The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Every aspect of life is, of course, a problem. The belief Shaw is attacking is the belief that the only problem worth a playwright's attention is love between the sexes, considered in isolation from everything else which men and women think and do. Like all persons engaged in polemic, he accepts the view of Shakespeare held by his opponents, namely, that, as a dramatist, Shakespeare, even when his characters are princes and warriors, was only interested in their "private" emotional life. In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as em­bodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide un­ending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. Romeo and Juliet,

for example, is by no means merely a "drama of feeling," a verbal opera about a love affair between two adolescents; it is also, and more importandy, a portrait of a society, charming enough in many ways, but morally in­adequate because the only standard of value by which its members regulate and judge their conduct is that of la bella

without being dull." For all his claims to be just a propagandist, his writing has an effect nearer to that of music than most of those who have claimed to be writing "dramas of feeling." His plays are a joy to watch, not because they purport to deal with social and political problems, but because they are such wonderful displays of conspicuous waste; the conversational energy displayed by his characters is so far in excess of what their situation requires that, if it were to be devoted to practical action, it would wreck the world in five minutes. The Mozart of English letters he is not—the music of the Marble Statue is beyond him—the Rossini, yes. He has all the brio, humor, cruel clarity and virtuosity of that Master of opera

buffa.

or la brutta figura. The disaster that overtakes the young lovers is one symptom of what is wrong with Verona, and every citizen, from Prince Escalus down to the starving apothecary, has a share of responsibility for their deaths. Quite aside from their different temperaments and talents, one can see a good reason why Shakespeare does not need to tell the audience his "thoughts," while Shaw is obliged to. Thanks to the conventions and the economics of the Elizabethan theatre, Shakespeare can present his picture of Verona in twenty- four scenes with a cast of thirty speaking roles and a crowd of walk-ons. Shaw has to write for a picture stage framed by a proscenium arch, furnished with sets which admit of few changes of location, and for actors whose salary scale makes a large cast prohibitively expensive. When, therefore, he writes about a social problem such as slum landlords, he is obliged to tell us through an intellectual debate between the few characters in the few locations at his disposal what he cannot present dramatically as evidence from which we could draw the conclusions for ourselves.