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Bernard Shaw on Tragedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Sylvan Barnet
Sylvan Barnet*
Affiliation:
Tufts University, Medford, Mass.
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Extract

When Shaw was alive the public had little opportunity to come to any conclusions about his attitude toward tragedy—and especially toward Shakespearean tragedy—because the septuagenarian, then octogenarian, then nonagenarian was always willing to publish yet another play, another pamphlet, or another letter reminding his readers that he was inordinately fond of Shakespeare's verbal music, quarreled not with Shakespeare but with Irving, and had included a question mark after the words “Better than Shakespear?” His pronouncements have often embarrassed his admirers, and a number of friendly critics have sought to clarify and make tolerable his opinions by demonstrating that he admired much in Shakespeare, that his fundamental conflict was only with bad Shakespeare or badly adapted Shakespeare.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 5 , December 1956 , pp. 888 - 899
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 “Superman versus Man: Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare,” YR, XLII (Autumn 1952), 67–82. Also of interest is E. J. West, “G.B.S. on Shakespearean Production,” SP, XLV (1948), 216–235. West assembles many of Shaw's defenses of Shakespeare but he oversimplifies the problem by suggesting that Shaw objected not to Shakespeare but only to 19th-century mutilations of the text.

2 See Morse Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA, LXVI (1951), 5–23.

3 Sixteen Self Sketches (New York, 1949), p. 126.

4 Insisting that the good life is rational rather than heroic, Plato saw man dwelling in a well-ordered cosmos. Disproportionate suffering was for him unthinkable, and he assumed that the tragic playwrights were slipshod philosophers. Shaw resembles Plato in yet another way, for like Plato he believes that tragic dramatists portray appearance rather than reality.

5 Parenthetical references containing a volume and page will all refer to Shaw's Our Theatres in the Nineties (London, 1932). References containing only a page number will be to Shaw's Prefaces (London, 1934). I think I have fairly stated Shaw's over-all theory of villains, but it must be pointed out that at times he modified this idea. See Our Theatres, iii. 332.

6 Postscript (1944) to Bach to Methuselah (New York, 1947), p. 248.

7 Ibid., p. 260. For Shaw on Ibsen, see the careful study by E. J. West, “Shaw's Criticism of Ibsen: A Reconsideration,” Univ. of Colo. Stud., Ser. in Lang, and Lit., No. 4 (Boulder, 1953), pp. 101–127. For a brief but perceptive study of Shaw's distortion of Ibsen's tragedies see TLS, 22 May 1953, pp. 325–326.

8 See, e.g., Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), pp. 326–350, and E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (London, 1950), pp. 12–17. For tie contrary view, that the tragic hero is not finally “regenerated,” see my “Some Limitations of a Christian Approach to Shakespeare,” ELB, XXII (1955), 81–92.

9 Complete Works, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903–32), xii, 410.

10 On Shaw and philosophy see Arthur H. Nethercot, “Bernard Shaw, Philosopher,” PMLA, LXIX (1954), 57–75.

11 Taking his cue from Wagner's youthful revolutionary activities rather than from the operas themselves, Shaw in The Perfect Wagnerite thought of the composer as a propagandist instead of a tragic artist. He insisted that Wagner's music dramas point the way to the millennium, but to do this he was forced to slight—even to scorn—the Gölterd'dmmerung, where the immolation of Brünhilde on Siegfried's pyre is about as relevant to a sunny future as Othello's suicide upon his realization that he has cast away a pearl richer than all his tribe. In the preface to Misalliance Shaw maintained that the Nibelung's Ring and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound are the “modern revelations” which correct “the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic picture of a bewildered soul” submitting to “the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of God” (p. 100).

13 Reprinted in Around Theatres (London, 1953), pp. 442–446. See also Arthur Nethercot, Men and Supermen (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 152.

13 For a good study of this play see Frederick P. W. McDowell, “Technique, Symbol, and Theme in Heartbreak House” PMLA, Lxvni (1953), 335–356.

14 Modernism“ in Modem Drama (Ithaca, 1953), pp. 58–60.

15 “He Was Mankind's Friend,” in George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Survey, ed. Louis Kronenberger (New York, 1953), p. 254.

16 Paul Green, Dramatic Heritage (New York, 1953), p. 127.

17 “Bernard Shaw at Eighty,” in George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Survey, p. 146. Louis L. Martz, in “The Saint as Tragic Hero,” Tragic Themes in Western Literature, ed. Cleanth Brooks (New Haven, 1955), takes a more moderate position than Wilson's when he suggests (p. 177) that in Saint Joan Shaw is “hanging on by his hands to the very rim of tragedy.”

18 Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence, ed. Alan Dent (New York, 1952), p. 163.

19 Quoted in Dramatic Heritage, pp. 125–126.