Protean Wit and Wisdom: Shaw's Uncollected Essays and Speeches

PROTEAN WIT AND WISDOM: SHAW'S UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND SPEECHES1 THESE TWO BOOKS are the third and fourth in a series of Shaw's miscellaneous writings published by Hill and Wang. Shaw on Theatre, edited by E. J. West, and How to Become a Musical Critic, edited by Dan H. Laurence, preceded them. Dan H. Laurence is preparing other volumes of Shaw's uncollected work. To emphasize that these collections are integral parts of Shaw's achievement, the publishers are making format, printing, and styling conform to those patterns used in the standard edition. Shaw's uncollected work states certain of his ideas SUCCinctly and memorably. The books are especially important for Shaw's comments about the theater and his own plays and for the illumination which they cast upon the thought of Shavian drama. Of the twO' volumes Platform and Pulpit is the more general in scope. On the other hand, The Matter with Ireland extends our knDwledge of one major play, fohn Bull's Other Island, and does more to correct mistaken impressions of Shaw. For one ignorant of the materials brought tDgether in The Matter with Ireland, it would be easy to' cDnclude that Shaw was an expatriate Irishman who as an authDr remembered his country only once, and thereupon forgDt Ireland's problems. Actually he was interested throughout his life, sometimes to' the point of Dbsession, with the welfare of Ireland. In The Matter with Ireland, he always regards Ireland as his country and the Irish as his compatriots. The first twenty years Df his life made ineffaceable impressions upon Shaw; but how pervasive they became was not apparent until The Matter with Ireland was published. Platform and Pulpit reveals the range of Shaw as a public speaker; or put another way, he was always eager to' talk about his numerous interests. The style of the speeches is blunter and terser than that of the essays written Driginally for publication. In his speeches Shaw makes less use of complicated sentence patterns than he normally does. In general, the cDntributions to this volume are less significant as literature than for what they tell us, additionally, of Shaw's mind and art. Platform and Pulpit contains fDur speeches on art in general and 1. Platform and Pulpit by Bernard Shaw. Edited with an introduction by Dan H. Laurence, Hill and Wang, New York, 1961, xvii + 302 pp. Price $3.00. The Matter with Ireland by Bernard Shaw. Edited with an introdUction by Dan H. Laurence and David H. Greene, Hill and Wang, New York, 1962, xviii + 309 pp. Price $5.00. 187 188 MODERN DRAMA September the theater in particular. "Acting: by One who Does Not Believe in It" (1889) is a plea for a realistic theater as opposed to the romanticism and artifice of fashionable drama. For Shaw acting was "metaphysical self-realization," not pretense. Already a disciple of Ibsen, Shaw maintained that the theater prOvided a real world, not a refuge from the world. If one regarded experience in the theater as pretense and acting as a sham, as current English and French playwrights did, he would be unable to take the drama seriously or to criticize it adequately. Both the anti-romanticism and the conception of the drama as a positive intellectual force expressed in this essay were, of course, basic to Shaw's theater criticism and to the writing of his plays. In "The Court Theatre" (1907) Shaw praised Vedrenne and Barker for eliciting plays from writers of talent like Masefield and Galsworthy, instead of shunting them into other literary genres. Shaw also scored the diffidence of the press toward the Court Theatre and recorded his indebtedness to actors like Louis Calvert. "Literature and Art" (1908) modifies Shaw's views, expressed elsewhere, that his plays were spontaneous eruptions and that his characters swept all before them once they were conceived. In this speech Shaw regarded the artist as a shaper of his material, who rearranged the events of life "to reveal their essential and spiritual relations to one another." The artist, furthermore, establishes connections between facts "by chains of reasoning," and also fashions ''bridges of feeling between them." The great artist makes Herculean efforts...