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Shelley and Shaw
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Commentators on the works of George Bernard Shaw almost invariably acknowledge his great indebtedness to Shelley. Their remarks are, however, limited to a passing statement or, at most, a page or two in which Shaw's enthusiasm for Shelley receives a very general treatment—several quotations from Shaw (and there are two or three favorites) usually being cited as evidence which needs little if any elaboration. Few of the numerous instances in which Shaw directly acknowledges his debt to Shelley have been noted by critics, to say nothing of an examination of decidedly Shelleyan ideas which are prominent in Shaw's writings. I propose, therefore, to trace in considerable detail the background of Shaw's interest in Shelley, its effect upon him, his opinions about Shelley and his art, and especially his agreements and disagreements with important ideas held by Shelley.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
Note 1 in page 114 See, however, Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (New York, 1950), p. 390 n. In this long note Professor Cameron presents an admirable résumé of views expressed by Shaw at meetings of the Shelley Society and points out other aspects of Shaw's interest in Shelley.
Note 2 in page 114 Stephen Winsten, Shaw's Corner (London, 1952), p. 107.
Note 3 in page 114 To a Young Actress: The Letters of Bernard Shaw to Molly Tompkins, ed. Peter Tompkins (New York, 1960), p. 72.
Note 4 in page 114 George Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches (London, 1949), p. 108.
Note 5 in page 114 Stephen Winsten, Days with Bernard Shaw (New York, 1949), p. 37.
Note 6 in page 114 George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Immaturity, in The Collected Works, Ayot St. Lawrence Ed. (New York, 1930–32), I, xx. All subsequent references to Shaw's writings, unless otherwise indicated, are to this edition.
Pointing out that Shaw used Shelley's term “Jupiter” and Blake's “Nobodaddy” interchangeably in the preface to Back to Methuselah, Julian B. Kaye, in his book, Bernard Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1958), p. 127, declares that Shaw, as he grew older, realized that Shelley had not been an atheist—that Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound represents not God but Nobodaddy.
Note 7 in page 115 See Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century (New York, 1936), p. 151. In a footnote Henderson points out that the remark is not found in the minutes of the Shelley Society. Shaw later (in the preface to Immaturity, p. xx) says of this declaration: “I did not know that I could have expressed my position more accurately by simply saying that my conception of God was that insisted on in the first Article of the Church of England. … I had never thought of reading the Articles of the Church of England; and if I had I should still have used the word atheist as a declaration that I was on the side of Bradlaugh and Foote and others who, as avowed Secularists and Atheists, were being persecuted and imprisoned for my opinions.” Shaw repeated the declaration in 1892 at a vegetarian banquet commemorating the Shelley Centenary. See “A Feast for Faddists,” Pall Mall Gazette, LIV (27 June 1892), 2.
Note 8 in page 115 Winsten, Days with Bernard Shaw, p. 196.
Note 9 in page 115 R. F. Rattray, Bernard Shaw: A Chronicle (Luton, England, 1951), p. 34. See also Henderson, p. 136. Shaw frequently refers to Shelley's being deprived by the State of the guardianship over his children. See George Bernard Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What (New York, 1945), pp. 74 and 152, and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, pp. 475,479.
Note 10 in page 115 Immaturity, pp. xix-xx.
Note 11 in page 115 Shaw, “An Aside”; see E. J. West, ed., Shaw on Theatre (New York, 1959), p. 219.
Note 12 in page 115 Sixteen Self Sketches, p. 53.
Note 13 in page 115 Winsten, Days with Bernard Shaw, p. 195. See also Winsten, Shaw's Corner, p. 35.
Note 14 in page 116 “Hypochondria,” the preface to Heartbreak House, p. 9. Julian Kaye (p. 129, n.) points out that Shaw referred to meat eaters as people who ate corpses and that The Revolt of Islam (v, lv-lvi) indicates a similar opinion on Shelley's part.
Note 15 in page 116 Shaw, “Shaming the Devil about Shelley,” Pen Portraits and Reviews, p. 253.
Note 16 in page 116 “Epistle Dedicatory,” Man and Superman, xxxi-xxxii. The other eleven are Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth, Turner, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche.
Note 17 in page 116 Ibid., pp. xxxvi-xxxvii.
Note 18 in page 116 Everybody's Political What's What, p. 360.
Note 19 in page 116 See Pen Portraits and Reviews, pp. 248–259. The quotations in this and the following two paragraphs are from “Shaming the Devil about Shelley.”
Note 20 in page 117 Winsten, Days with Bernard Shaw, p. 271.
Note 21 in page 117 Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, iii, p. 188.
Note 22 in page 117 Letter of January 1917. See Frank Harris, Bernard Shaw (New York, 1931), p. 362.
Note 23 in page 117 “An Aside,” p. 223.
Note 24 in page 117 Pen Portraits and Reviews, p. 191. At the vegetarian banquet held to commemorate the Shelley Centenary, Shaw “regretted that Shelley's artistic excellence, now beyond question, overshadowed his importance as a leader of thought.” See “A Feast for Faddists,” p. 2.
Note 25 in page 117 The Shelley Society, Publications, ser. 1, no. 2, pt. 1 [1913], p. 193.
Note 26 in page 117 Ibid., p. 31.
Note 27 in page 118 The Perfect Wagnerile, p. 275.
Note 28 in page 118 The Shelley Society, Publications, ser. 1, no. 2, pt. 1, pp. 184–185. Perhaps noteworthy in this regard is Shaw's postcard to Sylva Norman, in which he cautioned her about the reporting of the Shelley Society, stating that he himself had been among those suffering most severely from its inaccuracies. See her Flight of the Skylark (London, 1954), p. 272, n.
Note 29 in page 118 “The Censorship of the Stage in England,”; see West, pp. 71–72, 77; see also Appendix to The Quintessence of Ibsenism (West, p. 11). This apprendix appeared with the essay in only the first edition, 1891.
Note 30 in page 118 See Everybody's Political What's What, pp. 194–195, 198, 324, 325.
Note 31 in page 118 Letter of 24 June 1930. See Karris, p. 243.
Note 32 in page 118 Everybody's Political What's What, p. 176.
Note 33 in page 118 Preface to “The Black Girl in Search of God,” in The Black Girl in Search of God, and Some Lesser Tales, Standard ed. (London, 1934), p. 11.
Note 34 in page 118 The Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 56. 35 The Perfect Wagnerite, pp. 230–231.
Note 36 in page 119 Ibid., p. 232.
Note 37 in page 119 “Parents and Children,” the preface to Misalliance, p. 99.
Note 38 in page 119 “The Religion of the Pianoforte,” Fortnightly Rev., LV, n.s. (1 February 1894), 264.
Note 39 in page 119 “Epistle Dedicatory” to Man and Superman, p. xiv.
Note 40 in page 119 Winsten, Days with Bernard Shaw, p. 113. Shaw's response, at the 8 June 1887 meeting of the Shelley Society, to Mr. Edward Silsbee's untitled paper on Shelley, is pertinent here: “Mr. Bernard Shaw said the paper seemed to him a sort of act of worship, and he dreaded all criticism that had not a basis of reason. It seemed to him that Shelley does produce irrationally enthusiastical phenomena, which Dante and Shakespeare do not.” See Shelley Society, Publications, ser. 1, no. 2, pt. 2. See also Henderson, p. 152. Quite obviously, Shaw himself was tempted more by Shelley than by Shakespeare and Dante to become irrationally enthusiastic.
Note 41 in page 119 Man and Superman, p. 207.
Note 42 in page 120 “The Problem Play—A Symposium,” in West, pp. 64–65. This article first appeared in The Humanitarian, vi (May 1895).
Note 43 in page 120 Preface (1898) to Plays, Pleasant ana“ Unpleasant, p. ix.
Note 44 in page 120 Pen Portraits and Reviews, p. 193.
Note 45 in page 120 The Quintessence of Ibsenism, pp. 143–144. At the 8 June 1887 meeting of the Shelley Society, Shaw “contended that … Shelley had a large fund of humor, but the fact of taking so serious a view of life and life's work kept the humor away from his poetry.” See Shelley Society, Publications, ser. 1, no. 2, pt. 2.
Note 46 in page 120 The Quintessence of Ibsenism, p. 143,
Note 47 in page 120 Ibid., p. 15. In a footnote Shaw declares the second proposition both unimportant and old-fashioned. He compares it to the proposition, “It is not wrong to stand on one's head”; to which the reply is, “You may be very right; but as nobody wants to, why bother about it?” Yet he believes that Shelley has helped to bring about the modern, sensible way of treating the matter—an obvious improvement over the old morbid horror.
Note 48 in page 121 Ibid., pp. 31–33.
Note 49 in page 121 Ibid., pp. 33–34. The misleading statement about Shelley was one of Matthew Arnold's declarations. See also Pen Portraits and Reviews, p. 253.
Note 50 in page 121 Candida, p. 93. In view of Shaw's frequent citing of Shelley as a specimen of the realist in The Quintessence, it is most surprising to come upon William Irvine's remark that Marchbanks “is perhaps too much Shelley made over to fit the definition of a Shavian realist.” See Irvine, The Universe of G.B.S. (New York, 1949), p. 178.
Note 51 in page 121 See Henderson, p. 443. Note, in Henderson's biography, the photograph of the actor Arnold Daly as Marchbanks (in 1903), reading Shelley's poem, “One word is too oft profaned.”
Note 52 in page 121 Captain Brassbound's Conversion (Act l), p. 231. Note that Shaw has earlier used the phrase “witch of Atlas” in his first novel Immaturity (written in 1879), p. 350.
Note 53 in page 122 Immaturity, pp. 57, 58.
Note 54 in page 122 Ibid., p. 399. The novel also contains a reference to Laon and Cythna in which that poem is equated with Hamlet in regard to its intellectual content and artistry (p. 118).
Note 55 in page 122 Preface to Immaturity, p. xxxvi.
Note 56 in page 122 Essay on Christianity; see Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Works, Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, eds., Julian Ed. (London and New York, 1926–30), vi, 239. This edition is hereafter referred to as Works. Page numbers in parentheses after quotations from the Essay on Christianity refer to this edition.
Note 57 in page 123 Caesar and Cleopatra (Act v), p. 200.
Note 58 in page 123 See The Perfect Wagnerite, pp. 235–236, -where Shaw asserts that, to avoid the unprogressive fate of China, a nation must have anarchists, but that the anarchism must be limited to the sphere of thought. Our criminal law, he continues, is the outgrowth of “our vindictiveness and cruelty in a virtuous disguise,” and its own evil and uselessness will eventually beat this “unmitigated and abominable nuisance” out of us. Shaw predicts that it will not be replaced by anarchy, but that a much higher degree of social action will need to be exerted in order to bring about an appreciable change in the established system.
Note 59 in page 123 Preface to Androcles and the Lion, p. 24. Hereafter, page references to this preface are made parenthetically after quotations.
Note 60 in page 124 In view of his advocacy of love for both neighbor and enemy, Shaw may be called to task for his attack upon Shelley and Wagner as succumbing to panacea-mongering when they present universal love as the answer to man's problems. (See fn. 35.)
Note 61 in page 124 On the Punishment of Death; see Works, VI, 187, 190.
Note 62 in page 125 Appendix to Androcles and the Lion, p. 152.
Note 63 in page 125 Another parallel passage from Shelley is found in his fragment, The Moral Teachings of Jesus Christ (Works, vi, 255) : “This alone would be a demonstration of the falsehood of Christianity, that the religion so called is the strongest ally and bulwark of that system of successful force and fraud and of the selfish passions from which it has derived its origin and permanence, against which Jesus Christ declared the most uncompromising war, and the extinction of which appears to have been the great motive of his life… . Doctrines of reform were never carried to so great a length as by Jesus Christ.”
Note 64 in page 125 In his preface to Back to Methuselah (p. xxxix) Shaw again expounds this very point: “People at large could not conceive a god who was not anthropomorphic : they stood by the Old Testament legends of a God whose parts had been seen by one of the patriarchs, and finally set up as against the Church a God who, far from being without body, parts, or passions, was composed of nothing else, and of very evil passions too. They imposed this idol in practice on the Church itself, in spite of the First Article, and thereby homeopathi-cally produced the atheist, whose denial of God was simply a denial of the idol and a demonstration against an unbearable and most unchristian idolatry. The idol was, as Shelley had been expelled from Oxford for pointing out, an almighty fiend, with a petty character and unlimited power, spiteful, cruel, jealous, vindictive, and physically violent.”
Note 65 in page 126 Back to Methuselah (Part rv, Act i), pp. 164–165. 66 Ibid. (Part iv, Act n), pp. 184–185.
Note 67 in page 126 The Perfect Wagnerite, pp. 234–235.
Note 68 in page 126 Ibid., p. 231.
Note 69 in page 127 Quoted by Rattray, p. 177.
Note 70 in page 127 70 Ibid.