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  • "My Dear Watson"
  • J. P. Wearing (bio)
L. W. Conolly, ed. "My Dear Watson": Bernard Shaw's Letters to a Critic. Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON: Academy of the Shaw Festival, 2017. 110 pages. $10.00. www.shawfest.com/place/the-shawp/.

The critic addressed in this formerly private collection of fourteen letters written by Shaw was Malcolm Watson (1853–1929), sometimes called T. Malcolm Watson, who was also the author of thirty-six or so dramatic works in differing genres. The letters are fleshed out by several self-drafted "interviews" about some of his work that Shaw provided for publication by Watson. Indeed, these interviews constitute the greater part of this correspondence. Alas, Watson's side of the correspondence has apparently not survived, although Leonard Conolly provides some interesting conjectures in the course of his informative linking contextual narratives. In addition, there are forty pages of anonymous reviews of Shaw's plays published in the Daily Telegraph (from 1900 to 1924) that Watson might well have written as one of that newspaper's principal critics. Needless to say, this collection receives excellent scholarly editing from Conolly.

Shaw's views and style in his letters here will be familiar to readers of his correspondence elsewhere: his promotion of himself and his plays, his disparagement of mainstream drama, his initiatives with figures such as J. E. Vedrenne and Granville Barker at the Court Theatre, his occasionally acerbic opinion of audiences, his antipathy to stage censorship as well as the London press and its drama critics.

Not surprisingly, Shaw directs barbs at Shakespeare for his use of blank verse by averring that his own work on Man and Superman and other plays [End Page 254] would have been done "much more easily in blank verse than in prose," but he "resisted the temptation to be lazy" (25). Pinero, an early contemporary adversary, is condemned for inflicting Paula Tanqueray on Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Fay Zuliani (in The Princess and the Butterfly, 1897) on Fay Davis, both roles being "imposture[s]" on "eminent actress[es]" (13). Some other contemporary dramatists fare much better. Shaw declared that Galsworthy's The Silver Box, produced at the Court in 1906 during the Vedrenne-Barker partnership, was "a first-rate dramatic work" (15). Strindberg is pronounced a "very remarkable genius" (23). Shaw's approval of Tilda's New Hat by "George Paston" (the one-act curtain-raiser to The Admirable Bashville, 1909) as a "pièce de résistance" (26) might seem whimsical. However, Paston's piece may have appealed to Shaw because of its Pygmalion affinities. Tilda is a jam-factory girl who is proposed to by a man who wants to improve her by taking her to lectures and the theater. Moreover, Tilda disapproves of Shakespeare as being too coarse for the music halls. On Watson's own talents as a dramatist, Shaw apparently remained mute, perhaps diplomatically so.

The impending production of Pygmalion provoked Shaw to disparage audiences and their propensity to laugh loudly: "I suppose we shall have the usual well-intended, good natured riot that is the disgrace of the English theatre" (39); moreover, the cast and production would be disrupted as a result. Some audiences also possessed preconceived notions about a given play, such as Misalliance, and so adopted "a distorted unnatural, and unnecessarily clever attitude" toward the play and then blamed Shaw for "their own folly" (30, 31).

From Mrs. Warren's Profession onward Shaw suffered from censorship by the Lord Chamberlain's office, and this collection contains several complaints, particularly with regard to Press Cuttings (26–29). Shaw noted that, while his play's main characters (Balsquith and Mitchener) had drawn the censor's ire, similar political caricatures in J. M. Barrie's Josephine were permitted. Shaw sensed a conspiracy: "A Censor who passes [Barrie's] Arthur and Josephine and objects to Mitchener and Balsquith has some other reason in the background." Shaw found another inconsistency in censorship practices in the production (not specifically identified by Conolly) of Mrs. Percy Dearmer's nativity play The Soul of the World (Imperial Institute, 1 December 1911). Produced by the Morality Play Society, which numbered several bishops among its patrons, "there was...

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