“6. That when Shakespeare used that phrase he meant exactly what he said, and that the phrase ‘What You Will,’ which he applied to ‘Twelfth Night,’ meaning ‘Call it what you please,’ is not, in Shakespearean or any other English, the equivalent of the perfectly unambiguous and penetratingly simple phrase ‘As You Like It.’
“7. That Shakespeare tried to make the public accept real studies of life and character in—for instance—‘Measure for Measure’ and ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’; and that the public would not have them, and remains of the same mind still, preferring a fantastic sugar doll, like Rosalind, to such serious and dignified studies of women as Isabella and Helena.
“8. That the people who spoil paper and waste ink by describing Rosalind as a perfect type of womanhood are the descendants of the same blockheads whom Shakespeare, with the coat of arms and the lands in Warwickshire in view, had to please when he wrote plays as they liked them.
“9. Not, as has been erroneously stated, that I could write a better play than ‘As You Like It,’ but that I actually have written much better ones, and in fact, never wrote anything, and never intend to write anything, half so bad in matter. (In manner and art nobody can write better than Shakespeare, because, carelessness apart, he did the thing as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty.)
“10. That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of words, blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical, and even obscurely technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of fantasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression, and that this is why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the head of England since Shakespeare’s time in this form by people who could not have written ‘Box and Cox’ to save their lives. Also (this on being challenged) that I can write blank verse myself more swiftly than prose, and that, too, of full Elizabethan quality plus the Shakespearian sense of the absurdity of it as expressed in the lines of Ancient Pistol. What is more, that I have done it, published it, and had it performed on the stage with huge applause.
“11. That Shakespeare’s power lies in his enormous command of word music, which gives fascination to his most blackguardly repartees and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes.
“12. That Shakespeare’s weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality, and the bearing of these on communities, which is sociology. That his characters have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions of any sort. That there are, as Ruskin pointed out, no heroes in Shakespeare. That his test of the worth of life is the vulgar hedonic test and that since life cannot be justified by this or any other external test, Shakespeare comes out of his reflective period a vulgar pessimist, oppressed with a logical demonstration that life is not worth living, and only surpassing Thackeray in respect to being fertile enough, instead of repeating ‘Vanitas vanitatum’ at second hand to work the futile doctrine differently and better in such passages as ‘Out, out, brief candle.’”
These twelve articles merely serve to arouse a new storm of discussion and Shaw profited much thereby in the advertising it gave him. In May, 1905, the controversy had reached such a height that J. B. Fagan, a young English dramatist, wrote a burlesque about it. The piece was called “Shakespeare vs. Shaw” and was presented at the Haymarket Theater, London. The scene of the one act was a courtroom, in which the case between the two playwrights was being tried. James Welsh, Miss Winifred Emery, Cyril Maude, and other prominent players were in the cast and the little revue evidently made a fair success. At all events, its presentation was a rather significant thing. Few dramatists, in their lifetimes, see plays written about them.
THE END