Biographical criticism has treated Cymbeline as the dream-work of a man in the sunset of his life, too exhausted to invent new devices, filling it with echoes from Othello, King Lear, As You Like It. In this interpretation the contortions of the plot, grandiloquences of speech, emotional disorientation all become symptoms of Shakespeare’s second childhood; signposts in a world of fairy-tales which ‘complete existence for the young, and replace it for the old’. But in the context of historical criticism Shakespeare’s change of mood reflects a change in the country under a new monarch, King James I, a generous patron of Shakespeare’s company, who claimed descent from the mythical King Arthur and encouraged the arts to draw their inspiration from ancient English history. The extraordinary last act, with its profusion of dénouements leading to the King’s final speech, ‘Publish we this peace to all our subjects’, becomes in this historical context a commentary on King James’s intricate policy of appeasement – with a flattering masque served up to appeal to the new Court’s love of pageant. Later, in post-modernist criticism, Cymbeline was to be transformed into a post-Shakespearean romance that deconstructs the forms of Elizabethan tragedy.
What Shaw does is to replace Shakespeare’s fairy-tale with his own, introduce a number of contemporary political comments, and continue the work of deconstruction with a parody of diplomatic realism. He makes short work of the ‘ludicrous’ battle sequences, jettisons the masque, banishes all apparitions, gods, soothsayers, and, condensing five scenes into one, straightens out Shakespeare’s meanderings in little more than twenty minutes (‘Are there more plots to unravel?’ demands Cymbeline impatiently). He also uses the English victory over the Romans as a history lesson for Neville Chamberlain, advocating the preparedness of military training and rearmament. Finally, in the dismayed reactions of Guiderius and Arviragus to the discovery that they are the King’s sons (‘Not free to wed the woman of my choice... I abdicate and pass the throne to Polydore,’ cries Guiderius, to which Arviragus objects, ‘Do you, by heavens? Thank you for nothing, brother’), Shaw makes an approving reference to the abdication of Edward VIII which was announced while he was writing the play.
Cymbeline Refinished retains eighty-nine of Shakespeare’s lines, but Shaw gives none of them to Imogen whom he converts, as if she were a posthumous gift for Ellen Terry, into the incipient New Woman. Though some beautiful lines are forfeited, there is more than one ‘hilarious sensation’ in the best Shavian manner and fleeting moments of beauty, such as Imogen’s plea to the smiling Iachimo (who is made cleverer at the expense of Posthumus) and his response to her:
IMOGEN Oh, do not make me laugh.
Laughter dissolves too many just resentments
Pardons too many sins.
IACHIMO And saves the world
A many thousand murders.
Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw opened at the Embassy Theatre for a three-week run on 16 November 1937, the day before Chamberlain began his policy of appeasement with Lord Halifax’s visit to Hitler. The performance ‘left the impression that the actors were saving themselves up for Shaw at the expense of Shakespeare,’ wrote The Times. ‘...[They] visibly thrilled to a brand new challenge when the fifth act began.’ But the general public, worried by the news of the Japanese capture of Shanghai, General Franco’s blockade of the Spanish coast, and the riots in Sudeten Czechoslovakia, were in no mind to enter fairyland. They wanted something that spoke to the problems of the present – which is what Shaw, in his next play, tried to give them.
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Shaw’s expedition to the League of Nations Palace in September 1928 had been made towards the end of its ascendant phase. In this age of early tanks and aeroplanes, poison gas, new guns and bombs, people looked to the League to quell their anxieties. ‘I see again Mr Bernard Shaw stalking out of the dining-room of the Residence,’ wrote the diplomatist Bruce Lockhart, ‘an object of greater hero-worship and reverence to the throng of League visitors than any political delegate.’
Shaw was vividly aware of his starring role. ‘Fortunately, the young ladies of the Secretariat, who have plenty of theatrical instinct, arrange the platform in such a way that the president, the speakers, and the bureau are packed low down before a broad tableau curtain which, being in three pieces, provides most effective dramatic entrances right and left of the centre,’ he wrote.
‘When a young lady secretary has a new dress, or for any other reason feels that she is looking her best, she waits until the speaker – possibly a Chinese gentleman carefully plodding through a paper written in his best French – has reduced half the public galleries to listless distraction and the other half to stertorous slumber. Then she suddenly, but gracefully, snatches the curtains apart and stands revealed, a captivating mannequin, whilst she pretends to look round with a pair of sparkling eyes for her principal on the bureau. The effect is electric: the audience wakes up and passes with a flash from listless desperation to tense fascination, to the great encouragement of the speaker, who, with his back to the vision beautiful, believes he has won over the meeting at last.’
Swarms of journalists circled through the whispering atmosphere, plunging after gobbets of scandal, as the politicians, like monsters from the past, grappled clumsily for personal advantage. Among these relics of what seemed like a species already extinct, G.B.S. saw sparks of hope. The smaller states had sent to Geneva their ‘heaviest champions’ to hold the fort for sane internationalism against the cabinets of big Powers seeking to reduce the League to impotence. In such a situation the Whitehall socialite ‘soon suffers a Lake change,’ Shaw noticed. ‘In the atmosphere of Geneva patriotism perishes... In short, the League is a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy.’
The social, economic and humanitarian work of the League was carried out by the International Labour Organization, whose offices occupied a newly designed building where Labour was glorified in stained glass and muscular statuary. ‘Here the air is quite fresh: no flavor of Whitehall leather and prunella can be sniffed anywhere,’ Shaw wrote. ‘These neo-Carthusians are of a new order.’ To his eyes they were genuine internationalists working at what he had regarded all his Fabian life as the realities of politics: improving labour conditions; fighting epidemic diseases; finding accommodation and work for displaced people; controlling the traffic in opium; establishing the rights of women; caring for children, protecting strangers, welcoming sojourners like Shaw himself, and generally forcing up the moral standards of the big Powers.
Shaw’s Fabian Tract No. 226 put the question: ‘What do all these people do besides pretending that the League can prevent war?’ He gave as his answer that Geneva could justify its existence ten times over through this work of the International Labour Organization.
His play, Geneva, written mainly in the late 1930s, when the League was diminished by the Japanese invasion of Chinese Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the German invasion of the demilitarized Rhineland, was a make-believe about what might have happened if the Geneva Idea had spread. He pretends that there is no veto to make the League sterile, that the Idea has blown a fresh moral climate into the political atmosphere. He converts the natural theatre of the League’s Palace into a Platonic forum for international opinion, using none of the three institutions at its centre, but two of its satellites: the International Court at The Hague and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris.
Of all the functions of the League, the permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague was the most widely understood. ‘The League is still too uncertain of its powers to call the offenders to account,’ Shaw wrote in 1930. Six years later he gives his Judge in Geneva this certainty and makes the Hague Court the League’s operative organ.
This Judge, who presides over the last act of the play, has been called forth by applications for warrants against the dictators of Europe issued in Act I from the office of the International Institute for Intellectual
Cooperation. So little known was this organization that many of Shaw’s audiences believed he invented it. In fact he had merely invented its usefulness.
The first chairman had been Henri Bergson, but it was not until Gilbert Murray took over the chairmanship in 1928 that Shaw began to grow interested in its possibilities. Murray himself had shied away from this ‘beastly Intellectual Travail’ which attracted what Arthur Koestler called the intellectual ‘Call Girls’ of the world to its conferences. ‘It was rather like a Shaw play,’ Murray decided after one of these bureaucratic comedies. Yet in spite of himself ‘I find that I am getting interested in the wretched business, from having to explain and defend it!’ By the end of 1933 Murray had come to see its meetings as ‘a record – fragmentary indeed and imperfect – of the unseen process which creates and maintains human progress; a process which seldom gets into the front page of any popular newspaper, because it does not consist of explosions or spectacular triumphs; only of the steady growth, and amid much discouragement, of the activity that will save civilisation, if civilisation is to be saved’.
Gilbert Murray was godparent to Shaw’s Geneva. In 1933 he published a study of Aristophanes which he dedicated to Shaw, ‘lover of ideas and hater of cruelty, who has filled many lands with laughter and whose courage has never failed’. ‘Thanks mainly to Gilbert Murray, I know as much as anyone need know of the ancient Greek drama,’ Shaw later wrote. In Geneva he went back to the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, satirizing contemporary politicians to illustrate recurring historical processes. ‘The play is a lampoon with Hitler and Mussolini unmistakably on the stage,’ he told the theatrical producer H. K. Ayliff. Though still making fun of Murray’s Institute, Shaw gives it something to do at last.
The first act opens in its invented Geneva office, a ‘rotten little room’ on the third floor of a ‘tumbledown old house full of rats’. With her heels on the dingy table, sits a good-looking self-satisfied young Englishwoman smoking and reading an illustrated magazine. Her name is Begonia Brown. ‘Nobody ever comes in here,’ she says. But that May morning near the end of the 1930s she is astonished to be called on by five claimants in succession, ‘each with a grievance which they expect her to remedy’. Begonia Brown refers all grievances to the International Court at The Hague.
As the play proceeds into and beyond the second act we are introduced to the Spirit of Geneva in the person of the League’s Secretary: Shaw’s portrait of the permanent British Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond, to whom he grants the ‘Lake change’ he referred to in his Fabian Tract. Opposing him is the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Orpheus Midlander, ‘a very well-dressed gentleman of fifty or thereabouts, genial in manner, quick-witted in conversation, altogether a pleasant and popular personality’ – a damning Shavian description. He represents time present – ‘Nothing wrong with the world: nothing whatever,’ he tells the League of Nations Secretary in the manner of Tom Broadbent cheering up the disfrocked Irish priest Peter Keegan in John Bull’s Other Island; and he prescribes ‘a cup of tea’ to cure despair rather as Broadbent recommends phosphorous pills to brighten up Keegan’s view of the world. Sir Orpheus is opposed to change and believes that politics should be left to professional politicians (‘we cant have literary people interfering in foreign affairs’). He is Shaw’s portrait of Sir Austen Chamberlain (Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs between 1924 and 1929) whose naїve patriotism had been a standing joke at Geneva, ‘so outrageous that only a man with a single eyeglass could have got away with it,’ Shaw recalled in his Fabian Tract.
Begonia Brown’s unprecedented action creates European chaos and a war, in consequence of which she grows so popular in Britain that the government is obliged to make her a Dame of the British Empire. Like Sir Orpheus she is a patriot, but she is far more pugnacious and parochial than the Foreign Secretary, treating all ‘foreigners as her inferiors, especially when they differ in colour’. She represents the spirit of the past, and its aggressive resurgence into the present. ‘If you want to know what real English public opinion is, keep your eye on me,’ she tells the League’s Secretary. ‘I’m not a bit afraid of war...’ Though everyone agrees she is a political ignoramus, ‘she has courage, sincerity, good looks, and big publicity,’ Sir Orpheus acknowledges, ‘...Everything that our voters love.’ She is also intensely ambitious and knows that ‘victory in war is the key to fame and glory’. This Boadicea is to become ‘the first female Prime Minister, too late for inclusion in the play,’ Shaw was later to tell readers of Everybody’s Political What’s What? This is his prophetic warning against the backward-looking culture of a nation in decline that will raise from its legendary depths a Warrior Queen to relive its heroic days.
It is to gain the good opinion of the world that the three dictators present themselves at the international court. ‘Where the spotlight is, there will the despots be gathered.’ Signor Bardo Bombardone, ‘a man of destiny’ got up in the British première as a Roman emperor, has had previous reincarnations as Nero and Napoleon; Herr Battler with his ‘resolutely dissatisfied expression’ and attired as Lohengrin suggests Hitler’s permanent place in German medieval romance; and the name General Flanco de Fortinbras connects the contemporary Spanish leader to the Prince of Norway who calls for ‘Soldiers’ music and the rites of war’ over Hamlet’s body at the end of Shakespeare’s play.
‘What an actor!’ exclaims Battler in admiration of Bombardone. He is indeed a wonderfully bumptious presence, with a flight of words for every occasion, enunciating the doctrine of power, the praise of war, the belief in will and impulse that belong to Nietzsche. Bombardone is somewhat contemptuous of Flanco, a limited archetypal gentleman-soldier from the old school; but he feels wary of Battler whom he sees on a razor’s edge between inspiration and the megalomania that is a recurrent theme in Shaw’s later work.
Hitler had turned out to be ‘a very difficult character to dramatize’. It was not easy for Shaw to get ‘any credible account of the man’. He distrusted the newspaper stories he read and in 1936 and 1937 there was little else to go on. Some people he questioned, such as the German biographer Emil Ludwig, described Hitler as ‘an illiterate semi-idiot’. However a book called I Knew Hitler (1938) by Kurt Ludecke, an early Nazi who had left the party and gone into exile, gave Shaw a picture he could recognize – that of a patient learner determined to rise above his obscurity.
In trying to explain the phenomenon of Hitler, Shaw involves everyone. His Battler has been born a nobody, grown up in a humiliated country and matched his life to Germany’s history. This is no freakish homuncule accidentally visited upon an unfortunate world, but a terrible combination of us all, and it is we who have created him and called him forth. He bears witness to having been carried forward by ‘a mighty movement in the history of the world.
‘Impelled by it I have stretched out my hand and lifted my country from the gutter into which you and your allies were trampling it, and made it once more the terror of Europe, though the danger is in your own guilty souls and not in any malice of mine... You must all come my way, because I march with the times, and march as pioneer...’
But for those who expected him to prove the most ominous of the dictators, bringing extra intensity to the last act, Battler is a disappointment. Partly it may have been that Hitler was beyond Shaw’s range: he had chosen a brief period when he played ‘understudy’ to Mussolini. Partly it may be that his interest in power had declined in old age: many of Battler’s lines lack bite and he is given no confrontation with his chief accuser, the Jew, to match the confrontation between Warwick and Cauchon in Saint Joan. Partly, too, Shaw may have been worried by the consequences on Trebitsch of a horrifying stage presentation of protofascism (‘I could not involve you in such a controversy,’ he had written earlier, ‘...you would run all the risks and I none’).
Shaw tried to develop the character of Battler through the many revisions of Geneva. The first draft had been written between the second week of February and the first we
ek of April 1936. ‘I think I shall be able to turn Geneva into a presentable play after all,’ Shaw wrote that May. A year later, now nearing his eighty-second birthday, he announced: ‘Geneva is finished. So am I – very nearly.’ Both statements were untrue. The world première, however, took place in Warsaw on 25 July 1938 while Germany was preparing to mobilize. The British première opened at Malvern on 1 August in a last-minute revised version that with further modifications was then transferred to London towards the end of November.
Shaw’s alterations to Geneva were of three kinds: changes ‘to cut it to the bone’, changes to keep it up to date, and changes to appease Jewish feelings. None was perceived as being successful.
The fashionable length for a play in the 1930s was a little over two hours – 18,000 words. Shaw’s plays were from a third to half as long again. ‘I now overwrite to such an extent,’ he had said at the end of 1933, ‘that I have to cut the play down by a full third to pull it properly together and bring it within possible limits of time.’ Yet they were still too long – and when he added a new penultimate act in 1945 the length of Geneva was extended to nearly three and a half hours.
‘All plays with topical gags (and there is nothing else in Geneva) must have been altered almost from night to night in pantomimes and burlesques,’ Shaw wrote to the producer, H. K. Ayliff. The most substantial of his topical changes was to be the 600-word scene he added in September 1939. ‘The declaration of war is the making of Geneva which has always lacked a substantial climax,’ he told the theatrical presenter Roy Limbert. In the last weeks of 1938 and during the first eight months of 1939 Geneva had scored a spectacular success, playing for 237 performances in London before going on tour. ‘When do you sail?’ Shaw asked Maurice Colbourne on 17 September 1939. ‘I can let you have the new version by the end of the week.’ But Colbourne, who with Barry Jones was to give it an adventurous tour through Canada and the United States, believed that ‘Hitler worked too fast... the play was out of date before its ink was dry.’ By the time Geneva opened at the Henry Miller Theater in New York on 30 January 1940, the League of Nations was moribund and Shaw’s courtroom proceedings sounded ‘extraordinarily futile’.
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