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.’
“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.