Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (4 page)

Shaw bases the separation on a mystery, each realm's unknow ability to the other. The final stage direction tells us that after Eugene leaves, Candida holds out her arms to Morell and
“they embrace.”
But then Shaw adds a direction only for the readers of the play, “But they
do not know the secret in the poet's heart”
(p. 190). Of course, no audience has this stage direction available because it cannot be acted. The secret in the poet's heart is a secret between the playwright and the reader. It is Shaw's invitation to the reader to imagine the separate-ness of the realm of the poet, the line he follows out into the unknown night of poetic creation, the mystery of that craft, while the couple's realm is the circle their arms trace, their embrace, the mystery of marriage. Shaw subtitled the play “A Mystery” for a number of reasons. One reason was that he intended Candida as his equivalent to the Virgin Mother of medieval and Renaissance paintings. Another was because in the Middle Ages a mystery play was a play that celebrated one of the many mysteries of faith—for example, how a virgin could also be a mother. Such plays were sponsored by one of the town guilds of craftsmen—that is, men who had mastered a particular craft or mystery, such as wheelmaking.

A quarter century after the play was written, some students at Rugby wrote to Shaw in order to discover the secret in the poet's heart. Shaw wrote back to them—he was always kind and considerate to children, as childless people like himself so seldom are—inviting them to submit their theories. Their proposals, charmingly articulated, ranged from the cliché that Eugene wanted to put “an end to his miserable existence,” to the ridiculous suggestion that Eugene planned to come back after Morell was dead, to the impertinent, “There is no secret, and it is only mentioned for the purpose of puzzling the reader.” Shaw was much amused and replied in a mock lament for the vanished spirit of Rugby. He dubbed all the proposals “wrong” and “pure sob stuff,” except for that of the “soulless wretch” who called the secret “a spoof secret.” He explained patiently that he meant the poet to be going to meet his writer's destiny, into the night where “domestic comfort and cuddling” have no place. He ends by deferring his authorial authority: “It is only my way of looking at it; everybody who buys the book may fit it with an ending to suit his own taste.” So he returns the play to the realm of mystery again.

But the secret in the poet's heart is not the only mystery in the play. In truth, it is full of mysteries of all sorts, most of them revolving around Candida's character, motivation, and inner life. How is it that Candida's father, Burgess, speaks like an uneducated man with a thick local accent (which Shaw phonetically reproduces), while Candida herself talks grammar and speaks beautifully with no discernable accent? Why does Candida love and marry such a foolish man who knows himself so little? When she becomes so distracted while listening to Eugene recite his poetry, is it because the poetry is jejune or because she cannot really appreciate the poetry? Who imagined a spiritual resemblance between Candida and Titian's Virgin of the Assumption and hung an autotype of her on the wall in homage to Candida? What does Candida mean when she says to her husband that if she knew she would prevent Eugene's learning about sexual love from a prostitute by teaching him herself, she would do so as willingly as she would give her “shawl to a beggar dying of cold”—that is, if her love for her husband were not there to restrain her? (After hearing Shaw read the play aloud, Shaw's socialist friend and co-founder of the Fabian Society, Beatrice Webb, called Candida “a sentimental prostitute.”)

Many have fallen under the mysterious spell of Shaw's idealized virgin mother, the epitome of womanly grace in strength, simultaneously both a husband's fantasy figure of a wife and a boy's Oedipal dream-mother. Indeed, Vladimir Nabokov fell under her spell, for though he found little to value as literature in modern drama, he made an exception (in his essay “The Tragedy of Tragedy”) of “Shaw's brilliant farces, (especially Candida).” No doubt its depiction of an amorous affiliation between an eighteen-year-old poet and a thirty-three-year-old married woman particularly engendered admiration in the author of Lolita. The playwright who succeeded Shaw in dominating British theater during the 1940s and ‘5os, Terence Rattigan, named seven Shaw plays as the most popular with general audiences, Candida coming first—not surprisingly, since Candida's taking male weakness as such a focus makes it Shaw's most Rattigan-like play. And in the 195os American playwright Robert Anderson wrote
Tea and Sympathy
, which is in effect a version of Candida.

In his still pertinent 1936 essay on Shaw in The Triple Thinkers, Edmund Wilson suggests that while Shaw's political ideas were “confused and uncertain,” he was always “a considerable artist.” And like any fine artist, Shaw never could leave a theme or situation until he was satisfied that he had painted it from every interesting angle. So it is that the basic dramatic situation of Candida—an apparently comfortable marriage between a clergyman and his attractive wife upset by the intrusion on the domestic hearth of an unconventional outsider—replicates itself in The Devil's Disciple (1897), but with a major shift in period and place (to the American Revolution and New England), and with various adjustments in the postures and positions of the three protagonists. For example, the clergyman, Anthony Anderson, has married a handsome but considerably younger wife, Judith, who unconsciously longs for a more romantic connection to a man. The titular hero, Dick Dudgeon, unwittingly fulfills her unrecognized desire: When British soldiers arrive to arrest Anderson in his home for the capital offense of rebellion against the crown, Dick substitutes his neck for the Parson's in the noose. But due to a last-minute rescue of Dick from the scaffold by his rival, Minister Anderson, now transformed into a militia captain, Dick's heroic self-sacrifice comes to naught, and Judith keeps with her newly attractive husband.

Shaw subtitled the play “A Melodrama,” to make clear that he was both employing and making fun of the conventions of the genre. The hero of such a melodrama attains his heroic stature precisely by going to his death for the sake of another (or for the other's wife, with whom the hero is secretly in love). But Shaw gets to eat his cake and have it too by mocking the conventions of melodrama, yet exploiting their capacity to thrill and please: While he allows his hero to offer himself in sacrifice, he precisely prevents his hero from actually sacrificing himself. When the heroine, Judith, visits Dick in prison, under the assumption that out of love for her Dick is sacrificing his own life to help her husband save his, Shaw also prevents her from having the satisfaction of hearing a declaration of his undying devotion to her—indeed, she gets a denial and then an evasion, which she misinterprets as love, much to the comic delight of the audience. Best of all, as Martin Meisel points out in his Shaw
and
the
Nineteenth-
Century Theatre, while traditionally the ne‘er-do-well hero of melodrama, no matter how much of a scalawag and delinquent he is, has a sentimental reverence and loving soft spot for his dear mother, Shaw makes clear that rebellious Dick and his bitter, hard-hearted, puritanical mother heartily hate one another. (The otherwise excellent 1959 film version with Kirk Douglas failed Shaw only by giving Dick a visible pang of regret when his mother is forced to leave her home by the terms of her husband's will . )

Shaw's concerns in The Devil's Disciple extend further than the playful upending of generic expectations. When it was published in 1901, Shaw grouped it with two subsequent plays, Caesar
and Cleopatra
(written in 1898) and Captain
Brassbound's
Conversion (1899), and called the volume Three
Plays for
Puritans (1900). He did so because the three have a number of elements and aspects in common. All are set in contexts where empire clashes with native resistance: the American Revolution, the Roman conquest of Egypt, and the British presence in Moorish Africa. (Shaw does not, however, sentimentalize or reduce these clashes to melodramatic struggles between wicked oppressors and saintly colonials: He subjects both groups to humorous and ironic treatment.) All three plays culminate in trials in which the distinction between judicial vengeance and true justice is at issue. Shaw also used the colonial context as a metaphor through which he could explore the borderline between adolescence and adulthood. Indeed, all three plays involve a young man or young woman's conversion to adulthood through a confrontation with an adult who has great power, beauty, charm, or maturity.

What lends The Devil's Disciple its genuine distinction is that it plays with the theme of the Double (which probably explains why Alfred Hitchcock once thought of turning it into a film). The alliterating names of the twin protagonists, Dick Dudgeon and Anthony Anderson (the name—of Teutonic/Scandinavian origin—means “other son” or “son of another”) signal their doppelganger relationship: Each embodies an unrealized aspect of the other's inner self. Despite his defying King George and apparently breaking all conventions and rules, Dick Dudgeon has the impulse to sacrifice himself and to care for others that marks a born minister. He also finds himself mysteriously drawn to the integrity of Minister Anderson's hearth—and perhaps envies the minister his wife's “most ungodly allowance of good looks”—when he visits the minister's home. Anthony Anderson meanwhile finds himself instantly converted to a man of action when he learns that the British soldiers came to his home to arrest him and not Dick Dudgeon. Shaw contrives the action so that Dick Dudgeon puts on the minister's coat when he is arrested just as Anderson will then wear Dick's coat when he leaves to join the rebel militia. Shaw said that all his plays were in one way or another about conversion. Here the man of action becomes passive in allowing himself to be arrested while the man of peace goes to war in order to save his double. Shaw modeled the way the theme of the Double is embodied—in an exchange of coats—on the similar transaction between Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities, written by one of Shaw's favorite authors, Charles Dickens. Indeed, so intentional was this allusion that posters for the early productions of the play closely resemble posters for the contemporaneous standard theatrical version of the Dickens novel, renamed The Only Way.

But Dick Dudgeon and Anthony Anderson are not the only doubles in the play. The minister's protected and foolish wife, Judith, has a counterpart in the genuinely suffering serving girl, Essie. Judith misunderstands her attraction to her husband and therefore has to undergo a trial of authentic suffering in which her conceptions of goodness and badness are painfully transformed. Essie's instinctive and immediate attraction to Dick is exactly the impulse within Judith that she rigorously suppresses. Shaw points out how Essie represents Judith's repressed self by systematically paralleling the two women's struggles with tears. Each of the three acts ends with Essie in tears; and these three episodes surround episodes in the second and third acts when Judith breaks down crying. In the first act, Judith tries to convince Essie that she should not ever mention Dick's name or admit him into her presence. Judith likewise tries to prevent her husband from leaving her alone in their home with Dick. All the episodes of crying involve anxiety over Dick's safety, and with each woman he alternately approves the tears or orders that they be stopped. In observing these parallels, we see Judith gradually become more like Essie, and therefore more her true self.

Though Shaw's female characters cannot have the same impact on contemporary audiences that they had in his time—when Robert Louis Stevenson read Shaw's novels, he remarked to his and Shaw's friend, William Archer, “I say, Archer, what women!”—they nevertheless receive remarkably sympathetic and individualized representation in the plays. And so does the cause of equality for women, but never in the agit-prop way. An episode from The Devil's Disciple illustrates the point. Shaw presents Dick's mother, Mrs. Dudgeon, as a rather unpleasant and unsympathetic character: a hypocritical puritan who has suppressed her own romantic and sexual desires for the sake of respectability and propriety with the result that she is bitter, bullying, unkind, reproachful, and even cruel to those who come within her power—Essie, for example. Yet Shaw uses Mrs. Dudgeon as the vehicle to make the point that the legal system always favors men and therefore treats women unjustly. Mrs. Dudgeon's husband leaves their house and land to his son, Dick, which means that if she wants to stay in her own house, she would be living in the house of a son she can no more stand than he can stand her. To his wife he leaves an annuity of fifty-two pounds a year. At the reading of the will, she complains bitterly at the unfairness of this disposition of property, especially because, she claims, her husband had no money of his own when they married and she brought him a marriage portion that he now uses for her annuity. She asks if she has any legal redress, and Lawyer Hawkins replies that she has none because “the courts will sustain the claim of a man—and that man the eldest son—against any woman, if they can” (p. 236). Thus does Shaw highlight the law's systemic bias against women in favor of men, but note that he does not allow the audience or readers to click their tongues complacently at a social injustice with easy sympathy for the victim. The victim is unsympathetic and pointedly so. The will is poetic justice, but social injustice. And Shaw's whole strategy bends to make us separate principles from personalities, so that we must think for ourselves about the principles, and not just ride the hobbyhorse of our personal prejudices. In short, it is the difference between dramatic art and propaganda.

Though Shaw's initiation to sex did not come until comparatively late in life, at age twenty-eight, he made up for lost time by subsequently juggling several amorous relationships, some active, some epistolary—a state of affairs reflected in The Philanderer. He finally married an Irish millionairess, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, in 1898. Various biographers say various things about the sexual status of the marriage—that it was abstemious by agreement or that it began with relations but continued without them. My own opinion is that no one knows or can know the truth of it and, as the saying goes, whereof we do not know, thereof we cannot speak. What we can say is: After Shaw's marriage, he wrote Man
and
Superman, a play about sex and marriage that is full of the charm of sexual attraction between men and women, and the play makes that attraction palpable on stage.