“It was vulgar—vulgar,” he says. “I see that now; for you have opened my eyes to the past; but what good is that for the future? What am I to do? Where am I to go?”
It is not enough that he undoes his treason and helps to save Sir Howard. What he wants is some rule of life to take the place of the smashed ideals of his wasted years. He gropes in vain and ends, like many another man, by idealizing a woman.
“You seem to be able to make me do pretty well what you like,” he says to Lady Cicely, “but you cannot make me marry anybody but yourself.”
“Do you really want a wife?” asks Cicely archly.
“I want a commander,” replies the reformed Brassbound. “I am a good man when I have a good leader.”
He is not the first man that has fallen beneath the spell of her dominating and masterful ego, to mistake his obedience for love, and she bluntly tells him so. And thus they part—Brassbound to return to his ship and his smuggling, and Cicely to go home to England.
As will be observed, this is no ordinary farce, but a play of considerable depth and beam. Shaw is a master of the art of depicting such conflicts as that here outlined, and Brassbound and Cicely are by no means the least of his creations. With all the extravagance of the play, there is something real and human about each, and the same may be said of the lesser characters—Sir Howard; the Rev. Leslie Rankin, missionary and philosopher; Drinkwater, Brassbound’s recruit from the slums of London; the Moorish chiefs; Captain Hamlin Kearney of the U. S. S. Santiago, who comes to Sir Howard’s rescue, and the others.
The chief fault of the play is the fact that the exposition, in the first act, requires an immense amount of talk without action. The whole act, in truth, might be played with all of the characters standing still. Later on, there is plenty of movement, but the play as a whole is decidedly inferior to the majority of the Shaw dramas. The dialogue lacks the surface brilliancy of “You Never Can Tell” and “Candida” and the humor, in places, is too delicate, almost, for the theme. The piece, in fact, is a satirical melodrama disguised as a farce—a melodrama of the true Shaw brand, in which the play of mind upon mind overshadows the play of club upon skull.
“CÆSAR AND CLEOPATRA”
