Shaw and Legacy: Introduction
2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/shaw.40.2.0101
ISSN1529-1480
Autores Tópico(s)Literature Analysis and Criticism
ResumoIn 2020, seventy years after the death of George Bernard Shaw in 1950, how and what we consider to be Shaw's legacy (and legacies) to the theater and to wider society are being considered in new light. His legacies to the fields of theater, literature, political discourse, class and poverty, journalism, and media and communications as well as the position of public speech and commentary in society all find individual resonances but also contradictions and certain complexities. Marking this journal's fortieth anniversary, this special issue of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies is dedicated to reconsidering the legacy of Bernard Shaw today. The papers, reflections, practitioner interviews, and curated archives and exhibitions all envision trajectories for new engagements with Shaw's work and also with the public persona he created and curated throughout his lifetime to become one of the world's most familiar and celebrated literary and intellectual figures.This special issue contains a series of new essays that engage with the question of Shaw and legacy in various ways and in new contexts. Remembrance and commemoration of major public figures can often succumb to hagiography over time, as we move further into temporal distance from their own lifetime. The essays in this special issue consider the Shavian legacy as well as Shaw's legacy—and the tasks therein required to separate Shaw and “Shaw talk” from the external public discourse and the private man, husband, and individual. The contributors consider these questions and posit responses, answers, and new questions to take our study of Shaw and his vast contributions to multiple disciplines to new areas of exploration. These questions are presented here in a global conversation and context—from Ireland to Iran.A series of curated interviews with leading theater makers and artists who have worked with and presented some of Shaw's major works in traditional and nontraditional settings provide important viewpoints to the discussion of Shaw and legacy in performance and in today's theater. Playwright and journalist Colin Murphy, director and former artistic director of the Abbey Theatre Patrick Mason, director and co-founder of Hatch Productions Annabelle Comyn, and researcher and academic Aisling Smith all provide detailed and considered interviews and insights into their experience of engaging with Shaw's life, writings, and legacy, as well as producing his works on contemporary stages. A new engagement with Shaw's texts and worlds can reinvigorate the dramaturgy and reception of his plays, allowing theater makers to reinterpret his vast body of work and criticism within new theatrical frameworks. With volumes of Shaw's works increasingly coming into the public domain, and indeed soon to be free from copyright, this presents new possibilities for engagement and experimentation with Shaw's writing and texts, continually expanding the Shavian repertoire.Shaw's legacies are many but perhaps also unquantifiable. Shaw's works and his commentaries and contributions to intellectual and public thought are not just continually relevant to our contemporary time, but speak to our universal questioning of social existence. Shaw's actions, words, image, and memory carry great agency. In editing a short book of letters between Shaw, W. B. Yeats, and Florence Farr, the writer and critic Clifford Bax commented that even if Shaw did not think much of the letters, Bax did, “and posterity will.”1 Posterity and Shaw are interesting bedfellows to consider. To many during Shaw's lifetime, and perhaps to Shaw himself, he seemed immortal. His wiry frame, tall posture, and inexhaustible energy belied his advanced years and outward presentation of the gray-bearded sage.Shaw sought to assert control over how posterity would commemorate him. He inserted within his last will and testament the proviso that “no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating [Shaw]” shall claim he had devotion to any single established church or denomination, or to any of their symbols, citing himself as a follower of “Creative Evolution.”2 As Michel Pharand points out, religion, of some or any sort, and the importance of spirituality to soul, mind, and place, which Shaw was self-proclaimed to possess as a “Life Force,” was so necessary that Shaw invented his own religion, with “a Gospel of Shawianity.”3 If he created a religion, or at least a Shavian tradition for others to follow, then where does that tradition bring us? What legacies does it hold?The pressing issues of our time also reflect many of the issues of Shaw's own time. In the published U.K. edition of Shaw's lecture The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home (1933), Shaw chides his audience, describing their “vicious pleasure” taken in the “defamation of persons not born in England.”4 He criticizes the world economic conference then ongoing in London and berates the globalists in attendance whose self-appointed authority drives subsistence versus survival in the supply chains of global economic power. Most pressing was Shaw's concern that such capitalists, the “hundredpercentmen,” “live in a world of illusion.” Shaw was fascinated by and complicit in the art of illusion. Fintan O'Toole described in his book Judging Shaw the rise of the global brand of “GBS,” the self-creation of the individuality, public effigy, and celebrity that was “GBS.”5The individuality in which Shaw so incorrigibly reveled in played through to his characters and settings that he created on the stage. In his preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession, Shaw describes how confusion reigned in deciphering the artifice constructed on stage, “the real life of the spectator,”6 mirrored through the Ibsenite reality that was constructed on stage. Shaw's audiences found that the combination of artifice and reality was at times an incongruous experience whereby some of Shaw's works present social realism in an Ibsenite tradition; other works such as Back to Methuselah are constructs of illusion and time.Shaw's legacy is undergoing renewed exploration and (re)consideration. Global media have today been branded “the enemy of the people” by Donald Trump, the president of the United States. Shaw was a stringent proponent of a free and impartial press and a vocal advocate of ensuring those who governed are held accountable to the public, even (or especially) during times of crisis. As Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel notes, the role of the free press was, for Shaw, democracy's foundation.7 Shaw used the stage (and his personal persona) as many would see a journalist in a newspaper: as a truth-teller, a conveyer of images and language, to enable his audience to enter this other place, absorb the arguments and debates.In the era of Brexit, and when today British (and/or English) identity is arguably at its most brittle, through the insistence of a fragile conservative nationalism, how can the “other” other island, the United Kingdom, where Shaw spent the majority of his life, be positioned within Shaw's own nationality and identity? David Clare's recent study, Bernard Shaw's Irish Outlook, reconfirms that Shaw was aware of the great impact that his Irishness and his Irish outlook had on the gestation and impacts of his greatest works. Regarding his Irishness, Shaw declared he was “as proud [of it] as any member of the [Irish Literary] revival.” As Shaw summed up, he saw things from the point of view as an Irishman and therefore differently to an Englishman.8Shaw's view on the Irish literary canon and tradition is evident, considering himself part of it, and being a successor to those antecedent writers within the Irish tradition. Shaw wrote to translator, folklorist, and writer Alfred Graves and commented on Graves's inclusion of the “Saltair [na Rann]” in his compendium The Poem Book of the Gael. Shaw added that “in your translation, [it] is unquestionably an addition to our knowledge of Gaelic literature.”9 As Brad Kent outlines regarding the legacy of Shaw on Irish tradition and academy, “The admission of Shaw's artistic merit, formal innovation, and political relevance by successive generations of writers who were among the leading voices of their times attests to the need to account for Shaw's role in the development of modern Irish letters.”10How we mediate Shaw, his memory and his legacy, through digital means is a further facet to cultural remembrance that needs more exploration and debate. Archival records of Shaw's works, such as production records, digitized recordings of contemporary productions, digitized interviews, design records, and other documentary and multimedia legacies of Shaw's production histories allow new opportunities to conduct longitudinal studies across transnational and intercultural contexts. The London School of Economics, the New York Public Library, the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Austin, Texas, the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Library of Ireland, British Pathé, the Hardiman Library of NUI Galway, and the National Gallery of Ireland, to name but a few institutions, have all in recent years made available tens of thousands of digitized records freely online.These digitized archives, relating to Shaw's theater productions, his networks and associations, his public persona and commentaries, as well as more contemporary records of Shaw's plays in production can enable us to gain perspective on the legacy and impacts of Shaw. These can be quantified from assessing Shavian impacts beyond modern theater internationally to contemporary social and political levels, and on critical issues from climate change and the environment to migration and global economics.This special issue addresses themes of the legacy of Shaw's words, works, and actions within the artistic, cultural, and political spheres. The contemporary relevancies offer important opportunities to continue to explore Shaw's thinking. For example, Mrs. Warren's Profession, in both its play text and the play preface, addresses what Shaw describes as the capitalism of the female body. As Audrey McNamara writes in observing the contemporary resonances behind the play's 2013 production at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, “There is no doubt that Mrs. Warren's Profession, speaks to the ongoing struggle for women's equality…. In essence, Shaw is creating a dialogue that places women as a medium of economic barter inside and outside the confines of the law.”11This draws parallels to contemporary human trafficking in areas such as the Mediterranean, forced migration, and the ongoing exploitation of women for monetary gain. Ireland has witnessed both official and public reckoning with the memory and necessary restitutive justice for those women who were imprisoned within the statewide system of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Shaw's vast output across various forms, from essays to pamphlets, public speaking, media broadcasts, and of course the stage, provoke many responses. In Brad Kent's introduction to George Bernard Shaw in Context, we are reminded of how Shaw was indelibly shaped by and a product of the society, networks, and political and social movements of his time. It is inevitable that Shaw's legacy is both celebrated and also scrutinized.12 Tracy C. Davis also posits on “the context problem” within theater history, the distance of time and questions of sources through which to try to analyze and (re)reconstruct theater and personalities; it is a delicate act that falls between interrogation and hagiography.13 Hagiography is too, of course, to be expected but also hopefully avoided in such considerations as legacy. Are we too slow to acknowledge the aspects of Shaw's thinking that are uncomfortable for modern society—such as comments and opinions around the pseudoscientific discourse of eugenics, flirtation with the charisma of totalitarian leaders, or questions of nationalism that can be exaggerated or appropriated within extremist ideology?In doing such interrogation of legacy, it is necessary to continue such responses to Shaw and his many impacts in our contemporary context as well as in Shaw's own lifetime. Shaw's writings on social function and democracy are instructive today when we consider the exploitation of precarious workers in unsecured zero-hour contracts and within “the gig economy.” In his essay “Knowing Our Place,” Shaw warns of the fallacy of the position that “nobody must be allowed to practice any trade or profession which he or she does not understand…. When I contemplate what I know and have done, I have a high opinion of myself. When I contemplate what I don't know and cannot do, I feel as a worm might if I knew how big the world was.”14 As Lawrence Switsky describes, Shaw belongs to an age of mechanical reproducibility.15 The tools of craft and the expression of dramatic as well as public communication are so often “performed” and expressed through the hands. Shaw was aware of the dexterity of human handcraft as well as fascinated in technology and how the two forces of human and the nonhuman meet through touch. Shaw photographed his hands, immortalizing his handprints through the camera technology of the early twentieth century. The photographs and many self-portraits Shaw took are revealing of the views in which he captured himself for posterity, not least of all with a focus on the intimacy of touch, a focus on hands and tangibility of memory. Shaw's own hands, as the tools of his literary craft, also skillfully curated his legacy. In his preface to Saint Joan, Shaw describes the ignorance of the young Joan to the ways of warfare: “She knew nothing of iron hands in velvet gloves: she just used her fists.” A self-portrait within the collection of Shaw photographs at the London School of Economics sees Shaw seated and hunched over what looks like a stove, with light emitting brightly, simulating warming his hands over the fire. Shaw's posture in the photograph also alludes to him physically controlling the light with his hands, like a God, shaping its form. There are numerous photographic portraits of Shaw's hands in the photograph collection, and Shaw's own fascination in such photographs can be inferred from the influence of the work of Howard Coster, who photographed Shaw's hands in 1926.16 In Major Barbara, and in a Shakespearian allusion, Barbara castigates those who make wealth from manufacturing weapons: “Two million millions would not be enough. There is bad blood on your hands; and nothing but good blood can cleanse them. Money is no use. Take it away.”17Essays in this issue consider Shaw's legacy(ies) in the global context, from Ireland to Iran and from the Victorian period to contemporary Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Adrian Paterson explores Shaw and voice and the mechanics of speech as a technological device that fascinated and preoccupied Shaw. From music to song, speech, accent, diction, and rhythm, the aural legacy of Shaw is, by the playwright's own admission, filled with “Shaw talk.” The Voice: Its Artistic Production, Development, and Preservation, written by George J. Lee and published in 1870, is, as Paterson outlines, a formative volume for understanding the creation of voice and sound and its manipulation within Shaw's plays and characters, including Shaw's correspondence with Florence Farr and the staging of voice coaching and techniques in Pygmalion.Soudabeh Ananisarab presents a study of the production and reception of Shaw's plays in midcentury Iran. Ananisarab's essay presents a new study of the political context of the first production and translation of Shaw's plays in Iran, from 1946, and argues that Shaw has had a lasting influence and legacy on intellectual debate in Iran that is still being represented in contemporary Iranian popular culture. Ananisarab focuses on productions of Arms and the Man (1946) and Don Juan in Hell (1974) and also the translation of Saint Joan by pioneering Iranian modernist poet and film director Forough Farrokhzad prior to her death in 1967.Nicholas Grene tackles a central question on the premise of legacy and Shaw: can we, by our standards today, accept Shaw's opinions that were wrong or ill-considered? Can we forgive Shaw his failings? With his outspoken stances on vaccinations, totalitarianism, and even Nazism, the “dark side of GBS,” as so called recently by Fintan O'Toole, necessitates a reappraisal that avoids hagiography and considers why Shaw may have arrived at such viewpoints but also allows space for reflection on instances where Shaw reconciled his stance on such views within his own lifetime.Aileen Ruane considers the reception of Shaw's Saint Joan in a production at the Abbey Theatre in 1998, where the titular character was played by Jane Brennan. This carries specific connotations for the presentations of sexuality, masculinity, and femininity. While canonized, Joan as a saint presents the female as divine, a woman who has ascended to the status of deity. This production, directed by Patrick Mason, presented the character of Joan as an officer in the Russian army during World War I. The iconography of masculinity in wartime, self-sacrificing for political or ideological means, is contrasted with the androgyny of the female body in military uniform.Richard Dietrich also addresses the quandary of “Judging Shaw” and how that act of retrospection is possible when Shaw considered himself as a “world-betterer.” Dietrich's essay considers the risks and chances that Bernard Shaw took with respect to intervention through his promotion of a new science-based religion called Creative Evolution.In Judging Shaw Fintan O'Toole notes how a number of Shaw's great(est) plays still command regular audiences in major international theaters. O'Toole adds that “at his best Shaw is thrillingly (and maddeningly) open-ended. The aspects of his drama that seem old-fashioned—the heavy stage settings and elaborate costumes—are dispensable.”18 As Shaw's works will be free of copyright and open to new interpretation, we will see new formulations of Shavian theater. These should be welcomed if not also scrutinized for the liberties they will inevitably take. Shaw's plays without Shaw are not truly Shaw's plays. They are didactic insofar as he wanted them to be. As Shaw wrote in the preface to Pygmalion, “It goes to prove my contention that great art can never be anything else.”19 However, as O'Toole elaborates, something will be lost in the process of breaking Shaw's characters, setting, and drama out of the conventions of the Victorian and Edwardian theater, much can still be gained: “the fluid theatricality of the best plays will be given free reign.”20Within this special issue, these very questions of performativity and contemporary Shavian performance are discussed and analyzed in a series of practitioner interviews. We hear from writers, directors, researchers, and artists with a range of different voices and experiences in producing Shaw's work for the stage and indeed in bringing the identity and legacy of Shaw himself to the stage and how audiences may receive and consider Shaw in the modern theater.Patrick Mason, former artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, academic, and freelance director, has been formative of producing and directing Shaw in Ireland and internationally across four decades since first working in Dublin as a voice coach on a production of Saint Joan, directed by Lelia Doolan at the experimental Peacock stage. Mason speaks of the production histories of Shaw's plays “that come in waves” when a specific moment arrives or someone new engages with Shaw's work in a meaningful way.Playwright Colin Murphy wrote a new play, Judging Shaw, that was produced in site-specific production by the award-winning Anu Productions, at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, in November 2018. The play draws on and features excerpts from Shaw's letters, articles, prefaces, and plays and features a promenade performance around the Academy building in Dublin, where the audience encounters Shaw for themselves culminating with a broadcaster taking him to task for statements that he made over his lifetime that risk him being regarded as a pariah and “canceled” on social media. In the interview, Murphy discusses in detail the processes of creating such a work and considers Shaw in terms of today's society and contemporary theater.Annabelle Comyn, artistic director of Hatch Theater Company and freelance director, directed the Abbey Theatre premieres of Pygmalion and Major Barbara (2011 and 2013, respectively) and speaks of her processes with directing Shaw's plays for the first time. Comyn also speaks in detail of working closely in rehearsal with the ensemble to explore the “driving muscularity behind his writing,” where “real passion for something tumultuous to happen, something seismic” is brought out through collaborative processes of the theater.Academic and practitioner Aisling Smith completed a practice-as-research doctoral project based on a dramaturgical examination of Shaw's later plays, including O'Flaherty V.C., The Millionairess, and Pygmalion, using frameworks of site-specific, intermedial, and epic performance styles. This project examined Shaw through an active dramatic and performance lens as well as in a geo-economic context. Smith explains the significance in the works selected, through their contemporary restaging in Galway, as well as the economic and political resonances of money, gender, and class within the plays.Bernard F. Dukore provides an essay on Bernard Shaw and the smallpox epidemic of 1901–2, which offers a timely reflection and study of major global health concerns as seen at the beginning of the twentieth century. Also included in this issue is a pen portrait on the creative evolution of SHAW by the late Stanley Weintraub and Michel Pharand, charting the journal's legacy and remarkable body of achievements over its forty years; “A Continuing Checklist of Shaviana” by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín; as well as a number of book reviews.In the years that followed Shaw's death, audiences would seldom be without the opportunity to see Shaw's plays produced. As Robert G. Everding writes, A spokesperson for the Society of Authors noted that “a day never passes without a performance of some Shaw play being given somewhere in the world.” In 1951 five different Shaw plays appeared on Broadway, while six full-length and eighteen short scripts ran in London…. By 1975 [recordings on vinyl of] Shaw plays were issued by several different recording labels with the Caedmon catalogue offering seven complete plays including Pygmalion, Misalliance, and John Bull's Other Island.21 As a sign of changing tastes, however, and also of theatrical movements, by 1977 British playwright John Osborne could dismiss Shaw as an “inept writer of Victorian melodramas,” yet new generations of Irish and British audiences were finding new appreciations for Shaw's theater. The ability of Shaw's work to adapt and speak to the globalizing and modernizing world of the 1960s and succeeding decades allowed new companies and theaters to reinvigorate Shavian theater in terms of practice and production. Shaw's clarity, in his prose and in his theater, found a new audience in the globalizing and culturally fluid years of the 1960s onward. This was also, of course, a post-Shavian world. What remained accrued into vast remnants of a physical legacy—archives, manuscripts, and objects, along with an unquantifiable Shavian legacy of a way of thinking that J. B. Priestly described as being intermingled within the “air we breathe.”22The shopping list of Shaw manuscripts that was brokered for private sale between the Shaw Estate and the British Museum reveals what you needed to spend in order to buy a little piece of Shaw. The four manuscript notebooks of The Doctor's Dilemma would set you back three thousand pounds; a manuscript of Mrs. Warren's Profession was pitched at fifteen hundred, while the first three acts of The Devil's Disciple composing three notebooks would cost you seven hundred pounds. For an individual like Shaw, who popularized the paperback book and in doing so made intellectual and educational reading affordable to the masses, his archival legacy became a capital asset to institutions around the globe and via the major auction houses such as Sotheby's.23 Shaw was a top-price acquisition, a marketable commodity.In February 1964, the last act of Heartbreak House was read in place of the sermon during a service at St. Clement's Protestant Episcopal Church on West 46th Street in Manhattan. In just over a decade since he died, Shaw's words had quite literally been taken for Gospel. In November 1964, The Bernard Shaw Story, a one-man play written and performed by British actor Bramwell Fletcher, opened at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, directed by Hilton Edwards. The play transferred to New York, where it opened at the Theater de Lys in Manhattan in October 1965 and later in November at the 74th Street Playhouse. In a review the Irish Times suggested that for the play-starved Dublin audiences, The Bernard Shaw Story might send young playgoers “hurrying off to Shaw's works, to see what they're missing.”24Despite John Osborne's misgivings about the relevance of Shaw into the 1970s, the initials and enduring brand of “GBS” was pictured on the program cover of a Festival of Anglo-Irish Theater by Druid Theatre Company in 1977. Garry Hynes directed A Village Wooing and The Fascinating Foundling in 1978 and 1979. In Belfast, Cork-born director Mary O'Malley staged Shaw's satire on “the Irish Question,” John Bull's Other Island, in August 1971, the same week that the British Army's Operation Demetrius enforced the policy of “internment without trial” in Northern Ireland, a policy of internment against those suspected of Republican terrorist activity. While Anglo-Irish relations drew to a perilous low in the 1970s, audiences and critics signaled their emphatic approval of the production of John Bull at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, commenting that the play (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) has “blown the cobwebs off Shaw.”Jennifer Buckley observes how technology and digital media are enabling new (and global) encounters with Shaw “in a distinctly twenty-first century way” and in a digital capacity. “During the summer of 2015 … the Royal National Theater broadcast a live digital feed of Simon Godwin's high-profile production of Man and Superman to movie theaters and art centers across the United Kingdom and Europe.”25 Nicholas Grene points out that despite Shaw's output and impacts on the global stage throughout his long lifetime, he is still sometimes considered “the invisible man of Irish theater.”26 Through new digital media and the media of theater, a new global audience might encounter Shaw for the first time, to reawaken the personality behind the image.Shaw had complex opinions about his own effigy and legacy. He discarded his birthday by deed poll and famously never celebrated his birth, telling a reporter in Scotland on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday that he was “not young enough to be really proud of my age and not old enough to have become really popular in England.”27 Shaw objected to plans for a commemorative plaque to be mounted on the house of his birth on Synge Street, Dublin, saying he would strictly consent only to the detail he himself submitted and that the plaque “must bear no inscription of opinion as to my merits and demerits and must state only the unquestionable fact that I once lived in this house.”28 Considering his own mortality, Shaw later joked that his ghost would be “enormously amused” if his statue (cast in bronze by the sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy) would be placed on College Green in Dublin, next to the statues of Oliver Goldsmith and Henry Grattan, figures who were both Trinity College alumni and symbolic of the formal classical education Shaw himself did not receive.29 Charlotte Shaw took great efforts to ensure that Dublin would “possess a good portrait” of her husband, leaving one by John Collier to the National Gallery during his lifetime.30Despite the international celebrity of Shaw and the recognition of his public presence and persona through his talks, publishing, plays, and networks, Shaw was still taken by the urgent necessity of solitude and his relationship to the natural world. His own personal writing shed could rotate at his whim to follow the track of the sun's journey. On a journey to Skellig Michael, off the coast of County Kerry in 1910 “on an open boat,” Shaw marveled with childlike wonder at the “gothic extravagances” of the Skelligs. In trying to make sense of the “prodigious rock,” he was caught in the moment between dream and folklore, landscape and presence: “I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world.”31 Shaw's “dream worlds” were many, and his life's reflections upon his own mortality, image, and legacy do at times revert to dream worlds and wonder.In a filmed interview at his home in Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, the ninety-year-old Shaw delighted at the cameras and those present. “Well, it's very pleasant to have seen you all here. And to think that you are my audience, and all that. Because I'm a born actor, myself. I like an audience. I'm like a child in that respect. Well, goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye all of you.” Shaw reveled in having an audience. He never lost his childlike fascination with the world and people and the pursuit of ideas. It is true today that we are all still Shaw's audience.
Referência(s)