthened by ascetic exercise and rigid habits, stern on the others and also on himself, yet the result – which little interests him, in fact, as he cannot really think in positive, material terms – is logically null.

With Broadbent, it is self-delusion that may characterize him as an ‘optimistic’ misfit; through his expressiveness, vivaciousness and comparative sympathy with the others, Broadbent makes the most likeable character of the play, although to his direct and transparent motivation, simplicity and self-delusion is added a touch of vanity, in order to better delineate him from a human point of view, it seems. Self-delusion is enacted masterly in Act IV – in the scene of the mutual interchange of Nora and Broadbent; the comic show of self-delusion is centred upon his humourlessly talking about his ‘strong sense of humour’ and insistence upon being “a plain unemotional Englishman, with no powers of expression” – in spite of the fact that emotion is about to choke him.

2.4.3. The Unadaptable in disguise:In ‘Major Barbara’, the main point the play makes is Barbara’s conversion. Her initial

innocence / ignorance can really be perceived as naïveness. Her conversion – essentially the altering of her decision not to accept wealth – is the passing from a restricted view of life, limited by a self-imposed conception (and convention), to ‘real life’. As the case is not only of accepting money, but also the fullness of life, accepting the world as the ambit of real existence; a world from which Barbara initially meant to evade flying into a system of ‘pure’ values – yet all the more difficult to achieve from a practical point of view. In that world, dirty / tainted money was prohibited – but so were lots of social and human values coming with it, unfortunately. Then, her final conversion is actually the tearing off of the mask / ‘disguise’ from her face: from ideal faith to fact.

2.4.4. But Barbara is not actually the real representative in the play of the kind of rigid, somewhat shallow, dogmatic kind of Christianity preached by the Salvation Army; it is the caricatured character of Jenny Hill, through which the Christian spirit is however expressed essentially through her womanly victimized way: she always forgives; although she has something of a small automaton of the enthusiasm of Christian love, although she often is sentimental in expressing compassion and comfort (sometimes she even sins by over-sympathy, a fact even Barbara is aware of), she deserves her place in the Salvation Army by the genuineness of her feeling; Shaw used this character in order to expose lack of adherence to reality, while at-tacking the sentimentality of late Victorian evangelicalism – and, correspondingly, the womanly ideal underlying it, at least partly. Jenny’s factual naïveness frustrates her by imposing severe limits on her capacity to understand the real existence; but, on the other hand, she serves as a ‘re-versed model’ for Barbara in correctly finding her own perceptions and thus repelling the self-betrayal and vulnerability of ‘orthodox’ religion’s dogmas. As a conclusion to the whole of the section Unadaptable, we may quote Shaw’s words: “‘Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for all living things” (Schopenhauer said); ‘Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for reason’ (Shaw said)”.31

2.5. The Raisonneur (in fact, mask-characters –sometimes even ‘aside-characters’):

2.5.1. The ‘cosmic’ raisonneur:

In ‘Man and Superman’ the range of characters is extremely wide - cosmic as has been said: it is the first notable play Shaw wrote in this manner. It presents, as a mask-character, the ‘philosophic man’ (in Don Juan’s expression): “I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophical man”).

This mask-character functions as an instance of the authorial self. His generalizing sentences are the backbone of the display of ideas intertwined in the fabric of the play. In the Hell Interlude, Bon Juan adds comical nuances to the raisonneur-‘philosophic man’, endowing him with silly cleverness / clownish wisdom – one more of the hypostases employed by Shaw in the demonstration of the life Force doctrine, the very essence of the message of ‘Man and Superman’; as a character proper, Juan cannot be saved by the newly acquired wisdom.

2.5.2. The detached observer:

A similar figure, only lacking any suspicion of cosmicity this time, is Androcles in ‘Androcles and the Lion’. He has even clownish shades – v. the pantomime sequence of the lion. His Christian pathos may be of some assistance in outlining his figure as a raisonneur (through the really memorable generalizations concerning the human nature that he makes); but it is greatly and beneficially modified by his humour, his detached, frank, amused views of the situations that enables him to keep his heart up; the very figure of the henpecked man, Androcles escapes into the satisfaction his mind gives him when he contemplates the miserable, stupid ceaseless bullying of his wife.

2.5.3. The unpretentious monarch: King Magnus

King Magnus in ‘The Apple Cart’ is the very mouthpiece of Shaw’s views on democracy, i.e. real, assumed, thoroughbred democracy; being conscientious, he feels he must also be unpretentious: “…I have packed the cards by making the King a wise man and the minister a fool. But that is not at all the relation between the two… Not being as pampered and powerful as an operatic prima donna, and depending as he does not on some commercially valuable talent but on his conformity to the popular ideal of dignity and perfect breeding, he has to be trained, and to train himself, to accept good manners as an indispensable condition of his intercourse with his subjects, and to leave to the less highly placed such indulgences as tempers, tantrums, bullyings, sneerings, swearings, kickings: in short, the commoner violences and intemperances of authority… King Magnus’s little tactical victory, which bulks so largely in the playhouse, leaves him in a worse plight than his defeated opponent, who can always plead that he is only the instrument of the people’s will, whereas the unfortunate monarch, making a desperate bid for dictatorship on the perfectly true plea that democracy has destroyed all other responsibility (has not Mussolini said that there is a vacant throne in every country in Europe waiting for a capable man to fill it?), is compelled to assume full responsibility himself, and face all the reproaches that Mr Proteus can shirk…” (in Shaw’s Preface to ‘The Apple Cart’).

2.5.4. Mystics of the Idea: Andrew Undershaft

In Shaw’s words (in the Preface to ‘Major Barbara’), Undershaft firmly, unconditionally, believes in the idea of sincerity (cf. the Kantian absolute moral commandment), even at the risk of incurring opprobrium from the ‘well-meaning”; for him, being rich is a virtue, contrary to the Christian precepts, which he is continually ready to demonstrate and argue for: “Undershaft, the hero of ‘Major Barbara’, is simply a man who, having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when society offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative trade in death and destruction, it offered him, not a choice between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy. His conduct stands the Kantian test, which Peter Shirley’s does not. Peter Shirley is what we call the honest poor man. Undershaft is what we call the wicked rich one: Shirley is Lazarus, Undershaft Dives. Well, the misery of the world is due to the fact that the great mass of men act and believe as Peter Shirley acts and believes. If they acted and believed as Undershaft acts and believes, the immediate result would be a revolution of incalculable beneficence. To be wealthy, says Undershaft, is with me a point of honour for which I am prepared to kill at the risk of my own life. This preparedness is, as he says, the final test of sincerity. Like Froissart’s medieval hero, who saw that “to rob and pill was a good life”, he is not the dupe of that public sentiment against killing which is propagated and endowed by people who could otherwise be killed themselves, or of the mouth-honour paid to poverty and obedience by rich and insubordinate do-nothings who want to rob the poor without courage and command them without superiority”.

2.5.5. The garrulous observer:

Cusins, Barbara’s fiancé, the embodiment of universal war that religion wages on the world, is so to speak an interior, participative raisonneur; his part in the economy of the play is that of the Greek choir, as conceived originally (cf. Frank in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’): he is the observer, the commentator, upon which much of the comic tone of the play depends; as an observer, he is well qualified to point out and light up for the spectator the mythical analogies, or

the poetic, philosophical, etc. implications (he is actually a professor of Greek). His outer dynamism (v. his Dionysian appurtenance: the leader, inebriated with power, fervidly marching, relentlessly and victoriously launching his attacks on the enemy – here, Sin) finally turns into inner / reflexive dynamism: the power and faculty of observing those around him.

2.6. The Convert:

2.6.1. The Modern Faustus:Adolphus Cusins, if seen as a convert, represents the academic scholar striving to integrate

in the society ‘as such’ (especially in political life); based on the real figure of Shaw’s friend G. Murray, a professor of Greek himself (Undershaft gives him the joking name Euripides, thus implying that he looks on human affairs with a mixture of ironic pessimism and pity), Cusins finally gives in when brought face-to-face with the facts of armament, being subjugated by the ‘magus’ Undershaft. As a convert, Cusins acts as a kind of go-between in the relation Barbara–Undershaft. His marriage to Barbara (in fact, to Undershaft’s daughter and inheritor) represents a possibility he is given to ally his scholarly knowledge and ideals to power. His real motives are still shaded by ambiguity; his agreement may be interpreted as a Faustus–Mephistopheles pact, in which the latter can be seen as an embodiment of Life Force in Shavian terms. Cusins’s conversion is to be a theatrical paradox and a philosophical synthesis between the spiritual power of Barbara and her father’s material power – i.e. between emotion and money. Making the pact with Mephistopheles-Undershaft, Cusins prepares the finale, while giving back to Barbara the leading / protagonist position. The agreement between Undershaft and Cusins means the paradox of ‘good in evil’. Along the Nietzschean concepts, Cusins’s decision to accept a directorship in Undershaft’s firm can be interpreted as his gaining the power he needs in order to lead the others, while dominating his own passions: he now wants to wage war in the name of a newly and synthetically, dialectically acquired power – which he can actually use in token of rejecting the Old Testament philosophy in favour of the doctrine of evangelical forgiveness. On the other hand, the Dionysian–Apollonian oppositioncc) is solved out, in a synthesis owing much to the relative lack of firmness in the auctorial suggestion of the opposition Cusins – Undershaft.

2.6.2. The ‘Double Convert’:

The double convert, as embodied in Barbara, and also through the parallels she establishes with other characters of the play – such as Undershaft, Cusins – has as an idea basis such Shavian topics as Christian morality, genteel poverty, religious conversion, absolute moral principles.

Barbara undertakes the conversion-marriage following the lines of the evolutionary experiments – as seen within the framework of Shaw’s theory of Energy and Life Force; she has it justified as such, unconsciously desiring to be part of the crossing of types and classes, for Barbara has Lady Britomart’s genius for leadership and mothering, yet none of her class limitations. On the other hand, maybe on account of so little caring about ‘propriety’ (cf. Lady Britomart) and good forms, she identifies herself with the religious spirit of the crowd, throwing away upper-class prejudices and joining that reforming religious sect carrying on its activity at the time, the Salvation Army. Her conversion is double, as it is a social and moral conversion at the same time: Barbara accomplishes the course between absolute, violent contestation and the understanding of the usefulness of wealth; on the other hand, it accomplishes the way towards a more practical kind of moral religion, called on to acknowledge the role of the few elect.

cc) Apollonian / apollonian means: (1) “of, or relating to Apollo, or the cult of Apollo”. (In classical / Graeco-Roman mythology, Apollo was the son of Zeus and Leto, and brother of Artemis. He was worshipped as the god of light / the sun, pastoral life, poetry / poetic inspiration, music, medicine and healing, archery, and prophecy; the legendary birthplace of Apollo and Artemis was the island of Delos in the SW Aegean Sea, in the Cyclades, which, in classical times, was considered to be sacred to Apollo). (2) In the philosophy of Nietzsche, the term Apollonian / apollonian denotes or relates to the rational, ordered, balanced, and self-disciplined aspects of human nature, i.e. to the set of static qualities that encompass form, reason, harmony, sobriety, equilibrium, etc.

But Barbara, in spite of her original resolution, firm and rather garrulous, and demonstratively expressed, in spite of her will to turn her back on wickedness, is as unable to turn her back on life as Cusins is. By choosing faith, courage and action (along the same course of evolution as Cusins – i.e. towards Dionysian patterns, energetically participative forms), she feels redeemed from the triviality and boredom of mere conventional social forms (i.e. ‘the drawing room’).

For Barbara, the crux of her conversion is the understanding of social realities; like Bill Walker, one of the pensioners of the Salvation Army shelter, who, seeing that she accepts Undershaft’s donation, although he himself had previously refused the money coming from those quarters, hardens up against her in bitter scorn (the fact that he realizes that the whole activity of the Salvation Army depends on charity provided by the dirty gain derived from selling weapons and alcohol makes him exclaim: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”). The difference between them is that Barbara’s understanding is not simply embittered; she does more than unleashing hatred and scorn against the ‘seamy side’ of reality, she wants to encompass it in a new sphere of understanding. Barbara’s conversion / transfiguration includes, in a unitary triad, her father and her fiancé: Barbara is the idealist, Cusins – the realist, and Undershaft – the philistine; reuniting the three statuses of the evolutionary scale, in Shavian terms, is done in the last scene of the play. Although, seen in terms of mere conversion, ‘Major Barbara’ is an account of environment victorious over heroic will, and although the spectator can wonder how convincing Barbara’s and Cusins’s conversions are (in fact, hers is fully convincing, though apparently paradoxical, and leaving us with a bitter taste – it follows the way of Shavian logic, i.e. towards responsibility; similarly, Cusins’s is as convincing, as it certainly is the counterpart of Barbara’s conversion); there is still something heroic in it – namely, the will and the spiritual and moral availability to submit oneself to an existential experiment.

2.6.3. Re-birth:

The scene of Eliza Doolittle’s conversion is tantamount to a rebirth. She is not only re-born to a new status of social and intellectual life, but also to the idea that the true values of existence are not only those expressed in purely material terms (although heavily dependent upon the material factor – including here her newly acquired phonetic expertise). Despite the fact that the social definition of the characters may appear prevalent within the overall scheme of the play (v. Shaw’s own confession about the anecdotal nucleus from which its germination started: “‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ have been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write for them in which he shall be a West-End gentleman and she and East-End dona with an apron and three orange and ostrich feathers”), its main purport is the experiment module, amounting to Eliza’s re-birth as a teachable character.

2.6.4. The Rational Convert:

The title conversion in ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion’ refers to the realization of the fact that irrational – often violent – impulses (in this particular case, vengeance) have to be controlled in order to achieve the betterment of human existence; vanity of revenge comes from its triviality, the fact that it is too foolish and slight a thing for a man to allow to encumber himself with and destroy his conscientiousness – it is a mere childish flurry, the tearfully bitter wish to get even with someone in spite of the little remaining relevance of the fact itself. Captain Brassbound fostered, all the long of his erratic life, a sense of urgency as to the mission, which he considers sacred, to take revenge for his mother’s death; she has died because of a judge’s decision, and

Brassbound goes to every length, scheming and wandering far and wide, until the judge fall into his hands. Then a pleasant society lady, Lady Cicely Waynefleet, tells him in an easy conversational undertone that he is making a fool of himself, that his wrong is irrelevant, that his vengeance is objectless, that he is ruining himself for the sake of ruining a total stranger. (Shaw himself observed that he disliked murder, not so much because it wastes the life of the corpse, as because it wastes the time of the murderer. Rational truths, as we can see, are not always to be expounded as cold, dogmatically valid, allegedly unerring facts; but conversion can be achieved following a much more spiritualized – and, hence, humanly true, course). In Brassbound’s case, Shaw presents the conversion from the humanly reasonable to the rationally (in)human; from revenge to forgiveness.

2.6.5. The Convert ‘out of guilt’:

The paragon of this type of hero is Larry Boyle, who can be biographically read as “the man Shaw has become and who believes he belonged to “the big world… solid English life in London, the very centre of the world”. Larry with his ‘clever head’, his ‘suggestion of thinshinnedness and dissatisfaction’ and determination to be ruthless, embodies what must have been some of Shaw’s most awful nightmares. He is a displaced person who has escaped poverty and failure, but must put himself in double harness with the ‘efficient devil’ Broadbent to justify his decision with success.”32 Although ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ is not a ‘play of conversion’, Larry, the Irishman, is the character who gives the image of the conversion schema – that of a guilt-ridden character towards effectuality. Larry’s past can be perceived as a part with which the author seems to have identified his own past: Larry is the exile who does not want to return to a country (Ireland), which repels him through the recollection / the image of ineffectuality – the more so as it is opposed to social, lucrative, etc. success in ‘the other island’, England; this is a constant prick to his own, damned, origin (in that respect, we could draw a comparison to the image of Ireland as seen by Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus). Gradually, everything he has left back in Ireland – his father, his girlfriend – begin to look to him unimportant: they are the very image of a burden, the symbol of backwardness, of powerlessness and lack of will-power – although Larry has a clear sense of the spiritual, emotional link to his native country; in fact, what he wants to evade are: “narrowness, boredom, inactivity and ineffectually… The torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.”

The parallel that can be drawn between Larry and Broadbent may boil down to tragi-comic Mephistopheles–Faustus quality. Broadbent is an unimaginative Faust, somewhat foolish at that. But his real counterpart in the play is Keegan – the one who, in the name of an excessively stern morality, indicts the ‘foolish dream of efficiency’. Larry, the convert turned into a tool in the Philistine’s hands, becoming himself a Philistine worshipping the authoritative image of efficiency, is used by the author as a double – to redefine, through his sardonic attitude, Broadbent; but for Larry Doyle, the latter would hardly surpass the stature of an 18th century comic type; but as it is, he is emphasised through the strange attraction of opposites, as a minor key Faustus.

2.6.6. The ‘Nursery play’ Convert:

‘Arms and the Man’ is the best example typifying the ‘Tales for the Nursery’ (v. M. M. Morgan); in it, the passage from innocence to maturity is enacted; in Shaw’s terms, ‘maturity’ is

the equivalent of rationality. The character who is submitted to transformation /conversion is Raina, the lovely young heroine who is left in tearful rapture by the leaving off to death of the chivalrous, dashing officers at the beginning of the play, in an atmosphere of military melodrama. Raina is the ‘pedagogical’ victim of the ‘cold shower’ inflicted to her by the antiromantic Bluntschli, the little sturdy crop-haired Swiss professional soldier, who has no country but has a trade instead; even physically the very opposite of the martial prototype, which has functioned as worshipping-object for Raina so far, Bluntschli tells the army-adoring heroine frankly that she is a humbug; and she, after a moment’s reflection, appears to agree with him. The play is, like many other Shavian plays, the dialogue of a conversion, ending in Raina’s losing all her glorious military illusions and admiring this ‘chocolate soldier’ not because he faces guns, but because he faces facts: commonsensicality may require more courage and skill than warfare. This is really Bluntschli ‘s main instrument of de-idealisation, and also his essential implement in the ‘didactic’ (cf. ‘nursery’) conversion he accomplishes. In a similar way, Caesar (in ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’) wants, in his capacity as Superman of ideas, to achieve Cleopatra’s conversion to commonsensicality.

2.6.7. The Poet Convert:

In ‘Candida’, Eugene Marchbanks undertakes a passage from sensuality to spirituality and artistic dedication; the Morell couple is to him the most illustrative example of the fact that security, the domestic ideal, love are inferior ends if compared with the more isolated, yet all the more sublime, and heroic by its quality of renunciation, life of the artist. After all, Eugene is Shaw’s aristocratic, shy, unconvincing poet, the ‘Raphaelite’ character in the play. When, in Act III, Candida seems agreeable to the idea of an approach, he withdraws – from what Shaw arguably conceived as fear of descending into domesticity. The artist’s needs for freedom are stronger than the attraction of comfortably but conventionally married life. Although not very convincingly, Marchbanks sacrifices his worldly, bourgeois happiness for an intenser quality of life. Like Vivien Warren, Marchbanks renounces sex (like another, subsequent character in Shaw’s plays, Joan, who prefers death at the stake to being imprisoned); his idealism has a practical finality: he will devote all his energies to work, to his activity as a poet – and, in that respect, one can safely say that Eugene Marchbanks represents a superior plane in Shaw’s creation, in-between the mere philanderer and the first draft of the superman (cf. Nietzsche’s description of the creative man, the creator-superman); yet, the fact that the play is actually a study in self-deception, the conversion / metamorphosis of the character is not very sure to have been solidly construed.

2.7. The Rebel (v. the figure of Lucifer)

2.7.1. The Non-Conformist:

Vivie Warren represents a novelty in Shaw’s play-writing; the evolution of this character as against her predecessor, Trench (in ‘Widowers’ Houses’); like him, she makes a discovery revealing the shady source of the wealth that lies at the basis of their own comfort as well as social status. Vivie ends by turning her back on a corrupt system, unlike Trench. Likewise, Vivie’s relation to her mother (especially in Act II, when she goes against and challenges her mother’s authority) is tackled in the purest Ibsenian terms, Vivie’s non-conformism making full use of the dialogue. Shaw’s character chart for this play was as follows: “I have made the daughter the heroine and the mother a most deplorable old rip… The great scene will be the crushing of the mother by the daughter… The girl is quite original character”.

While Vivie’s mother tries to save her child from contact with her own kind of life (based on dependence upon men), ending by turning her into a cold, efficient, automaton, praising work more than anything, smoking cigars and having businesslike relations with the others, the girl’s final gesture of disagreement with the material commandments of an excessively pragmatic society, in which money could be turned into the very token of power irrespective of its origin, her tearing up the note, completes her breaking off of human ties, her descent into prospectless, blind work – maybe as a sort of ceremonial castigation, too. Vivie’s revelation by her mother’s exposition helps her to discard the unconsidered fragments of respectable opinion, which she has taken over without recognizing their irrelevance to the kind of person she is and has chosen to be. Vivie’s conversion – from (non-conformist, of course) lack of involvement in a social fatum whose seamy and gloomy sides she cannot perceive, to rebelling isolation, as a form of protest (active, in a way) is achieved with the total exclusion of love. This is an edifyingly bitter conversion.

As a rebel, Eliza Doolittle manifests her newly born personality by finally asserting herself as a human being. She stands up against the lack of manners and propriety of proceeding by which Higgins’s lack of adherence to reality (in point of treating his fellow-beings) is manifest: up to now, Higgins treated Eliza as if she were a mere object, a product of his trade; he proves himself incapable of understanding her feelings, her wishes and her need for affection and of integrating herself – within the new social (and spiritual) complex for which she was actually trained; this new social status implies great difficulty for Eliza. This perception she has of the fact that she is cast out of the humanly definable, spiritual confines of her newly acquired position makes her revolt against Higgins, throwing to his face the truth that, for her, he was no more than a teacher of phonetics – anyway, less than Colonel Pickering managed to be. The ‘puppet’ wants independence, fair, kindly treatment, affection (“Liza: …I want a little kindness. I know I am a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman: but I am not dirt under your feet. What I done… what I did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I come – came – to care for you: not to want you to make love to me, and not forgetting the difference between us, but more friendly like. Higgins: Well, of course…. Eliza, you’re a fool”.

2.7.2. The Idealistic Rebel:

Barbara Undershaft, granddaughter of the Earl of Stevenage, daughter of a millionaire, secedes from the established social order (and church) to join the Salvation Army. The sprit of

this (literal) army which seems to exert its attraction on Barbara is revolutionary (cf. Shaw’s definition of the ‘revolutionist’, in ‘Man and Superman’); it is basically Dionysian, a new and peculiar type of enthusiastic illumination, amounting, in fact, to a union / a synthesis of Apollo and Dionysus (cf. Cusins’s declaration: “[The Salvation Army] is the army of joy, of love, of courage; it has banished the fear and remorse and despair of the old hell-ridden evangelical sects: it marches to fight the devil with trumpet and drum, with music and dancing, with banner and palm, as becomes a sally from heaven by its happy garrison.” Barbara, the militant for the Gospel, represents life, seen through the angle of its Apollinic energy, while the armament firm of Undeshaft (whom Cusins calls Mephistopheles, Machiavelli, etc.) represents the Nietzschean will (i.e. the Dionysian spirit) of fully lived life. To this is added the conflict of generations, ending in Undershaft’s (false) conversion (false, as his new humanitarianism is only achieved in terms of socially applied utilitarianism), which can be seen, starting from Freud, as a coming together of the father and the re-found daughter. One of Shaw’s devices used in ‘Major Barbara’ – as most anywhere else in his plays, in fact – is paradox, which Shaw resorts to in order to destroy conventional moral oppositions, finally proving them to be complementary; so, the shock of more carefully reconsidering the characters – Barbara, in the main – has, among other results, the effect of a more comprehensive understanding of the world of the play, including Barbara’s revolt and conversion; ambivalence seems to be the rule with Barbara; the characters’ actions, most of them quests – one can say even ritual quests – like the parallels established between them are suggested in terms of ambivalence: literal–metaphoric, ironic–straightforward meanings, etc. So, with Barbara, revolt and conversion go hand in hand.

2.7.3. The Anarchist:

Mendoza, the bandit in the play ‘Man and Superman ‘, is the caricature of the capitalistic man – which is achieved through the mirror-reflection of the values of that society (compare with Brassbound’s stature); Mendoza and the members of his gang are more bandits than revolutionaries, and, as bandits, they have – vague and anarchic – political ideas. By their figures, Shaw basically intended to draw the caricature of old-fashioned, stale romanticism – it is a burlesque of it – associated in a false manner with the idea of revolution, especially through the opposition with Tanner. Their replies in Act III are memorable: “Mendoza: I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich. Tanner (promptly): I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.” ‘The revolutionaries’ are anarchists with the nostalgia of respectability (for instance, Mendoza’s mock-parliament is made up of individuals wearing top-hats; eventually, they will be absorbed by improper dealings with the tycoon Malone). As an ironic piece of false revolutionary exposure, this is maybe the finest creation Shaw managed.

2.8. The Libertine:

Motto (from the Preface to ‘Overruled’): “…the theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life, whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all other libertines, and excessively conventional in professions of social principle.”

2.8.1. The Hedonist:

In Doolittle, Shaw merged two characters from Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’: Boffin, the honest serving man who inherits a large fortune made out (even literally) of dust, and Silas Wegg, the villain with philosophical penchants (Doolittle can successfully claim to have his own philosophy, that of ‘Undeserving Modesty’, or hedonistic surviving); to those features was added the remarkable humour of the dramatist. Doolittle’s evolution is achieved in a parallel to the social and spiritual progress of Eliza: his first entrance, as a poor dustman, is at the beginning of the girl’s social evolution, when he says he wants to “save her from worse-than-death”, but is bought away with five shillings. His second appearance, as a rich man, prone to “middle class morality”, is at the climax of Eliza’s progress. His prosperous figure, blended with a sincere look of misery because of too rapid and tormenting social success, is symbolic of Eliza’s false social success – which seems to bring to nothing Professor Higgins’s experiment. The character of Doolittle has a certain closeness to the vitalistic doctrine (it would be too much to say, for instance, that he gets near the stature of a middle-class superman); a perfect embodiment of the type of the impenitently unproviding man, he is a jolly fellow; he expounds the moral of careless, easy-going life, as opposed to the thriftiness and petty (Victorian) satisfaction of deserving restraint, of prudence, economicality and security; he pleads for the unrestricted happiness and fullness of life; his celebration of ‘Undeserving Poverty’ is famous; even though unintentionally, he implies through it a certain moral superiority as against the pressure of a system of values to which he will not give up or let himself be trapped by, is implied. Doolittle is the perfect image of the common / average man, the perfect mean – he is not a rogue, yet he is not an honest man, either (and he is the first to admit it: “A little of both, like the rest of us”). His roguishly libertine cynicism is exquisite: he comes to ‘save’ Eliza from Higgins’s ‘grip’, yet ends by literally selling her to the professor – he is a ‘moderate’ man, as he does not accept more than five pounds, for fear he might become a provident man, i.e. too ‘middle class’.

Ironically, the Doolittle experiment clearly demonstrated that, while money can replace manners along the social scale (where no manners are needed, in fact – v. Higgins’s own lack of manners), with Eliza the new room gained by her ‘social re-birth’ cannot be simply filled through the new possibilities conferred by the transformation in her social (and material, of course) status: her soul has some other needs, too. As for Doolittle, he can adjust himself in almost any circumstance he has to go through, he is a survivor, a man who “knows what he wants”.

2.8.2. The Philanderer:

In the Shavian concept of Life Force, the men characters appear as subjugated by the (biological) force of women. “The ‘Philanderer’ dealt with sex – with the power game of sex that was played in the society of the 1890’s, and the vanity, deception and concealed vulnerability of men and women to one another”.33 Although the ‘philanderer’ was wrongly described as ‘the real Don Juan’, the Shavian definition of philandering is the following: “A philanderer is a man who is strongly attracted by women, He flirts with them, falls in love with them, makes them fall in love with him, but will not commit himself to any permanent relation with them, and often retreats at

the last moment if his suit is successful – loves them but loves himself more – is too cautious, too fastidious, ever to give himself away”.34 On the contrary, don-juanism is the man’s fear of committing himself, deriving from a sort of a default of affective memory – his longing for the new, for continual exploration. And Shaw adds, sympathetically it seems, to round off the image of philandering: “…the innocent and conventional people who regard gallant adventures as crimes of so horrible a nature that only the most depraved and desperate characters engage in them or would listen to advances in that direction without raising an alarm with the noisiest indignation, are clearly examples of the fact that most sections of society do not know how the other sections live. Industry is the most effective check on gallantry…”35

The following telling excerpts, giving the essentials of donjuanism as a ‘philosophical’ attitude, are from the EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY, which precedes the play ‘Man and Superman’: “I have had to ask myself, what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the philosophic sense. Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows his own instincts without regard to the common, statute, or canon law; and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends himself by fraud and force as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the 16th century by a Spanish monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama, growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don Juan’s account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police, temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for tomorrow it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart’s content. But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own Devil’s Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. (…) Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port; and Byron’s hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb: he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova, tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a bolder poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a bolder king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then, leave Byron’s Don Juan out of account”.

2.8.2.1. Among Shaw’s philanderers, Professor Higgins, the confirmed bachelor, holds a really special place; his inveterate bachelorhood (ascribable, in the play, to the mythological inspiration – cf. Ovid’s Pygmalion, the artist who grew disgusted with the womankind) can more profitably be analyzed in Freudian terms: his ‘games of ingenuity’ (v. the section on the ingenuous artist) have been protected by the maternal presence, his intellectual occupation has evolved under this motherly aegis, which he has come to perceive as a trans-human principle; for him, the woman may have the signification it had with the ancient sculptor, if it springs out of his own creation, if it is structured in keeping with his own spiritual coordinates. As a ‘philanderer’, Higgins does not belong to the category of the ‘active’ ones, he is rather a ‘passive’, theorist Philanderer; with him, philandering is only a way to keep away from women: “Oh, I cant be bothered with young women. My idea of a lovable woman is something as like you (i.e. Pickering!) as possible. I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be changed”.

2.8.3. The Libertine ‘in the spirit’:

The artist and the work of art – i.e. Higgins and his creation of Eliza – live separate lives. In Fact, in ‘Pygmalion’, the former ‘automaton’, once getting the awareness of her being a social being on an equal footing with those in the new sphere she has entered, spiritually, cannot be self-reliant before the umbilical cord which used to link her to her creator has been severed. This does not imply, on the other hand, marriage – which does not, anyway, fit into the code of values specific to the professor; but a good, close relationship of fellowship / comradeship. The moral point of the play could be summarized as follows: a new creation is only entitled to a new life if you allow it / her to live as she chooses, in accordance with a certain code of personal values and action (or, at least, an internalized code). As a confirmed bachelor – so, an approximation of the Shavian philanderer – Higgins conceives any future relation / association with Eliza only in terms of good, real fellowship – with the exclusion of any slavery of dependence. Higgins, the artist-libertine, is as ‘undemocratic’ as his ‘spiritual father’, Shaw; a character for whom democracy depends on equalizing the advantages of education – by wealth, of course – means hardly anything if it is not accompanied by self-respect and independence of spirit; Higgins’s ‘undemocratic’, spiritual libertinism implies, in a way, living in a kind of paradise: a paradise of high spiritual values.

2.8.4. The good-for-nothing young man:

Frank (in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’) is an attempt by Shaw to prevent sympathetic concern rather than interest in the spectator; by doing this, Shaw was establishing an important Shavian type, adding to a shade of practical, easy-going cynicism the ‘entirely good-for-nothing’ description; the exemplification of the basic trait of being a man of ‘agreeably disrespectful manners’, Shaw demonstrates that he is fond of “alternately impudent and whining young men – all of them as destitute of hearts as they are of manners, and all of them endowed with an equal measure of chilly sensuality”. The spectator’s or the other characters’ possible disenchanted view of such good-for-nothing young men (in our case, Vivie’s attitude to Frank) do not seem to contravene Shaw’s plans to delineate a likeable, although libertine, type of character.

2.9. The Philistine:

2.9.1. The Social Shark

As a perfect philistine figure in Shavian terms, Broadbent is the prototype of the acquisitive man, a man of unscrupulous self-interest; his genius of action is stronger than his (seeming) failure to grasp the facts of a more refined, spiritual reality (incorporated, in its religious, moral description, in Keegan, with his fastidious sense of horror and spiritual revulsion when confronted with Broadbent’s world). To Broadbent, there are only two qualities with which the world can be described and evaluated: efficiency and inefficiency. Broadbent is the embodiment of action, while Keegan speaks on behalf of the realm of emotions, as Larry Doyle is in the play the representation of the intellect. By contrast with Broadbent, Keegan, even though placid, dull, is the saint, by his self-efficiency, as Larry Doyle, with his coldness and lethargic faith, is, in the diadic relation established between ‘saints and traitors’ (which is, in fact, applicable not only to Ireland in the play) is the ‘traitor’.

Sartorius in ‘Widowers’ Houses’ may be called a similar philistine, a man of ferocious social conduct; while this is true socially, it would be interesting to observe that, through the coldly dignified public manner and the sentimental devotion to his daughter, Sartorius was endowed by Shaw with the impression of a very shy man, frightened of people and ineffectual in personal relationship. The dominant personality in the pair is not Sartorius, but Blanche, the female figure being identified to the force of evil (cf. the sordid remembrance of the dramatist’s own father), and also the biological force which, in Shaw’s system, is the inalienable possession of woman.

2.9.2. The ‘scientific prig’:

Ridgeon, the younger doctor in ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’, is the type of the God-playing hero – he plays with the lives of people. The fact that he has discovered a cure for tuberculosis – a lethal disease at the time – confers him life-and-death authority over his patients; he actually feels he has a messianic mission – and power; yet, like Paramore in ‘The Philanderer’, he is no longer interested in the medical act as such (i.e. a curative device) or his patients’ lives. He has now the oversized, fake attitude of the artist for whom what matters is the technique he employs to create his work of art, not the result itself (with Ridgeon, the process, the material act of healing) or the contents, the idea. His vanity – and here, Shaw’s antiscientism surely had the final word – prevents him from being compassionate and sympathetic with his patients’ suffering. His (naturally scientific, otherwise) clear-sightedness is impaired by the sheer technicality of his expertise – for which human life merely boils down to being or not being ill (he declares: “The most tragic thing in the world is a sick doctor”). In fact, what he is doing is a mere game, in which (he thinks) most of the rules are enforced by him (v., in Act V, his words: “I have committed a purely disinterested murder”). After all, Ridgeon, a minor character in the play, serves as a mirror-character (carrying also something of a caricatured effect, too), antagonistically enlightening the complementarity with Dubedat.

An even better illustration of the ‘scientific prig’ (and Shaw’s anti-scientific obsession) is the figure of Dr. Paramore in ‘The Philanderer’: when the disease he thinks he has discovered is disproved, Paramore sees in it almost a personal offence, the defeat of something he perceives as a sort of sacred cause, not the simple, happy event of the salvation of a man’s life. Shaw associates

this scientific (namely, medical) priggishness with excessive, distorted idealism (v. his preface to the play and The Quintessence of Ibsenism), boiling down to sacrificing people for mere, sometimes hollow, ideals. To Shaw, physicians were only frauds, mere quacks, operating with so-called scientific principles (“Why couldn’t a playwright be as good a biologist as a physician?” Shaw used to wonder, ironically); more than that, their competence seems to be directed towards rather commercial ends. In ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’, the pair Ridgeon–Dubedat (through which to scientific prig is opposed to the figure of the artist) is meant to express the principle split between ethics and aesthetics.

2.9.3. The Intellectual Philistine:

As an ‘Intellectual Philistine’, Adolphus Cusins is a complex and subtle character in his intellectual and moral perception of fact, a representative of human conscience in its most tender and perceptive form. Although a representative of the Shavian class of the Philistines, Cusins is fully aware of the drawbacks of the moral and spiritual condition entailed by poverty; a Christian neophite (by joining the Salvation Army), he is aware that Christianity itself must assume part of the responsibility for the poor’s debasement. Cusins, on the other hand, praises the services of the Salvation Army as ‘the true worship of Dionysos’ – in which he also finds the ecstasy of enthusiasm – which, later on, through his conversion (v. the ‘Convert’ section), he thinks he can make into calm order and moral but also pragmatic rationalism. So, the philistine in Cusins is, so to speak, awakened through the Dionysian, which has the power to shock, stir and convey the sense of change (cf. the Salvationists’ trombones, trumpets, tambourines, drums and timbrels). “Thus Dionysianism is what Bergson calls a ‘dynamic religion’.” He has the (intellectual, but not only) revelation of force, of brutal – and effective, it seems – force / energy: “…like the Greeks of Euripides’ day, Cusins has also been brought face to face with a brutal, primitive force of life and death which the cultivated, sensitive side of him recoils from, but which the clear-headed student of society is forced to take into account. This power is the destructive-creative energy …” 36

2.10. Miscellaneous Characters:

2.10.1. Idealists:

Motto: “Idealism is a crackbrained fuss about nothing.” (G. B. Shaw, ‘Ideals and Idealists’, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism)

To Shaw, idealistic / idealizing vision represented one of the greatest dangers the evolution of humanity had, or was about to have to incur, as idealism is preconceived distortion of our perception of the world. For instance, he had a strong objection to such idealized notions as war and love in so far as they were (perceived as) ideal. Shaw objected not so such to war (which he usually defined as ‘waste’ and ‘butchery’) as to the attractiveness of war; and he did not dislike the idea of love as the love of love.

2.10.1.1. The Elderly Gentleman (in part 17, ‘The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman’, from ‘Back to Methuselah’) may be said to be the only ‘heroic figure’ of the play, specifically through his status as a ‘romantic fool’; he chooses to stay with the Oracle, although he was warned that he “will die of discouragement”, rather than going back to die of “disgust and despair”; in this way, i.e. by looking in the face of truth, he exposes the very pretence on which

the ideation structure of the play is based. In a somewhat paradoxical way, he can also assume the opposite stand – admitting the peril of practising too thorough objectivity (which can be seen in turn as a source of ‘reversed idealism’, as it were): “I think that a man who is sane as long as he looks at the world through his own eyes is very likely to become a dangerous madman if he takes to looking at the world through telescopes and microscopes.”

In ‘Misalliance’, Shaw appears to have supported the type of the philosopher-king (cf. the raisonneur king in ‘The Apple Cart’); one of the ideas embodied by the characters in the play is the possibility that pure physical force could be successfully dealt with by the intellectual; likewise, the necessity that value should transcend mere social, material standing of the character – appearing in the couple Percival–Hypatia, in which the tough terms of the presentation of the situation as a matter of financial bargaining represents a reproach to action, even if it were added to youth, which lacks higher values.

The idealists in ‘Misalliance’ – on the side of whom Shaw constantly stands – v. the Gunner, are opposed to the realists, Joey and Hypatia, who are also certainly less likeable. The distinction between idealists and realists is doubled in the play by the distinction between talkers and men of action; with Lord Summerhays, his flight from reality, as opposed to his active past, turns him into one of the most representative talkers. On the other hand, Johnny Tarleton is manifestly the greatest ‘talker’ through his contention of being a ‘democratic’ man. Among the ‘idealists’, The Gunner is the type of the man who unsuccessfully tried action, plus the falseness of the romantic literary stuff, as a mock-ideal; and Tarleton – the type of the capable man, achieved through action – acknowledges and uses the creative power of ideas.

2.10.1.2. The type of the gullible idealist is Mazzini Dunn (in ‘Heartbreak House’), one of the most typical Shavian figures, through his feeble, virtuous character; he, like his group, has an uprightness, which partly derives from the mere fact that they do not have the power and they have self-impelling morals, doubled by scepticism; although they are not addicted to money, Mazzini becomes the instrument of the financial success of the tycoon Mangan. When he is morally amiss, it is because of his failure in social responsibility, not out of lack of self-respect. In fact, he is a sham; according to Shaw’s opposition, as drawn in ‘The Perfect Wagnerite’, Mazzini Dunn can be considered a ‘giant’ (as opposed to the ‘dwarfish’ stature – cf. Phinegold), although a man intoxicated with fashionable ideals, and so an ‘idealist’.

2.10.1.3. Shaw makes Eugene Marchbanks (in ‘Candida’) a cold-blooded prig, which comes with him from a certain type of misdirected idealism (Shaw said about him that he was his ‘Raphaelite figure’), just as the dramatic purposes would ask him to be a passionate lover. Thus, the young man is turned into an idealistic theorizer speaking about the things about which he could be expected to be a sort of mystical materialist. It is however true that, as an idealist, Marchbanks is less convincing than as a ‘poet convert’: he is not ‘the weaker’ of the two because he is an idealist; quite on the contrary, his power of insinuation, be it couched in idealized forms, is definitely non-idealistic – hence, Candida’s choice for Morell as the weaker man.

2.10.1.4. Seen as an idealistic addict, beyond the rather superficial characterization to this effect in terms of ladylike fear of vulgarity, matching with the puritan’s fear of evil and the idealist’s fear of life, Vivie Warren can be ascribed this description through the very fact that her decision to take refuge in work is not really pragmatic – on the contrary, it is an act of ‘drug abuse’ through work (or ‘workaholism’), which is the only way for her to escape the gloomy influence of her mother: “Mrs. Warren goes out, slamming the door behind her. The strain on Vivie’s face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her place at the writing pla-ce…” – in the final act). The names of the auxiliary characters in the play who are representative

of her mother’s world (Praed, Gardner, Crofts, and even Warren) are all associated with natural elements; it is them that Vivie symbolically repudiates when secluding herself into her own world – that of strenuous activity, implying, in the spirit of the ‘enlightened Puritanism’ made up of metaphors and symbols of Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, the idea of taking refuge into one’s own self (i.e. indoors, if read symbolically), that is to say, into the world of her own cleanly, positive, new and constructive preoccupations – hence, ‘ideals’.

2.10.2. ‘The Impecunious’:

Motto: “The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty. Our first duty, to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor” (Preface to ‘Major Barbara’)

Lubin: “…you fall into the very common mistake of supposing that it is poverty that makes the proletarian and money that makes the gentleman. You are quite wrong. You never belonged to the people: you belonged to the impecunious. Impecuniosity and broken boots are the lot of the unsuccessful middle class, and the common places of the early struggles of the professional and younger son class”.37

The image of the impecunious may often be that of the ragged, rather quarrelsome, yet very interesting people who do not constitute with Shaw the mob lacking clarity of ideas, indefinitely gullible riff-raff which one could imagine. As figures in the play (in our case, ‘Major Barbara’) they [i.e. Bill Walker, Willy] serve as a Greek choir, providing, by contrast, points of view justifying Barbara’s choice – and, on the other hand, the rationalizing, demonstrative argumentativeness of Undershaft’s stand. If the plays in which the impecunious appear Shaw’s (rather condescending) sympathy goes to them, this does not prove some kind of shallow sentimentality or ‘democratic’ prudery, but the author’s conviction that, in spite of everything, the ‘raw material’ of history (which, of course, has to be refined through spiritualization) is represented by them – i.e. the masses.

NOTES:

1. A. Chapellow, Shaw the Villager and Human Being, pp. 323-3242. “Blake’s view of Satan and Nietzsche’s Dionysus unite to form one of Shaw’s most

impressive characters’’: A. Undershaft. (M. M. Morgan, Shavian Playground, p. 1353. The energy is of Dionysian origin, and it is opposed, in Nietzsche’s terms, to the

Appollonian dimension.4. Shaw in the unpublished Derry 8-9/1905 manuscript (British Museum MS 5O7/D folios)

– apud W.K. Gordon, Literature in Critical Perspectives, p. 755. W. K. Gordon, op. cit., p. 716. Apud W. K. Gordon, op. cit., p. 667. G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, p. 368. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 449. Ibid., p. 4910. Ibidem11. Shaw – in a letter to W. Archer and in a letter to A. B. Walkley, apud M. Holroyd, op. cit.,

vol. I, pp. 304, 30512. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 12713. G. K. Chesterton, op. cit., p. 3314. M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. I, p. 39415. Shaw in a letter, apud M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. I, p. 39516. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 10117. G. K. Chesterton, op. cit., p. 14718. G. K. Chesterton, op. cit., p. 149: “The dramatist has introduced a soliloquy of Caesar

alone with the Sphinx (…) Caesar is as cold and lonely and as dead as the Sphinx (…) The Shavian Caesar is… a very fine reality (…) it is a statue by a great sculptor.”

19. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 20920. W. K. Gordon, op. cit., p. 7521. G. K. Chesterton, op. cit., p. 12222. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 23323. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 19624. From Shaw’s essay ‘La Princesse Lointaine’, in G. B. Shaw. Dramatic Opinions and

Essays25. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 2326. A. Chapellow, Shaw the Villager and Human Being, p. 6827. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 5028. M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. I, p. 31529. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 5130. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 13731. G. K. Chesterton, op. cit., p. 19432. M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. II, p. 8733. M. M. Morgan, op. cit., p. 12334. M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. I, p. 9235. M. Holroyd, op. cit., vol. I, p. 28736. A. Chapellow, op. cit., p. 7337. C. K. Chesterton, op. cit., p. 114.