Shaw and Gilbert Murray

stephen. Cusins is a very nice fellow, certainly: nobody would ever guess that he was born in Australia; but—

—Major Barbara, Act I

Perhaps no member of the first audiences of Major Barbara would have enjoyed this joke more than the real-life, Australian-born professor of Greek upon whom Shaw modeled the character of Cusins, Gilbert Murray, O.M. (1866–1957). Another social group was more privately insulted by Shaw when he wrote to Murray, apropos Cusins, “handsome of me not to make you a Rhodes scholar, by the way” (50). Murray himself described his portrayal in the play as a caricature, but Harley Granville Barker, who first played the role at the Court Theatre in 1905, went to great lengths to make it a true-to-life representation of the man, even to the extent of borrowing a pair of Murray’s own spectacles for the production. The passages of verse recited by Cusins in the play are quotations, with minor variants, of Murray’s translation of Euripides’s The Bacchae. Charles A. Carpenter’s expertly edited and handsomely produced collection of the correspondence between Shaw and Murray takes the reader on a fascinating journey of discovery about the long-standing friendship and lively exchanges of ideas between these two remarkable men.

It is likely that Murray’s Australian origins were as difficult to detect as those of his fictional counterpart. Although some noticed traces of those origins in his accent, Murray’s family background and education, mostly in England, make it seem unlikely that the traces were strongly marked.¹ In 1877, four years after the death of Murray’s father, Sir Terence Murray, his mother, Lady Agnes, who was born in Wales, returned to England, taking the eleven-year-old Gilbert with her. He became a pupil at the Merchant Taylors’ School, one of the top nine independent schools in England, and went on from there to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he won major scholarships and prizes. His brilliance as a classical scholar led to his election as a fellow of New College, Oxford, immediately after graduation. Shortly afterward, at the early age of twenty-three, he was appointed professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow. In 1908 he was elected to the prestigious post of Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. He married into the English aristocracy, his wife Lady Mary being a daughter of Lord and Lady Carlisle, owners of Castle Howard, the magnificent stately home in Yorkshire used as the setting of the film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

As an academic, Murray was renowned for his skill at bringing ancient Greek poetry and drama and the classical world to life for his students. One of his students and a successor of Murray in the chair of Greek at Oxford is quoted in the introduction to this volume as saying of his lectures that they brought to his audiences “the intoxicating illusion of direct contact with the past,” an opinion echoed in the following quotation from another former student, Sir Maurice Bowra: “he made Greek poetry live” (xxii). This skill was also apparent in Murray’s translations of plays by Euripides that, with Shaw’s support and encouragement, became an important component of the famous Harley Granville Barker–J. E. Vedrenne productions at the Royal Court Theatre. The plays offered in the revolutionary seasons of new drama at the Court included his translations of Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, and The Bacchae.

Murray and Shaw are rightly described as “unlikely friends” in the dust jacket note to this work. Shaw habitually railed against universities and university professors and vehemently refused offers of honorary degrees. This despite the fact that three of his best friends, Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas, and Murray, were university professors. In one of the early letters in this collection, Shaw advised Murray that he was subject to the “inexorable law” that “every university professor is an ass” (25). In a...