Heartbreak House: Shaw's Lear

Heartbreak House: Shaw's Lear STANLEY WEINTRAUB • SHAKES. Where is thy Hamlet? Couldst thou write King Lear? SHAV. Aye, with his daughters all complete. Couldst thou have written Heartbreak House? Behold my Lear. - Bernard Shaw in Shakes vs. Shav (1949) IN A MUSICAL REVIEW IN 1893 "G.B.S." joked, "It is impossible to say what a man can do until he tries. I may before the end of this year write a tragedy on the subject of King Lear that will efface Shakespear's; but if I do it will be a surprise, not perhaps to myself, but to the public. It is certain that if I took the work in hand I should be able to turn out five acts about King Lear that would be, at least, grammatical, superficially coherent, and arranged in lines that would scan."l At the time Shaw had completed only one play, Widowers' Houses; and was working on a second, The Philanderer, one of his least successful efforts. The likelihood of a Shavian Lear was remote. A dozen years later, when he tried to interest classicist and translator of Euripides Gilbert Murray in "a great dramatic theme ... - a Woman Lear with three sons - just the sort of Aeschylean subject in modern life you want,,,2 the idea was no longer a flippant aside. Just before the First World War Shaw found his own Lear - although he had not yet recognized it - via the circuitous route of the Moscow Art Theatre. At the close of the first performance in England of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, he had said to producer Frederick Whelen, who sat next to him, "I feel as if I want to tear up all my plays and begin all over again.,,3 But although he subtitled his next major play, Heartbreak House (written 1916-17), a fantasia in the Russian manner upon English themes, and echoes of The Cherry Orchard unquestionably reverberate through it, the play might be profitably viewed as a fantasia in the Shakespearian manner upon Shavian 255 256 STANLEY WEINTRAUB themes. In particular, Heartbreak House seems clearly to have been designed, at least in part, as Shaw's Lear. Earlier he had tauntingly titled part of a preface to his Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) "Better than Shakespear?" suggesting a parallel with the Bard's Antony and Cleopatra; yet by presenting a kittenish young queen and an aging Caesar, rather than an aging but still sultry Cleopatra and a younger admirer, he had evaded any direct comparison. Like his Cleopatra play, Shaw's Lear was offered not in competition but as commentary. G.B.S. waited until his nineties to point publicly to Heartbreak House as his Lear. Even then he did so guardedly through the disarming medium of a puppet play, perhaps to prevent the comparison from being taken as seriously as he inwardly still meant it to be, for in his lifetime the play's now very considerable reputation had never measured up to his expectations for it. "If the critics had the brains of a mad Tom," he grumbled, using a suggestive association with Lear, "they would realize it is my greatest play. But they don't. They all go following after the Maid of Orleans.,,4 Privately, Shaw had suggested the Lear connection almost as soon as he had completed the play. In mid-1917, actress Lillah McCarthy had asked him for details of the work, hoping to convince him to let her produce it or at least acquire a starring part in it. Shaw put her off. It was wartime, he pointed out, and the play was unpleasant, unsuitable fare for war conditions. The hero was an old man of eighty-eight, and there were no young male roles (its implicit recognition of the wartime dearth of leading men). The women were either too young or too old - an ingenue and two sisters in their middle forties. The sisters, Shaw confided - "I don't find them much more popular than Goneril or Regan" - were the old man's daughters.5 Disgusted with the dragged-out war and its effect on theatre as well as much else, he confessed finally that his heart...