Abstract
Most realistic plays of any ambition written in the twentieth century have been — more or less — like the plays of Ibsen or like the plays of Chekhov. That is to say they have been, if Ibsenite, firm in structure, decisive in characterisation, and often focused on questions of public morality; if Chekhovian, they have been freer, more episodic in structure, comparatively ambiguous in characterisation, and focused on private, psycho-sexual concerns. This over-simplification may beg to be refuted, or at least qualified because it is unjust to the complexity of the modern theatre and reductive of the two great masters whose names are here appropriated, but not on the grounds that it ignores a notable comic tradition deriving from the work of Bernard Shaw. No such tradition, after all, exists. It is extraordinary that the other two initial masters of modern drama should be so profoundly influential that, at least arguably, subsequent plays have been in modes delineated by their work, whereas Shaw remains a solitary giant, in art as in life childless.
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Notes
For a thoughtful discussion of the relation between Shaw’s temperament and his style, see Richard Ohmann, Shaw: The Style and the Man (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1962).
From a letter to Ivor Brown, quoted in his Shaw in His Time (London: Nelson, 1965) p. 40.
These matters are admirably clarified by J. L. Wisenthal in the introduction to his Shaw and Ibsen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.) Wisenthal reprints, along with the text of The Quintessence, the direct warnings to rival socialists that Shaw omitted from the published version and footnotes the changes (which are perhaps less significant than Wisenthal argues) that, despite his disclaimers, Shaw did indeed make when he added new material to The Quintessence in 1913. This is the best edition in which to read The Quintessence.
See Charles A. Carpenter, Bernard Shaw and the Art of Destroying Ideals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
These equivalences and many others are thoughtfully examined in Martin Meisel’s Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
For a full consideration of both these topics see two studies by Bernard Dukore: Bernard Shaw, Director (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971) and The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).
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© 1983 Arthur Ganz
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Ganz, A. (1983). The Life of the Theatre: Shakespeare, Wagner, Ibsen and the Theatre of the Age. In: George Bernard Shaw. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17134-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17134-7_4
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