One Man and His Dog: A Study of a Deleted Draft of Bernard Shaw's The Philanderer

ONE MAN AND HIS DOG: A STUDY OF A DELETED DRAFT OF BERNARD SHAW'S THE PHILANDERER IN THE SPRING OF 1885, Bernard Shaw's fourth novel, Cashel Byron's Profession, was progressing, in serial form, through the pages of the Socialist magazine To*Day, and the April issue contained Shaw's first printed utterance on a topic about which he was to fulminate all his life: vivisection, for the abolition of which he was an untiring agitator .1 Cashel Byron himself makes the complaint: I think it hard that I should be put out of decent society when fellows that do far worse than I are let in. Who did I see here last Friday, the most honored of your guests? Why, that Frenchman with the gold spectacles. What do you think I was told when I asked what his little game was? Baking dogs in ovens to see how long a dog could live red hot! I'd like to catch him doing it to a dog of mine.... It is not generally known that just eight years later Shaw went to a great deal of trouble to bring together a vivisector and a dog of his; though the experimenting, as we shall see, was carried out by Shaw himself. Let me hasten to add that the dog in question was not one that Shaw owned; so far as I can ascertain he never did own one, though he testifies to having had "dogs left in my care as part of the furniture of hired homes."2 The dog to which I refer is the animal that haunted him at the time of writing his second play The Philanderer in 1893; and which threatened to do to that play what he claimed William Archer's "long lost old woman" would do to their collaborative venture Rheingold, namely "turn the thing into a plot and ruin it."3 Our thanks to the Public Trustee and the Society of Authors for permission to print material contained in the British Museum. 1 G. H. Bowker, in his book Shaw on Vivisection (London, 1949), is in error, stating that Shaw's first printed pronouncement on the SUbject of cruel experiments on animals in the name of Science occurs in his review of Edmund Gurney's Tertium Quid.. in December 1887, in the Pall Ma-ll Gazette. 2 G. B. Shaw, Shaw Gives Himself Away (London, 1939), p. 174. 8 G. B. Shaw, Letter to William Archer, October 4. 1887. 69 70 MODERN DRAMA May Now above all the machinery of Victorian drama, Shaw abominated the plot. His hatred for it is apparent throughout his entire critical career. Speaking of H. A. jones's play Hoodman Blind, as early as 1885, he said: Hit has that dramatic cancer, a plot";4 and he praised another work by the same author, six months later, by saying: "The sole superiority of The Lord Harry to Mr. Jones's previous work consists in its almost absolute freedom from the incubus of a plot."lS His days with The Saturday Review further exemplify this attitude; so that when he turned from playgoing to playwritingactivities which he carried out simultaneously for a time-one would expect him to put his precepts into practice. And so it has always been believed. William Archer spoke with authority in his book on playmaking: There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along. That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw.6 Shaw affirmed this: Instead of planning my plays I let them grow as they came, and hardly ever wrote a page foreknowing what the next page would be.7 and defended the method: If you construct a play: that is, if you plan your play beforehand , and then carry out your plan, you will find yourself in the position of a person putting together a jig-saw puzzle, absorbed and intensely interested in an operation which, to a spectator , is unbearably dull.s Perhaps the years had erased the memory of his first draft of The Philanderer: perhaps there is much virtue in the Pinafore...