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from the preface to Three Plays for Puritans
(1900) | ||
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Why for Puritans? | The doctors said: This man has not eaten meat for twenty years: he must eat it or die. I said: This man has been going to the London theatres for three years; and the soul of him has become inane and is feeding unnaturally on his body. And I was right. I did not change my diet; but I had myself carried up into a mountain where there was no theatre; and there I began to revive. | Topic: |
The authors had no problematic views: all they wanted was to capture some of the fascination of Ibsen. It seemed to them that most of Ibsens heroines were naughty ladies. And they tried to produce Ibsen plays by making their heroines naughty. But they took great care to make them pretty and expensively dressed. Thus the pseudo-Ibsen play was nothing but the ordinary sensuous ritual of the stage become as frankly pornographic as good manners allowed. | ||
And when I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwells major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine. The pleasures of the senses I can sympathize with and share; but the substitution of sensuous ecstasy for intellectual activity and honesty is the very devil. It has already brought us to Flogging Bills in Parliament, and, by reaction, to androgynous heroes on the stage; and if the infection spreads until the democratic attitude becomes thoroughly Romanticist, the country will become unbearable for all realists, Philistine or Platonic. | ||
On Diabolonian Ethics | I really cannot respond to this demand for mock-modesty. I am ashamed neither of my work nor of the way it is done. I like explaining its merits to the huge majority who dont know good work from bad. It does them good; and it does me good, curing me of nervousness, laziness, and snobbishness. I write prefaces as Dryden did, and treatises as Wagner, because I can; and I would give half a dozen of Shakespears plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written. | |
My personal relations with the critic and actor forbad me to curse them. I had not even the chance of publicly forgiving them. They meant well by me; but if they ever write a play, may I be there to explain! | Topics: | |
Better than Shakespear? | It is a dangerous thing to be hailed at once, as a few rash admirers have hailed me, as above all things original: what the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it. | |
text checked (see note S) Feb 2005 |
The Devils Disciple
A Melodrama (1897) | ||
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Act I |
The year 1777 is the one in which the passions roused by the breaking-off of the American colonies from England, more by their own weight than their own will, boiled up to shooting point, the shooting being idealized to the English mind as suppression of rebellion and maintenance of British dominion, and to the American as defence of liberty, resistance to tyranny, and self-sacrifice on the altar of the Rights of Man. Into the merits of these idealizations it is not necessary to inquire: suffice it to say, without prejudice, that they have convinced both Americans and English that the most highminded course for them to pursue is to kill as many of one another as possible, and that military operations to that end are in full swing, morally supported by confident requests from the clergy of both sides for the blessing of God on their arms. | Topic: |
Act II |
Anderson: | Topics: |
Act III | Richard: | |
Burgoyne: | ||
Swindon: Richard: Swindon: Richard: Swindon: Richard: | Topic: | |
Judith: | ||
Swindon: Burgoyne: | Topic: | |
Notes to The Devils Disciple | That, of course, is only one of the unfortunate consequences of the fact that mankind, being for the most part incapable of politics, accepts vituperation as an easy and congenial substitute. Whether Burgoyne or Washington, Lincoln or Davis, Gladstone or Bright, Mr Chamberlain or Mr Leonard Courtney was in the right will never be settled, because it will never be possible to prove that the government of the victor has been better for mankind than the government of the vanquished would have been. It is true that the victors have no doubt on the point; but to the dramatist, that certainty of theirs is only part of the human comedy. | |
text checked (see note S) Feb 2005 |
Cæsar and Cleopatra
A History (1898) | ||
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Act II |
Pothinus: Cæsar: | Topic: |
Cæsar: Rufio: Ftatateeta: Cæsar: | ||
Britannus: Theodotus: Cæsar: Note (Hals): end note | Topics: | |
Act III | Apollodorus: | |
Apollodorus: Britannus: Cæsar: Britannus: | Topics: | |
Act IV |
Musician: Cleopatra: Musician: Cleopatra: Musician: Cleopatra: | Topics: |
Cleopatra: Charmian: Cleopatra: Iras: Cleopatra: | ||
Pothinus: Cleopatra: Pothinus: Cleopatra: | Topic: | |
Cæsar: | ||
Cæsar: Rufio: | ||
Cleopatra: Cæsar: | ||
Cæsar: | Topic: | |
Notes to Cæsar and Cleopatra |
The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery. Savagery, they think, became barbarism; barbarism became ancient civilization; ancient civilization became Pauline Christianity; Pauline Christianity became Roman Catholicism; Roman Catholicism became the Dark Ages; and the Dark Ages were finally enlightened by the Protestant instincts of the English race. The whole process is summed up as Progress with a capital P. And any elderly gentleman of Progressive temperament will testify that the improvement since he was a boy is enormous. Now if we count the generations of Progressive elderly gentlemen since, say, Plato, and add together the successive enormous improvements to which each of them has testified, it will strike us at once as an unaccountable fact that the world, instead of having been improved in 67 generations out of all recognition, presents, on the whole, a rather less dignified appearance in Ibsens Enemy of the People than in Platos Republic. | Topic: |
But even if mans increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us. | ||
Goodness, in its popular British sense of self-denial, implies that man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom. Not sharing that pious opinion, I have not given countenance to it in any of my plays. In this I follow the precedent of the ancient myths, which represent the hero as vanquishing his enemies, not in fair fight, but with enchanted sword, superequine horse and magical invulnerability, the possession of which, from the vulgar moralistic point of view, robs his exploits of any merit whatsoever. | Topic: | |
text checked (see note S) Feb 2005 |
Captain Brassbounds Conversion
An Adventure (1899) | ||
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Act I |
Sir Howard: | Topic: |
Act II | Lady Cicely: | |
Lady Cicely: | ||
Act III |
Sir Howard: Lady Cicely: | Topic: |
text checked (see note S) Feb 2005 |
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