In this sort of thing, “literary people trying their hand at the drama for the first time revel as ludicrously as amateur actors revel in flagrant false hair, misfitting tunics and tin spears.” The abuse, as Mr. William Archer has pointed out, arose at the time when the drama ceased to be regarded as literature. Plays designed for “intending performers,” amateur and professional, were often printed from the actual prompt-books used in the theatre. Even when this was not the case, they were closely modelled after the prompt-books.
Shakespeare and Ibsen, to mention two obvious examples, suffer from this very deficiency. “What would we not give,” asks Shaw, “for the copy of Hamlet used by Shakespeare at rehearsal, with the original 'business' scrawled by the prompter's pencil?... It is for want of this (realistic) process of elaboration that Shakespeare, unsurpassed as poet, story-teller, character draughtsman, humorist and rhetorician, has left us no intellectually coherent drama, and could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his studies of character and society....” The literary product of two years of Ibsen's life, exhibiting exhaustive knowledge not only of the character of the individuals represented, but also of their personal history and antecedents, reads to the actor-manager, Shaw declares, exactly like a specification for a gas-fitter! It is an “insult” to an exceptionally susceptible, imaginative, fastidious person like Shaw. Frankly speaking, Ibsen in this respect occupies a position intermediate between Pinero, with his dry enumeration, and Shaw, with his breezy loquacity. Shaw swings to the furthest extreme, making his stage-directions piquant and facetious essays for the edification of the reader—discursive, argumentative, polemical, historical, psychological, or social essays, varying in length from two lines to five pages. With characteristic adroitness, Shaw has defended one of his own stage-directions which has been rebuked as a silly joke. “It runs thus: 'So-and-So's complexion fades into stone-gray, and all movement and expression desert his eyes.' This is the sort of stage-direction an actor really wants. Of course, he can no more actually change his complexion to stone-gray than Mr. Forbes Robertson can actually die after saying, 'The rest is silence.' But he can produce the impression suggested by the direction perfectly. How he produces it is his business, not mine. This distinction is important, because, if I wrote such a stage-direction as 'turns his back to the audience and furtively dabs vaseline on his eyelashes,' instead of 'his eyes glisten with tears,' I should be guilty of an outrage on both actor and reader. Yet we find almost all our inexperienced dramatic authors taking the greatest pains to commit just such outrages.”
The issue, however, is not to be confused by any such defence, however adroit. In fact, in this particular instance Shaw makes a valid defence of a stage-direction with which no fault can be found save that of literary over-accentuation. Shaw has followed one safe rule in his stage-directions: “Write nothing in a play that you would not write in a novel”; but the converse: “Write everything in a play that you would in a novel,” would be fatal. The great fictionist does not write: “A keen pang shot through the mother's heart; for she saw at a glance that her child had not many more chapters to live.” Similarly the dramatic author should not tell the public that “part of the stage is removed to represent the entrance to a cellar.” Shaw is perfectly correct in saying that “a dramatist's business is to make the reader forget the stage and the actor forget the audience, not to remind them of both at every turn, like an incompetent 'extra gentleman' who turns the wrong side of his banner towards the footlights.” But Shaw's practice of obtruding the refractory lens of his own temperament between the reader and the characters of the drama is open to very serious objection. The prime incident in the history of the production of Candida in both New York and Vienna was the animated discussion over the concluding sentence, which Georg Brandes regarded as wholly superfluous: “James and Candida embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet's heart.” Shaw was so much amused by the futile guesses of the Candida-maniacs that he wrote to Mr. James Huneker a Shavian exposé of the “secret in the poet's heart.” A spurious interest was thus tacked on to the play on account of Shaw's proposition of a riddle of which he alone claimed knowledge of the solution. Again, Shaw goes to the length of explaining dubious and laconic remarks of his characters, thus totally destroying the realistic illusion that this conversation is actually taking place. The following illustration from The Devil's Disciple seems to be a sort of first aid to the actor: “Judith smiles, implying 'How stupid of me!' ...” At one point in the trial of Dick Dudgeon, Burgoyne remarks: “By the way, since you are not Mr. Anderson, do we still——eh, Major Swindon?” [Meaning “do we still hang him?”] When the party breaks up at the close of the first act of the same play, Shaw pauses to give us the following historical and social reminder: “Mrs. Dudgeon, now an intruder in her own home, stands erect, crushed by the weight of the law on women.... For at this time, remember, Mary Wollstonecraft is as yet only a girl of eighteen, and her Vindication of the Rights of Women is still fourteen years off.” The vital defect of Shaw's method is epitomized in that single word “remember.” He might just as well write “Gentle Reader” and be done with it. And yet Shaw is not alone in this defect; Bahr not infrequently strikes the personal note, and some of D'Annunzio's stage directions are little poems in themselves—delightful, but not strictly artistic. Shaw has done genuine service to the modern English drama by his conscientious effort to make his plays readable, to write not mere drama, but genuine literature. Through his long training as dramatic critic, he learned to effect the complete visualization of the painted sets of the stage, thus preserving intact, in that respect, the illusion of reality. He has replaced the old stocks and stones of French's Acting Edition by personal and scenic descriptions, imaginatively, vividly, humorously—in a word, artistically—rendered. But he has not avoided the intrusion of the personality of the dramatist; he has imported into the English drama that pleasant vice of English fiction: imperfect objectivity. Mr. Archer states the plain common-sense of the matter when he says that stage-directions should be clear, adequate, and helpful, but that they should always be impersonal.[212] With all Shaw's praiseworthy efforts to create the realistic illusion of life by making us forget that his characters are only fictions of the stage, he occasionally destroys that illusion by making us remember that they are only the puppets of Bernard Shaw.
However original and iconoclastic Shaw may be in respect to interpretative prefaces and artistically cast stage-directions, in the matter of dramatic construction and technique he has been notably rigorous, rather than careless, in his attempt at realistic representation. In minor matters of punctuation, it is true, he has freely gratified his own preferences and likings—using spaced letters for emphasis, omitting commas and apostrophes whenever no doubt as to the sense is involved, avoiding quotation marks for titles and, indeed, in Biblical fashion, dispensing with punctuation on every possible occasion. All these things are merely matters of taste. But the conventional technique of the drama, the customs, tricks and devices of stage-craft, he ordinarily accepts without question. In Widowers' Houses in its first form, he made the explicit division into scenes; since that time, he has made each of his plays, as far as scenes go, a continuous whole, unbroken save only by division into acts, and by a succession of asterisks where a lapse of time is to be understood. In this respect, he has carefully preserved his rule of writing down nothing that might remind the reader of an actual stage or a theatric representation.[213]
The incidents, plot, construction and technical details of drama Bernard Shaw manipulates for his own purposes, giving them novelty, piquancy, and charm by the essentially modern use he makes of them. As for indebtedness to Ibsen for his technique, he vigorously scorns the idea. “It is quite the customary thing to say, nowadays,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “that Ibsen revolutionized the technique of English drama. I cannot, for the life of me, find the least evidence of such a thing. The objective side of Ibsen's technique is a part of the common stock of modern dramatic realism. The symbolic side of Ibsen's technique is incommunicable—peculiar to Ibsen alone. The technique of such a play as John Gabriel Borkman, for example, is inextricably bound up with the dramatic genius which devised it.” Shaw asserts that his own plays have all the latest mechanical improvements. In his plays there are no “asides,” no impossible soliloquies, no long-winded recitals in the second act of what has taken place in the first, no senseless multiplication of doors and windows, no incessant stream of letters and telegrams. Shaw revolted against many of the technical practices of Ibsen. “Go back to Lady Inger,” he recently wrote, “and you will be tempted to believe that Ibsen was deliberately burlesquing the absurdities of Richardson's booth; for the action is carried on mostly in impossible asides.” And he said to me, in discussing the use of the soliloquy, “I do not in the least object to the soliloquy provided it does not exceed the time-limit a rational man might be supposed to observe in talking aloud. But if there is anything that drives me wild, it is to hear Brown come down to the footlights, and begin: 'I wonder where Jones can be! He promised to meet me here at half-past four. Can it be possible that he is still suffering from remorse for the murder of his father-in-law? etc., etc.' Deliver me from the soliloquy used solely as a first aid to ignorant audiences.” In his Saturday Review period, Shaw insisted that, “What most of our critics mean by mastery of stage-craft is recklessness in the substitution of dead machinery and lay figures for vital action and real characters.” And in his notable essay on Ibsen, in 1906, he clearly sets forth his dramatic ideal.
“What we might have learned from Ibsen was that our fashionable dramatic material was worn out as far as cultivated modern people are concerned, that what really interests such people on the stage is not what we call action—meaning two well-known and rather short-sighted actors pretending to fight a duel without their glasses, or a handsome leading man chasing a beauteous leading lady round the stage with threats, obviously not feasible, of immediate rapine—but stories of lives, discussion of conduct, unveiling of motives, conflict of characters in talk, laying bare of souls, discovery of pitfalls—in short, illumination of life....”[214]
Shaw's Country House at Ayot St. Lawrence.
“All this talk about the dramatist proceeding according to rule and only making a coherent story which begins at the beginning of the play,” Mr. Shaw remarked to me one day, “is the most mistaken and harmful notion in the world. A dramatist finds himself in the grip of a situation or a complex of character of which he must make the most and the best that he can. Take Ibsen, for example. Not infrequently he finds himself compelled, for the sake of giving coherence and validity to his characters, to introduce a long recital by some character, without which the play would lack a vital part of the dramatic structure. Not that I defend such technique. I instance it merely to show that even a craftsman like Ibsen is driven occasionally to such expedients.”
“It seems to me,” I remarked, “that, whereas some of your plays are notable for their first acts—The Philanderer and Arms and the Man, for instance—because you seem to be concerned chiefly with exposition of the plot and not with brilliant Shavian divagations, in certain others you wholly concern yourself in the first act with the careful setting-up of a complex milieu, the elaboration of an environment out of which the principal character emerges. In certain other plays, the method is somewhat the same, but the purpose and the result quite different. The first act of The Devil's Disciple, for instance, is like a picture of Hogarth. By minutely delineated portrayal of Dick's home, his training and environment—all the influences and surroundings of his youth, you explain and thus justify his revolt. The first act isn't a part of the plot—it is, however, an indispensable phase of the situation. From the first act there emerges one remarkable character, Dick Dudgeon; this act makes him comprehensible—that is its fundamental purpose. But in The Doctor's Dilemma the case is quite different; the hour-long first act is vital only in the sense of acquainting us with the single fact that, to turn a patient over to Bloomfield-Bonington for treatment is to commit murder.”