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Shaw’s Candida: A Comedy

1990; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1990.0005

1913-4835

James Woodfield,

Sustainable Development and Policies

SHAW’S CANDIDA: A COMEDY JAM ES W O O D F IE L D University of New Brunswick In Plays Pleasant, Shaw abandons the ambiguities and uncertainties of form that characterize Plays Unpleasant, and settles for variations of Scribean comedy. It is, perhaps, more accurate to say that Shaw exploits the form, and by utilizing conventional devices, such as comic inversion, in uncon­ ventional ways, he creates his own particular brand of comedy to challenge conventional thinking and, at this stage of his dramatic career, to adumbrate the philosophical direction he was to take later in such plays as Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Getting Married, and Back to Methuselah. In Candida (1895), through his sub-title, “A Mystery,” Shaw diverts attention from the comedy and suggests larger dimensions; again, in the 1898 Preface to Plays Pleasant, he emphasizes those dimensions in his explanation of how he came to attempt “a modern pre-Raphaelite play” (372). Just as Shaw’s comedy is not the conventional comedy to which his 1895 audience was ac­ customed, so his religion is not conventional Christianity (or “Crosstianity” as he terms it in the Preface to MB).1This paper is an examination of Can­ dida with a view to establishing the relationship between its comic form and its religious, or philosophical, message, and the extent to which the form and the message reinforce each other. I In his analysis of “Shaw’s Debt to Scribe,” Stephen S. Stanton sees Candida as the author’s most extensive application to date of conventional dramaturgy. . . . He makes particular use of the suspense technique of the withheld se­ cret, the guiproquo or misunderstanding, the triangle of hero and two rival women (here becoming heroine and two rival men), and the Scribean act structure. (578) Eugene’s secret love for Candida is soon revealed, and precipitates the con­ flict. Shaw differs from other dramatists in the well-made-play tradition in that he does not employ his secrets to complicate the action, but rather he transposes them to the realm of ideas. “Prossy’s secret” is her love for Morell, but it has no plot function, nor does the secret that the Morells’ E n g l is h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , x v i , 4 , December 1990 marriage is not what it appears (or what he thinks it is) or the secret that the poet carries away with him at the end. The triangle of husband-wiferomantic lover forms a basic pattern for countless domestic comedies, and Shaw follows the general outline of the formula, including inversions and reversals of fortune, even to the conventional moral conclusion of husband and wife being united and lover expelled. However, he extends the inver­ sion pattern to overturn the conventional expectation by making the wife, rather than the husband, the stronger partner. She does not discover that her seemingly prosaic husband has romantic qualities, nor does she come to appreciate his strength; rather, her view of his weaknesses is confirmed, and she recognizes her responsibility to him more as mother to a needy child than wife to a pillar of the household. As Martin Meisel has noted, the auction itself is similar to scenes in Sardou’s Divorçons, adapted by Charles Dance as Delicate Ground (229).2Unlike the wives of conventional domestic drama, Candida is too much a realist to fall victim to the enticements of romantic love or to be enslaved by notions of duty and respectability. As a realist, she has a more objective view of the nature of her marriage, a view that Morell totally misunderstands; but she, too, misunderstands, or at least un­ derestimates, his faith in its conformity to the Victorian ideal. Each makes significant discoveries about the other (and himself, in Morell’s case) and the nature of married love, while the audience, presented with disturbing ideas within the framework of conventional comedy, are made “to scrutinize the complacency of their own lives” (Stanton 581). That Candida is comedy in the general sense is immediately clear to any­ one who sees or reads the play: it provokes laughter in large measure from start...