Abstract
The plays of Bernard Shaw feature new, sometimes daring ideas intended to jolt the audiences of his day into recognizing the multifarious problems of their society and acting accordingly. Shaw frequently employs interior authors, characters who create works that in many ways underscore his own message, to deliver his strongly held opinions on everything from family life to the Life Force. This chapter not only considers Shaw’s interior authors but also examines the nexus of censorship and modernism in one facet of his oft-censored plays: his creation of characters who either self-censor their own published or highly publicized work, or who are censored themselves by their fellow characters. I identify Shaw’s interior authors as Mrs. Clandon in You Never Can Tell, John Tanner in Man and Superman, Fanny O’Dowda in Fanny’s First Play, the Brothers Barnabas in Back to Methuselah, and the eponymous protagonist of Saint Joan. I also discuss Shaw’s secondary or exterior authors who write, although their works are not central to their respective plays. Chapter 3 considers censorship and modernism in You Never Can Tell, Man and Superman, and Fanny’s First Play.
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Notes
- 1.
See Bernard Shaw CPP 2: 17–18 for Archer’s reaction and a broader account of the production. All quotations from Shaw’s dramas are quoted from The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays and their Prefaces,7 vols., ed. Dan Laurence (London: Max Reinhard, 1970–74), hereafter noted as CPP followed by volume and page numbers.
- 2.
Shaw’s Plays Unpleasant are Widower’s Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession found in CPP 1.
- 3.
Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell are also in CPP 1.
- 4.
Charles Berst, Bernard Shaw and the Art of Drama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 3.
- 5.
Mary Christian, “Not a Play: Redefining Theater and Reforming Marriage in Candida,” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 35 (2015): 2 243.
- 6.
John A. Bertolini, The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 11–25, 29.
- 7.
Ibid., 87–88.
- 8.
Bert Cardulo, “Whose Life Is it Anyway? The Doctor’s Dilemma and Modern Tragedy” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies: 31 (2011): 111.
- 9.
Bertolini, 110.
- 10.
Joan Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 291.
- 11.
Jean Reynolds, Language and Metadrama In Major Barbara and Pygmalion (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan: 2022), 33.
- 12.
Bertolini, 7.
- 13.
See Introduction to this volume, and Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge University Press: 2006).
- 14.
Brad Kent’s apt term relating to Shaw’s Mrs. Dudgeon in “Censorship and Immorality: Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple,” Modern Drama 54:4 (2011): 511.
- 15.
Kerry Powell, “Farcical Comedy” in Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge University Press: 2015) ed. Brad Kent, 85. Also, Marshik contends that both Shaw and Virginia Woolf evaded the censorship by the use of humor and satire British Modernism and Censorship, 4. See Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw 1856-1898: The Search for Love (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985), 383 regarding Shaw’s attempt to destroy the genres of melodrama and farce.
- 16.
Holroyd. The Search for Love, 386-87 and A.M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw: A Life (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005), 190.
Ibid. 189.
- 17.
Phillip Graham, “Bernard Shaw’s Neglected Role in English Feminism 1880-1914,” Journal of Gender Studies 14 (2014): 175.
- 18.
Tony J. Stafford, “You Never Can Tell: Shaw’s Shakespearian Comedy,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 31 (2011): 40.
- 19.
Templeton, 153.
- 20.
Dorothy Hadfield, “What Runs in the Family,” SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 74.
- 21.
Ibid, 71.
- 22.
Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1874-1950. Ed. Dan Laurence 4 Vols. (New York: Viking, 1985–88) ii, 34; hereafter referred to as CL, followed by volume and page number. Also see CL ii: 471.
- 23.
CL ii: 473.
- 24.
This familial rebuke, a familiar form of censorship, was also suffered by modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf. See Leslie Kathleen Hankins, “A Splice of Reel Life in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Time Passes’: Censorship, Cinema and ‘the usual battle field of emotions,’” Criticism, 35, 1 (1993): 92.
- 25.
Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 32, 113.
- 26.
Peter Gahan, Shaw’s Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw (University of Florida Press, 2004), 178.
- 27.
Quoted in Kent, “Censorship,” in Kent, Bernard Shaw in Context, 200.
- 28.
Holroyd, The Search for Love, 339.
- 29.
Ibid, 390.
- 30.
See Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw. 1898-1918: The Pursuit of Power (New York: Random House, 1989) 173.
- 31.
Quoted in Gibbs, 190.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid
- 34.
Gahan, Shaw’s Shadows.
- 35.
Margery Morgan, Shavian Playground, An Exploration of the Art of George Bernard Shaw (London: Methuen, 1972), 115.
- 36.
Gahan, Shaw Shadows, 178.
- 37.
Morgan, 116–18.
- 38.
Maurice Valency, “Man and Superman” in Harold Bloom, Major Critical Interpretations Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (New York: Chelsea House: 1987), 85–86.
- 39.
J.P. Wearing, “Reception in London, 1892–1950” Shaw in Context, 324 and 324n.
- 40.
Lawrence Switzky, “Shaw among the Modernists” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 31 (2011): 144.
- 41.
Fredrick Berg, “Structure and Philosophy in Man and Superman,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge UP, 1998), 152–153.
- 42.
Holroyd, The Pursuit of Power, 2, 78.
- 43.
Morgan, 109.
- 44.
See Lawrence Switzky, “Introduction,” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 35, 1 (2015):1.
- 45.
Gahan, Shaw’s Shadows, 12.
- 46.
Quoted in Gahan, Shaw Shadows, 12.
- 47.
Barbara M. Fisher, “Fanny’s First Play: A Critical Potboiler?” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 7 (1987): 196.
- 48.
Holroyd, The Pursuit of Power, 280.
- 49.
Gahan, Shaw Shadows, 170.
- 50.
Fisher, 189.
- 51.
Holroyd, The Pursuit of Power, 280–82.
- 52.
Peter Gahan, “Ruskin and Form,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 15 (1995): 85–87.
- 53.
Gahan, Shaw’s Shadows, 168. See Gahan 166–88 for an in-depth analysis of the Shaw-Ruskin nexus and other literary allusions found in Fanny’s First Play.
- 54.
Gahan, Shaw Shadows, 170.
- 55.
J. Ellen Gainor, Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 181.
- 56.
Published in 1916 “To be substituted for Induction.” IV: 347).
- 57.
See Gahan, “Ruskin and Form,” 85.
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Tallent Lenker, L. (2024). Bernard Shaw’s Plays—Not in This Family. In: Bernard Shaw’s and Virginia Woolf’s Interior Authors. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49604-2_4
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