GEORGE BERNARD SHAW AND THE ENGLISH DRAMA

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The Shaw Drama

Bernard Shaw began a career in playwriting in 1891, with Widowers’ Houses. By 1910, he had become well-established as a playwright and his fame had spread to Germany and the United States of America. He wrote over sixty plays with a vast subject – matter on the “paradoxes of conventional society” (Downer, p.303). Shaw’s themes include the evil of capitalism, the struggle of the sexes, professional hypocrisy, marriage as a procrustean bed, individualism versus collectivism, the goodness of life, averted love interest, life as a process, reality and idealism, etc.

According to Eric Bentley, Shaw’s interest in playwriting is to depict “human situation as he found it and not simply as he desired”. Shaw perceived human society as plagued by hypocrisy and that everyone poses. For him therefore, the goal of the theatre is to discover the man or woman under the pose. In line with this, G.K. Chesterton observes that Shaw’s major business as a theatre person is “the pricking of illusions, the stripping away of disguises’.

Apart from Mrs. Warren’s Profession where he made a frontal attack on capitalism, Shaw as an observer of human situations, deals with the “struggle between human vitality and the artificial system of morality” (Bentley, p.105). Shaw finds the conventional ethics of modern life to be synonymous with those of stage melodrama. Like Shakespeare he sees the world as a stage where people pretend to be what they are not in reality. According to Bentley:

He ridiculed the unreality of Victorian melodrama by letting a flood of “natural history”. But he found that the unreality was the real: the illusions of melodrama were precisely those which men fall victim to in “real” life. Hence the inversion of melodrama – a device found in Shaw from the beginning to the end was not an arbitrary trick but an integral part of an interpretation of life.

Shaw’s characters are lively and filled with unusual energy and intellect. For Shaw, the credible human being is not wholly good or completely bad. Man is a bundle of opposites. In one person, there is a constant interaction of reality and illusion. Eric Bentley states:

The upshot is that Shaw repudiates the villain and hero system, not in sheer contrariness, nor yet out of love for that drab naturalism which replaces black and white with an even gray. Shaw wanted to bring in “reality”, and reality for him was neither black, white, nor gray but all the colors of rainbow.

In Shaw’s plays, people do wrong not as villains but “only for ends they regard as right”. The implication for Shaw is that every person is right or wrong from his or her own perspective. He believes that an individual in the context of the tragi-comedy of the real has a multiple personality. A good man sometimes does outrageous deed and a bad woman can perform a gracious deed. So to be normative in his characterisation, “Shaw abandoned the totally black villain and substituted a human being, shaped by heredity and environment, and able to justify his behaviour in terms acceptable to the society in which he lived” (Downer, p.304).

Shaw’s plays examined the relationship between the ideal and practice and as such, we find in them men of the mind on one hand, and on the other hand, we find practical men who are devoid of speculative life. The first group speculates about the world but hardly does anything to help it out, while the second group which Shaw represents with professionals is made up of impostors.

Shaw’s major contribution to the theatre is that he helped to bring into fashion, a type of drama known as drama of idea, discussion, or disquistory play. Drama of idea is a drama of the mind. It makes its appeal directly to the mind. With reference to discussion plays, Tom F. Driver observes that “The drama in them consist of the dialectical conflict among the ideas themselves”. In fact, ideas are in the foreground. What is particularly intriguing and fascinating in Shaw’s drama of ideas, lies in his handling of the ideas. Bentley posits that:

Shaw’s handling of ideas is “of the theatre” most obviously because he so well knows how to confront spokesmen of different outlooks. To this task Shaw brings his unequalled gift of sympathising with both sides… This is not a matter of fair-mindedness merely, it is a matter of a particular mentality, a particular way of observing life. Shaw’s way is the dramatist way. For him, ideas perform like characters.

In Shaw’s plays, each character speaks and acts as life affects him or her and this makes it possible to be drawn to different magnetic poles in quick succession. Because conflicting ideas are at issue, Alan S. Downer argues:

The intellectual rather than the physical complication is the dramatist main concern, and it is Shaw’s distinction that he has made the conflict of ideas as exciting as any of Boucicault’s last – minute rescues. The secret may lie in the fact that Shaw is no abstract philosopher, but one who sees ideas always as part of human problems.

Shaw’s plays are fall of wit, humour, and irony. These elements function to demonstrate that appearance is highly deceptive and that man is a malleable creature with more than one self. In fact, Chesterton regards a Shavian play as an extended paradox because truth is gained indirectly. For Shaw the human mind may not be totally depraved, but “unable to face reality except in the disguise of comforting illusion” (Bentley, p.178).

The Synopsis of Heartbreak House

Heartbreak House is written in three acts and it is set in the ship-like house of Captain Shotover, a very odd house full of surprises and impossible characters. In Act 1 Ellie Dunn visits Hesione Hushabye but her hostess keeps her waiting without anybody to even say welcome. The Nurse who stumbles on her apologises and assures her that she will get used to the house.

As Ellie rescinds her intention to leave, Ariadne, now Lady Utterword, daughter to Captain Shotover, the father of the house, comes in after a long period of absence occasioned by her marriage. She chats with Ellie and after a long time of nobody in the house coming to welcome her, she gets angry telling Ellie about the chaotic state of the house and its inhabitants.

In a moment, Mrs. Hesione Hushabye another daughter of Captain Shotover and Ellie’s hostess bursts in, apologises to Ellie but does not recognise her sister Ariadne. Worse still, the Captain sees Lady Utterword as a stranger and treats her as such in spite of the lady’s explanation. This is followed by the coming of Ellie’s father Mazzini Dunn of which Hesione regards as brute for wanting his daughter to marry an old man because of money, even though she herself has an eye for the same man. The Captain mistakes Mazzini Duun to be Billy Dunn – a sea pirate that had robbed him.

A chat between Ellie and Hesione reveals that Eliie actually longs for one Marcus Darnley. She is only bound by honour and gratitude to marry Mangan because of his financial assistance to her father. When he appears, Marcus Danrley happens in reality to be Mr. Hector Hushabye, Hesione’s legally married husband. The knowledge shocks Ellie and merely surprises Hector that a young woman he shortly fell in love with is his wife’s acquaintance.

As the noise about the afore-mentioned issue dies down, Boss Mangan appears. Captain Shotover without hesitation bluntly tells him that he is too old at 55 years to marry Ellie, but Mangan tells him that Ellie does not feel so. The discussion is interrupted by the appearance of Randall Utterword, a younger brother to Hastings, the husband of Lady Utterword. The young diplomat is treated shabbily by Lady Utterword for coming uninvited.

Nevertheless, Randall joins the company. When all have gone out of the room except Lady Utterword and Hector Hushabye who is described as “splendid – looking and irresistible’, the two begin to talk love, consummating it with a kiss. In respect to this kiss, Ariadne tells Hector, “Oh! That was a little more than a play, brother – in – law!” and Hector replies, “In effect, you got your claws deeper into me than I intended” (Act 1). When the Lady leaves, Hector, alone, begins to gesticulate on the affair – all this he turns immediately into a pretended exercise on the entrance of the Captain.

In Act II, Mangan and Ellie engage in a verbal duel of which Mangan gets more than he bargains for. Hesione had attempted in vain to make Dunn to stop the idea of marrying Ellie to Mangan. While Mangan is in a pretended sleep owing to his encounter with Elie, Hesione tries to dissuade Ellie herself from accepting Mangan, saying all sorts of things against him. Mangan wakes up and confronts the ladies especially Hesione for saying awful things against him. He threatens to leave, but Captain Shotover tells him:

Go, Boss Mangan, and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you (Act 11).

As the company of men and women are digesting the foregoing, there is a noise of a burglar attack. The burglar is caught by Hector and he begs to be sent to jail but the people not willing to engage the court decide against the idea. Captain comes to identify the culprit as Billy Dunn the pirate that had robbed him and who once married Nurse Guinness.

When the hullabaloo of the burglary settles down, Mrs. Hushabye forces Mangan to have a walk with her. Captain Shotover and Ellie talk about Ellie’s intention to marry Mangan. When Ellie learns that Shotover’s claim of selling his soul to the devil is a pretense, she tells Shotover that she will pretend to sell herself to Mangan in order to save her soul from poverty that is destroying it by inches. Randall reveals his jealousy over Hector and Lady Utterword’s relationship because he has been secretly longing for her too. Lady Ariadne gives him a bit of her tongue for meddling into her private affair and this lashing of the tongue keeps Randall angry causing him to, see women as the most hateful animals in the world.

In Act III, everything appears to be dissolving like a candle. Hector talks about heaven being unhappy with earthly creatures. Everyone’s pose is unmasked where danger hovers in the air. An explosion blows up the rectory while another yet gets the glasses of the window of the house shattered. Mangan and Billy Dunn who run into Shotover’s gravel pit, denotate the dynamite he keeps there and get killed. This is followed by a distant explosion signifying impending doom. At the end nobody gets what he or she has been longing for. More important is that those safe in the house now live in a haunted environment.

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