Biblical Myth Shavianized

Biblical Myth Shavianized SUSAN C. STONE • SHAW'S PLAYS CONTAIN a wide assortment ofmythic and legendaryl material , reflecting his interest in the way myth and legend are propagated, their relationship to historical fact, and the qualities that make them durable. Despite his obvious interest in legends, however, he often sounds dubious about their value. In Everybody's Political What's What? Shaw notes that he read "the first chapter or so" of Frazer's The Golden Bough when it was first published, "but soon got oppressed with the sameness of its instances of human delusion."2 This apparently negative verdict on myth and legend is reinforced by Shaw's reference in the Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra to "the vulgar and sanguinary senationalism of our religious legends." His reservations about the value of these religious legends are voiced by Lavinia as she faces martyrdom in Androcles and the Lion. Reflecting on Spintho's abortive attempt to escape the lions, she concludes, "a man cannot die for a story and a dream. None ofus believed the stories and the dreams more devoutly than poor Spintho; but he could not face the great reality.... It is since all the stories and dreams have gone that I have now no doubt at all that I must die for something greater than dreams or stories."3 Lavinia speaks for Shaw here in her recognition of the relative unimportance of the myths associated with her religious faith. Shaw believed that myth has its value, but that there is danger in misinterpreting or exaggerating its importance. Science as well as religion has its legends, he points out, but "no student of science has yet been taught that specific gravity consists in the belief that Archimedes jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting 153 154 SUSAN C. STONE Eureka, Eureka, or that the law of inverse squares must be discarded if anyone can prove that Newton was never in an orchard in his life.'~4 Religion must be careful to make the same distinctions as science does, Shaw felt, but he never advocated discarding legend. In fact, he described himself as "a professional legend maker" (p. lxxiv), asserting that "it is only through fiction that facts can be made instructive or even intelligible."5 The primary responsibility of the artist, Shaw came to believe, is to function as "an iconographer of the religion of [his] time" (p.lxxxiv). He thought that the credibility ofthe Christian Bible was being seriously questioned, and he proposed to start filling the gap with his own "beginning of a Bible for Creative Evolution" (p. lxxxvi). Much of Shavian drama could be regarded as myth making, or as a contribution toward "a Bible for Creative Evolution." My purpose is to consider the two plays, Back to Methuselah and The Simpleton ofthe Unexpected Isles, in which Shaw makes substantial use of biblical myths, to see how he reworks them into books for his own Bible. Back to Methuselah is a five-play cycle which opens with "In the Beginning," a Shavian version of the Garden of Eden myth. With "'In the Beginning" Shaw offers his audience a myth which is familiar and basic to Western culture and builds his own "Bible" on a reinterpretation of it. In the second part of Back to Methuselah, Franklyn Barnabas suggests the reason that Shaw was interested in using the myth ofAdam and Eve: "The fact that the tale of the Garden of Eden has survived and held the imagination of man spellbound for centuries, whilst hundreds of much more plausible and amusing stories have gone out offashion and perished like last year's popular song, is a scientific fact; and Science is bound to explain it" (p. 76). Shaw explains it by concluding that the story holds the key to an essential truth about mankind. It has been observed that Shaw treated the Bible "as though it were itselfan earlier parable of Creative Evolution, written by prophets who lacked the insight that the intervening centuries ofdiscovery had given him."6 This attitude motivates Franklyn Barnabas' claim that "the most scientific document we possess at present is ... the story of the...