Shakespeare, Shotover, Surrogation: "Blaming the Bard" in Heartbreak House

The halls of Heartbreak House reverberate with dead men's words. Shaw's most haunted play, Heartbreak House represents a cultural space in which the past attempts to destroy the present. The play's constant tension between what is remembered and what is forgotten, between the old generation and the new, between the past and the present, gives special resonance to the voices of the cultural and literary dead. Although echoes from Chekhov and Wilde reverberate, it is the voice of Shakespeare that looms over all.¹ Indeed, the Shakespearean echoes in Heartbreak House would later haunt the ninety-three-year-old Shaw, who in his antagonistic puppet play, Shakes versus Shav, would point to Heartbreak House as his rewriting of King Lear—a rewriting that the puppet representing Shaw uses as the climax of his assault against the puppet representing Shakespeare. Rewriting the past, it would seem, is a superior Shavian weapon. Indeed, Heartbreak House represents the climax in a lifetime spent speaking for the literary dead, a culmination in Shaw's ongoing attempts to present himself, both in his criticism and in his drama, as a cultural surrogate for Shakespeare. Although Shaw's battles with the Bard have long been the focus of scholarly scrutiny, critics have yet to point out that Shaw's lifelong struggle with Shakespeare's ghost enacts Joseph Roach's theory of surrogation. Shaw performed his role as Shakespeare surrogate through his public persona, in which he attempted to associate himself with Shakespeare, through his Shakespearean criticism, in which he tries to attack Shakespeare, and through his dramatic adaptation of King Lear, in which he struggles to alter and replace elements of Shakespeare's greatest work.

In many ways, Shaw's performance of the G.B.S. persona is an example of dramatic surrogation in the sense forwarded by Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead. Roach defines all forms of performance as an ongoing process of "surrogation," which is "the enactment of cultural memory by substitution."² Surrogation is a process in which "repetition is change": the society remembers its cultural and artistic past through the surrogate, while the change in figures leads cultural evolution in a new direction.³ According to Roach, "Celebrity … holds open a space in collective memory while the process of surrogation nominates and eventually crowns successors."⁴ Shakespeare maintains his celebrity as chief dramatist, a title to which Shaw continually aspired. Throughout his life, G.B.S.'s attacks on Shakespeare became so famous that one of his defining attributes in the mind of the public was that he understood himself and his drama in opposition to Shakespeare. In the pages of The Saturday Review, Shaw presented the authorial G.B.S. as a writer filled with shocking pronouncements about his dramatic forerunner. Shaw was eager to admit that this witty, outrageous, and egotistical persona was a fiction, making comments such as "The celebrated G.B.S. is about as real as a pantomime ostrich. I have never pretended that G.B.S. was real: I have over and over again taken him to pieces before the audience to shew the trick of him."⁵ G.B.S. is not a person but a public performance, a pantomime of false identity.⁶ Indeed, a key element in the complex performance of G.B.S. is the act of destroying Shakespeare and replacing him with Shaw. Surrogation often focuses on the bodies of the dead, sometimes making use of "the folkloric tradition that regards with special awe and dread a corpse that has been dismembered, disturbed, or improperly laid to rest."⁷ In "Blaming the Bard," Shaw attacks both Cymbeline and Shakespeare, threatening to defile Shakespeare's body, "to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity."⁸ The focus on symbolically destroying a physical body has powerful significance for surrogation, in which the human body is a vessel for cultural memory. The body of the famous poet or playwright can accumulate power as...