January Conference 1999
THEATRE
: ANCIENT & MODERN
Return
to contents
Shaw's
response to the deus ex machina:
From The Quintessence of Ibsenism to Heartbreak House
Miriam
Handley, University of Sheffield, England
The final stage directions
of Shaw's play Heartbreak House (1919)[1]
describe a series of explosions that are heard to pass over the
house, killing two of the characters. Although neither the stage
directions nor the dialogue name the machine producing the explosions,
the surviving characters are swift to provide their own interpretations.
Captain Shotover, the owner of Heartbreak House, for example,
counsels his daughters and their guests to 'stand by, all hands,
for judgement', and describes the explosions as 'the hand of God.'[2]
Reviews of the first London production of Heartbreak House
at the Court theatre in 1921 interpreted the play's explosive
conclusion as a type of deus ex machina. The reviewers's
disapproving response to the end of Heartbreak House emulated
Shaw's own dismissal of the deus ex machina as a 'puerile
evasion' in his essayThe Quintessence of Ibsenism(1891).[3]In
his review for The New Statesman, Desmond McCarthy described
the explosions as 'tomfoolery',[4]
while Sydney Carroll suggested in The Sunday Times that
Shaw used the sound effects to end 'a piece that did not appear
concludable otherwise.'[5] The only
review of the play to offer a less hostile reading of the explosions
came from James Agate, dramatic critic for The Saturday Review,
a publication with strong links to Shaw.[6]
Agate wrote, 'I refuse to believe that [the explosions are] an
irrelevant joke, a device for waking [the] audience up.'[7]
In applying Shaw's critical opinions to one of his own plays,
these critics demonstrated a contradiction in the playwright's
response to the deus ex machina. To examine this contradiction,
this article will look from The Quintessence of Ibsenism
to Heartbreak House and will ask why Shaw made use of a
deus ex machina thirty years after he had dismissed it
as anachronistic to the 'new' dramatic method.
The term deus ex
machina, literally, 'the god from the machine', has been used
in scholarly and colloquial discourse to describe everything from
divine intervention to a sudden and surprising turn of events.
The critic Francis Dunn notes that in ancient theatre, and most
particularly in the tragedies of Euripides, the significance of
the spectacular arrival of a god would be marked by the characters
looking up and exclaiming with wonder.[8]
The use of such a device to resolve the complications of plot,
however, has been the subject of a large body of criticism.[9]
In Tragedy's End. Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama
(1996), Dunn sets out the critical disapprobation of the deus
ex machina by depicting the fourth century B.C. comic poet,
Antiphanes, as one of the device's earliest detractors. As Antiphanes
writes and Dunn translates:
when they don't
know what to say
and have completely given up on the play
just like a finger they lift the machine
and the spectators are satisfied.[10]
Antiphanes's disapproval
of the deus ex machina was echoed by classical scholars
working at the time that Shaw started to write his plays. In The
Attic Theatre (1889) for example, A.E. Haigh described the
use of the device by writing that, 'The most ordinary occasion
for its employment was [...] when affairs had reached such a complicated
condition that only divine interference could put them right
again.'[11] (my italics). Like
Antiphanes, Haigh implies in this comment that the appearance
of the deus ex machina at the end of a play indicated the
playwright's negligence in managing the complications of plot.
Other late- nineteenth-century
criticisms of the deus ex machina are surveyed at the outset
of A.W. Verrall's chapter on Iphigenia in Euripides
the Rationalist (1895). Verrall recorded that the deus
ex machina was considered to be 'nothing better than burlesque',
and he added that for many critics, 'The final scenes [of Euripides's
plays], in particular the coup de théâtre
with which the action is wound up or cut short, have almost always
a conventionality of manner, a perfunctory style.'[12]
Verrall also noted a preponderance of dismissive responses to
the authors who had adopted the device. The appearance of the
deus ex machina prompted many critics to 'wonder, sarcastically
and sorrowfully, at such a suicide of genius.'[13]
Completing his survey of critical response to the device, Verrall
came to the conclusion that for many critics, the deus ex machina
indicated the author's attempt to do 'his utmost to ruin the whole,
and to prevent us from attaching any serious importance to his
representations.'[14]
Verrall's survey of
the adverse critical response to the deus ex machina suggests
in its use of the terms 'burlesque', 'coup de théâtre'
and 'catastrophe' an elision of the distinction between divine
and mortal intervention, and between the tragedies of the fifth
century B.C. and the dramatic work of the nineteenth century.
By adopting a vocabulary more commonly associated with melodrama
and the well-made-play,[15] Verrall's
text reveals that the deus ex machina was being interpreted
outside its own dramatic context.[16]
Although Verrall went on to demonstrate the specific and, he asserts,
ironic function of the deus ex machina in Euripides's work,
the criticisms of the device set out in his chapter indicate the
concern of 'candid and reasonable judges'[17]
over the manner in which plays were ended.
Shaw's response to
the conclusions of plays was first made explicit in The Quintessence
of Ibsenism, a lecture given to the Fabian Society in 1890
and published in 1891. In this work, Shaw argued that the endings
of Ibsen's plays enunciated a departure from catastrophes and
coup de théâtre. In the chapter entitled 'The
Technical Novelty of Ibsenism' Shaw referred to Ibsen's drama
of discussion as a new stage in an evolution of theatre and asserted
that the sudden and violent ending had become an outdated dramatic
device. He stated that:
The writer who practises
the art of Ibsen [...] discards all the old tricks of preparation,
catastrophe, dénouement, and so forth without
thinking about it, just as a modern rifleman never dreams of
providing himself with powder horns, percussion caps, and wads:
indeed, he does not know the use of them.[18]
In dismissing catastrophe
and dénouement as 'old tricks', Shaw indicated that
he required a new standard to be applied to the endings of plays.
He wrote, 'we have come to see that it is no true dénouement
to cut the Gordian knot as Alexander did with a stroke of the
sword [...] it is much more tragic to leave [characters] to wither
in their bonds.'[19] Such realism
in psychology involved Shaw in distancing the 'new' dramatic method
from the highly unrealistic arrival of the deus ex machina.
He wrote:
Now the natural
is mainly the everyday and its climaxes must be, if not every
day, at least every life, if they are to have any importance
for the spectator. Crimes, fights, big legacies, fires, shipwrecks,
battles and thunderbolts are mistakes in a play even when they
can be effectively simulated.[20]
With this list of
catastrophes, extending from 'Crimes, fights, big legacies' to
'thunderbolts', Shaw dismantled the disparity between the absurd
endings of melodrama and the tragic bloodiness of the deus
ex machina. By concluding that such effects were mistakes
'even when they can be effectively simulated', Shaw argued that
the drama of discussion should distinguish itself from the practice
of recreating sensation scenes on the stage. In spite of the technical
ingenuity with which the Victorian stage could reconstruct scenes
of fire, shipwreck and battle,[21]
Shaw maintained that:
[...] pure accidents
are not dramatic; they are only anecdotic [sic]. They may be
sensational, impressive, provocative, ruinous, curious or a
dozen other things, but they have no specifically dramatic interest.[22]
Such effects, Shaw
added, were only used because 'the audience expects blood for
its money and because it is difficult to make people attend seriously
to anything except by startling them with some violent calamity'.[23]
These excerpts from
Shaw's reading of Ibsen, or, perhaps more correctly, his manifesto
for his own play-writing technique,[24]
enunciate a precise response to the 'out-dated' appearance of
catastrophe, coup de théâtre and deus ex
machina at the end of plays. However Shaw's depiction of such
techniques as irrelevant to the 'new' drama is belied by his use
of effects in Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1899) that
are reminiscent of the deus ex machina. Instead of being
confined to the end of Captain Brassbound's Conversion,
however, the effects appear at least twice during the course of
the play. In the second act, for example, Shaw constructs a seemingly
insuperable situation and meets it with a machina disjoined
from its deus. Just as Lady Cicely is about to be carried
off by the Sheikh, there is 'a tumult without'.[25]
The assembled characters 'all turn apprehensively' to witness
the arrival of the Cadi, a messenger who proclaims, 'Now woe upon
thee.'[26] The politely-worded
message he carries locates the source of the interruption in an
off-stage ship with a grim reputation for setting the sea on fire.
The message reads, 'Captain Hamlin Kearney, of the cruiser Santiago
[...] announces that he is coming to look for the two British
travellers. [...] As the search will be conducted with machine
guns, the prompt return of the travellers [...] will save much
trouble to all parties.'[27]
Having used an off-stage
ship and its attendant machine guns to tantalise the audience
with the prospect of 'blood for their money', Shaw adds another
incident at the end of the play that serves to 'startle' the audience
'with violent calamity', the second function associated with the
deus ex machina. The off-stage volley of gun-fire from
Captain Brassbound's ship, 'The Thanksgiving,' recalls Lady Cicely
and Brassbound from the 'trancelike' state into which they
have fallen.[28] This 'startling'
noise serves two purposes. Firstly it prevents the proposed marriage
of the two characters; Lady Cicely's relieved last line reads,
'How glorious! How glorious! And what an escape!'[29]
Secondly, it encourages Shaw's audience to attend seriously to
the end of the play by rousing them so that they may begin to
applaud.
The intervention of
the off-stage providential machina in Captain Brassbound's
Conversion emphasises Lady Cicely's belief that the deus
ex machina and its deliverance of justice is better managed
as a domestic principle. As the captains of each machina,
Hamlin Kearney and Brassbound are far from proving themselves
to be godlike, Lady Cicely revises the function and effect of
the deus ex machina by taking the role of the deus
for herself. Accordingly, Lady Cicely involves herself in the
distribution of justice. Having witnessed Lady Cicely's machinations
during the trial scene of the play's third act for example, her
brother-in-law, the judge Sir Howard Hallam complains, 'You have
made me your accomplice in defeating justice.'[30]
Lady Cicely's domestication of divine justice is given a linguistic
parallel when she translates into English Sir Howard's Latin reference
to justice:
SIR HOWARD Fiat
Justitia: ruat coelum!
[Let Justice be
done: though the Heavens fall!]
LADY CICELY Let
Justice be done, though the ceiling fall! [my italics][31]
In Passion, Poison
and Petrifaction (1905), a play that Shaw described as a 'brief
tragedy', Lady Cicely's mis-translation of Sir Howard's Latin
tag is taken literally and divine justice is located in the ceiling.
When Adolphus appears to display his new outfit, threatening,
'if you laugh at my clothes, one of us must die,'[32]
Fitztollemache first laughs, then poisons him and finally informs
him that an antidote is available in the plaster ceiling. Magnesia,
the heroine of the play, enacts the gestures of a character heralding
the arrival of the deus ex machina in the ancient theatre,
by looking up and exclaiming in wonder, 'Saved, saved, saved!'[33]
In this play, the ceiling's version of divine justice becomes
evident when the plaster sets inside Adolphus, turning him into
'a living statue'[34] to himself;
a mannequin for the better display of his clothes.
Shaw continued to
refine his use of the deus ex machina in Major Barbara,
a play first performed at the Court theatre in 1905 and published
in 1907. Fiona Macintosh has recently argued that Shaw's growing
acquaintance with Gilbert Murray, a translator of Greek drama
and later the Regius Professor of Classics at Oxford, led to his
composition of plays that were 'adventurous and obviously intellectually
challenging.'[35] Macintosh suggests
that Shaw, 'overwhelmed' by Murray's reading of his translation
of Euripides's The Bacchae to the Fabian Society in 1901,
recognised 'how classical scholarship could illuminate twentieth
century political concerns.'[36]The
relationship between Major Barbara and Greek tragedy is
signalled by the presence of Adolphus Cusins in the play, a Greek
scholar answering to the name 'Euripides'. As letters and rehearsal
notes for the production of Major Barbara indicate, Adolphus
Cusins had been modelled on Murray.[37]
In addition to the personal relationships forming between Shaw
and Murray, it is clear that by 1905, an audience's impulse to
find classical precedents for the action taking place in Shaw's
plays would also have been quickened by the context against which
Major Barbara was first performed. As Dennis Kennedy notes,
Harley Granville-Barker, actor, director, playwright and joint
manager of the Court theatre, had already staged Murray's translations
of Hippolytus and The Trojan Women during his 1904-1905
season.[38] By performing Major
Barbara at the Court theatre and by using costume and makeup
to emphasise the similarities between Cusins and Murray, Shaw
indicated to his audience that his play should be interpreted
within the context of the recently-revived Greek tragedies.[39]
In her essay 'The
Shavian Murray and the Euripidean Shaw' Macintosh notes the ways
in which Major Barbara refers to The Bacchae and
Aristophanes's The Frogs, but the connection between Shaw's
play and its classical forbears can also be found in the unravelling
of its plot. The dénouement of the play occurs when
Undershaft announces that the 'big legacy' of his foundry and
its business of building weapons and 'aerial warships' can only
be inherited by a foundling. The following scene occurs after
the discussion of the terms of Undershaft's legacy:
CUSINS (mounts
the firestep distractedly and leans with his elbows on the parapet,
turning his back to them)
[...]
UNDERSHAFT I should
ask nothing better if Adolphus were a foundling. He is exactly
the sort of new blood that is wanted in English business. But
he's not a foundling; and theres an end of it. (He makes
for the office door)
CUSINS (turning
to them) Not quite. (They all turn and stare at him)
I think - I t h i n k [sic] the foundling difficulty can be
got over. (He jumps down to the emplacement) [...] My
mother is my father's deceased wife's sister; and in this island
I am consequently a foundling.
(Sensation)
BARBARA Silly![40]
In this scene, Shaw
uses plot and staging to indicate the appearance of a deus
ex machina within the play. Immediately prior to Undershaft's
final word on the inheritance of his business, Cusins 'distractedly'
mounts a portion of the cannon, the machina, and turns
his back on the rest of the characters. When he turns around to
face them again from his position on the cannon, he does so in
the role of the deus ex machina. Accordingly the characters
adopt the suitable gestures of response, 'They all turn and
stare at him'. Shaw then undermines Cusins's status by directing
him to climb down from the cannon and join the rest of the characters.
By the time Cusins announces that he is a foundling, the characters
are divided over whether to greet his revelation with the gestures
associated with a 'sensation', or to dismiss it as 'Silly'.
Shaw's depiction of
Cusins as a deus and a 'strong-silent-still-waters-run-deep
hero of melodrama'[41] articulates
the critical uncertainty surrounding the use of a coup de théâtre
to conclude a play. Neither Cusins nor the characters he faces
are sure whether he is a deus or a relic of melodrama.
In this case, the play's dénouement is further complicated
by the 'big legacy' that Cusins is about to inherit. Undershaft's
reference to the 'tremendous success' of the 'aerial battleship'
built in his foundry in 'wiping out a fort with three hundred
soldiers in it' connects Cusins's inheritance with the descending
machine of the deus ex machina.[42]
In effect, the product of Undershaft's 'big legacy' emphasises
a new relationship between providence and the machina.
As Shaw's preface to Misalliance (1910) indicates, this
connection becomes increasingly important to the playwright's
work, for Shaw writes:
For sometime past,
a significant word has been coming into use as a substitute
for Destiny, Fate and Providence. It is 'the machine'. [43]
In Misalliance
Shaw emphasises this relationship between the machina and
providence. Shortly after Hypatia wishes for a man 'with a brain
and a full-sized body,'[44]and
her father describes her as 'Restless. Wants things to happen.
Wants adventures to drop out of the sky,'[45]
a machina appears to provide her with both a man and an
adventure. The connection between the machine's arrival and the
descent of the deus ex machina is marked by the gestures
of the characters:
They are interrupted
by excited cries from the grounds.
HYPATIA Papa! Mamma!
Come out as fast as you can.
BENTLEY Hello, governor!
Come out. An aeroplane!
Look! Look!
TARLETON (starting
up) Aeroplane! Did he say an aeroplane?
LORD SUMMERHAYS
Aeroplane! (A shadow falls on the pavilion; and some of the
glass at the top is shattered and falls on the floor)
[...]
TARLETON ... but
they're coming slam into the greenhouse.
LORD SUMMERHAYS
Look out for the glass.
An appalling crash
of breaking glass in heard. Everybody shrieks.
[...]
TARLETON Are you
all right? Sure you won't have some brandy just to take off
the shock?
THE AVIATOR (taking
off his goggles) You're really more than kind.
BENTLEY Why, its
Joey Percival![46]
Shaw's use of a providential
falling aeroplane in Misalliance requires careful appraisal.
As Robert Everding has noticed, Misalliance, set 'on
the slope of Hindhead', 'the focal point of British aviation,'[47]
makes use of real-life developments in machines that were richly
documented for Shaw's audience in the newspapers of the period.
The aeroplane that falls on the Tarletons's greenhouse seems to
have its source in a series of complaints about 'compulsory descents'.
In 1909 for example, an irate landowner called Henry Harben wrote
a letter to The Times asserting that, 'a man also owned
the air above his home and castle [and] no one should cross it
or fall from it without first gaining permission.'[48]
Harben's logic is paralleled in Misalliance when Mr Tarleton
ruminates on the 'remarkably good-looking'[49]
passenger who emerged behind Joey Percival from the fallen aeroplane.
Arguing that providence renders good manners irrelevant, Mr Tarleton
claims:
A woman I bring
into my house is a guest. A woman y o u [sic] bring into my
house is a guest. But a woman who drops bang down out of
the sky into my greenhouse and smashes every blessed
pane of glass in it must take her chance. [50]
(my italics)
Misalliance's implied
references to the real life 'compulsory descents' of the Hindhead
aeroplanes suggests that the falling machina can be interpreted
as an acceptable dramatic climax because it is 'if not everyday,
at least everylife'. The audience's familiarity with the Hindhead
aeroplanes meant that Shaw could assimilate the machina
into the play as a piece of realism, rather than just a 'startling'
noise or an excuse for entertaining the bloodthirsty. Despite
the 'everylife' realism of the falling aeroplane and its undeniably
exhilarating dramatic effect in Misalliance, however Shaw's
device is distinguished from the deus ex machina by its
appearance at the beginning of the play rather than at its end.
In this play Shaw still seems to be following his own advice on
the liberal use of discussion after a catastrophe as it is set
out in his chapter on Ibsen's technical novelty.[51]
It is only in Heartbreak House that Shaw finally places
his deus ex machina at the end of a play.
The explosions at
the end of Heartbreak House, a play written during the
First World War and intended as a 'record of [...] civilian life',[52]
effectively contradict the domesticated versions of problem solving
set out in Captain Brassbound's Conversion, Passion,
Poison and Petrifaction and Misalliance. The accuracy
of the machines in choosing their targets, silencing the chatter
of the heartbreakers and implying the zeppelin air-raids of the
First World War suggests that rather than using the machina
as a substitute for 'destiny, fate, providence', Shaw reappraises
the role of the deus in the deus ex machina.[53]
Shaw distinguishes
between the explosions concluding Heartbreak House and
the coup de théâtre of melodrama by introducing
and dismissing as irrelevant the 'crimes', 'big legacies' and
gunshots that occur in the first acts of the play. By act III,
the dashing lover, Hector, who regaled Ellie with stories of his
lost legacy and his great fights, has been proven a liar.[54]
Ellie, the romantic heroine, has sought out a cold-hearted marriage
of convenience, and the dull, rich, older suitor has revealed
himself to be a confidence trickster.[55]
In addition to this, the only pistol shot discharged in Heartbreak
House frightens the marksman more than the victim, who merely
complains that the shot 'took the skin off my ear.'[56]
In effect, the heartbreakers, described in the preface to the
play as a well-trained Ibsen-admiring Shavian audience,[57]
dismiss these 'sensational, impressive, provocative, ruinous,
curious accidents', allowing them 'no dramatic interest.'[58]
Having depicted the
earlier 'explosions' as irrelevant, 'Sorry to wake you miss, I'm
sure,' and 'One of my duelling pistols. Sorry',[59]
the characters themselves emphasise the difference of the final
explosions by describing them using 'godly' images. They speak
of 'heaven's threatening growl of disgust', of the sound and danger
of thunder and, on hearing the crescendo of blasts, agree that,
'The judgement has come.'[60] As
the stage directions of the final scene of the play suggest, the
characters display their recognition of the explosions as a deus
ex machina by taking up the conventional positions of response,
'They all turn away from the house and look up, listening.'[61]
By setting Heartbreak
House against the backdrop of the First World War, Shaw was
again able to represent the explosive conclusion of the play as
'not everyday [but] everylife'. Although Mazzini acknowledges
that the machina is man-made and flown, 'Think of the risk
those poor fellows up there are running!'[62]
the rest of the characters revel in their interpretation of the
falling bombs as emanating from the gods. Shaw's characters make
a distinction between the man-made machina, the 'poor fellows
up there' dropping the bombs on them and the deus that
they imagine to be overseeing human actions. Thus, rather than
dismissing the explosions as a coup de théâtre,
the characters recognise the falling bombs as divine justice raining
down upon them. In effect, Shaw's characters revise Lady Cicely's
notion that justice is done 'though the ceiling fall' and convince
themselves that the bombs exploding around them are deistic, retributive
and just. By interpreting the zeppelin as a deus ex machina,
the characters of Heartbreak House make a distinction between
the man-made machina and the deus that compels the
soldiers in the zeppelin to drop their bombs.
This article has argued
that Shaw's attempt to describe the deus ex machina as
a melodramatic device, anachronistic within the 'new' drama, was
prompted by his sense of its irrelevance to plays documenting
the comparatively peaceful Victorian England of the late nineteenth
century. In place of shipwrecks, fires and battles, Shaw substituted
in his early works the calamities that arose from specific social,
economic and political contexts. In his depiction of the effects
of slum landlordism (Widower'sHouses) and prostitution
(Mrs Warren's Profession), Shaw is able to indicate social
tragedy at the end of his plays without having to resort to the
violent disasters associated with the deus ex machina.
The final explosions of Heartbreak House, however, show
that the deus ex machina became relevant to the modern
theatre again because the social and historical context of Shaw's
plays changed. In a First World War context, fires, shipwrecks
and thunderbolts cease to be fantastic. The interpretation of
the explosions at the end of Heartbreak House as emanating
from a deus had unpleasant implications for Shaw's audiences
of 1921, but it is clear that the context of the First World War
allowed the playwright to reappraise his dismissal of the deus
ex machina as a 'puerile evasion' of a play's meaning. In
effect, Shaw uses the explosions at the end of Heartbreak House
to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the deus ex machina
to modern theatre.
Return
to contents page
Endnotes:
[1]
Dates given in parenthesis indicate the year of first publication
rather than performance unless otherwise stated.
[2]
George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House, The Works of Bernard Shaw,
vol. 15 (Constable & Co. Ltd., 1931) p. 147.
[3]
George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, The Works of
Bernard Shaw, vol. 19 (Constable & Co. Ltd., 1931) p. 125.
[4]
Desmond McCarthy, "Review," The New Statesman 29 October
1921, p. 104.
[5]
Sydney Carroll, "Review," The Sunday Times 23 October
1921, p. 4.
[6]
Shaw had written theatre reviews for this newspaper in the latter
half of the 1890s and had published selections of this criticism
as Dramatic Opinions and Essays in 1906. Collected reviews from
this period were published in three volumes as Our Theatres in
the Nineties in 1931.
[7]
James Agate, "Heartbreak Shaw," The Saturday Review
29 October 1921, pp. 504-505.
[8]
Francis M. Dunn, Tragedy's End. Closure and Innovation in Euripidean
Drama (Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 27-33.
[9]
Discussions of the deus ex machina include Gilbert Norwood's Greek
Tragedy, 4th ed. repr. (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1948) pp. 164-165,
313-314; H. D. F. Kitto's Greek Tragedy. A Literary Study , repr.
(Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1966) pp. 285, 302; Peter Arnott, Greek
Scenic Conventions in the Fifth Century B.C. (The Clarendon Press,
1962) pp. 72-78; Christopher Gill, "Bow, Oracle and Epiphany
in Sophocles's Philoctetes," Greek Tragedy, eds Ian McAuslan
& Peter Walcott, vol. 2 (University Press, 1993) 95-103, especially
95, 101; Peter Burian, "Myth into muthos: the shaping of
tragic plot," The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed.
P. E. Easterling (Cambridge University Press, 1977) 178-208, especially
180-192, 198-201.
[10]
Antiphanes translated by Dunn, Tragedy's End, p. 27. Patrice Pavis
adds that, 'The deus ex machina is sometimes an ironic means of
finishing a play [...] It provides a means of casting doubt on
the efficacy of divine or political solutions.' Patrice Pavis,
Le Dictionnaire du Théâtre (Paris: Éditions
Sociales, 1980) p. 110 (my translation). Pavis's examples include
Molière's Tartuffe and Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
[11]
A. E. Haigh, The Attic Theatre, vol. 4 (The Clarendon Press, 1889)
pp. 190-191. For Gilbert Murray's defence of the use of deus ex
machina see the notes to his translation of Iphigenia in Tauris
(George Allen & Son, 1910) pp. 104-105.
[12]
A. W . Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist (Cambridge University
Press 1895) p. 166.
[13]
Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist, p. 166.
[14]
Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist, p. 167.
[15]
A strictly regulated dramatic form associated with the French
dramatist Sardou. Shaw dismisses this type of play throughout
his career, referring to it as 'a commercial product' in The Quintessence
of Ibsenism, p. 149 and as a 'clockwork cat' in a letter to William
Archer, 22nd June 1923, Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters 1911-1925,
ed. Dan H. Lawrence (Viking Penguin Inc., 1985) pp. 836-837.
[16]
This elision of terms helps explain the ease with which critics
and audiences of the later nineteenth century equated the action
and characters of modern drama with Greek tragedy. In a letter
to Gilbert Murray about the casting of Medea for the 1907 Savoy
theatre production for example, Shaw suggested a comparison between
Euripides and Ibsen by arguing that in playing Rita in the 1896
production of Little Eyolf, Janet Achurch 'was Medea'. George
Bernard Shaw, "Letter to Gilbert Murray," 22 June 1907,
Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters 1898-1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence
(Max Reinhardt Ltd., 1972) 694. See also Arnheim's argument, in
which the 'social constraints and dead ideas' operating in Ibsen's
Ghosts are identified as a deus ex machina. Rudolf Arnheim, "Deus
ex Machina," British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): pp.
221-226, especially 224.
[17]
Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist, p. 166.
[18]
Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 155-156.
[19]
Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 153.
[20]
Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 150.
[21]
For a discussion of the representation of shipwreck, fire and
battle scenes on the Victorian stage see Michael Booth, Victorian
Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)
14-16, 159-160.
[22]
Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 150.
[23]
Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 153.
[24]
A charge levelled at Shaw by the dramatic critic, William Archer.
See their exchange of letters in response to Archer's article,
"The Quintessence of Ibsenism: An Open Letter to Bernard
Shaw," 26 October-9 November 1891, Bernard Shaw Collected
Letters 1874-1897, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Max Reinhardt, 1965) 314-323.
[25]
George Bernard Shaw, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, The Works
of Bernard Shaw, vol. 9 (Constable & Co. Ltd., 1931) 269.
[26]
Shaw, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, p. 269.
[27]Shaw,
Captain Brassbound's Conversion, p. 270.
[28]
Shaw, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, p. 299.
[29]
Shaw, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, p. 299.
[30]Shaw,
Captain Brassbound's Conversion, p. 290.
[31]
Shaw, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, p. 278.
[32]
George Bernard Shaw, Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, The Works
of Bernard Shaw, vol. 18 (Constable & Co. Ltd., 1931) 200.
[33]
Shaw, Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, p. 200. In a note to the
1931 edition of the play, Shaw admits, 'As it is extremely difficult
to find an actor capable of eating a real ceiling, it will be
convenient in performance to substitute the tops of old wedding
cake for bits of plaster. There is but little difference in material
between the two substances; but the taste of the wedding cake
is considered more agreeable by many.' p. 192.
[34]Shaw,
Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, p. 204.
[35]
Fiona Macintosh, 'The Shavian Murray and the Euripidean Shaw:
Major Barbara and The Bacchae', Classics Ireland 5 (1998) 64-84;
see particularly 66 and 69-76.
[36]
Macintosh, 'The Shavian Murray', p. 70.
[37]
For details of Murray's translations and of Shaw's references
to him in Major Barbara, see Duncan Wilson, Gilbert Murray O.M.
1866-1957 (Clarendon Press, 1987) pp. 88-89; 108-112 and S.P.
Albert, '"In More Ways than One": Major Barbara's debt
to Gilbert Murray', Educational Theatre Journal 20 (1968) 123-140.
[38]Dennis
Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge
University Press, 1985) 41-50, 118-122. Barker later produced
Iphigenia in Tauris at the Kingsway theatre in 1912.
[39]
Fiona Macintosh also draws attention to the growing interest in
Greek tragedy during the early part of the twentieth century in
her essay, "Tragedy and performance: nineteenth- and twentieth-century
productions," Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, pp. 284-323.
[40]Shaw,
Major Barbara, pp. 330, 331, 332.
[41]
Shaw, "Letter to Gilbert Murray," 7 October 1905, Collected
Letters 1898-1910, p. 566.
[42]Shaw,
Major Barbara, p. 327.
[43]George
Bernard Shaw, preface, Misalliance, The Works of Bernard Shaw,
vol. 13 (Constable & Co. Ltd., 1931) p. 102.
[44]
Shaw, Misalliance, p. 130.
[45]
Shaw, Misalliance, p. 145.
[46]
Shaw, Misalliance, pp. 148-149.
[47]
Robert G. Everding, "Bernard Shaw, Misalliance, and the Birth
of British Aviation," The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies
8 (1988): pp. 66-77, especially 70.
[48]Henry
Harben, "Letter to the Editor," The Times quoted by
Everding p. 71.
[49]
Shaw, Misalliance, p.151.
[50]
Shaw, Misalliance, p. 156.
[51]
A point of dramatic construction emphasised in The Quintessence
of Ibsenism, pp. 148-149.
[52]
Shaw, preface, Heartbreak House, p. 29. For the play's resonance
within other cultural contexts see my forthcoming article "Chekhov
translated: Shaw's use of sound effects in Heartbreak House,"
Modern Drama (1999).
[53]
References to the explosions at the end of Heartbreak House as
bombs dropped from a zeppelin can be found in Shaw's rehearsal
notebooks for the play, held in the British Library, ms. 50644-50647.
A zeppelin is also drawn into Shaw's set design for the final
act, British Library, Ashley A 1521, III. See also Arthur Nethercott,
"Zeppelins over Heartbreak House," The Shaw Review 9.2
(1966): pp. 46-52 and Anne Wright, Literature in Crisis, 1910-1922
(Macmillan Press, 1995) p. 69.
[54]Shaw,
Heartbreak House, pp. 59-64.
[55]Shaw,
Heartbreak House, pp. 84-88.
[56]
Shaw, Heartbreak House, p. 107.
[57]Shaw,
preface, Heartbreak House, pp. 5-6.
[58]
Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 150.
[59]
Shaw, Heartbreak House, p. 44, 107.
[60]
Shaw, Heartbreak House, p. 130, p. 147. The references to thunder
in the play seem to be connected to the repeated allusions to
the retributive force of Jove's thunderbolt in Shaw's preface
to the play, p. 27.
[61]Shaw,
Heartbreak House, p. 148.
[62]
Shaw, Heartbreak House, p. 148.
Return
to contents
|
Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English