Poor old George Bernard Shaw. So far out of fashion has he fallen, apparently, that not even his 150th birthday could persuade Dublin theatres to revive one of his plays. The Abbey and the Gate have added insult to injury by choosing this summer to stage works by his contemporaries Oscar Wilde and Somerset Maugham. To mark Shaw's anniversary with a play by one other comic dramatist born in the late 19th century might be considered unfortunate. Two seems like carelessness.
In July 1946, when GBS was still alive, he was considered - among many other things - to be a triumph of vegetarianism. An article in Britain's Vegetarian Messenger celebrated his 90th birthday and trumpeted: "No writer since Shakespearian times has produced such a wealth of dramatic literature, so superb in expression, so deep in thought and with such dramatic possibilities." Sixty years on, not even a vegetarian drama critic could be quite so positive about Shaw. The consensus now is that there was something missing from his 52 plays that has prevented them from living as long as he did. Only the beef industry would suggest it was protein. But his biographer Michael Holroyd, writing in the Times Literary Supplement last week, listed the crimes that audiences from the 1970s onwards (unfairly, Holroyd thought) held against Shaw, including the following: "He lacked what was once called 'sex appeal' and appeared to have ink rather than blood in his veins."
Is that the problem - that Shaw wasn't sexy enough to last, unlike the playwright once regarded as his only superior? By coincidence, I have just read James Shapiro's brilliant 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, and one of the things it suggests about that pivotal 12 months in the Bard's career was that he was almost too sexy for his own good. His serious plays were still obscured by his more famous love poetry, so that no literary critic of the era could get through a piece on Shakespeare without calling him "honey-tong'd".
The success of Romeo and Juliet a few years before had only added to his honeyed reputation. As Shapiro says: "Writers at the time joked about young men who slept with a copy of Venus and Adonis under their pillows and about others who rifled Shakespeare's work for pick-up lines. Just a year earlier, John Marston had mocked young men about town from whose 'lips doth flow/ Naught but pure Juliet and Romeo'." Shapiro argues that 1599 was the breakthrough year, when Shakespeare moved from being a very good dramatist to a great one. Ireland played an unwitting role in his artistic development, thanks to Hugh O'Neill's rebellion, which had forced Queen Elizabeth to dispatch the (for her) dangerously popular Lord Essex to Ulster with a huge army. Meanwhile, back home, an undefended England was rife with rumours of either a Spanish invasion, or a returning Essex with ambitions for the throne, or both.
It was a play in itself. And at this very moment, when actual plays were read carefully for political content and when careless words could land the author in jail, Shakespeare chose to write Julius Caesar. This concerns a coup d'état against an allegedly tyrannical leader, dangerous subject matter in the circumstances. But so exquisitely did Shakespeare sit on the fence that neither his Elizabethan readers nor readers today could say whether he sided with Brutus or Caesar. In the process he had produced a masterpiece.
Like Shakespeare, Shaw lived in turbulent times. Unlike Shakespeare, he didn't have to censor his ideas, which may have been part of his problem. On the contrary, not only did he fill his plays with them, he prefaced the plays with essays that were sometimes longer than the action. Is this another reason modern audiences don't like him: that he explained too much? By contrast with Shakespeare, who explained nothing, and
always gave his audiences plenty of sex and violence, neither of which has gone out of fashion in 400 years?
On a more hopeful note for Shaw, he is apparently the only writer to win both a Nobel prize for literature and an Oscar (for the screenplay of Pygmalion). Unlike Shakespeare, one of his plays (again Pygmalion) has also provided the premise for a TV reality show, in which pop star Kerry Katona was groomed with a view to passing herself off in polite society. Both of these facts suggest Shaw could yet be reclaimed by a modern audience. After all, Shakespeare has had quiet centuries too.
I don't know. I only know that Shaw died in 1950 after a fall from a ladder, and he seems to have been falling ever since. His work is so vast and so little presented that, outside academia, no one knows where to start now. Like most people, I only ever meet him in quotations dictionaries. But any man who said that if all the economists in the world were laid end to end, "they would not reach a conclusion" can't be bad. Having failed to reach a conclusion myself, I'll just leave you with that.