Free Man and Superman and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw Page A

whom I designed as a moneylender of strong feelings operating through an entirely commercial intellect. But pray dont alter your conception, which will be abundantly profitable to us both.” Or “My dear Miss Rehan, let me congratulate you on a piece of tragic acting which has made me ashamed of the triviality of my play, and obliterated Sir Peter Teazle from my consciousness, though I meant him to be the hero of the scene. I foresee an enormous success for both of us in this fortunate misrepresentation of my intention.” Even if the author had nothing to gain pecuniarily by conniving at the glorification of his play by the performer, the actor’s excess of power would still carry its own authority and win the sympathy of the author’s histrionic instinct, unless he were a Realist of fanatical integrity. And that would not save him either; for his attempts to make powerful actors do less than their utmost would be as impossible as his attempts to make feeble ones do more.
    In short, the fact that a skilfully written play is infinitely more adaptable to all sorts of acting than ordinary acting is to all sorts of plays (the actual conditions thus exactly reversing the desirable ones) finally drives the author to the conclusion that his own view of his work can only be conveyed by himself. And since he cannot act the play single-handed even when he is a trained actor, he must fall back on his powers of literary expression, as other poets and fictionists do. So far, this has hardly been seriously attempted by dramatists. Of Shakespear’s plays we have not even complete prompt copies: the folio gives us hardly anything but the bare lines. What would we not give for the copy of Hamlet used by Shakespear at rehearsal, with the original “business” scrawled by the prompter’s pencil? And if we had in addition the descriptive directions which the author gave on the stage—above all, the character sketches, however brief, by which he tried to convey to the actor the sort of person he meant him to incarnate, what a light they would shed, not only on the play, but on the history of the sixteenth century! Well, we should have had all this and much more if Shakespear, instead of having merely to bring his plays to the point necessary to provide his company with memoranda for an effective performance, had also had to prepare them for publication in competition with fiction as elaborate as that of Balzac, for instance. It is for want of this process of elaboration that Shakespear, unsurpassed as poet, storyteller, character draughtsman, humorist, and rhetorician, has left us no intellectually coherent drama, and could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his studies of character and society, though in such unpopular plays as All’s Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, we find him ready and willing to start at the nineteenth century if the seventeenth would only let him.
    Such literary treatment is ten times more necessary to a modern author than it is to Shakespear, because in his time the acting of plays was very imperfectly differentiated from the declamation of verses; and descriptive or narrative recitation did what is now done by scenery and “business.” Anyone reading the mere dialogue of an Elizabethan play understands all but half a dozen unimportant lines of it without difficulty, whilst many modern plays, highly successful on the stage, are not merely unreadable but positively unintelligible without the stage business. The extreme instance is a pure pantomime, like “L‘Enfant Prodigue,” e in which the dialogue, though it exists, is not spoken. If a dramatic author were to publish a pantomime, it is clear that he could only make it intelligible to a reader by giving him the words which the pantomimist is supposed to be uttering. Now it is not a whit less impossible to make a modern practical stage play intelligible to a reader by