Introduction: Dionysian Shaw

Nothing is rarer in nature than a man who, on accepting a new idea, proceeds to overhaul his old ideas and see how many of them must be scrapped to make logical room for the newcomer.

—Bernard Shaw, in The Irish Statesman (15 September 1923)

Although the above epigraph could stand as a motto for all of Shaw's writings—letters and speeches, reviews and articles, prefaces and plays—it is especially pertinent to the topic of this volume. Self-appointed iconoclast and gadfly, Shaw devoted his life to exhorting the world to overhaul its old ideas about love and sex, romance and sentimentality, marriage and divorce, prostitution and venereal disease, asceticism and adultery, obscenity and censorship, birth control and sexual education. "It has now become axiomatic," writes Bruce R. Smith in "Premodern Sexualities," that "sexuality . . . is a function of ideology, a social construction that varies according to time and place. Different cultures at different moments in history construct sexuality differently."¹ Shaw's cultures—Victorian, fin-de-siècle, Edwardian, and Modern—were usually resistant to his attempts at a sexual overhaul. And with reason: the messenger could be abrasive, the message was often shocking.

That message, simply put, was the need for the honest and realistic expression, on stage and in life, of what Shaw termed "sexual emotion." One must underscore the crucial importance of this idea for Shaw. In his 1909 preface to a volume of Eugène Brieux's plays in English—one of them translated by Charlotte Shaw—he affirmed that "sex is a necessary and healthy instinct; and its nurture and education is one of the most important uses of all art; and, for the present at all events, the chief use of the theatre."² A few years later, in a letter published on 8 November 1913 in The Times, Shaw answered the Bishop of Kensington, who had complained two days earlier about the "atmosphere of immorality and the suggestion of vice" of a recent show (which he had not seen) at the Palace Theatre: "Now a Bishop who goes into a theatre and declares that the performances there must not suggest sexual emotion is in the position of a playwright going into a church and declaring that the services there must not suggest religious emotion. The suggestion, gratification, and education of sexual emotion is one of the main uses and glories of the theatre."³ Shaw reiterated the idea with equal panache in his 1929 address to the third International Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform: "I am an expert in sex appeal. What I mean is that I am a playwright. I am connected with the theatre. The theatre is continually occupied with sex appeal. . . . One very important function of the theatre in society is to educate the audience in matters of sex."⁴ In all of these pronouncements, not unexpectedly, arch-realist G.B.S. is concerned with the notion of education, or rather reeducation: with making "logical room" for the new idea that the theater should not shy away from "sexual emotion."

Of course by now, the case for Shavian "sex appeal" has been argued often—but primarily by Shaviophiles. Bernard Dukore has shown that "Shaw's plays contain more sexuality than is generally credited," and that "sensuality, red corpuscles, or 'lower centres' [Shaw's term] permeate Shavian drama."⁵ Jacques Barzun believes that in all of the plays up to Heartbreak House, "it is sexuality that is at work, with or without the glow of romance," and that plays such as Widowers' Houses,Mrs Warren's Profession, and The Philanderer "are suffused with eroticism."⁶ And Louis Crompton refutes the charge that Shaw writes "sexless drama" by asserting that "no playwright has dramatized the naked power of the sex impulse more directly or with more respect."⁷

With these endorsements in mind, how do we explain Shaw's ongoing reputation with the public at large as the high...