Bernard Shaw and William Archer ed. by Thomas Postlewait (review)

Few professional relationships offer such a panoramic view of the emerging modern theatre as that of playwright Bernard Shaw and critic William Archer, as seen through their longstanding epistolary correspondence. Of course, to identify their two professions in this way is imprecise, as Shaw was himself one of the greatest critics of modern theatre and drama, only retiring from professional criticism in 1898 after the publication of his first seven plays concurrently in two volumes, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. And while it might be reasonably argued that Archer was the most important theatre and drama critic writing in the English language between 1880 and 1920, he ended his life as a successful playwright.

Theatre historian Thomas Postlewait has spent decades hunting down the letters of the famous pair, never quite satisfied that there were not more letters to be found. The volume consists of 181 epistles, mostly from Shaw to Archer, and spans from January 6, 1885 to December 17, 1924, just ten days before Archer died. Although some of the letters have appeared elsewhere, many are being published here (unabridged) for the first time. Of particular note is one letter that Postlewait discovered, finding it enclosed in one of Archer's censorship-article scrapbooks in the now-shuttered British Theatre Association in London. The copy that he made of that letter—published in this volume—remains the only record of this missive, as the original somehow disappeared when Archer's archives were moved (83). More generally, Postlewait suggests that many of Archer's responses to Shaw are simply lost, most likely destroyed during World War II.

What makes this book so compellingly readable, despite the gaps created by the lost letters, is Postlewait's extraordinary scholarship. He provides extensive headnotes, which "supply the immediate context and the connecting narrative for each letter." He also follows each letter with a comprehensive endnote, identifying "people, references, allusions, and quotations that Shaw and Archer mentioned in their letters" (lxxxiii). Rarely have headnotes and endnotes been so pleasurable to read and so enormously helpful. They complement the letters brilliantly, especially because Postlewait provides excerpts from the reviews, essays, and books by the two authors that fill in lacunae. He began his career with Prophet of the New Drama: William Archer and the Ibsen Campaign (1986), an important book, and Bernard Shaw and William Archer is a significant extension of that work.

In his lengthy introduction, Postlewait identifies "six major fronts" where the two men "battled for the birth, development, and fulfillment of the modern theatre: the new drama, the new theatre, the new criticism, the establishment of a national theatre, the revitalization of Shakespearean theatre, and the opposition to stage censorship" (xii). All of these topics are discussed in the letters, most of them at great length. For instance, Archer and Shaw were both deeply involved in the efforts to establish a national theatre in London during the early part of the twentieth century, Archer starting the Theatrical Reform Committee in 1902 and then composing, with Harley Granville Barker, A National Theatre: Schemes and Estimates in 1907. This was a decades-long conversation, turning eventually into an argument when the national theatre scheme transformed into a national Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. In fact, their discussions on Shakespeare make for some of the most interesting reading in the book, as Archer and Shaw frequently debate such issues as staging and cutting Shakespeare's plays; Shaw contended, for instance, that William Poel's spare and supposedly uncut productions with the Elizabethan Stage Society were the perfect model for Shakespearean production, while Postlewait notes that such "praise must have made Archer see red because he was a relentless critic of Poel's productions" (336).

Both Shaw and Archer were fervent supporters of Ibsen and the new theatre (both are discussed frequently), but the two men differed throughout their forty-year correspondence on the topic of dramatic construction, which is a source of constant contention in...