Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Imagine Shaw

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.34.1.0193

1529-1480

Richard F. Dietrich,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Oh, to have been a fly on Shaw's wall, as many of us have many times wished! What did he actually say where and when, and what reply did he actually get when and where, and how did he reply to that, and what faces did everybody make, and what body movements occurred, and so on? Shaw's biographers and chronologizers have done their best to evoke the actualities of Shaw's life, his letters, autobiographical sketches, and diaries have given us vivid pictures as well, and we have recordings and videos of some of his public performances, which help us know his voice and some of his facial expressions and gestures, but we're still left wondering what really happened or what Shaw was really like in any given situation, especially when he was offstage, so to speak. Or was he always onstage when people were around, as is our custom as a species? In either case, how did he “act”? At least he admitted to acting.Eons ago, it seems, I published in SHAW 12 (1992) an article titled “Shaw as Dramatic Icon: A Bibliography of Impersonations” in which I listed and annotated eighty-four examples of Shaw's use as a character in some other writer's dramatization, in some of which sincere guesses were made as to what Shaw was really like, in some of which Shaw was made to perform according to the author's agenda, often satiric, and most being mixed. I had the impression then that there were many more examples to be found, and I've noted that hardly a year has passed since without some attempt to use Shaw as a character, including as a narrator or commenting bystander in his own plays. And this says nothing about his use in poetry and prose fiction, not as frequent, I think, but it did and does happen.A particularly successful current example of a play's making extensive use of Shaw as a character is John Morogiello's engaging play, Engaging Shaw, which has had several productions and good reviews, and, reportedly, good audience response. Its action covers one of those events we'd definitely like to know more about, the courtship of Charlotte Payne-Townshend by Shaw, or was it of Shaw by Charlotte? The cover of the play features an amusing cartoon drawn by artist Marjorie Williamson (and published here with her permission) that argues for the latter.The cover is in vivid color, Shaw mostly in reds (his hair) and browns or tans, but there's a minor blue note mixed with the tan in his argyle socks that prophetically matches the overwhelming blue of Charlotte's dress.Well, that fits the plot of Man and Superman, written not long after Shaw's marriage, with the pursuit of male by female, so why not imagine that Charlotte was at least one of the models for Ann Whitefield and might actually have supplied some dialogue for it, as Morogiello does in his play? Except that the cartoon goes a step further (cuts to the chase, you might say) by having the person in the driver's seat be Charlotte, with Shaw uncomfortably and relunctantly seated on the handle bars. That doesn't literally happen in either Shaw's or Morogiello's play, but that image is a poetic expression of what does happen in Man and Superman, especially when Tanner's dream of “Don Juan in Hell” rationalizes the need to surrender to the driving force of the universe.With the married Webbs for counterpoint and contrast, the Webbs being in the thick of all the intrigues and debates that follow, Morogiello's Shaw and Charlotte dance a complicated mating dance, Shaw having moves, witty moves, that few women have seen, and this Charlotte gains credit for so skillfully answering many of them with witty moves of her own. But was the real Charlotte quite the match for the real Shaw in the sort of witty exchange that Morogiello portrays (and as perhaps supported in the cover's having the tan in her hat matching Shaw's vest, her brown hair matching Shaw's suit)? The biographers suggest that wouldn't be quite accurate. It seems Morogiello has lent Charlotte some of the wit and verbal energy that we find in Ann Whitefield and any number of other Shavian female characters who deal expertly with recalcitrant males. And this is typical of the way Morogiello has borrowed from fictional characters in Shaw's future plays to assist in the imagining of the characters of the real people of the late 1890s who, after all, probably and partly inspired the fictional characters, and, if the fictional ones improve on the real ones, that's only as art always does to life. Of course, Shaw actually claimed that he was creating the New Woman in his plays expecting that life would imitate art, and here we have Morogiello imitating Shaw's art to create a facsimile of a real New Woman. Too many repeating mirrors in this funhouse! But now we add Shakespeare to itIn a cottage in Stratford, of all places (perhaps tipping us off that we're in for some sort of midsummer night's dream), Sidney Webb opens the play by practicing for a speech he's to give later, the first line of which is “How do we convince a man to sacrifice self for the needs of the community?” He's arguing for the peaceful, gradual progress toward socialism in a democracy in which the electorate has been slowly permeated by education in the advantages of socialism, but the play implicitly applies this as well to its main action, the progress of Charlotte in “engaging” (socializing) Shaw. As Sidney argues that socialism cannot be forced, so too Charlotte's Fabian tactics illustrate how romance can also not be forced. Since the sort of gradualism and permeation she practices takes time and patience, as Shaw repeatedly fancy steps away from domestication, so, like Fabius, Charlotte must bide her time.It helps that the Webbs are on her side, eventually, Sidney from the start arguing that “marriage is the perfect social model,” and Beatrice, at first steering Shaw toward Bertha Newcombe and Charlotte toward Graham Wallas, changing Shaw's direction toward Charlotte, partly because she perceives a threat to her marriage from the notorious philanderer and wishes to deflect him elsewhere as soon as possible.With banter that has been recorded nowhere (except in Shaw's own plays?) and that at times sounds a bit more Wildean than Shavian but witty in either case, Charlotte and Shaw game each other through various events: a bicycle crash after which Shaw lifts Charlotte's skirt to attend to her injury; discussions of his plays (she hates The Philanderer); confessions of his bent toward the ménage à trois (thus Beatrice's worries); the arrival of a Bertha Newcombe painting of a writing Shaw reclining on the ground (The Snake in the Grass); the agreeing of Charlotte to finance the Webbs' School of Economics in exchange for Beatrice's delivering to Charlotte an exclusive relationship with Shaw (never mind marriage); Charlotte's plotting with Beatrice to win Shaw by becoming indispensable to him, first as his secretary, and by playing on his constant desire to teach, starting with typing; exposure by Charlotte of the truth that the “other woman” in the contest for Shaw is actually Beatrice (Shaw's posting off letters to Ellen Terry notwithstanding); the attempt of Sidney to get Shaw to run for office, understood as an attempt to domesticate him politically; and so on. Act 1 ends with an alarmed Beatrice persuading Sidney to take her off on a long lecture tour to America and an implication of impending sexual congress between Charlotte and Shaw as, after likening sex to riding a bicycle, she beckons him offstage for a spin around the block, so to speak. Those who think something like this really happened will be pleased.Act 2, a year later, back in Stratford for rekindling of a romance that has dampened down amid the drudgery of authorship, Shaw and Charlotte fuss over galleys for his next preface while the Webbs are packing for another tour (Australia, this time), and a discontented Charlotte confesses to Beatrice that she wants the more conventional marital relationship with Shaw she had earlier disdained. Beatrice tips her off that his plays reveal a man who likes doing conventional things for unconventional reasons.Charlotte eventually plays that card, she thinks, with the unconventionality being in the woman's proposing marriage, although not until scenes 2 and 3 bring Shaw to the brink of a breakdown by Charlotte's walking out and spending months traveling about, ignoring his epistolary pleas for her return to save him from one misery after another, compounded by his mother's ignoring of him (he has had to retreat to Fitzroy Square). At last Shaw's serious foot infection causes her to relent and to try once more with him, but he stubbornly resists her marriage proposal. Suitably unconventional though such a proposal be, there's something missing. Then, in something like a deus ex machina, a resolution drops on the stage right out of Man and Superman, as Charlotte seems to give up her marital quest in exhaustion à la Anne Whitefield, and Shaw, suddenly acceding to the Life Force, springs to embrace her à la Jack Tanner (which in this play is done without an intervening dream realization to persuade him, so is less convincing). This is quickly followed by Shaw's stunning realization that, unconventionally, “marriage is not a sexual contract, but a social one,” satisfying both the socialist in him and the need to do conventional things for unconventional reasons. The one thing missing, it turns out, was that the man had to come to an intellectual understanding of it and make it his own. Remember that Sidney Webb had told him much the same at the beginning, so it's not just Charlotte who's being ignored!Of the many attempts to imagine Shaw and draw him as a fictional character, I find Morogiello's to be one of the most rewarding, not so much for its literal accuracy as for its superior creativity in melding the historical facts as they are known with the hints provided by Shaw's own dramatic dialogues after the fact to reveal the essential Shaw. Sparkling dialogue through most of the play, with the characters mostly “in character” as we know them, also helps to create a convincing atmosphere, even though it may be unlikely that these people literally said those things in that way at that time and place. The play encourages you to feel that they must have said and done something like this in order to arrive at that actual marriage.The play also convinces by the frequent echoing back and forth of the 1890s context of Shaw's time as it reverberates in today's context. It's not updating that goes on here exactly but a subtle reminding us of how far ahead of the times Shaw and his circle were, as we hear echoes of today's arguments, on relations between the sexes and women's rights, most notably, that were anticipated back in the day.There are exceptions to be made, especially to a blurb on the back cover that says “He considered himself the superman. She allowed him to believe it,” which the play pretty much shows happening. But Shaw made it clear enough that he was joking about that, and Man and Superman clearly shows that the Superman is yet to come, though Shaw wasn't ready to despair as thoroughly as Beckett later would in Waiting for Godot.Despite that and a few other exceptions one could take, I think this play can stand with Dear Liar, The Ghost of Adelphi Terrace, The Best of Friends, and a handful of other plays or dramatized readings of letters that provide excellent imaginings of Shaw, and their variety only speaks to how various was Shaw.Based in Washington, D.C., John Morogiello is a playwright in residence at the Maryland State Arts Council, works as TAI Staff at Young Audiences of Maryland (an art-in-education nonprofit), and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. To see a list of his plays and learn more about him, please visit www.linkedin.com/in/johnmorogiello.