BERNARD SHAW DISCOVERS MELODRAMA

BERNARD SHAW DISCOVERS MELODRAMAAuthor(s): David BowmanSource: Interpretations, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1975), pp. 30-37Published by: Scriptorium PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23240406 .

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BERNARD SHAW DISCOVERS MELODRAMA

By the time Bernard Shaw began writing plays, in the 1890's, melodrama was a disreputable and exhausted dramatic genre. But when

Shaw became the drama critic for the Saturday Review, in 1895, he saw

he could use melodrama as a stick for beating the prevailing drama then

on the London stage; he also discovered how suitable melodrama would

be for his own "drama of ideas."

Shaw's Saturday Review pieces may be the best and most readable

drama criticism in our language, but they also provide keys to his own

dramatic theory. From these weekly reviews we can see why the

dramatic format of his first seven plays was abandoned and why he

chose melodrama as the vehicle which carried him into professional

playwriting. In 1892, Shaw was 36 years old and still undecided as to what to do

with his life. Though he had been paid for music reviews and other short

pieces, from time to time, he was still being supported by his mother, and he still lived at home with her. None of his socialist activities or his

five unpublished novels had earned him anything, so he realized it was

high time to find a career for himself. At the encouragement of his

fellow Ibsen-lover, William Archer, he decided he would write a play about slum landlords, a proper socialist play, called Widowers' Houses.

It was given a stage reading by the Independent Theatre Society on

December 9, 1892, and almost ended Shaw's career as a playwright:

everyone knew it was awful.

But Shaw persevered. He wrote more plays, gave copies to dozens of

theatre people, and invited them to give the plays a reading, but no one

seemed terribly interested. True, they were funny, but, well, they were

not really plays. The one promise of a real production was Shaw's fourth play, Arms

and the Man\ an anonymous benefactor let it be known that he would

underwrite the production of two examples of the "New Drama." So

Arms and the Man ran for eleven weeks, beginning April 21, 1894, at

the Avenue Theatre. The result was a loss of £5000. Again it looked as if

Shaw should stick to being a journalist. The final discouragement to Shaw's ambitions as a dramatist came in

1897, by which time he had made many friends as a drama critic; in that

year it seemed as if two of his seven plays would be given West End

productions. The great actor and impresario of the Lyceum Theatre,

Henry Irving, showed great interest in Shaw's Napoleon play, The Man

of Destiny, but he had held on to the play for over a year without making

any commitment to produce it. Irving may have thought the play was

not quite good enough, or he may have secretly hated Shaw for unkind

reviews, but suddenly, in April 1897, Irving turned the play down.

Several days later, with characteristic perversity, Shaw turned around

and withdrew his fashionable comedy, You Never Can Tell, from the

Haymarket Theatre, even though the play had been in rehearsal for

several weeks. If the actors really believed the parts to be "ineffective

30



and impossible," as Shaw reported, then he would not subject the

audience to a bad play.1 By May, 1897, Shaw announced to his friends

that he was through with the commercial theater: he would reach his

audience like the great Ibsen by publishing his plays. As Shaw readily admitted, the problem was simply that he had started

writing plays without knowing anything about the theater. But when

from 1895 to 1898 his job took him to the theaters night after night, it

was inevitable that he should begin to see the glaring weaknesses of his

own plays. Here is his humble confession from his review of November

7, 1896:

I began my own dramatic career by writing plays in which I

faithfully held the mirror up to nature. They are much admired in

private reading by social reformers, industrial investigators, and

revolted daughters; but on one of them being rashly exhibited

before the footlights, it was received with a paroxysm of

execration, whilst the mere perusal of the others induces loathing in every person, including myself, myself, in whom the theatrical

instinct flourishes in its integrity.2

The problem was that Shaw's plays failed when they tried to be original, and they failed when they tried to imitate the prevailing tastes then on

the London stage. In his first three plays Shaw tried the Fabian socialist or the Ibsenist

approach of saying to the audience, "Let's be realistic about slum

landlords (Widowers' Houses), about sexuality and marriage (The

Philanderer), and about prostitution (Mrs. Warren's Profession)." The

result was more indictment-by-essay than drama.

For His fourth play Shaw realized he must write plays more like those

on the London stage, because his first three dealt with "crimes of

society" and were sure to be* unpalatable to the audiences of that era.

When the rich benefactor offered to underwrite the production of some

of the New Drama, Shaw realized he only had "unpleasant plays" on

hand, so he "hastily completed a first attempt at a pleasant one, and called it Arms and the Man."3

This play was more successful, not because he had copied the

commercially successful formula, but because he had relied heavily on

bits from old farces and melodramas he remembered from the 1870's

and 1880's, when he had gone to the theater for entertainment.

His next three plays got closer and closer to the prevailing tastes—

that is, to the "problem play" and "drawing room drama." (Problem

plays have been defined as "plays which are melodramas disguised as advanced thought," and drawing-room drama is a "kind of melodrama

on which the curtain does not rise until the deeds of blood and violence are past.")4 With the possible exception of Candida, these three plays which follow Arms and the Man also fail to come off on the stage.

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In his reviews, Shaw explained in great detail why the prevailing tastes in London theater were such a disaster. One review (July 27,1895) summed up the reasons for the failure of the best plays then on the

stage—Victorien Sardou's "well made plays," Arthur Wing Pinero's

"psychological dramas," Henry Arthur Jones' "domestic melodramas," and Henrik Ibsen's so-called "New Drama." A second review

(November 21, 1895) summed up the pernicious influences of the actors and their preference for the fashionable "drawing room drama."

A third review (April 3, 1897) explained the failure of the only two London playwrights of promise, Pinero and Jones, for their "high life above stairs" and their philosophy of pessimism. A fourth review (May 15,1897) showed that even the greatest of modern playwrights, Henrik

Ibsen, had by 1897 become unbearable to Shaw. After reminiscing about

how A Doll's House had come to London in 1889 and had single

handedly started the New Drama there, Shaw confessed what had

happened to himself:

At last I am beginning to understand anti-Ibsenism. It must be that

I am growing old and weak and foolish; for I cannot stand up to

reality as I did once.5

A fifth review (March 19,1898) said that the London theater was in a state of severe stagnation:

I cannot for the life of me see that any new impulse came to our dramatic literature between 1889, when 'the potent and sundering word' of Ibsen first reached us, and the irruption of the dramatized

novels like Mr. George DuMaurier's Trilby and Mr. Anthony

Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda in 1895 and 1896.6

The sum of these five reviews is that even the best plays then on the

stage were failures. Shaw objected to their fashionable life, their

drawing-room scenario, their psychological intricacies, and their limited variety of plot possibilities. He knew that, this boring and unpalatable drama was driving all the intelligent and sensitive people out of the theater.

As might be expected, a reaction away from this state of affairs was

inevitable. If plays of fashionable domestic life, cup-and-saucer realism, and psychological drama were no longer the answer, then the logical

place to look was in the opposite direction—to low life, exotic settings, and physical drama. Shaw explained what could be gained by this reaction in a review dated November 6, 1897.

The dramatic art of our day has come to such a pass of open

artificiality and stale romantic convention that the sudden

repudiation of all art produces for the moment almost as

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refreshing a sensation as its revival would. In The First Born the death of a little boy at the end of the first scene, and the murder of a man whose corpse is propped up against the doorpost by his murderer and made to counterfeit life while the policeman passes, might be improvised in a schoolroom; yet they induce a thrill

which all the resources of the [fashionable] St. James Theatre, strained during five long acts to their utmost, cannot attain to for the briefest instant. Truly the secret of wisdom is to become as a

little child again.7

As he often liked to do, Shaw was exaggerating: he did not seriously intend the repudiation of all art. But he would change tactics. In the

previously cited review about Shaw's own plays "holding up the mirror to nature," Shaw suggested he would henceforth be seeking the "stagey" element:

It was the stagey element that held the stage, not the natural

element. In this way, too, the style of execution proper to these

plays, an excessively stagey style, was evolved and perfected, in the

palmy days" when nature, except as a means of illusion, had

totally vanished from both plays and acting. I need not tell over

again the story of the late eclipse of the stagey drama [in favor of

the cup-and-saucer realism of the garden-party play] . . .But ever since the garden-party play suddenly weakened and gave way to

[biblical melodramas like] The Sign of the Cross and The Red Robe . . .it has become only too probable that the genuine old

stagey drama only needs for its revival artists, who, either by instinct or under the guidance of the Nestors of the profession, shall hit on the right methods of execution. . . .[The times are]

ripe for a revival of colour and costume.8

Shaw believed the remedy for his plays was to be stagey instead of

natural, fantastic instead of realistic, and colorful instead of homely. A

more stagey melodrama had exactly those qualities which Shaw's earlier

drama had lacked.

Shaw knew melodrama thoroughly, liked it, and saw clearly enough how it could be improved. The more stagey and swashbuckling melodrama he called "Adelphi melodrama," from its associations with the Adelphi Theatre in London. Shaw boasted that his knowledge of Adelphi melodrama was so perfect that there was no need to verify it

experimentally; nevertheless, when he went in 1895 to review David

Belasco's Civil War play, The Girl I Left Behind Me, he left us with an important definition of the melodrama genre:

33



I hold Adelphi melodrama in high consideration. A really good Adelphi melodrama is of first-rate literary importance, because it

only needs elaboration to become a masterpiece . . . Unfortunate

ly, a really good Adelphi melodrama is very hard to get. It should be

a simple and sincere drama of action and feeling, kept well within

the vast tract of passion and motive which is common to the

philosopher and the laborer. [It should be] relieved by plenty of fun, and depending for variety of human character, not on the high

comedy idiosyncrasies which individualize people in spite of the closest similarity of age, sex, and circumstances, but on broad

contrasts between types of youth and age, sympathy and

selfishness, the masculine and feminine, the serious and the

frivolous, the sublime and the ridiculous, and so on. The whole

character of the piece

must be allegorical, idealistic, full of

generalizations ana moral lessons; and it must represent conduct

as producing swiftly and certainly on the individual the results

which in actual life it only produces on the race in the course of

many centuries.9

Since the actor-manager of the Adelphi Theatre, William Terriss, was

the person for whom Shaw wrote The Devil's Disciple one year later, it

is not surprising that the definition should apply so well to Shaw's first

successful melodrama.

Shaw liked other brands of exotic melodrama as well; he explained why in his review (January 11,1896) of Wilson Barrett's long-running success, The Sign of the Cross, a biblical melodrama concerning the

Christian persecutions during the reign of Nero.

What we enjoy is being so familiarly in Rome . . . We come into

the presence of Nero, and hear him ordering a set of living torches

for that evening, and boasting of what an artist he is. We see the

Roman ladies at home sticking pins in their slaves, and the Roman

diner-out exhausted by his second vomit. We hear the thunder of

the chariot race, and see the gladiator enter the arena . . . The

mounting is handsome, and the stage management good and

unselfish, all the parts being played with quite extraordinary spirit, and in no way sacrificed to the actor-manager's. I have never seen

better work got out of a company.10

The excitement generated by such a play could easily have been

influential in shaping the stage spectacle of Caesar and Cleopatra, as

well as Shaw's later play, Androcles and the Lion.

With his characteristic perversity, in seeing works of art differently from his contemporaries, Shaw labeled certain Shakespeare plays as

melodramas. In his reviews he called Julius Caesar" the most splendidly

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written political melodrama we possess" (January 20, 1898), and he

talked about "such splendid melodramas as Othello, with its noble

savage, its villain, its funny man, its carefully assorted pathetic and

heavy feminine interest, its smothering and suicide, its police-court

morality and commonplace thought" or the other "half-dozen big

popular melodramas which the Bard has sublimified by his tempest of

trandiose

verse" (February 12, 1898).11 Here Shaw was insisting that

hakespeare was a popular playwright—a man catering to the tastes of

his audience by shaping his plays into that popular art form which two

hundred years later would be called melodrama. But there is also a clear

ulterior motive for this talk about Shakespeare and melodrama: in May, 1898, three months after the review just quoted, Shaw would quit his

critic's job to begin his own Shakespearean melodrama, Caesar and

Cleopatra. Shaw obviously liked melodrama, but he also knew it could be

improved. From his drama reviews, he has offered us a number of sound

critical suggestions. The first critical suggestion comes in a review of W.E. Henley and

Robert Louis Steveson's Robert Macaire (June 8, 1895):

The conception of theatrical art as the exploitation of popular

superstition and ignorance, as the thrilling of the poor bumpkins with ghosts and blood, exciting them with blows and stabs, duping them with tawdry affectations of rank and rhetoric, thriving

parasitically on their moral diseases instead of purging their souls

and refining their senses: this is the tradition that the theatre finds

it so hard to get away from.12

When we consider how much of drama (from the lowest of Grand

Guinold and our TV cop operas to our best new-wave films and the

highest of Shakespeare) depends on such sensationalistic devices as

Shaw listed here, then Shaw's indictment is a serious indictment indeed.

Yet in looking at Shaw's own -melodramas, we can see how

sensationalism was generally avoided. Shaw called them "Puritan

Plays," because they had been purified of the seamy and sensational

elements usually found in melodramas of his time and our time.

The second critical suggestion comes in his review of a naval

melodrama called True Blue (March 28,1895). There, Shaw made a plea for technical accuracy and attention to detail in melodrama, and

applauded the playwrights for consulting a naval officer about the

special information necessary for a play taking place on board a British

cruiser:

What True Blue wants is more of the fresh naval routine and less of

the stale melodramatic routine. Why not allow the captain to

descry the Venezuelan fleet on the horizon, and give us the process of preparing for action? Why not display in the third act a more

35



interesting section of the ship, showing us both above and below

decks? . . .[In] this play Lieutenant Gordon [the technical adviser] worked on the right lines, and the melodramatist collaborators on

the wrong lines.13.

The realization of this goal by Shaw can be seen throughout his plays: he

researched the historical background thoroughly and took great pains to

suggest in his stage directions what the sets should look like. Shaw's

stage directions are fatter and more helpful than any other playwright's. The third critical suggestion comes in his review titled "Mainly about

Melodamas" (October 3,1896). His principal target was the Drury Lane

Theatre melodrama, which specialized in "the open exploitation of the

popular worship of sport, fashion, and jingoism"; there, Shaw noted, one could expect to see racecourses, Johannesburg hotels, parade

grounds, magazine gun-firing, polo matches, and Worth dresses, and "all the expensive jingo machinery of Sir Augustus Harris, with its

troopships and battles." Shaw's criticism here is simply that drama

should not always be soothing and flattering its audiences; rather, it should do its best to make the audience see other points of view beyond those which it takes every day for granted. Thus, in his own plays, such as The Devil's Disciple, Shaw argued the American revolutionaries' side

against England. In other plays, like Captain Brassbound's Conversion

(1899), Shaw ridiculed British jingoist-imperialist thinking that was drawing them into the Boer War (1899-1902).

In suggesting these and other improvements in melodrama, Shaw was looking ahead to a "purification" of the theater of his time; he created melodramas which he labeled "plays for Puritans." It was this

discovery of melodrama that enabled Shaw to break away from his

contemporaries and to develop his own mature dramatic style. In discovering melodrama, Shaw became a professional playwright.

The £674 he made in royalties from The Devil's Disciple in 1897 exceeded his income as a journalist and critic; this was all the

encouragement he needed. The following year he quit The Saturday Review, married a wealthy Irish lady, sat down to his most ambitious

dramatic undertaking, Caesar and Cleopatra, and devoted the rest of his life to drama.

David Bowman Assistant Froressor or English

36



NOTES

lEllen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence, ed. Christopher St. John (New York: Putnam's, 1932), pp. 135-141.

2Collected Works of Bernard Shaw (London: Constable, 1931), XXIV, 248-9.

5Collected Works, VIII, ix.

4M. Willson Disher, Melodrama: Plots That Thrilled (London: Rockliff, 1954), p. 153 and p. 80.

5 Collected Works, XXV, 136.

6CW, XXV, 357.

7CW, XXV, 248.

»OF, XXIV, 249, 253.

>CW, XXIII, 99.

>°CW, XXIV, 14-15.

"CW, XXV, 313, 332.

12CW, XXIII, 149-150.

"CW, XXIV, 89.

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