Shaw Settles His Quarrel with Sir Henry Irving: (Introduction, Afterword, and Notes by Margot Peters)

One of the most notorious theatrical quarrels began in 1895, when Bernard Shaw, the new drama critic of the Saturday Review, took aim at London's most prestigious actor, Henry Irving, manager of the Lyceum Theatre. On 12 January, Irving mounted J. Comyns Carr's King Arthur;a week later he had the pleasure of opening the Saturday to read: "I sometimes wonder where Mr. Irving will go when he dies—whether he will dare to claim, as a master artist, to walk where he may any day meet Shakespeare whom he has mutilated, Goethe whom he has travestied, and the nameless creator of the hero-king out of whose mouth he has uttered jobbing verses."¹ From the beginning, Shaw directed his outrage chiefly at the plays Irving staged rather than at the actor himself: by refusing to mount the New Drama, Irving actively hindered theatrical progress, which meant to Shaw, not coincidently, the transcendence of the playwright over the actor. Not that Shaw didn't get personal. Irving's Richard the Third, he claimed, was impish buffoonery, his Mephistopheles a travesty, and his Don Quixote an exercise in sheer clownishness.²

Throughout, Irving remained largely silent, though remarking privately, "I would cheerfully pay the man's funeral expenses at any time."³ He had a measure of revenge when, in 1895, Shaw sent him his play The Man of Destiny, admitting to the actress Ellen Terry that a production by Irving would be the making of him. Irving toyed with his torturer, even inviting him to the Lyceum for an interview ("He is without exception," Shaw wrote Terry, "absolutely the stupidest man I ever met. Simply no brains—nothing but character and temperament.")⁴ Irving did not produce Shaw's play. By Irving's death in 1905, Shaw still was not acknowledged as a major playwright. This may have given the actor some satisfaction, though he could not forget Shaw's seditious courtship of his beloved acting partner, Ellen Terry.

John Irving, Sir Henry Irving's great-grandson, takes up the story in 1946, when his father, Laurence, began researching his biography of Henry Irving.⁵ Sir Henry Irving (born John Henry Brodribb) had two sons, Henry Brodribb Irving and Laurence Sydney Brodribb Irving. Both became well-known actors. Lawrence S. B. Irving was drowned with his wife, actress Mabel Lucy Hackney, in the St. Lawrence Estuary, Canada, aboard the RMS Empress of Ireland in 1914, leaving no issue. Irving's eldest son, H. B. Irving, married the actress Dorothea Baird; they had one son, Laurence Henry Foster Irving (1897–1988), an illustrator, writer, and scenic designer. Douglas Fairbanks hired him to design his Hollywood films; in the 1930s, he became a regular designer for British plays and films. He married Rosalind Woolner; John H. B. Irving is their son.

Between 1946 and 1950, my late father, Laurence Irving, was researching his biography of his grandfather, Sir Henry Irving. In the autumn of 1946, he must have written to Shaw, who had had a firsthand encounter with Irving. My father, in his "Author's Foreword," writes:

Equally am I indebted to the veteran leader of the opposition, the late Mr George Bernard Shaw, who never failed to answer, copiously and provocatively, any questions I put to him; in fact he showered ammunition upon me and if, occasionally, I have found that it fitted my own gun, I know that he would be the first to forgive me for discharging it, not ungratefully, at the donor.

I have not been able to find a copy of my father's first letter to G.B.S. Its terms must have been influenced by an encounter the two had had eleven years earlier, when Shaw chose Gabriel Pascal to direct the film of his play Pygmalion.

Pascal immediately began putting together his production company. Having been recommended for the post of production director, Laurence Irving met with Pascal in the latter's London hotel. My father described the meeting in the (as yet unpublished) last volume of his...