And so much for George Bernard Shaw.
SHAKESPEARE AND SHAW
Shaw’s notion that Shakespeare’s plays—or, at least, some of them—have been left behind by the evolution of popular philosophy and ideals is scarcely original with him. As he himself points out, the Bard of Avon has been burned in hot critical fire for many years, despite the “Shakespeare fanciers” who hold him as a god. Some of his plays, says Shaw, were so far ahead of their time when they were first presented that it has taken 300 years of theater-goers to tire of the “long line of disgraceful farces, melodramas, and stage-pageants which actor-managers, from Garrick and Cibber to our own contemporaries, have hacked out of them,” and to understand performances of the texts as the poet wrote them. By the same token, those plays which Shakespeare himself “wrote down” to the level of his audience have grown archaic in sentiment and character. Dramas like “Anthony and Cleopatra,” says Shaw, will nevermore be written, “nor relished by men in whose philosophy guilt and innocence, and, consequently, revenge and idolatry, have no meaning. Such men must rewrite all the old plays in terms of their own philosophy....”
When this was published, as a preface to “Cæsar and Cleopatra,” in “Three Plays for Puritans,” there was a volcanic critical eruption, and ever since then the flames have roared about the ingenious Irishman. He has delivered lectures explaining his position, he has set forth his views, elaborately and carefully, in print, and his admirers have gone to his rescue—but a large party of Shakespeare worshipers insist on clinging to the belief that he has attempted to drag the bard from his pedestal and himself climb upon it. Recently, in London, he delivered a lecture designed to make clear his idea. Next morning the London morning papers printed amazingly confused reports of it, and to set himself right Shaw wrote a letter to the Daily News containing 12 assertions, which, like the 95 theses Luther nailed upon the church door at Wittenberg, he desired should make known the substance of his argument. Here they are:
“1. That the idolatry of Shakespeare which prevails now existed in his own time, and got on the nerve of Ben Jonson.
“2. That Shakespeare was not an illiterate poaching laborer who came up to London to be a horseboy, but a gentleman with all the social pretensions of our higher bourgeoisie.
“3. That Shakespeare, when he became an actor, was not a rogue and a vagabond, but a member and part proprietor of a regular company, using, by permission, a nobleman’s name as its patron, and holding itself as exclusively above the casual barnstormer as a Harley Street consultant holds himself above a man with a sarsaparilla stall.
“4. That Shakespeare’s aim in business was to make money enough to acquire land in Stratford, and to retire as a country gentleman with a coat of arms and a good standing in the county; and that this was not the ambition of a parvenu, but the natural course for a member of the highly respectable, though temporarily impecunious, family of the Shakespeares.
“5. That Shakespeare found that the only thing that paid in the theater was romantic nonsense, and that when he was forced by this to produce one of the most effective samples of romantic nonsense in existence—a feat which he performed easily and well—he publicly disclaimed any responsibility for its pleasant and cheap falsehood by borrowing the story and throwing it in the face of the public with the phrase ‘As You Like It.’