The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of Bernard Shaw by Maurice Valency (review)

Book Reviews • THE CART AND THE TRUMPET: THE PLAYS OF BERNARD SHAW, by Maurice Valency. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. 467 pp. $12.50. Maurice Valency's very considerable critical sensitivities have been applied in recent years to a study of Ibsen and Strindberg (The Flower and the Castle) and to Chekhov (The Breaking String). About as large as the two previous books together is his examination of Shaw, completing what amounts to a trilogy on the four basic playwrights of the early modern drama. As with most recent Shaw studies, this one ranges chronologically, almost play-byplay , through the canon, though giving short shrift (in some cases no mention at all) to the post-Saint Joan political fantasies which preoccupied Shaw's years from 1929 to 1950. Much of The Cart and the Trumpet (a Shavian allusion to his own hortatory approach to playwriting) is very good criticism indeed; but the book in general is flawed by Valency's apparent unawareness of most of a decade or more of Shavian research and commentary. The lens through which the G.B.S. plays must be viewed is not merely the text, but also the context. By accepting the now-discarded 1913-16 dates for the composition of Heartbreak House, for example, he constructs a state of mind for Shaw which he might have modified on the basis of the actual 1916-17 dates; but few studies published in the last decade are utilized here. Similarly, long-exploded crotchets are re-aired. Hardly any critic now takes seriously, for example, the old charges that the Epilogue to Saint Joan was a disservice to the play, or even largely comic, T. S. Eliot himself recanting in his "Poetry and Drama" confession that he borrowed from it himself for Murder in the Cathedral. Yet Valency finds that Saint Joan, "after skirting ... the borders of tragedy, plunges suddenly into melodrama.... The comic epilogue was inevitable." Professor Valency's long relationship with the European drama, both as translator and elucidator, results in some striking insights, but also in some 345 346 BOOK REVIEWS curious ways of looking at Shaw. Thus the preface to Major Barbara is found to contain lines on poverty "that oddly recall the Ragpicker's wry speech in Giraudoux's La Faile de Chaillot." Clearly the reverse is true, and a 1962 article even analyzed the Shavian impact on Giraudoux. Perhaps in general Valency discovers more continental origins for Shavian drama than exist in fact because his mind is attuned to the most subtle European parallels; for although Shaw was not unaware of what was going on in Germany, France and Scandinavia, his theatrical tradition is very clearly English, from the morality play to the music hall. But Valency's perspective is a useful corrective to our seeing Shaw only in terms of his Anglo-Irish heritage and only in terms of his being confessedly "a natural-born mountebank." Delicacy of touch was not for him, Shaw had written early in his playwriting career: "The cart and trumpet for me." But, Valency observes, Shaw soon ventured into "contemporary mysticism" - as early, in fact, as Candida, although he did so in "extremely circumspect" fashion in order to retain his Fabian credentials. "In this manner," writes Valency, "having rejected in the name of realism, all the traditional values of romance, Shaw retrieved them one by one as realistic expressions of the Life Force. By shifting his axis from the self-interest of the individual to the self-interest of the species, he was able to reconcile individualism with socialism, and realism with idealism, and thus to place his characters on a level where their extravagance could be justified in terms of a higher morality." Only an afterthought in The Cart and the Trumpet, it is a provocative approach to the plays, and one of the many shrewd observations for which critics and scholars will keep returning to Valency's book. STANLEY WEINTRAUB The Pennsylvania State University A SOCIOLOGY OF POPULAR DRAMA, by J. S. R. Goodlad. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972; London: Heinemann, 1971. x & 230 pp. £3.50. Dr. Goodlad works in a doubly difficult field for he is. concerned with...