Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in <i>Major Barbara</i>

1. The Drama of Nutrition

II Shaw’s Bacchae 1 The Drama of Nutrition Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension ; for his politics, his art, and his religion—to say nothing of the shape of his sentences—are unique expressions of an enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness. Jacques Barzun, The Energies of Art However striking the dissimilarities between Euripides’s ecstatic tragedy and Shaw’s tragicomedy—in content and form, in plot and character, and conceivably in direct meaning and intent—the unmistakable resemblances between them are as illuminating as they are varied. Even the apparent dissimilarity in treatment ought not to blind us to the formal aesthetic features they share. Thus, although the Bacchae is written in verse and Major Barbara in prose, both utilize a rich undercurrent of musical reinforcement, and both bring music on stage with potent emotional and operatic effect. Euripides does not hesitate to intermingle ludicrous and comic elements in his tragedy, nor does Shaw to infuse the gaiety of his serious comedy with a tragic harrowing of the spirit.1 Trenchant irony abounds in both dramas, contributing to the effective interweaving of contrasts in mood and tone. The dramatic agon figures as prominently in the structure of the modern as of the ancient work, and in each case the dialogue makes sparing yet effective use of 54 · Shaw’s Bacchae stichomythia (line by line alternation of speakers) and antilabe (a line divided between two speakers). What is more, each of these plays evinces a dramaturgical complexity that has earned it a history of wide interpretive controversy.2 Even the valiant attempts to designate the plays’ principal characters have generated sharp critical disagreements.3 Above all, like the Euripidean classic, Shaw’s Major Barbara operates on more than one layer of meaning, with each plane of significance interpenetrating and imbruing the others. Hence what Gilbert Murray has said of the Bacchae is no less true of Major Barbara: “Like a live thing it seems to move and show new faces every time that, with imagination fully working , one reads the play” (Euripides and His Age, 128).4 Bacchic Parallels With respect to content, both plays delineate the fate of an expanded single family—a family whose lives and actions profoundly affect the course and destiny of the whole social and political order surrounding them. The characters and action in each work symbolize impelling forces that shape life in nature and society, manifesting conflicting psychological, political, moral, and religious currents circulating in the world. Some of the underlying forces and trends are fundamental and universal; others belong to the specific era of the playwright. In both plays human events acquire a cosmic dimension, with the relation between the human and the divine a central concern. They also possess a number of motifs and themes in common, exemplified by their distinctive probing into the respective roles of wisdom and power in human civilization, and their vivid reminders of the ironic tension between nature and convention, or from another perspective, between reality and appearance. Initially the most arresting parallels align Undershaft with Dionysos and Major Barbara’s Salvationists with the Bacchae’s maenads. But beyond these are others, along with innumerable minor correspondences that, however insignificant they may strike us singly, cumulatively are too impressive to be ignored. Even where plot is concerned the two plays reveal a marked pattern of congruence beneath the obvious surface differences. The Bacchae dramatizes the return of a stranger god, in human guise, to his native city of Thebes, where his relatives, all of whom belong to the ruling family , deny his claims to divine ascendancy and greatness and vainly resist the spread of his cult and its ritual practice. Drawing upon his vast The Drama of Nutrition · 55 reserves of power, the god Dionysos effortlessly but relentlessly imposes his will—which in the end he declares serves a more basic order in the universe—on a variety of recalcitrants in his family, converting some of them to frenzied worship, others to conforming adaptation, and all eventually to an indefeasible recognition of his overwhelming, indomitable might. The most stubborn resister of all, Pentheus, the young king and cousin of the god, is led by his own Dionysian impulses to unwitting death at the hands of his maddened mother, Agave, and her sister bacchants . At the...