July 2002
Transferred to www.oscholars.com with minor revisions January 2009
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This is our third collection of Shavings, where Wilde/Shaw links will be discussed. In this section we shall also try to cover productions of Shaw's pre-1900 plays, and news of productions of these (with offers of review) will be most welcome.
Richard Dietrich (University of Southern Florida): British Drama, 1890 to 1950: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne, 1989), contains a substantial chapter on Wilde, 'Oscar Wilde: The Marlowe of the New Drama' (pp.58-73) that makes comparisons between Wilde and Shaw.
Two plays in the current season at the Shaw Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake date from before 1900, Caesar & Cleopatra, written in 1898 (directed by Christopher Newton), and Candida, written in 1895 (directed by Jackie Maxwell). The following is taken from http://www.shawfest.com/guild/guild.html
Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's ninth play, represents a watershed in his career. Shaw's Caesar was the first of his many 'supermen' - people of extraordinary ability or ambition who seem marked to lead humankind to a higher plane of evolution. This Caesar is not at all like the self-serving tyrant that Shakespeare depicted in his play Julius Caesar - in fact, many critics consider this Caesar a portrait of Shaw made heroic. Similarly, this Cleopatra is very different from the one in Antony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare's Cleopatra was a mature woman whose queenly gifts were subverted by her passionate love for Antony, while Shaw's is just a slip of a girl who begins learning statecraft from the ancient world's master politician. And while the historical Cleopatra was probably 21 when she met Caesar and had a son by him, in Shaw's play there is no hint of a sexual liaison between the two.
Shaw considered Caesar and Cleopatra a chronicle play that was faithful to the historical personalities involved. His source was the German historian Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome, published in the 1850s and translated into English in 1870. Mommsen's work was notable for the contemporary feel it gave to Roman life. As Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd explains: 'The Mommsenite view of Caesar is of a democrat and republican whose impulse towards social reform opened up overseas possessions and remodelled the political structure of Rome so that it provided a material foundation for modern civilization. In Mommsen's hagiographic vision of 'the entire and perfect man' Shaw found what he wanted for his own conception of the hero.' Shaw acknowledged that 'Mommsen had conceived Caesar as I wished to present him,' and elsewhere wrote, 'I stuck nearly as closely to him as Shakespeare did to Plutarch or Holinshed.'
Shaw wrote Caesar and Cleopatra in 1898, shortly after his marriage to the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend and during his long convalescence from a series of operations on his foot. The play had its first full production in Berlin in 1906, staged by the great German director Max Reinhardt, and later that year received its English-language premiere in New York. The London premiere came in 1907. Shaw had written the role of Caesar for Johnston Forbes Robertson, the foremost classical actor of Edwardian London; and indeed, Robertson played the part in both its New York and London premieres, opposite his wife Gertrude Elliott. Other noteworthy actors in these title roles have included Cedric Hardwicke and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies (London, 1925), Hardwicke and Lilli Palmer (New York, 1949), Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh (film, 1945), and Leigh and her husband Laurence Olivier (London and New York, 1951). This is the play's third appearance at the Shaw Festival, following productions in 1975 (with Edward Atienza and Domini Blythe) and 1983 (with Douglas Rain and Marti Maraden).
Candida
‘A fine morning in October 1894,' begins Shaw's stage direction, 'in the north east quarter of London, a vast district miles away from the London of Mayfair and St James's'. In this unfashionable middle-class suburb, with its 'miles and miles of unlovely brick houses', is St Dominic's Parsonage, the home of the Reverend James Mavor Morell and his family. Reverend Morell is a vigorous, genial, attractive man of about forty; and since he is also a fine speaker and holds advanced political views, he is much in demand for public lectures.
As the play begins, we find Morell's wife Candida returning home from three weeks in the country. She is accompanied by Eugene Marchbanks, an 18-year-old poet and the nephew of an earl, whom Morell discovered some months ago sleeping among the homeless on the Thames Embankment. When the two men are left alone, a nervous Marchbanks informs Morell that he is in love with Candida, and starts to undermine Morell's confidence that Candida is still happy in her marriage. And though Candida shows that she is fond of them both, she speaks warmly of Eugene and seems oblivious to her husband's growing concern. Some kind of confrontation is clearly brewing.
This was only the second of Shaw's plays to receive a full professional production. He wrote it in 1895 for the actress Janet Achurch who, along with her actor-husband Charles Charrington, tour edit in English provincial theatres in the 1890s, most often in repertory with Ibsen's A Doll's House. Indeed, in some ways Candida is a companion piece to A Doll's House, with Eugene's final exit in the one play mirroring Nora's in the other. (This must have been Shaw's intention, as Achurch was England's first Nora as well as its first Candida.) For the first London production of Candida, a single performance in a private theatre club in 1900, Achurch and Charrington were joined by a young actor named Harley Granville Barker who played Marchbanks. This connection proved to be crucial to Shaw's rise to playwriting fame, for it was Barker's celebrated series of productions at the Royal Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 that established Shaw's reputation as England's leading playwright of the new 20th century.
A list of websites provided by Richard Dietrich:
BERNARD SHAW SOCIETY WEB SITE:
http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dietrich/shawsociety.html
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA SHAW SERIES WEBSITE:
http://www.upf.com/shaw.html
http://www.upf.com/se-shaw.html
SHAW BIZNESS WEB SITE:
http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dietrich/shawbizness.html
INTERNATIONAL SHAW SOCIETY WEB SITE:
http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dietrich/international_shaw_society/index.html
THE SHAW FESTIVAL
http://www.shawfest.com
Other websites include
http://www.infography.com/content/272906973619.html (a bibliography)
http://www.therightside.demon.co.uk/quotes/shaw/ which has 123 quotations from Shaw, but irritatingly does not source them.
http://www.georgebernardshaw.com/ is The Bernard Shaw Information & Research Service, which has as its Patrons Dame Diana Rigg, Dame Wendy Hiller, Brian Cox, Richard E Grant and Jerry Hall, a remarkable list.
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