“Shaw, The Philanderer, and the (Un)Making of Shavian Drama Robert Cardullo (Izmir) “Shaw, The Philanderer, and the (Un)Making of Shavian Drama” is an essay that considers this early play by Shaw in the context of the popular theater of the time, and bases its appreciation or advocacy on The Philanderer’s honesty in exploring human relationships - a characteristic that disappears from Shaw’s œuvre as his various philosophies ossify into orthodoxy. The first section supplies historical and background information; the second section summarizes and comments on The Philanderer’s action, scene by scene; and the third section analyzes Shaw’s interest in this play in the dramatic confrontation between realists and idealists, before offering some final parting comments. In sum, the author attempts to reevaluate The Philanderer and to try to understand why it has been neglected, how Shaw himself may have contributed to its neglect, and why, in some ways, this drama may not only be better than it has long been thought to be, but may also be better even than the plays by which Shaw is best known (e.g., Major Barbara, Saint Joan, Heartbreak House). 1. “For the right moment you must wait, as [Quintus] Fabius [Maximus] did most patiently when warring against Hannibal …; but when the time comes, you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.” - Motto of the Fabian Society. 1 Shaw was thirty-seven years old in 1893 when he started work on The Philanderer, his second play after Widowers’ Houses. In 1893 Shaw was known in London intellectual circles as a respected music critic, an accomplished orator, and a Socialist propagandist. He had written five novels, two of them published, both unsuccessfully. In 1889 he had edited and contributed two essays to the enormously influential Fabian Essays in Socialism, which went through three editions within a year. 2 On July 18, 1890, Shaw delivered his famous lecture on Ibsen to an enthusiastic audience at St. James Restaurant; this lecture was then expanded and published in 1891 as The Quintessence of Ibsenism - the first full-length study of Ibsen in the English language. Shaw’s writing of The Philanderer in 1893 began, as he himself put it, “with a slice of life; most of the first act really occurred.” 3 Here is how it did so: at the age of twenty-nine, Shaw had lost his virginity to an insistent, passionate, strong-willed widow named Mrs. Jenny Patterson, who was twelve years his senior. Mrs. Patterson, one of his mother’s singing students, invited the shy young man over to her London apartment one afternoon for tea. Shaw accepted the invitation, and before the afternoon was over the aggressive woman had almost literally raped him. Shaw did not resist her advances. “I permitted her,” he told Ellen Terry in a letter of October 12, 1896, “being intensely curious on the subject.” 4 When Frank Harris asked him forty years later what his affair with Jenny Patterson was like, Shaw responded in a letter dated June 20, 1930: “If you want to know what it was like, read The Philanderer, and cast her for the part of Julia, and me for that of Charteris.” 5 He also wrote to Hesketh Pearson that “Mrs. Patterson was my model for Julia; and the first act of The Philanderer is founded on a very horrible scene between her and Florence Forum Modernes Theater, Bd. 25/ 1 (2010), 33-44. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 34 Robert Cardullo Farr.” 6 Besides supplying Shaw with the opportunity to break off with Jenny, this incident supplied him with the opening situation for his new play. On June 27, 1893, The Philanderer was completed, four and a half months after Shaw had started work on it. But the four acts of the final version of the play (published in 1898) were originally conceived as three acts; and in 1930 Shaw made minor changes to the play for his Collected Works and recompressed Acts II and III into a single act, thereby turning The Philanderer back into the three-act work it was intended to be. His seriousness about the play is evidenced by the fact that the revisions and alterations to its various drafts are more extensive than those for any of his fifty-two plays, with the possible exception of Heartbreak House. Dealing with the serious literary and academic criticism of The Philanderer is a swift and easy task, because very little exists. Most full-length critical books on Shaw either do not even mention the play or, if they do, it is written off in a few sentences or even phrases. Here are a few of them: “a self-congratulatory piece of autobiography” and “a retrogressive step in Shaw’s career as a dramatist” (Colin Wilson) 7 ; “an apology for his own comprehensive philanderings” (Maurice Valency) 8 ; a “bad” play, “too clever-by-half” (St. John Ervine). 9 Even in the massive field of Shaw scholarship, then, there is no large body of criticism to consult; The Philanderer is only grudgingly accepted into the Shavian canon. This judgment began to be altered in the late 1970s, when there was a resurgence of interest in the play and it was performed at the Roundabout in New York, Britain’s National Theatre, and at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Later, serious studies of The Philanderer started to appear in such books as J. Ellen Gainor’s Shaw’s Daughters (1991) 10 and Peter Gahan’s Shaw Shadows (2004). 11 Nevertheless, the play is still seen as inferior to Shaw’s major works, as a mere preparatory sketch for the larger canvases of his subsequent dramatic masterpieces. The play’s reception demonstrates how critical distortion occurs when critics take an author’s greatest works and set such “masterpieces” up as literary peaks, in relation to which all his other work is viewed as either an ascent toward these heights or a descent from them. Thus, The Philanderer is usually approached simply as an amateurish, rough, flawed version of Man and Superman, The Doctor’s Dilemma, or Getting Married, depending on the individual critic’s bent. Putting a playwright’s work into the perspective of his career as a whole can indeed be valuable and illuminating, but it is not useful or valid to say that Ajax is not a good play because it is not Oedipus, that Little Eyolf is a bad play because it is not Hedda Gabler, or that Andromache is somehow flawed because it is not Phaedra. We all bring expectations and preferences to the theater, critics no less than audiences; this is especially true for a playwright with whose work we are familiar. In fact, to facilitate the clarification and definition of our expectations, we invent adjectival forms of the playwright’s name - Brechtian, Shavian, Shakespearean, Aristophanic, Racinian, Pinteresque, Beckettian. Without realizing it, we start approaching a playwright’s work, not on its own terms, but solely in terms of how much or how little it fits the ideal Shavian, Sophoclean, or Chekhovian model. In Shaw criticism, the holy trinity consists of Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan, so the critics evaluate and discuss his entire dramatic oeuvre on the basis of how similar or dissimilar any given play is to these works. And since The Philanderer is quite dissimilar to each of the three plays named, it is considered an inferior drama. To be sure, critical perceptions of The Philanderer have been severely altered by what seemed to be Shaw’s own disowning of the play in a letter to Ellen Terry in August of 1896: Shaw, The Philanderer, and the (Un)Making of Shavian Drama 35 To tell you the truth, I have had a shock down here. In the evenings they make me read plays to them; and the other night I had to fall back on my Opus 2, a comedy called The Philanderer, now some years old. It turned out to be a combination of mechanical farce with realistic filth which quite disgusted me; and I felt that if my plays get stale at this rate, I cannot afford to postpone their production longer than I can help. 12 This letter has been quoted dozens of times by disparagers of the play. However, we must bear in mind the context of the letter. Shaw was writing it to persuade Terry to undertake the role of Candida, so what was wrong, in this instance, with talking down one of his other plays that had a tempting part for an actress? On April 19, 1898, The Philanderer was published in Plays Unpleasant. This volume also included Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession; on the same day Plays Pleasant was also published, including Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell. Shaw became a literary sensation as a result. The most favorably received play in these two collections was Candida, and the most savagely attacked was Mrs. Warren’s Profession - in relation to which The Philanderer fared only slightly better. The Academy’s critic, for one, charged Shaw with ignoring the emotions of his audience in this work: The Philanderer is professedly the study of a male flirt…. The defect of the play seems most clearly to exhibit Mr. Shaw’s own main defect - the utter want of any real experience in life…. he has not understood, has not sympathised…; it does not move him at all on the side for which theatre mainly exists, that of the human emotion. 13 Shaw would hear this charge again and again - that he was heartless, cold-blooded, inhuman, unrealistic, merely delighting in paradox. But, in his “Author’s Apology” (1902) for Mrs. Warren’s Profession, he pointed out that his plays seemed paradoxical and inhuman not in relation to real life, but only in relation to the sentimental, romantic, idealized theatrical notions of human behavior that “do not exist off the stage.” 14 Shaw went on declare “that the real secret of the cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage.” II. If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; … Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; … This … is the sum of all practical wisdom. Kierkegaard, Either/ Or, 1843. 15 The world of The Philanderer is that of the middle and upper-middle class, and the opening presents a light scene of lovemaking between Grace and Charteris, two intelligent people. This first scene appears to be one of very sophisticated high comedy with an emphasis on verbal wit. As the scene gathers momentum, it is interrupted by Julia, and a scene of sharp contrast follows, one that seems almost farcical on account of its total reversal of the expected male-female roles of pursuer and pursued. As this scene approaches its climax, it too is interrupted by the entrance of Craven and Cuthbertson, two long-lost friends. The Ibsenite Realist, Charteris, is now surrounded by Idealists: a Romantic Idealist, Julia, who believes in the ideal of “depth of feeling” as the guarantee that she is a special human being with a “soul”; a Military Idealist, Craven, who sees society as one large barracks and the observing of social conventions and proprieties as the equivalent of “following orders”; and a 36 Robert Cardullo Theatrical Idealist, Cuthbertson, who believes that life should aspire to the ideals of a sentimental play. Charteris makes a partial revelation about the preceding action to Craven and Cuthbertson, followed by a full revelation to Cuthbertson, providing in effect a succinct outline of Act I: CHARTERIS. Julia wants to marry me: I want to marry Grace. I came here tonight to sweetheart Grace. Enter Julia. Alarums and excursions. Exit Grace. Enter you and Craven. Subterfuge and excuses. Exeunt Craven and Julia. And here we are. 16 In Act II the action moves into a polyphonic series of duologues, and the love triangle expands to a quartet. The opening scene introduces Sylvia, Julia’s younger sister (a female Realist), and Dr. Paramore (a male Idealist). It is possible that Sylvia is actually a “closet Idealist”; her ardent feminism may well be just another ideal, for she still defines herself as an “unwomanly woman” rather than as an individual human being. To her mind, to be treated as a “man” means that she is accepted as a human being. Paramore is a Scientific Idealist who, generally, perceives other human beings in the same way that he views microbes in his laboratory. Interestingly, although he is in many ways unsentimental and probably an atheist, he still believes in the sentimental ideal of romantic love. Enter Cuthbertson, and we see that the two Idealists are at perfect ease with each other. We then discover that Paramore is in love with Julia but doesn’t think he has a chance. With the entrance of Craven and the exit of Paramore, the two men - fathers both (Craven to Julia, Cuthbertson to Grace) - talk “man to man,” and, by adopting the familiar attitude of male cynicism, briefly enter into the world of the Realist without realizing they are doing so. Although both of them believe absolutely in the romantic ideal of the institution of marriage, Craven confides to Cuthbertson, “Well, Jo, I may as well make a clean breast of it - everybody knew it. I married for money.” Cuthbertson responds encouragingly, “And why not, Dan? Why not? We cant get on without it, you know” (41). This moment is complicated by the fact that Cuthbertson married the woman with whom Craven was in love, but it is still the only moment in the play where these two characters let the masks fall away; it is also the only scene in which they are together onstage alone. With all social pretense gone, they speak to each other as two men in a bar would. Enter Charteris, who explains his dilemma frankly to Craven and Cuthbertson, hoping for some advice from two “men of the world.” But suddenly, they are fathers again, and each is shocked that Charteris wants to talk “man to man” about the communications he has received from both Grace and Julia since he saw them in Act I. Cuthbertson and Craven can respond only with fatherly sentiment, as the latter does here: CRAVEN. Charteris: no woman writes such a letter to a man unless he has made advances to her. CHARTERIS (mournfully). How little you know the world, Colonel! The New Woman is not like that. CRAVEN. I can only give you old-fashioned advice, my boy; and that is that it’s well to be off with the Old Woman before youre on with the New. (43) Julia arrives, and Cuthbertson and Craven go to lunch while Julia finds a pretense to lag behind. Once again the play approaches farcical dimensions as Charteris tries frantically to get out of the clutches of Julia, upsetting all our theatrical expectations of malefemale role models. The scene culminates in a line spoken by almost every heroine of nineteenth-century melodrama, but now it is the man who protests: “Unhand me, Julia. If you dont let me go, I’ll scream for help” (43). Here, again, a scene building to a climax is Shaw, The Philanderer, and the (Un)Making of Shavian Drama 37 interrupted, and the final confrontation between Charteris and Julia is postponed by the reappearance of Cuthbertson, who reminds Julia that her “lunch will be cold” (44). Sylvia and Charteris are subsequently left alone. They are at ease with each other, and for once Charteris can have a “man to man” talk with someone: SYLVIA (thoughtfully)…. I dont think you care a bit more for one woman than for another. CHARTERIS. You mean I dont care a bit less for one woman than another. SYLVIA. That makes it worse. But what I mean is that you never bother about their being only women; you talk to them just as you do to me or any other fellow. Thats the secret of your success. You cant think how sick they get of being treated with the respect due to their sex. (44) This characteristic of his is the key to Charteris’s successful philandering, but it also makes him prey to a woman like Julia, who sees him as the ultimate challenge. Julia is convinced that Charteris’s advanced theories about male-female relationships and his objections to romantic love are due to the fact that he simply hasn’t yet found the right woman - a woman, like her, of sincerity and depth of feeling. But, no matter who the woman may be, Charteris appears to be uncompromising in his refusal to act upon romantic, sentimental, and idealized assumptions as if they were real. The point is not that he is heartless, cruel, unfeeling - Charteris does have emotions, and he does love Grace - but that he refuses to make his intellect subservient to his emotions, i.e., he refuses to become a character in a popular sentimental drama. Grace soon arrives and Sylvia leaves. The scene that follows is a very sophisticated intellectual chess game during which Grace counters Charteris move for move. Although neither one is posing, Charteris does at times slip into the clichéd speech of the romantic lover - partly as a game but also partly to test Grace, to see if she really is the New Woman. Ironically, the more Grace refuses to marry Charteris, the more he is attracted to her, to the “newness” in her womanliness: GRACE. Oh, Leonard, does your happiness really depend on me? CHARTERIS (tenderly) Absolutely. (She beams with delight. A sudden revulsion comes to him at the sight: he recoils, dropping her hands and crying) Ah no: why should I lie to you? My happiness depends on nobody but myself. I can do without you. GRACE (nerving herself). So you shall. Thank you for the truth. Now I will tell you the truth…. I love you…. but I’m an advanced woman. I’m what my father calls the New Woman. I quite agree with all your ideas. CHARTERIS (scandalised). That’s a nice thing for a respectable woman to say! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. GRACE. I am quite in earnest about them too, though you are not. That is why I will never marry a man I love too much. It would give him a terrible advantage over me: I should be utterly in his power. Thats what the New Woman is like…. And so we must part. (45-46) The second act of The Philanderer thus ends with the posing of the paradox that a true marriage is possible only between people who do not love each other. Act III begins on a note of gloom with a discussion of Craven’s supposed terminal illness-“Paramore’s Disease” (44, 47) - and the change in eating and drinking habits he has been forced to accept. Then comes the revelation that Paramore’s Disease has been disproved and that Craven is a perfectly healthy man. (Paramore’s Disease, incidentally, is supposed to be a disease of the liver - traditionally the seat of the passions.) Craven’s continued insistence on vegetarianism and abstinence, not because he now has to live in such a way but on moral principle, gives us a key to the Idealist mentality: 38 Robert Cardullo CUTHBERTSON (chuckling). Aha! you made a virtue of it, did you, Dan? CRAVEN (warmly). I made a virtue of necessity, Jo. No one can blame me. (47) No one will blame him, indeed, because society operates on this principle of convincing people that what they have to do is what they ought to do. Paramore and Charteris are now by themselves for the first time, and Charteris tries to get Paramore to propose to Julia. This little moment contains another insight into the Idealist, who looks at everything in abstract terms. Paramore is angry that Craven’s life is no longer in danger, because it has struck a blow to the progress of medical science: CHARTERIS…. Didn’t you congratulate him? PARAMORE (scandalised). Congratulate him! Congratulate a man on the worst blow pathological science has received for the last three hundred years! CHARTERIS. No, no, no. Congratulate him on having his life saved. (50) Grace enters and takes Paramore aside to chat, followed by the entrance of Julia, who, jealous to see Grace speaking with Paramore, throws a fit. The men leave and the stage is now set for the great confrontation scene in the play, an agon between the Realist Woman and the Idealist Woman: GRACE…. How I hate to be a woman when I see, by you, what wretched childish creatures we are! Those two men would cut you dead and have you turned out of the Club if you were a man, and had behaved in such a way before them. But because you are only a woman, they are forbearing! sympathetic! gallant! Oh, if you had a scrap of self-respect, their indulgence would make you creep all over. I understand now why Charteris has no respect for women. JULIA. How dare you say that! GRACE. Dare! I love him. And I have refused his offer to marry me. JULIA (incredulous but hopeful). You have refused! GRACE. Yes; because I will not give myself to any man who has learnt how to treat women from you and your like. I can do without his love, but not without his respect; and it is your fault that I cannot have both. Take his love then; … Run to him, and beg him to take you back. (52) Julia concludes with “Thank Heaven, I have a heart: that is why you can hurt me as I cannot hurt you” (52), after which Grace turns away from her contemptuously. The masks have been ripped away during the above exchange, and we are completely immersed in the world of sexual power politics. Julia shows that she is far from the naïve romantic she has seemed to be. She is not a Nora, for she is fuly conscious of her ability to use her sexuality to manipulate men in order to get what she wants. Grace, for her part, loses her temper without realizing it, in her own way thereby sinking just as low as she thinks Julia has sunk. Perhaps she too, like Craven, has made a virtue of necessity since she doesn’t have Julia’s innate sex appeal. They are both stripped naked, in any event: two women fighting over a man just as shamelessly as a pair of animals fighting over a piece of meat. In its dissection of character and laying bare of human emotion, this scene is far from being merely cleverly comic. When Craven enters, the masks are flung back on. Julia rushes to him, crying “Daddy! ” (52). Since Charteris, now rejected by Grace, is not as attractive to Julia as he had been, she soon rushes off to Paramore’s house, where all will gather for the last act, while Charteris tries to delay their arrival in the hope that Paramore will have enough time to propose to Julia. Though we get further insight into the characters in Act IV, especially Julia and Charteris, the key to sustaining the action here is suspense: the suspense of waiting for the answer to the question “How is the play going to end? ” or “Who will marry whom? ” Shaw, The Philanderer, and the (Un)Making of Shavian Drama 39 And this is by no means certain at the end of Act III. Grace seems to be out of the picture as a mate for Charteris, which somewhat increases Julia’s chances, but Paramore is suddenly much more attractive to Julia now that Grace has shown an interest in him. Moreover, it is not at all certain that Grace will not change her mind about Charteris’s proposal, and she insists at the end of Act III that she, too, is going to Paramore’s house to see what will happen in the end. In the course of Act IV, Julia has a dramatic anagnorisis, as we see from the following exchange: PARAMORE. As it is, I can only admire you, and feel how pleasant it is to have you here. JULIA (bitterly). And pet me, and say pretty things to me! I wonder you dont offer me a saucer of milk at once…. you seem to regard me very much as if I were a Persian cat…. You are all alike, every one of you. Even my father only makes a pet of me. (55) This is not an act on Julia’s part, even though she is toying with the idea of marrying Paramore; she is having an extended recognition. As Act IV progresses, she realizes that what Charteris says of her is true, that she is a slave to her feelings or passions, and this is not a noble or wonderful thing to be. Julia has a recognition comparable to Nora’s, but she undergoes the further recognition that she can do nothing about it. Paramore himself talks his way through every cliché of romantic love - in each of which, unlike Charteris, he fervently believes. But his words only further Julia’s recognition of how foolish she is when she gives herself over to her own emotions: “(earnestly). Believe me: it is not merely your beauty that attracts me: I know other beautiful women. It is your heart, your sincerity, your sterling reality, your great gifts of character…” (55). With the arrival of Craven, Paramore hustles his future father-in-law offstage to formally ask for his daughter’s hand, while Charteris and Julia are left alone for their last confrontation. And here, all the themes of the play converge: JULIA (earnestly). It is you who are the vivisector - a far crueller, more wanton vivisector than he [Paramore]. CHARTERIS. Yes; but then I learn so much more from my experiments than he does! And the victims learn as much as I do. Thats where my moral superiority comes in. (57) Charteris is right, and he is helping here to solidify Julia’s anagnorisis. Ultimately, our understanding of Charteris is an ironic one. We wonder if his uncompromising refusal to sink to Julia’s level has in fact made him sink just as low, if his advanced ideas have become just another set of Ideals. As a result, the ending of The Philanderer is very serious, indeed: JULIA (exhausted, allowing herself to take it). You are right. I am a worthless woman. CHARTERIS (triumphant, and gaily remonstrating). Oh, why? JULIA. Because I am not brave enough to kill you. GRACE (taking her in her arms as she sinks, almost fainting, away from him). Oh, no. Never make a hero of a philanderer. (Charteris, amused and untouched, shakes his head laughingly. The rest look at Julia with concern, and even a little awe, feeling for the first time the presence of a keen sorrow.) (61) This conclusion is close to tragic. It is the equivalent, from a reverse angle, of Nora’s returning to Torvald, not out of a concession to audience taste and Idealism, but because she realizes that her romantic sentimentality is not an illusion or something that she can disown but what she is at the very core of her being, and that, although it would be theoretically wonderful to be liberated and inde- 40 Robert Cardullo pendent, she cannot live without an equally sentimental Torvald - just as Julia requires a Paramore for her own emotional survival. For his part, the advanced Ibsenite philosopher, Leonard Charteris - Shaw’s Gregers Werle, a distant cousin of Brand and Rubek - has actually not progressed one step from Jack Horner or any other Restoration rake. As for the New Woman, Grace Tranfield is hardly a flattering portrait, especially when, toward the end of the play, she approaches self-loathing. A glimmer of hope seems to be presented in the uncorrupted Sylvia, but that may be only because she has not yet been tainted by the cynicism of worldly experience. III. Technically, I do not find myself able to proceed otherwise than as former playwrights have done…. My stories are the old stories; my characters are the familiar harlequin and columbine, clown and pantaloon…; my jests are the ones in vogue when I was a boy, by which time my grandfather was tired of them. Shaw, Preface, Three Plays for Puritans, 1901. 17 It has long been assumed that the basis of Shaw’s method, in The Philanderer as in other plays of his, was the shattering or at least the disregard of popular theatrical conventions of his time. Actually, the opposite is true: Shaw’s major plays are the very apotheosis of nineteenth-century dramatic technique and the popular performance tradition. Just as surely as the effectiveness onstage of Celina, Black-Ey’d Susan, The Colleen Bawn, and The Ticket-of-Leave Man depended upon a set of assumptions and conventions implicitly accepted by the audience, just so do Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Major Barbara depend almost entirely for their theatrical effectiveness on this exact same set of conventions and assumptions. By injecting into his plays challenging intellectual content, by clouding and thus complicating the moral perspective (i.e., by making the immoral, or even the moral, amoral), and by feeding on the irony between real life and the theater’s idealized version of it, Shaw was able to employ the mechanics of the well-made play and the time-tested structural pattern of melodrama with freedom and dexterity. A simple summary of the action in Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell, or Man and Superman (minus the third act) would show Shaw’s skill in plot construction. He did not reject the traditions of the pièce à thèse, the pièce bien-faite, or popular melodrama, but instead employed them in their most extreme and radical forms. He was thus dead serious when he declared, “A really good Adelphi [Theatre] melodrama is of first-rate literary importance, because it only needs elaboration to become a masterpiece.” 18 While Shaw often seems to be parodying the popular theater or contravening melodrama, in fact he is shamelessly exploiting every theatrical trick and melodramatic convention known. The basic situation of The Philanderer, for example, was familiar to any nineteenthcentury theater audience: A. (Julia) loves and wants to marry B. (Charteris), who loves and wants to marry C. (Grace), while D. (Paramore) loves and wants to marry A. This initial dramatic premise is the springboard for the action of the play, and that action achieves its fruition in the conflicts between the various characters. But the outcome of the play is determined by the beliefs and ideas of those characters, not by the providential design of melodrama. For in melodrama characters are slaves to their moral classification; in Shaw, as Brecht pointed out, “The opinions of his characters constitute their fates.” 19 If The Philanderer were true to classic comic form, its “fate” would be to end with a pair of marriages (Julia-Charteris and Grace-Paramore). But there is no such reconciliation or synthesis in the play, as there is, say, in Major Shaw, The Philanderer, and the (Un)Making of Shavian Drama 41 Barbara. True, there is a marriage agreed upon at the end, but it is only one that ironically fulfills the dialectical thrust of the drama. Shaw’s plays are all structured dialectically. A thesis is stated; counter to this thesis is presented another one, an obstacle to and contradiction of the original thesis. The Philanderer posits two antithetical approaches to the modern institution of marriage: marriage with love and marriage without love. Each thesis produces unpleasant or even disasterous consequences, and both are found insufficient. The Philanderer therefore does not produce a reconciliation in the end, and this play, like Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Caesar and Cleopatra, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan, is not structurally a comedy. It does not bring order out of chaos or reconcile two opposites; the synthesis must be provided by the audience. The original (and rejected) final act of the play did provide the only possible synthesis - love without marriage. Charteris and Julia, of course, are the two characters who represent the dialectical extremes, in this case of human personality: Charteris feels only intellectually and Julia thinks only feelingly. The dynamic that these two figures represent could be expressed in a number of different ways: the tension between Apollo and Dionysus, Logos in conflict with Eros, the Ethical Man versus the Aesthetic Man, the struggle between the Ego and the Id. Any one of these approaches could be fruitful if applied to The Philanderer - when all is said and done, one dialectic is as good as another. But a good way in which to approach the play is to use the vocabulary that Shaw himself employed (and which is employed, as well, in part II of this essay) in The Quintessence of Ibsenism to describe these two types of personality: Realism versus Idealism. An Idealist is one who cannot look life in the face, and instead puts a mask (an Ideal) over every potentially unpleasant reality. Thus marriage, in reality a simple property relationship originally devised as a means of effectively propagating the species, to the Idealist becomes a sacred or holy institution through which man and woman find their ultimate fulfillment as human beings. Similarly, because it was unpleasant or even terrifying to face the inevitable reality of death, the Idealists invented the notion of an afterlife, and so on and so forth. The rare person, Shaw’s one in a thousand, is the Realist, the man or woman who dares to rip the mask away, look reality squarely in the face, and call things by their proper names. A Realist is by nature an Ironist. The ultimate, true Realist is incapable of not seeing anything unironically - indeed, this is the tragedy of the Ironist. The true Realist must be able to preserve an ironic understanding of even his own sense of irony. Indeed, he can turn even it into yet another Ideal, which truly makes him one man in a thousand. Idealists, by contrast, are incapable of an ironic understanding of life. An Idealist will therefore wage wars to end wars and build bombs to preserve the peace. It is important not to view these categories as permanent classifications or static conditions. Shaw is presenting an evolutionary principle of human society wherein Realists and Idealists are not so much opposites as ideologies that are at different levels of development. Most important of all, we must realize that the Realist, after ripping away the mask from a given Ideal, will eventually substitute another Ideal for the one he has destroyed. Progress does obtain, however, because, as Shaw writes in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, “every new ideal is less of an illusion than the one it has supplanted.” 20 Now this model of Realism versus Idealism fits certain plays by Ibsen very well and others not at all, but The Quintessence of Ibsenism is much more valuable for understanding Shaw than it is in understanding Ibsen. On a very basic level, the cast of characters in The Philanderer can be broken down as 42 Robert Cardullo follows: Realists - Charteris, Grace, Sylvia; Idealists - Julia, Paramore, Cuthbertson, Craven. Cuthbertson and Craven are modeled on the portrait of the Idealist in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Cuthbertson has had an absolutely wretched failure of a marriage and is now separated, but still he would defend marriage to the death as an institution. Craven, who was in love with the woman whom Cuthbertson married, gave her up, thereby sacrificing what he considered his happiness for the romantic ideal of doing what was best for her; eventually he married, not for love, but for money. Grace, a widow, was an Idealist when she married, but the experience of marriage made her a Realist; like Charteris, she has torn the mask off the institution and now sees marriage not as the ultimate fulfillment of the human personality, through love, but as a conventional social arrangement and property relationship - not at all the correct arrangement or relationship for one person who loves another, because it will degrade them both as human beings. Julia herself believes fervently in the romantic ideal of marriage and the sentimental ideal of deep, intense feeling as the ultimate proof of a sincere, noble, and higher form of being. The proper mode for the Idealist is comedy, for the Realist tragedy. And the Realist- Idealist extremes of character that are yoked to the central action of this play may partially explain the seeming incongruity of its structure. To wit: The Philanderer seems like a different play when Charteris and Grace (two Realists) are onstage together, as opposed to when Charteris and Julia (Realist and Idealist) are together onstage. The conflict in The Philanderer, in fact, is precisely the one between Idealist and Realist, and it takes the specific form of a struggle between passion and intellect. The action of the play is an attempt to reconcile this opposition. The plot forces the characters into a series of choices - Charteris decides to reject Julia, Grace decides to reject Charteris, Julia decides to reject Charteris, Juia decides to marry Paramore. Each choice centers around circumstances reflecting the opposition between passion and intellect and the characters’ understanding of those circumstances. Since each decision made alters the previous set of circumstances and the characters’ understanding of them, it further complicates the next decision that has to be made, and in this way each decision becomes more complex and more important. For example, Julia’s final decision to marry Paramore is determined by a causal chain of prior decisive actions in the play - Charteris has rejected her once, Grace has rejected Charteris, Charteris has rejected Julia again, Paramore has shown an interest in her, Grace is showing an interest in Paramore, then Paramore declares his love and asks Julia to marry him. The “given” of the play is that marriage is an outmoded institution. The hypothesis of The Philanderer is that educated, modern, enlightened people can nevertheless find fulfillment through the existing institution of marriage. As each possible match is suggested and debated and each decision made, various aspects of the hypothesis are explored and tested until the play ultimately proves the hypothesis false. Intelligent, advanced, civilized human beings cannot marry and at the same time remain intelligent, advanced, civilized human beings. The Philanderer’s ending is by far its most challenging moment, and it should not be pushed aside or allowed to “take care of itself” in any production. It demands clear choices by the actors and a distinct point of view on the part of the director. The audience must take this conclusion seriously and not just as mere Shavian perversity or paradox. To be part of a satisfying theatrical experience, it must present a clear challenge to audience members, and one that they will actually confront once they are outside the theater. The ending is neither happy nor funny, neither a paradox nor a “cop-out” on Shaw’s Shaw, The Philanderer, and the (Un)Making of Shavian Drama 43 part. It would have been much easier to unite the pairs of lovers at the end, as Shaw would later often do, and as traditional comic form demands. As it stands, the play’s rhythm modulates between an idealized vision of life (comedy) and an ironic vision of life (tragedy). Then it ends on a tragic note. In The Philanderer, then, Shaw would allow himself to explore the basis of his understanding of life and human relationships much more honestly than he would in his later plays, when his ideas about Creative Evolution had ossified into an orthodoxy. It is itself a human, or dramatic, tragedy to see Shaw, the great iconoclast, the great Realist, thus transform himself into as much of an Idealist as any such character in his plays. Nietzsche asked to be saved from his disciples, and Shaw could well have taken this as a bit of advice, because he became his own worst disciple. 21 At a certain point, in fact, Shaw’s ideas become empty and mean nothing, because he invests nothing of himself in his work. His devastating wit and incredible intellect become an insulation. And they ultimately turn against him when we begin to realize that Shaw is clever enough to build convincing arguments for absolutely anything. Shaw’s saint and soldier, Greek professor, and munitions maker can all convince us with equal dexterity that their vision of the world is right. As Don Juan himself admits in a Shaw play, “Yes, it is mere talk… nothing but words which I or anyone else can turn inside out like a glove. 22 Part of Shaw’s displeasure with The Philanderer in his later years was surely that it did not neatly fit into his theory of Creative Evolution in the way that, say, Man and Superman did. In the earlier play, Shaw was “shooting from the hip,” if you will, for he had not yet developed the vocabulary of Creative Evolution and the Übermensch. The confessedly autobiographical nature of The Philanderer was also an embarrassment to him. Those who claim that the play is a selfflattering vindication of Shaw’s own philandering have not read it very closely. The character of Charteris is a severe self-criticism, whether it was conscious or not. The play remains dark and unpleasant for all its wit and humor; it strenuously questions the possibility of progressive human evolution in a way that reminds one of the following words by Ibsen: “Everyone wants their own special revolutions, always in external things. What is really needed is a revolution of the human spirit.” 23 When The Philanderer was finally published in 1898, Shaw had already passed the point where he could have written it. The play is alive and attractive precisely because of its roughness, its hardiness, its sincerity; its complex, problematic nature makes it both profound and heartfelt. But, no, this play does not contain the dramatic algebra of Saint Joan: Shaw had not yet canonized himself. NOTES 1 Fabius cited in Max Beer. A History of British Socialism. (1919), Vol. 2. London 2002, 274. 2 George Bernard Shaw, ed. Fabian Essays in Socialism. London, 1889. 3 Archibald Henderson. “George Bernard Shaw Self-Revealed.” Fortnightly Review 109 (1926): 439. 4 Christopher St. John, ed. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence. New York, 1932. 90. 5 Shaw quoted in Frank Harris. Bernard Shaw. New York, 1931. 30. 6 Shaw cited in Hesketh Pearson. George Bernard Shaw. London, 1942. 123. 7 Colin Wilson. Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment. London, 1969. 84, 115. 8 Maurice Valency. The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of Bernard Shaw. New York, 1973. 89. 9 St. John Ervine. Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends. New York, 1956. 108. 10 J. Ellen Gainor. Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender. Ann Arbor, 1991. 48-59 et passim. 44 Robert Cardullo 11 Peter Gahan. Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw. Gainesville, 2004. 157-188. 12 St. John 1932, 38. 13 J. Murray. Review of The Philanderer. The Academy: A Weekly Review of Literature, Science, and Art, 4 June 1898: 614. 14 George Bernard Shaw. “The Author’s Apology.” Mrs. Warren’s Profession. London, 1906. xxiii. 15 Søren Kierkegaard. Either/ Or: A Fragment of Life. London, 1992. 54. 16 George Bernard Shaw. “The Philanderer.” The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw. London, 1931. 38. Hereafter cited by page number in the text. 17 George Bernard Shaw. “Preface.” Three Plays for Puritans. London, 1931. xxxv. 18 George Bernard Shaw. Dramatic Opinions and Essays. Vol. 1. New York, 1906. 72. 19 Bertolt Brecht. “Three Cheers for Shaw.” Brecht on Theatre. New York, 1964. 11. 20 George Bernard Shaw. “The Quintessence of Ibsenism.” The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, Vol. 19. New York, 1932. 45. 21 Friedrich William Nietzsche. Nietzsche: A Self- Portrait from His Letters. Cambridge, 1971. 46. 22 George Bernard Shaw, Don Juan in Hell (Act 3, Scene 2), from Man and Superman, in The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw. London, 1931. 386. 23 Henrik Ibsen, Letter to Georg Brandes dated December 20, 1870, in Ibsen: Letters and Speeches. Ed. Evert Sprinchorn. New York, 1964. 106-107.