The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw ed. by Bernard F. Dukore (review)

REVIEWS Dukore, Bernard F., ed. The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Pp. xiv+487. $35.00. It is clearly an article of faith in the Shaw Industry that every word set down by The Master should find its way into print, preferably at­ tached to a complete scholarly apparatus of introduction, footnotes, appendices, etc. Considering the complaint of Michael Holroyd (the official biographer selected by the Shaw estate) that Shaw seemed able to write more words in a day than he could read and considering as well the length of Shaw’s writing life, the prospect of so much editorial energy is a little disquieting. Bernard Dukore’s edition of Shaw’s screenplays is a case in point. Splendidly edited, it must be an unbounded delight to the film buff as well as the Shavian enthusiast; but to the student of Shaw who suspects there are still depths to be plumbed in the great plays it offers relatively little. However, it is probably unreasonable to grumble about a book that gives us a number of Shavian works (even if only new versions of older ones) we have not had before and that reveals, often in lively detail, the screenplay period (1937-45) in Shaw’s career as more active than it has previously seemed. If I appear impatient when Shavian scholars occupy themselves with lesser matters, I can only echo Shaw’s conclusion to his review of Pinero’s The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith : “my criticism has not, I hope, any other fault than the inevitable one of extreme unfairness.” Surely an example of such injustice is the implication in the pre­ ceding paragraph that Professor Dukore has merely edited this material. He has, of course, done more than that; but since the screenplays in­ cluded here—Saint Joan, Pygmalion, The Devil’s Disciple (an intro­ ductory fragment), Major Barbara, Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra—exist in mutiple versions, and these not necessarily con­ gruent with what reached the screen, the editorial work alone was a considerable labor. Dukore must at moments have envied the Shake­ spearean scholar placidly contemplating a few modest discrepancies between quarto and folio. To assist the reader, Dukore includes a tenpage “Note on the Texts” in which he discriminates between the screen­ plays he publishes and the “screen versions’” (of Pygmalion and Major Barbara) published by Shaw (film sequences combined with “uncut and unaltered acts of the stage plays”), explains the provenance of the material he has worked from, and justifies his choices and arrangements. But Dukore, in addition to presenting this material lucidly, has written a 150-page monograph (modestly called an introduction) tracing the history of Shaw’s involvement with the cinema. There is much to present here, for the connection extends from the days of the silent 268 Reviews 269 film, when Shaw flirted with the notion of allowing a studio to “do its worst” with The Devil’s Disciple, through the grand technicolor pro­ duction of Caesar and Cleopatra. Mixing cinema history, personal anecdotage, and analyses of the Shavian films in judicious proportions, Dukore avoids the twin dangers of purveying mere gossip on the one hand and aspiring after cinematic crypto-profundity on the other. Regrettably, Dukore, though informative about Shaw’s producer, Gabriel Pascal, does not quite succeed in creating a vital portrait of this outsize figure, who appeared at Shaw’s door and somehow induced the great playwright to grant him film rights. Pascal, who seems to have been a living caricature, an embodiment of the mad Hungarian producer of Hollywood legend, was given to emotionally extravagant temper tan­ trums—firing actors one moment and embracing them the next—and financially extravagant outlays, regularly forfeiting his own royalties (despite the money-conscious Shaw’s desperate pleadings) to get funds so he could achieve the films of his dreams. In compensation, Dukore perceptively treats the strengths and weaknesses of Pascal’s films and is informative about their making. We are dismayed, retrospectively, to learn that Shaw had wanted Charles Laughton for Henry Higgins and frustrated at hearing that for Cusins he had suggested, but not insisted on, a then obscure young actor named...