September 2002

Transferred to www.oscholars.com with minor revisions January 2009

The Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS with responsibility for helping with this issue of SHAVINGS was Julie A. Sparks of the Department of English, University of Arkansas-Monticello.

‘Oh, Shaw! That’s the man who smokes Jaeger cigarettes!’

– Oscar Wilde, quoted by Richard Le Gallienne: The Romantic Nineties.

New edition. London: Putnam & Co. 1951 p.81.

Note: Subscribers to this Journal have their names printed in bold, and can be contacted through us at oscholars@gmail.com

Click  for the last issue of Shavings (August 2002); click    for the Table of Contents of this issue; click  to return to the Shavings home page.

I. The Plays.

II. Shawlines.

III. Reviews.

1. Candida.

2. Cæsar and Cleopatra.

IV. Bibliographies

1. GBS for Wildeans.

2. Websites.

V. Specially Commissioned article: ‘About Bernard and Bosie’ by Anthony Wynn.

VI. Tailpiece.

I. The Plays

In this section we shall try to cover productions of Shaw’s pre-1901 plays, and news of productions of these (with offers of review) will be most welcome. The plays are Arms and the Man(1894), Cæsar and Cleopatra (1898), Candida (1895), Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899), The Devil’s Disciple (1897),The Man of Destiny (1895), Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893),The Philanderer (1893), Widowers’ Houses (1892), You Never Can Tell (1895). (Dates of composition, not first performance.) Wilde is known to have attended the first night of Arms and the Man (20th April 1894).

Two plays in the recent season at the Shaw Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake date from before 1900, Caesar and Cleopatra, (directed by Christopher Newton),and Candida, (directed by Jackie Maxwell). Reviews are below, respectively by Julie Sparks (University of Arkansas – Monticello) and Elisa Beshero-Bonder (Penn. State).

In England, Arms and the Man will be played at

o The Brewhouse Theatre,Taunton, Somerset, 3rd to 5th October

o The Vera Fletcher Hall,Thames Ditton, Surrey, 18th October

o The Landmark Theatre, Ilfracombe,Somerset, 24th October

o The Theatre, Chipping Norton,Oxfordshire, 29th October.

This production is by Michael Friend who has staged a number of Shaw’s plays at Shaw’s Corner,Ayot St Lawrence.

Full details of all the productions, cast lists, photographs, and touring plans for 2003, can be found at Error! Hyperlink reference not valid..

Mrs Warren’s Profession, directed by Deborah Bruce and designed by Lucy Bevan continues at the Bristol Old Vic:

Peter Hall (Director), John Gunter (Design), Peter Mumford (Lighting), Brenda Blethyn (Mrs Warren), (Performer), Richard Johnson (Performer), Peter Blythe (Performer), Laurence Fox (Performer), Rebecca Hall (Performer), James Saxon (Performer). [We shall update this list as soon as we know the cast]

In the United States, Mrs Warren’s Profession continues at the State Theater, Austin, Texas, to 20th October.

The World Premiere of Bernard and Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship by Anthony Wynn is being staged as a rehearsed reading at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London on Friday, 25th October.

This play in two acts is adapted from the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Lord Alfred Douglas with Barry Morse as Bernard Shaw and Hayward Morse as Douglas.

The performance begins at 7:00 pm., and tickets are only available at the door. Shaw Society Members £2, Non-members £ 3. Seating available on a first-come, first-served basis.

A discussion session with the actors, author, and others will follow.

Website for Bernard and Bosie: http://www.geocities.com/starparty1/bernardandbosie

II. Shawlines

In this section we will print all the news that we find or, better still, are sent. We especially welcome news of Shaw on curricula.

The John J. Burns Library at Boston College has acquired the Samuel Freedman Collection of George Bernard Shaw, comprising more than 3,500 items.

Arms and the Man is a set text on the ‘Victorians’ section of the English course at Goldsmiths College, University of London, with the accompanying lecture given by Professor Chris Baldick.

Signy Henderson (Middlesex University) writes: ‘We teach Mrs Warren’s Profession as part of the core module strand on our BA (Hons) Drama and Theatre Studies degree here at Middlesex University.

We also wish to record articles and papers relating to the earlier Shaw, and news of new editions of Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886), An Unsocial Socialist(1887), The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), Love Among the Artists(1900), as well as other related material.

III. Reviews

1. Candida.

Shaw Festival 2002, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. Sunday 25th August, 8 p.m. performance in the Festival Theatre.

Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar.

A hearty bravo for the Shaw Festival’s outstanding production of this particularly challenging play, pitting the hypersensitive visionary genius of an eighteen-year-old budding poet against the decisive middle-class morality of a Christian Socialist orator for the love of his wife, Candida, the spirited mainstay of his ego and household. Candida poses great difficulty for stage production, as Shaw himself noted in his 1930 Preface to Plays Pleasant (London: Penguin Books, 1946), remembering Richard Mansfield’s early failed attempts to stage the play and tackle the role of the poet in the mid 1890’s: ‘Richard Mansfield, who had, with apparent ease, made me quite famous in America by his productions of my plays, went so far as to put the play actually into rehearsal before he would confess himself beaten by the physical difficulties of the part’ (p.9). It is understandably difficult to convey the wisdom of a tattered, aristocratic teenage poet whose apparently slothful, selfish devotion to beauty requires the benevolent charity of the very people whose household he intentionally disrupts. Indeed, the character of Eugene Marchbanks appears designed to prompt scorn, particularly when pitted against the Reverend James Morell, who so markedly exudes the work ethic and solid progressivism of respectable society, indeed, that society’s very ideal of responsible manliness. Appearances work to the disadvantage of the fearful, trembling young, satanic genius, particularly in the full childish bloom of his youth, and Shaw, indeed, commented that, had he ‘made the poet a cripple, or at least a blind, so as to combine an easier disguise with a larger claim for sympathy, something might have been done’ (p.9).

The challenge, of course, as with each of Shaw’s plays, lies in the shock value of deconstruction, in surprising viewers with Marchbanks’s superior courage, honesty, and vision, as they learn the real support of Morell’s electric confidence. Yet, while Morell is easily humbled within Shaw’s script, particularly for twenty-first-century audiences accustomed to the artificial construction of public authority figures, Marchbanks’s respectability is quite another matter. Certainly we recognize Candida Morell’s understated emotional power over her husband, as easily as we perceive his weaknesses. But can we sympathize with Marchbanks’s determination to rescue Candida from a lifetime of servitude, as he sees it? Can we sympathize with Marchbanks’s horror-stricken perspective of the Morells, as a wife who scrubs while her husband sermonizes? Indeed, his perspective is not accurate, for as Candida corrects him, her husband scrubs the boots, and she is involved with his socialist concerns as an equal helpmate.

But the ideal of utilitarian or Christian Socialist servitude is really at the heart of Marchbanks’s objection to the Morells’ self-important way of life. In Act II, Marchbanks desires for Candida, ‘No, not a scrubbing brush, but a boat: a tiny shallop to sail away in, far from the world, where the marble floors are washed by the rain and dried by the sun; where the south wind dusts the beautiful green and purple carpets. Or a chariot! To carry us up into the sky, where the lamps are stars, and don’t need to be filled with paraffin oil every day.’ As Morell see this, such a vision is ‘idle, selfish, and useless,’ but to Marchbanks, it is rather, ‘to be beautiful and free and happy: hasn’t every man desired that with all his soul for the woman he loves? That’s my ideal: what’s yours, and that of all the dreadful people who live in these hideous rows of houses? Sermons and scrubbing brushes!’ (p.129). Shaw’s Preface presents the inspired artist as one who glimpses ‘the distant light of the new age. Discernable at first only by the eyes of the man of genius, it must be focused by him on the speculum of a work of art, and flashed back from that into the eyes of the common man,’ yet the artist generally cannot explain coherently the value or importance or practical use of that flashing vision. In accordance with this perspective Shaw explicitly sets up Marchbanks as having not only a higher, but also a ‘vaguer and timider’ vision, and he projects a youthful uncertainty combined with impulsive waywardness which the Reverend James Morell, like many of us I suspect, see as a sign of immaturity, and toward which we quite wrongly adopt a guardian’s benevolent attitude.

While those of us sympathetic to the poet’s prophetic capacities might wince at his being played as an awkward, impulsive adolescent, who at one moment buries his head in sofa cushions or prostrates himself on the floor, while at the next leaps thoughtlessly and boldly toward the object of his affections, Mike Shara’s interpretation of Marchbanks is nevertheless true to Shaw’s direction and the spirit o the character. Spontaneous emotional response, however ridiculous it may appear, projects not only unrestrained, unschooled innocence, but more importantly, Marchbanks’s honest and keen appraisal of the carefully buried needs and desires of the Morell household. His awkwardness comes of sheer terror of being alone with his insight, of needing to communicate his vision yet knowing what that communication will cost. In loving Candida and desiring to free her, Marchbanks is nevertheless horrified when she chips at her husband’s façade of confidence, for he sympathizes with his avowed rival, and does not wish Morell to confront the horror of a lost moral foundation. Certainly Morell does learn the foundation of his happiness and security is not his own ideas, ‘mere phrases that’ as his wife tells him, ‘you cheat yourself and others with every day,’ but that knowledge could not have come without Marchbanks’s impulsive testing of the Morell’s marriage. If Candida chooses in the end, the weaker of the two, she willingly denies the vision of free love Marchbanks offers, perhaps because the ideal of dependent servitude in love is too strong an attraction, too powerful an allure. But can Shaw’s ideal of the artist’s specular visionary gleam really be played out on stage? Certainly Candida made a mature, responsible decision, but can the audience know ‘the secret in the poet’s heart,’ if she does not? (p.160)

I suspect this depends very much on the audience, and the extent to which viewers allow themselves to sympathize with a dangerous, young, Romantic rebel. Certainly by the end, Mike Shara succeeds in conveying Marchbanks’s bildung, his growth of confidence and sense of mission as he leaves the Morell household. Kelli Fox’s Candida, true to Shaw’s caricature of the bemused matron, projects a fearless, motherly willingness to nurture the young poet, even to give herself to him ‘as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold, if there were nothing else to restrain me’ (135). She reigns calmly and confidently over her husband and the agitated poet, so that even when her husband discovers Marchbanks in her arms, she unselfconsciously commands the situation. Blair Williams’s Reverend Morell rises majestically to defend his marriage, and quite persuasively and sympathetically falls in his battle of wits and hearts with Marchbanks, so that we can easily perceive his need of Candida by the end of the play. The three lead players, taken together, faithfully uphold the spirit and the letter of Shaw’s direction to provide more than a convincing Shavian dialectic of contrary perspectives. All three gave the play a realistic emotional vibrance that made viewing it a far more serious act than merely reading it. The stage production foregrounded a fearful awareness of the poet’s seductive potential in all three roles, as the characters come to troubled life—so that the experience of seeing them in action may well be more troubling than an intellectually detached reading of the play’s pleasant comedy.

If the set, with its grandiose gilded paneling and enormous, filled bookshelves appeared rather more opulent a Victorian household than Shaw’s directions appear to indicate, his merely contributed to the appearance of the Morells’ great success, to be offset by the dynamic tensions of the play. The Festival Theater is an excellent venue; even sitting in the upper balcony did not detract from fully seeing, hearing, and enjoying the play—or with sympathetic identification with the characters. (The Shaw Festival’s assistive listening devices, which may be reserved for $2 when seats are booked, work quite well for those relegated to distant seats; but I did not find them necessary for this performance.) Candida will be playing through November 2002, and should be seen as one of the Shaw Festival’s most important productions of the season.

v Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar is a Ph.D. candidate, Department of English, Penn State University Homepage: http://www.personal.psu.edu/eeb4/. Email: eeb4@psu.edu

2. Caesar and Cleopatra.

The Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. 13th April - 27th October 2002. Viewed on 24th August.

A Cameo Role for Oscar?

Julie A. Sparks

Wilde scholars and enthusiasts might be interested in Bernard Shaw’s Edwardian history play, Caesar and Cleopatra, as an interesting example of the intellectual cross-fertilization that persisted between Shaw and that other great Irish playwright.

As Stanley Weintraub points out in his article about the two former Dubliners, Wilde wrote his Soul of Man Under Socialism after a long conversation with Shaw (and a few others) on the subject, and in turn, Wilde’s treatise most likely influenced Shaw in his conception of Caesar. As evidence for this influence, Dr. Weintraub cites this passage: Wilde wrote, “It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art. In action, we never have. Caesar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect man. But how tragically insecure is Caesar! . . . Caesar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road.” Shaw seeks out Mommsen’s portrait of Caesar to inform his own, and although Shaw rebukes Wilde’s (and more deliberately, Shakespeare’s) emphasis on the great general’s insecurity, he certainly shows what a dangerous road Caesar traveled as a genius and a Superman among less evolved (and thus hostile) minds.

Wilde’s influence on the play is also evident in the character of Apollodorus the professional aesthete and apostle of beauty whose motto is “Art for Art’s sake”. Although Shaw’s original conception for the character seems to be the Renaissance ideal of the patrician equally well schooledin the arts of leisure and the arts of war, Christopher Newton’s production de-emphasizes the warrior element, hiding the character’s sword in the handle of an Edwardian parasol, and dressing him in an immaculate three-piece suit and straw hat. Mr. Newton’s conception of this character, played with bemused understatement by Patrick R. Brown, contrasts strikingly with the version Shaw helped put on the screen in 1945, an ornate but emphatically virile and athletic figure played dashingly by Stewart Granger. While the Hollywood version verges on beefcake, Mr. Brown’s portrayal emphasizes the refined, intellectual aesthete.

In his conception of other characters, however, Mr. Newton evokes Hollywood iconography to preserve Shaw’s deliberately anachronistic approach. Caesar is dressed as Indiana Jones, while Lucius Septimus, a relatively minor character, gains added grandeur and historical resonance from a Lawrence of Arabia costume. This is a particularly apt reference, not only because Lucius Septimus, like Lawrence, was an agent of imperialist aggression who changed sides twice, but also because Lawrence formed a very close personal attachment to Shaw (and Shaw’s wife) during Word War I and later, when he was writing his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. By updating Shaw’s anachronisms to the early 20th century, Mr. Newton suggests that Shaw’s commentary on British imperialism in the Muslim world might have new resonance for Britain and her increasingly bellicose American ally, and Caesar’s failed effort to restrain the ancient lust for revenge in his Egyptian allies also gains new and disturbing relevance.

Despite these rather ominous undercurrents, the Shaw Festival production remains a comedy, buoyant with wit and panache. Jim Mezon plays Caesar with an appropriately whimsical intelligence that switches adroitly to moral outrage or Olympian detachment as the situation demands. Caroline Cave is also excellent as Cleopatra. Although her delivery is sometimes a little rushed, for the most part she captures the mercurial temper ofthe young queen on the cusp between girlhood and greatness. Fine performances in smaller roles include Guy Bannerman’s Rufio, Sarah Orenstein’s Ftatateeta, and Norman Browning’s Britannus. The stage design by William Schmuck and the costumes are spectacular.

All things considered, I believe both Shaw and Wilde would be pleased.

¹ Stanley Weintraub: Shaw’s People: Victoria to Churchill. University Park, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. The chapter I quote is called ‘“The Hibernian School”: Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw.’

v Julie A. Sparks is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, Monticello. Her scholarly interests include Victorian and Early Modern literature, drama, utopian and dystopian literature, and the relationship between science and religion. She has been a devoted Shavian since high school.

IV. Bibliographies

1. GBS for Wildeans: A Bibliography of 19th century Shaw.

This will be a cumulative bibliography as references come to hand.

Borsa, Mario: The English Stage of To-day. Translated from the original Italian and edited with a prefatory note by Selwyn Brinton M.A. London: John Lane The Bodley Head 1908. This has one chapter on Shaw.

Chapter IV: G.B.S.

Innes, Christopher (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998. This contains four essays on the younger Shaw:

Gordon, David J.: Shavian Comedy and the Shadow of Wilde;

Kelly, Katherine E.: Imprinting the Stage: Shaw and the Publishing Trade 1883-1903;

Marker, Frederick J.: Shaw’s early plays;

Powell, Kerry: New Women, new plays, and Shaw in the 1890s.

Meisel, Martin: Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater. Princeton University Press 1963; new edition New York: Limelight Editions 1984 ISBN 0-87910-017-6.

Morgan, A.L.: Tendencies of Modern English Drama. London: Constable 1924. This contains three chapters on Shaw:

Chapter VI. Shaw the Iconoclast–Dramatic Iconoclast

Chapter VII: Shaw the Iconoclast–Social Iconoclast

Chapter VIII: Shaw the Philosopher.

2. Websites.

A list of websites kindly provided by Richard Dietrich (University of Southern Florida):

BERNARD SHAW SOCIETY WEB SITE (see illustration below):

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.

http://www.phnet.fi/public/mamaa1/shaw.html also gives an unsourced list of ‘quotes’ – ‘one-liners’ – presented in a table. The best use of it is to check all those sayings ascribed to Wilde that are in fact by (or ascribed to) Shaw.

http://www.shawchicago.orgis the site of the Shaw Chicago Theatre Company, specialising in Shaw’s plays.

http://www.theheritagetrail.co.uk/notable%20houses/shaws%20corner.htmhas two pictures of Shaw’s house and a brief account.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/centurions/shaw/shawbiog.shtmlgivesa biography of Shaw as it appeared to the BBC compilers.

V. ABOUT BERNARD AND BOSIE

Anthony Wynn

The genesis of my interest in, firstly, the wonderful poetry of Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas and then, the history of his relationship with Oscar Wilde; began in a poetry course during my university days more than 10 years ago. The poem in question was ‘The Green River’, full of lush imagery and vibrant turn of phrase:

I know a green grass path that leaves the field

And, like a running river, winds along

Into a leafy wood, where is no throng

Of birds at noon-day; and no soft throats yield

Their music to the moon. The place is sealed,

An unclaimed sovereignty of voiceless song,

And all the unravished silences belong

To some sweet singer lost, or unrevealed.

So is my soul become a silent place...

Oh, may I wake from this uneasy night

To find some voice of music manifold.

Let it be shape of sorrow with wan face,

Or love that swoons on sleep, or else delight

That is as wide-eyed as a marigold.

It was only then after discovering the poem that I became aware of history and the relationship between the two men. One thing that always intrigued me was that Lord Alfred himself seemed to be remembered more for his relationship with Wilde than for his own important contributions to the world of literature. It became a passion for me to find the out-of-print volumes of autobiography by Douglas and to read his various books of poetry – most of which were also not generally available. Eventually I discovered the wonderful volume of collected letters between playwright George Bernard Shaw and Douglas, Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas: A Correspondence edited by Mary Hyde.

Fast forward to autumn 2001 and a memorable dinner with veteran stage and screen actor Barry Morse, the President of The Shaw Society of England. The subject of Oscar Wilde came up and soon after we were discussing the finer points of the infamous trials and Barry pointed out how Wilde seemed either unwilling or unable to flee England, even given that the police delayed arresting him until after the final boat train had departed London. We talked more about Bosie’s rather tragic life following Wilde’s death and at some point I mentioned how much I had enjoyed reading the engaging correspondence between Shaw and Douglas. Barry, an expert in the life and works of George Bernard Shaw (and who knew him in the 1930s), pointed out how improbable their relationship was based on their absolute differences in every respect of their lives. Shaw was an atheist, a socialist, a vegetarian, and highly opinionated; Douglas was religious (having converted to Roman Catholicism), litigious, cantankerous, and rather lonely. “What an interesting concept for a play,” Barry mused thoughtfully, “Someone should adapt their correspondence for the stage.”

Up for the challenge I endeavoured to do just that – the result is Bernard and Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship which will debut in London during October. Interestingly, Shaw and Douglas only met in-person on one occasion, in 1895 during a fateful luncheon at London’s Café Royal, where Shaw and author Frank Harris tried to dissuade Wilde from pursuing his action against the Marquess of Queensberry. Bosie himself appeared during the course of the meal determined that his father should pay and that Oscar would win the action. As we all know, the two men were unable to persuade Wilde to change his mind. Many years passed and when Douglas initiated a correspondence with Shaw in 1931, Bernard was seventy-four years of age and Bosie himself was sixty. It’s my feeling that Shaw continued to envision Bosie in his mind’s eye as the beautiful young man he remembered from before the turn of the century – choosing the nickname of ‘Childe Alfred’ for Bosie (to counter Douglas’s appellation of ‘St. Christopher’ for Shaw). I’ve taken care to alter as little as possible the actual text of the two men’s letters in the piece. Judicious editing was accomplished in order to bring the play to a standard running length and in a number of instances brief explanations were added to enable a 21st century audience to follow late 19th and early 20th century references. For the sake of clarity, the full names of individuals were substituted in several cases where Shaw or Douglas only used first or last names.

Lord Gawain Douglas, the Great-Nephew of Bosie, wrote of Bernard and Bosie: “It provides a fascinating insight into these two characters and their most unusual relationship...skillful arrangement of the correspondence highlights the essential affection and understanding between them despite their very different viewpoints...and the humour comes out splendidly.” It is my hope that this piece will serve to illuminate the life of Alfred Douglas more fully through his ‘most unlikely friendship’ with Shaw ? and help introduce a new audience to the beauty of his poetry.

––––––––––––

v Anthony Wynn is co-author with Robert E. Wood and Barry Morse of the forthcoming autobiography Pulling Faces, Making Noises on the life of actor Barry Morse; and is currently working on a biography of ‘America’s Sweetheart of Song,’ Ruth Etting.

©Anthony Wynn 2002

VI. Tailpiece: SHAW’S FRIENDs

Archibald Henderson has printed the phrase as ‘Shaw has many enemies and none of his friends like him’. Shaw writes to remonstrate. ‘. . . . the well-known epigram “Shaw had not an enemy in the world; and none of his friends like him”: a really witty sally . . .’

—Shaw to Archibald Henderson 22.ii.1911.

‘You have made a much cleverer “epigram” than Wilde did, and I give you due credit therefor. But you adduce no evidence to show that your “improved coinage” was originated anywhere save in your own brain. I fancy Wilde did not make this thrust for publication; and I could not find it in the authorised edition of his works, which I own – although it may be there. The epigram has been repeated to me by word of mouth many times, and I also have it in print, in an illustrated article about you that appeared, I believe, in 1896. I have never once heard a single variation from the way in which I have given the saying. I stand by it as an excellent example of Wilde’s seductively malicious wit – until you can [p.11] bring some evidence to show that I am wrong. As a matter of fact, your own happy emendation of Wilde would have served my purpose equally well – which was, to say something kind and true in behalf of your capacity for friendship.’

—Archibald Henderson to Shaw 6.iii.1911.

‘As to Oscar Wilde’s epigram, I decline to argue. I tell you with brutal violence that not only is the version I gave you the correct one, but that it is well known and has been quoted again and again in its original form. Oscar must have turned in his grave when you not only spoilt it, but turned it into an ill-natured platitude. When you added that Shaw gave it brilliance by turning it into a really witty saying, all Père Lachaise must have rocked. If you still doubt me, as I have no doubt you do, ask Robert Ross.’

—Shaw to Archibald Henderson 23.iii.1911

[All from Dan H. Laurence (ed.): Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1911-1925. London: Max Reinhart 1985 pp.8, 10-11].

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