Shaw’s Sites of Knowledge

Shaw’s volubility regarding stage directions is a trademark that evokes praise or blame, but is nonetheless essential to his dramaturgy, particularly regarding setting. Tony Stafford’s book, devoted to Shaw’s use of gardens and libraries as recurring elements in works from Widower’s Houses to Back to Methuselah, adds a new dimension in our consideration of the plays and their evolving designations of the sites of knowledge. According to Stafford, these settings do far more than function as a backdrop to the representations of character and situation in individual comedies. Rather, the significance of the natural world and humankind’s arrangement and interference with it on the one hand, and our penchant for collection and reverence for intellectual accomplishments of past and present on the other, undergo continuous scrutiny in these texts.

The true strength of the book is the close reading of the inextricable relationship between dialogue and action at key moments and the analysis of the significance of where these scenes occur. Even when discussing very familiar speeches, Stafford steers the reader to recognize the semiotic significance of place. Whether the play is realistic or inches toward fantasy, ordinary aspects of daily life occur in settings that at once garner audience approval and appeal to the class-consciousness so essential to many characters he portrays. In his introduction, Stafford designates an individualized usage and conception of gardens and/or libraries for each of the nine plays that compose the chapters of his study: Widower’s Houses, “reveal character and enhance irony”; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, “support structure and clarify conflict”; Arms and the Man, “satirize pretense and mock idealism”; Candida, “define ego and expose pretense to erudition”; Man and Superman, “depict the workings of the Life Force and invoke symbolic overtones”; Major Barbara, “portray poverty and satirize capitalism”; Misalliance, “dramatize primal urges and the power of books”; Heartbreak House, “reinforce literary motifs and foreshadow ominous endings”; Back to Methuselah, “ruminate on ultimate and philosophical concerns by means of the original garden.” Clearly thematic in analysis all the way through, Stafford’s text prompts us to consider Shaw’s in three broad categories: social hypocrisy, limited and thereby pretentious understanding, and the semiconscious biological forces that prompt behavior as well as attitudes. The duality of gardens and libraries likewise offers Shaw and his audiences consistent examination of the mind/body question so central to these issues, as well as to the eras these plays represent.

Feeding the soul through meaningful work, romantic love, or social justice comes with physiological as well as intellectual overtones in Shaw. While sunny comedies are most readily identified with Shakespeare—think As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s Dream—such designation applies as much to metaphorical consideration as to the physical landscape. Because of his work with both Shakespeare and Shaw, Tony Stafford may well be predisposed to zero in on an important factor in Shaw’s settings: weather. Many plays in his study take place in fine weather, while an exception, Major Barbara, occurs in raw, unpleasant January—that is, until the family visits the armaments factory. Could it be that pleasant environs, even in Perivale St. Andrews, could mask the complex assault on the do-gooders that trade a bowl of soup for tacit belief that such remedy cannot even begin to undo the crime of poverty that Andrew Undershaft rightly claims is the worst of crimes? Stafford notes that Shaw makes no reference at all to weather in the final act of this play and asserts that this “unequal treatment of the two outdoor settings bespeaks his intention of depicting poverty for what it is.”

Multiple points of view toward gardens pervade Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which opens in a garden with Vivie reading books on actuarial accounting. Scholarly books are not part of this play; rather, Shaw emphasizes experiential learning, ranging from escaping poverty to affecting respectability via “dirty money.” As characters enter that scene, they bring a spectrum of attitudes toward respectability and class standing...