The Yale Shakespeare Book

Shaw was a man of conflicts, and though some came from without, the majority were simply Shaw running roughshod over himself. He was quick to adopt new ideas, then vehement in defending them for as long as he kept them--which was rarely very long.

He first fought to abolish censorship, then supported the right of a fascist regime to silence undesirables. He was a lifelong supporter of the people's revolution against economic tyranny, but praised totalitarian rule by both Stalin and Hitler. He condemned Romanticism in drama, and then wrote plays about beautiful, wealthy people and their conjugal angst, ending with double marriages. He unquestioningly accepted the health benefits of vegetarianism, but held a lifelong grudge against inoculation.

Nothing better represents Shaw's internal conflict than a comparison of one of his plays to the preface that precedes it. His prefaces were long--often exceeding in length the play which followed--sometimes by twice or more. They were drawn from long lectures which Shaw gave to various radical political groups, combining his pet interests with whatever new idea he had recently digested.

Rarely did the prefaces resemble the plays, either in tone, philosophy, or argument. They may have related to the plays by theme, but the combination of two thematic pieces which share no common point of view does not create anything more in conjunction than they might have, alone.

The preface to Androcles and the Lion does take Christianity as its central motif, and so is more aligned to its play than many of his others. In the preface, Shaw begins with a thoughtful analysis of the gospels, showing how each disagrees with the others and reveals the bias of its author.

It is an amusing and thoughtful deconstruction of Christian myth, showing that no sooner had Jesus been martyred than his message was subverted into several inconsistent political movements. Jesus' time as the messiah did nothing to patch the schisms already present in the Levantine faith, and the moment he was gone his followers were more than glad to use his name to their own ends: whether it was Paul returning the church to John the Baptist's tradition, Mark obsessing with early prophecy, or Luke making Jesus into a mighty hero of romance.

They don't agree on where he was born, where he lived, what he said, what he did, what others did around him, or how or why he died. Shaw tries to read between the lines to find the real Jesus, and eventually determines he is an outspoken man who breaks with tradition to bring a personal faith based on deeds, not thoughts, and who became obsessed with the old myth of martyrdom and rebirth, and hence committed a crime which carried a penalty of death and refused the ways out which were offered to him.

All this is interesting enough, if not revolutionary in the realm of biblical scholarship. Shaw then ends his concrete analysis of how men have perverted the life of Jesus for political ends and begins instead to interpret the life of Jesus to match his own political ends, namely: Jesus the father of communist revolution.

What could better show the schism in Shaw's mind than the fact that he can move from ridiculing other men for rewriting Jesus' philosophy, then doing it himself in the span of a few pages whithout showing the least recognition of the irony? He goes on and on about how Jesus' church is the Socialist party and how his goals were the Socialist goals of abolishing and equalizing wealth, and other such pats on the back.

He then abruptly switches gears again, to a yet more unasked-for argument. No longer does he talk about Jesus or Socialism, but about how people come to believe what they believe. Yet, what he presents is both old and useless: The Skeptic's Argument.

This might also be termed 'The Six-Year-Old's Argument' or 'The First Year Philosophy Major's Argument', as it boils down to responding to every statement with "what if that's not true?" or "why?" Shaw suggests that we don't really know anything, and so believing one thing or another thing is merely a matter of taste.

He gives the example of the 'sacred number' seven, which was often given in earlier times as an answer to various questions. He suggests that if the king asked his magistrate how far the sun was from the Earth, the magistrate might say "seven-hundred seventy-seven miles", and be declared correct on the basis of using a sacred number for a sacred measurement.

He then goes on to suggest that the new sacred number is 'a million', and that our new experts telling us the distance of the sun is millions of miles is the same as a medieval astrologer saying seven-hundred seventy-seven. He then suggests the same relationship between a million (rightly, billions of) bacteria and seven evil spirits. This allows him to come back around to his perennial hatred of doctors and especially, inoculation.

There is a viable defense against the Skeptic's Argument, and it is the mere fact that we all act, we all feel, we all argue, and some of us even write complex philosophical arguments. If it was merely a case of 'sacred numbers', then there would be no point to argue, to convince, or even, to believe. If it really all was the same either way, then everyone would be equally successful with various methods.

You could give a rocket seven-hundred seventy-seven miles worth of fuel or ninety-three million miles worth and get the same result. All that is required to refute Shaw's sophistry is to place an eye up to a microscope and simply count the bacteria. Of course, that requires enough knowledge of optics and medicine to recognize what you're looking at, which often seems to mark the difference between theories which stand the test of time and the delusions of pseudoscience.

Unfortunately, Shaw is not renowned for his due diligence. When enraptured by an idea, he would rather be interesting than well-informed, from changing Cleopatra's age by a decade in 'Caesar and Cleopatra' to his confused geography in 'The Devil's Disciple'.

His politics are equally unfounded. His love of Socialism amounts to a love of his fellow man and a desire that all should be treated equally. He declined to equalize any of his own fortune, arguing (quite rightly), that anything he gave to the poor would be quickly snatched up by taxation and rent, thereby changing nothing.

Yet, he gives us nothing else--certainly no economic theory--to argue how a revolution might come about, or even why it should. To Shaw, it seems better that men should not suffer unequally under the yoke of power, and that is enough. Like Marx, he seems to assume that the poor will eventually tire of the inequality and overcome it. Certainly, it upsets him enough.

But the same inequality of power has marked every culture throughout history--when will the patience of the proletariat be well and truly exhausted? He might as well suggest that since violence is harmful, we should quickly tire of it and move on to something else. Shaw's notions are much too lovely a dream for a man who loathes the "dishonesty of Romanticism".

Eventually, we finish the prelude and get to the play, itself, which is Shaw's retelling of a Roman fable about a man who shows kindness to a lion and receives kindness in return. The story has sometimes been attached to Aesop, and indeed it proceeds as an instructional fable, but Shaw rewrites it in the form of a Christian parable.

Even though we have left the prelude behind, we have not left the realm of Shaw's internal conflicts, for this play proceeds along familiar lines: once again, Shaw the philosopher seems intent on producing some deep message but Shaw the humorist will always undermine it by presenting it under the auspices of an aimless farce.

In some plays, the philosopher takes over, but these we rarely hear of and never see performed, for they are as uninformed and overwrought as his introductions. The humorist has created the more popular works, which are usually along the lines of the classic English social farce, as practiced by Wilde and Wodehouse.

'Androcles and the Lion', contrarily, is a less witty comedy, relying on caricatures, physical humor, and absurdly realized arguments. The play contains a Christian allegory and a satire against the unfaithful, and if Shaw had stopped there, he would have simply produced propaganda. But the allegory is wholly fused with a satire against the pride, meekness, and thoughtlessness of Christians.

We might imagine that Shaw is endeavoring to achieve the same effect of his role model, Shakespeare, who would place so many contrary opinions in his carious characters' mouths that the reader might never guess what bias the author carried. Yet Shaw is writing a fable, a Christian allegory, and has peopled his play with caricatures who, while sometimes vividly drawn, are not written as real people, but as symbols. They are the voices of Shaw's many ideas, and as such, are supported not only by their own words, but by the sweep of the story and the acts of those around them.

There is a tonal bias which carries along the argument. It feels as if, in writing the argument or slight, Shaw is able to convince himself of a notion, and hence his work changes enough to admit it--at least, until he can convince himself of the opposing view.

By the end of the play, all the heroes have been ridiculed and all the villains have been made appealing, and each argument has swung into prominence and out again, so that the audience is left asking what Shaw's purpose is: what has been achieved?

In the realist movement, which influenced Shaw through Ibsen, the author deliberately writes in such a way as to negate his character's arguments, and to allow different points of view to be considered, and in the end, leaves nothing decided. This does not leave the audience confused, because Realism intends to depict actual people and conflicts, and for something to remain undecided is a perfectly natural notion. That isn't to say that a Realist play should be just like life, but that its form approximates and subverts the way life feels, if not the way it is.

Human beings create patterns and symbols even where none exist, so it does not strike us as false to see archetypes or metaphors played out, as long as they are well-written enough to leave the author's hand hidden. There is a certain notion of sprezzatura in Realism: the author wants to construct something carefully and deliberately, but without calling attention to himself.

Shaw's works aspire to many aspects of realism--such as shifting morality and vivid, sometimes absurd characters--but as an author he is almost never invisible. He writes with his tongue in his cheek, winking at his audience, trying to allude over their heads, bringing in the newest ideas (before they have had time to mature), and drawing heavily on archetypal stories, both allegorical and Romantic.

Another aspect of his writing which encourages disbelief is his reliance on soliloquies and structured, symbolic debates. Again, he evokes the style of Shakespeare, who also interjected allusion, wit, and light fourth-wall breaks. In the end, what separates their presentation of ideas is how much Shaw seems to commit himself to one idea or the other at any particular time. While Shakespeare can always be read wryly, Shaw can almost always be read earnestly.

We know from his prologues that he has no qualms about attaching himself to ideas, even ideas which are contrary to what he has said or done before, or contrary to his own interests. There is a fine line walked by all writers who mean to tackle and confront grand ideas. The author must be conceited enough to think he has something new to say in the first place, but self-deprecating enough to know when to bow out.

Shaw is given many grandiloquent titles by his adherents, from visionary to prophet, and these terms are more often given to those who go too far than those who do not go far enough. It is easier to impress and overawe with pomposity than with austerity, but what author is driven to write because it is the easy thing to do?

In the end, and author's bombasticity must equal to or exceeded by his competence and diligence. There are such authors, like Twain or Nietzsche, who are more-or-less capable of maintaining this balance, but Shaw overreaches. It is his nature and his delight to overreach. He does it from all sides, and his philosophical over-commitment conflicts with his humorous over-commitment.

He is capable of being both profound and amusing, but he is neither funny enough nor profound enough to finally save this play's lack of purpose. He cannot fall back on the British class humor of his best plays, and his awkward combination of Christian allegory, Roman fable, religious satire, Realist philosophy, and slapstick humor is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.