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

dialogue alone, than to make a pantomime intelligible without it.
    Obvious as this is, the presentation of plays through the literary medium has not yet become an art; and the result is that it is very difficult to induce the English public to buy and read plays. Indeed, why should they, when they find nothing in them except a bald dialogue, with a few carpenter’s and costumier’s directions as to the heroine’s father having a grey beard, and the drawing-room having three doors on the right, two doors and an entrance through the conservatory on the left, and a French window in the middle? It is astonishing to me that Ibsen, who devotes two years to the production of a three act play, the extraordinary quality of which depends on a mastery of character and situation which can only be achieved by working out a good deal of the family and personal history of the individuals represented, should nevertheless give the reading public very little more than the technical memorandum required by the carpenter, the gasman, and the prompter. Who will deny that the result is a needless obscurity as to points which are easily explicable? Ibsen, interrogated as to his meaning, replies, “What I have said, I have said.” Precisely; but the point is that what he hasn’t said, he hasn’t said. There are perhaps people (though I doubt it, not being one of them myself) to whom Ibsen’s plays, as they stand, speak sufficiently for themselves. There are certainly others who could not understand them at any terms. Granting that on both these classes further explanations would be thrown away, is nothing to be done for the vast majority to whom a word of explanation makes all the difference?
    Finally, may I put in a plea for the actors themselves? Born actors have a susceptibility to dramatic emotion which enables them to seize the moods of their parts intuitively. But to expect them to be intuitive as to intellectual meaning and circumstantial conditions as well, is to demand powers of divination from them: one might as well expect the Astronomer Royal to tell the time in a catacomb. And yet the actor generally finds his part full of emotional directions which he could supply as well or better than the author, whilst he is left quite in the dark as to the political, religious, or social beliefs and circumstances under which the character is supposed to be acting. Definite conceptions of these are always implicit in the best plays, and are often the key to their appropriate rendering; but most actors are so accustomed to do without them that they would object to being troubled with them, although it is only by such educative trouble that an actor’s profession can place him on the level of the lawyer, the physician, the churchman, and the statesman. Even as it is, Shylock as a Jew and usurer, Othello as a Moor and a soldier, Caesar, Cleopatra and Anthony, as figures in defined political circumstances, are enormously easier for the actor than the countless heroes as to whom nothing is ever known except that they wear nice clothes, love the heroine, baffle the villain, and live happily ever after.
    The case, then, is overwhelming for printing and publishing not only the dialogue of plays, but for a serious effort to convey their full content to the reader. This means the institution of a new art; and I daresay that before these volumes are ten years old, the attempt that it makes in this direction will be left far behind, and that the customary, brief, and unreadable scene specification at the head of an act will by then have expanded into a chapter, or even a series of chapters, each longer than the act itself, and no less interesting and indispensable. No doubt one result of this will be the production of works of a mixture of kinds, part narrative, part homily, part description, part dialogue, and (possibly) part drama—works that can be read, but not acted. I have no objection to such works; but my own aim