Much Ado about Act 3: The New Broadview Edition of The Philanderer

Editor Leonard Conolly’s new edition of Shaw’s The Philanderer, published by Broadview Press, has all the features one would expect from such a scholarly work: a learned introduction featuring a thorough review of the production history and critical responses to the play, a careful presentation of the text, including all variants, lucid footnotes, useful appendices, and a full bibliography. And the introduction gives readers a bonus: a detailed, intriguing account of the controversies involving the composition of the play and its production history, particularly focusing on the two versions of Act 3.

Right from the start, the discussion becomes arrestingly personal, rather than drily academic. We learn that the opening scene of the play, with its combustible confrontation between Charteris and Grace versus Julia, was not invented for the play: it was borrowed from life, specifically an incident in which Shaw and actress Florence Farr, in the midst of an evening tryst, were interrupted by the unexpected entrance of Jenny Patterson, his former and very agitated lover. Thus jump-started, composition of the play in 1893 proceeded fairly rapidly through Acts 1 and 2, which takes place in an Ibsen Club, and satirizes the vogue for the Norwegian dramatic realist stimulated in part by Shaw himself in his The Quintessence of Ibsenism. At that point, however, the well of inspiration ran dry, until Shaw, on the way to another visit to Florence, decided to focus on the complications of Victorian marriage and marriage laws in Act 3. He did so by moving the action of the plot ahead several years to a time when Julia and her then husband, Dr. Paramore, are unhappy, and frustrated by laws that make divorce very difficult and therefore unlikely.

Before the play was submitted for production, however, still another woman Shaw admired, Lady Colin Campbell, intervened. She was a celebrated beauty, an aristocratic wife separated from a syphilitic husband, and a powerful presence in the world of journalism and the arts. When she told Shaw that the third act “ought to be put into the fire,” because it seemed to belong to another play, Shaw listened: he promptly abandoned the “marriage act” and substituted a new Act 3, in which Julia is maneuvered into a marriage with Paramore, and Charteris is left smugly secure in his status as a philanderer on the loose. That version was published, and eventually produced in 1905, but it enjoyed only sporadic success on stage and little approval or attention from critics. Nevertheless, no one questioned the elements of the text, until late in the twentieth century, when an essay by Canadian scholar Brian Tyson described the abandoned Act 3 and proclaimed it far superior to its substitute, and when Shaw biographer Michael Holroyd argued for the same conclusion in a program essay introducing the 1991 premiere performance of the play as originally written.

Not everyone approved of this departure from established practice. Indeed, some very influential Shaw scholars, such as Bernard Dukore and Dan H. Laurence, vehemently opposed the use of the original Act 3, and not just because they wanted to follow what we know of Shaw’s wishes. They insisted that the substitute version was actually superior to the original, and a better fit with Acts 1 and 2. Nevertheless, hybrid productions, including both versions of Act 3, and recent productions featuring only the original text, have been favorably received, by audiences, reviewers, and scholars. It’s no wonder, then, that contemporary directors and producers of The Philanderer, as well as contemporary critics and scholars such as Conolly, are increasingly willing to consider adopting the original Act 3 as the preferred option.

Conolly is a judicious editor, so he clearly elucidates both sides of the debate about Act 3, as well as all other issues about the play. In fact, his prose is one of the virtues of this edition. In the introduction and the appendices, he avoids pedantic plodding and dense convolution, and...