Shaw / Baziyan Major Barbara & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-7427-6971-8
Verlag: neobooks
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Deutsch, 370 Seiten

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Major Barbara contains 178 letters and entries, written between 1891 and 1950. This publication from 'John Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara: also How He Lied to Her Husband, Constable and Company Ltd, London, 1920' is a handmade reproduc-tion from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading. Here are some inspirational book quotes from Bernard Shaw: 'When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world hap-pens to agree.' 'Marx's 'Capital' is as amateurish in its abstract economics as Ruskin's Munera Pulveris, or, for the matter of that, as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; but for all that it is one of the books that has changed the mind of the world.' 'I do not say that my books and plays cannot do harm to weak or dishonest people. They can, and probably do. But if the American character cannot stand that fire even at the earliest age at which it is readable or intelligible, there is no future for America.' 'Now I want to make a suggestion to the press. I dont ask them to give up abusing me, or declaring that my plays are not plays and my characters not human beings. Not for worlds would I deprive them of the inexhaustible pleasure these paradoxes seem to give them. But I do ask them, for the sake of the actors and of Vedrenne and Barker's enterprise, to reverse the order of their attacks and their caresses. In the future, instead of abusing the new play and praising the one before, let them abuse the one before and praise the new one.' 'I regard a writer who is convinced that his views are right and sound as a very dangerous kind of lunatic. He is to be found in every asylum; and his delusion is that he is the Pope, or even a higher authority than the Pope.' 'All the faithful I have known have been rough and unsympathetic at times, all the charming persons I have known have been faithless in some of the relations of life.' 'An educated man, according to the old formula, is one who knows everything of something or something of everything.' 'But would anyone but a buffle headed idiot of a university professor, half crazy with correcting examination papers (another infamous activity pursued under economic pressure) immediately shriek that all my plays were written as economic essays, and that I did not know that they were plays of life, character, and human destiny as much as Shakespear's or Euripides's?' 'My plays are miracles of dramatic organization because I have never constructed them: there is not an ounce of dead wood in them: every bit of them is alive for somebody. To me constructed plays are all dead wood, bearable only for the sake of such scraps of sentiment or fun or observation as the artificer has been able to stick on them.' 'The cost of getting old is that one does and says things without realising what effect they may have on other people or oneself.' 'There is a point at which continuous successes will make a man believe that he can achieve anything.' 'I have honor and humanity on my side, wit in my head, skill in my hand, and a higher life for my aim.' 'It is not the story that matters but the way it is told.'

Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and influencer. Shaw is one of only two people in the world to have won both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shaw, Bernard

Baziyan, Vitaly

Leseproben

63/ Sidney Webb to Beatrice Webb   17th June 1907   Dear One I was glad to get your long cheery letter this morning; and to think of you as well. Your visit will have been good as preventing any doubt or uncertainty as to there being any sort of validity in the idea of ‘no relief for the able bodied’—which is, in fact, only the negation of the very idea of a Poor Law. The Shaws are very happy and prosperous—nearly persuaded to get a motorcar, and learn themselves to drive it! Charlotte has been a five-days tour with Lion Phillimore. One [Robert] Lorraine, an actor, who plays Jack Tanner [in Shaw’s Man and Superman], was there; with his little motorcar. There is a possibility of Granville Barker being offered a big theatre and a big salary in New York, to repeat there what he has done at the Court [Theatre]. There is as yet no new play begun. As to availability of the house, Charlotte thinks she will get her Welsh Mansion, (at some large price!). It will not be until after 7 July, it is clear, because there is a public dinner to Granville Barker on that day at which Shaw plays a leading part. Down [Mrs Arthur Down] does not know whether her sister would be able to go to Hertfordshire, but will write to ask; also as to a gardener youth; but her relatives are engaged. Today I have got Professor [Karl Gustav] Cassel, a Swedish Economist coming to lunch—he is a Marshallian, but he asked to come. He is the only Political Economist in Stockholm; and now the merchants insist on starting a Faculty of Commerce—all shorthand and bookkeeping, French and German. He turns out to be a Land Reformer, and quite reasonably ‘Fabian’; much interested in getting more concrete economics. Cyril Jackson is just about to start his enquiry into boy labor, and asks what your lady can do! I told him that I feared she had gone off into history, and was probably not going to be of any use to him. Per Contra—I hear that the Liverpool Fabian Society is going to devote the coming year to studying Casual Labor there. I have encouraged them, and discreetly directed them, as to what to get and what to do, and what conclusion to come to. If the Society brings out a good report a year hence, it will not be otherwise than helpful. Goodbye—dear one, do not get too tired—don’t commit yourself to Aberdeen.   Sidney       64/ Sidney Webb to Beatrice Webb   20th June 1907   Dear One Your charming letters are a great joy to me. I am fully convinced that it is well worthwhile your going to Aberdeen, if you don’t visit too many institutions. Pray don’t feel obliged to go through the programme any day that you are tired. The quorum of three is all nonsense: there is no requirement that there should be three; or that all three should be always together—though no doubt it looks better to pretend that the Commission has so divided up. Here are some fragments of more or less interest, not involving any action on your part. The photograph of me I have no knowledge of. I was at Brighton with [Graham] Wallas after my scarlet fever in 1890-1, but I do not remember being ‘took’, then or otherwise. Last night I read through Shaw’s new volume of (old) plays, staying up until I finished it (which was only till 12). It is full of amazingly clever observations and correct criticisms of persons and tendencies. But to me all this ‘scrappy’ and disconnected criticism lacks force and effectiveness—at least, I do not feel myself to be affected, and therefore doubt whether others are affected, to any great extent. It seems to me, as with his presence on the St Pancras Borough Council, that he fails to ‘catch hold’ of the ordinary man—just as a locomotive engine, when its wheels revolve fast without ‘biting’ the rails, and therefore without making the train progress. This leaves out of account his effect in stimulating people to think, if they can think; and in imperceptibly educating them to see that shams are shams. How many are capable of such education? There is thus a lack of constructiveness in the effort, which seems regrettable. But he is as he is; and I suppose all I mean is that he is not me! I send you the book herewith, in case you care to read it, or in it, for it is all in pieces. (Bring it back.) You will see from the [Louisa] Creighton letter that the two sons of Frederic Harrison are coming to dinner tomorrow, which is quite interesting. Now goodbye dear one, or I shall get no work done. This is a very dreary time, but you must not go away again.   Sidney       65/ Bernard Shaw’s article “The Solution to the Censorship Problem” contributed to The Academy, a review of literature and general topics published in London   29th June 1907   The Academy, in taking up the question of the censorship of the stage in England, has done no more than its duty in the position it has lately taken as an organ of belles lettres. Most literary papers conceive it to be their duty to express all the popular prejudices and corrupt interests which enslave literature, and to give their earnest and thoroughly intimidated support to the Philistine assumption that every artist, especially every artist connected with the stage, is an agent of the devil. That this assumption may in certain cases be sufficiently sound to have a salutary effect need not be denied; and I should not complain of it if it were impartially applied to all the professions with due regard to the patent fact that the stage tests character more severely than the pulpit, and far more severely than the exchange and the counting house or the routine of fashion. But unfortunately it is coupled with another assumption which is monstrous and intolerable. And that assumption is that any person who is not connected with the theatre or the fine arts is competent to supervise them despotically in the interests of public morality, just as any tramp is considered competent to hold a horse. This is the Achilles heel of our present censorship. All the rest is invulnerable. It is quite possible to conduct a theatre in such a fashion as to make the stage a mere shop window for the brothel. Theatres have been and still are so conducted, though they are all licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, and cannot dress their shop window without paying him two guineas for certifying that the display “does not in its general tendency contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage.” Actors, actresses, authors, and managers—clever ones too—can be found who have absolutely no consciences as to the class of mind to which they appeal. They accept in its fullest dishonor the postulate that “the drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, &c.” It is useless to urge on their behalf that their profession exacts from them more industry, self-control, and nervous energy than a church living: the same may be said of burglary. A wise control of the stage by the community is very much to be desired indeed; and the mischief of the present situation lies, not in the existence of such a control, but in its utter defeat by the false and silly pretence that the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain supplies it. But there you have our national habit: if we have no good generals we pretend that the least imbecile one we have is a [Gaius Julius] Caesar or a Hannibal [Barkas]; if we cannot find a [Otto von] Bismarck or a [Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Count of] Cavour we draw disparaging comparisons between them and Sir Edward Grey or [Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice] Lord Lansdowne; our best bishop is always a [Jacques-Bénigne Lignel] Bossuet, our Lord Chancellor always a [John] Selden, our first Lord of the Treasury always a [an Athenian statesman, lawmaker and poet] Solon. And by dint of pretending that the King’s Reader of Plays, a very typical West End gentleman, is half [Charles-Augustin Sainte-] Beuve, half St Thomas Aquinas, and wholly and divinely good and omniscient, we have provoked an infuriated reaction in which Mr [dramatic censor George Alexander] Redford is dragged down to earth and accused of having been employed in a bank, the implication being that no antecedent could be more infamous. Now I do not agree with this view. I had rather be censured by a man with one day’s practical experience of banking than by a university professor of literature. Besides, as Mr [dramatic censor] Redford is eligible for the jury list, and may possibly have to decide some day whether I shall be hanged or not, it is useless to disparage his competence to discharge any possible judicial function under the sun. The question is, is the censure of plays a possible judicial function? I submit that it is not. I do not see how any censorship in the world can pretend to higher authority, more imposing prestige, and greater personal austerity than the Roman Catholic Church. Yet all that Church has been able to do is to reduce the institution of censorship to the wildest absurdity. The truth is that no book or play would ever be published or performed at all if it were really thoroughly censured. The Roman Catholic Church puts [Charles Robert] Darwin on the Index; but it goes still farther with the Bible, which it resolutely keeps on a top shelf beyond the reach of its average laity. Mr [dramatic censor] Redford has been accused of intolerance: I...