Granville Barker on Theatre: Selected Essays by Harley Granville Barker (review)

We need to begin at the end of Granville Barker on Theatre: Selected Essays, a collection of twenty-one insightful pieces that reflect the range of Harley Granville Barker's theatrical ruminations in the latter half of his career. In their "Editors' Postscript," subtitled "A Question of Reputation," Colin Chambers and Richard Nelson lay out a rather breathtaking revision to the narrative of Barker's later life, works, and legacy, as it has come down to us from any number of biographical and critical studies. The received resume has Barker (1877–1946) pursuing an early career as an actor, before finding his voice as a playwright (The Marrying of Ann Leete, The Voysey Inheritance, Waste, The Madras House) and as a director, especially from 1904 to 1907, when he oversaw, with manager J. E. Vedrenne, the legendary repertory seasons at London's Royal Court Theatre. Then, so the conventional story goes, his divorce from actress Lillah McCarthy and second marriage to the American heiress Helen Huntington prompted him to turn his back on the British theatre and his colleagues therein, and to abandon his creative genius to retire into a life of privilege and leisure.

"But," ask Chambers and Nelson in their stunning alternative narrative, "what if Barker never did retire or quit the theatre?" Moreover, "[w]hat if the Barker legend … was the conscious creation of a frustrated rival who was desperately afraid that Barker's plays … would be the basis for the future British theatre and not this rival's own?" Then, with a rhetorical coup de théâtre, they hypothesize, "What if this rival was Barker's friend, one-time confidant, early mentor and collaborator, George Bernard Shaw?" (230). While these queries may appear sensation-alistic, the postscript lays out solid and convincing scholarly evidence for their claims. The editors craft a series of plausible scenarios to account for the indisputable facts, observed behaviors, and documentary record of Barker's later life. They point to his shortened work schedules and travel itinerary, which were previously assumed to reflect Helen's goal to separate him from his former associates, as instead evidence of her eagerness to protect his health and bring him for medical assistance to a series of locations strongly associated with the treatment of tuberculosis and related illnesses. Similarly, they undermine the notion of Helen's "ruining" Barker's career by detailing his many professional undertakings after his second marriage—on his own and in collaboration with Helen—as a translator, critic, public speaker, director, and dramatist. They examine the sketchy details behind the final break between Barker and Shaw to reveal that the latter appears to have manipulated and misrepresented other mutual friends' comments about Helen to discredit her in Barker's eyes. Chambers and Nelson indicate that Barker's resulting decision to sever all ties with Shaw essentially turned the protégé, in Shaw's view, into a direct rival. Shaw then appears, in private exchanges with critics such as St. John Ervine, to cast Barker and his work unfavorably—a perspective that Ervine soon parroted in print. Finally, they track the perpetuation of this perspective, which has remained unchallenged by respected scholars and leading theatre artists for the past century.

Given the cogency of their alternative explanations for core details of Barker's later life and work, it is surprising that Chambers and Nelson present this revisionist reading at the end of the volume, but they may have wanted to keep their readers' focus initially on Barker's essays alone. Yet, their "Editorial Note," which precedes the essays, raises other questions. The editors state that they "have edited Barker's writing, often quite heavily, to avoid repetition and now-obscure references, and to present his thoughts on theatre in the clearest way" (xii). What exactly did the editors remove, change, or clarify? We cannot know for sure without returning to the source publications, and this renders the volume on its own...