We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of ancient idealism.
(Prospectus for the Irish Literary Theatre drafted by Lady Gregory, 1897; page 188)
This is a much more substantial work than O’Connor’s 1975 history of the Easter Rising. That was a slender pocket-sized 180 pages, this is a bigger format 416-page book complete with hefty index, 17-page bibliography and all. But like the earlier book, it’s still very much a personal account, and based on biography and anecdote rather than more scholarly history.
O’Connor (1928 to 2019) wrote a lot but he was neither a professional historian nor literary critic. He was more an erudite and impassioned amateur. And so this isn’t a scholarly or historically profound account, more an attempt, in his own words, ‘to convey the energy and elation of an era on Europe’s last island, perhaps the last in a series of renaissances which flourished in different countries since the Italian one in the fourteenth century’.
As with the earlier book, O’Connor is not shy about describing his own connections with the various settings and people involved, which makes for sweet anecdotes which, however, tend to bring out its rather home-made feel.
I was led to believe it’s a group biography of the key figures of the Celtic renaissance but, as you can see from my summary (below), it’s more like an interlocking series of biographies of all the Irish writers of the time, plus a fair few political figures.
One by one O’Connor introduces them to us and gives pen portraits. (I double checked I was using this phrase correctly. A pen portrait is ‘a brief, vivid and written description of a person, providing a “snapshot” of their character, lifestyle, and key traits, rather than just objective data’, which seems accurate enough.)
First of all we’re introduced to the key figures in chronological order and then, as they begin to work together, write for each other’s magazines or theatres, introduce each other to new ideas etc, the stories overlap and intertwine to build up a mosaic portrait of a major literary movement. At key moments when the central players, Griffiths, Yeats, Lady Gregory, AE, Edward Martyn, see their vision for a mature national Irish literature come to fruition, it can be very moving. And the figure of George Moore, the mocking dandy novelist, weaves in and out of the story like Puck, helping, mocking and memoiring.
The key players are:
Standish O’Grady (1846 to 1928)
Son of a Church of Ireland minister, O’Grady retained his aristocratic Unionist beliefs till the end of his life, but he played a pivotal role in the Celtic Renaissance by researching, writing, publishing and publicising the ancient legends of Ireland. His academic works – ‘History of Ireland: Heroic Period’ (1878–81) and ‘Early Bardic Literature of Ireland’ (1879) – didn’t sell so he realised he needed to dramatise them and romanticise Irish legends in a series of historical novels including ‘Finn and his Companions’ (1891), ‘The Coming of Cuculain’ (1894), ‘The Chain of Gold’ (1895), ‘Ulrick the Ready’ (1896) and ‘The Flight of the Eagle’ (1897). His insistence that the ancient Irish legends ranked with the tales of Homer inspired Yeats and others, leading to the title ‘Father of the Celtic Revival’. A lot later Yeats wrote: ‘whatever is Irish in me he kindled to life’ (p.25).
Douglas Hyde (1860 to 1949)
Son of a Church of Ireland rector, Hyde was home schooled among gillies and labourers, where he heard Gaelic spoken and started to study it. He began transcribing folk songs and discovered the people of Connacht remembered courtly songs and poems, which he translated and published. It was his poems published between 1890 and 1894 that inspired Yeats and Lady Gregory to realise the folk culture could be the basis for a national revival.
Around 1880 Hyde joined the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. Between 1879 and 1884 he published more than a hundred pieces of Irish verse under the pen name An Craoibhín Aoibhinn.
In 1886 Hyde met and became close friends with W.B. Yeats (then 21). They often met and discussed each other’s poetry.
In 1892 Hyde helped establish the Gaelic Journal, and wrote a manifesto called ‘The necessity for de-anglicising the Irish nation’ arguing that Ireland should follow its own traditions in language, literature, and dress. O’Connor sees it as a pivotal moment (p.165) because it led to…
In 1893 he helped found Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) to encourage the preservation of Irish culture, music, dance and language. Ten years later there were 600 branches with a membership of 50,000. The next generation of Irish republicans (including Pádraig Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins) became politicised through their involvement in Conradh na Gaeilge.
In the same year he published ‘Love Songs of Connacht’. The book had Gaelic poems on one page and prose and verse translations on the other. O’Connor thinks it ‘set the style of the literary renaissance’ (p.170).
Charles Stewart Parnell (1846 to 1891)
1875: Charles Stewart Parnell elected MP for Meath. O’Connor thinks the crucial fact of his life was that his other was American, from a family of heroes who fought against the British. By 1880 Parnell had succeeded Isaac Butt as leader of the Irish Party. In 1888 he was vindicated by an enquiry into his role in the Phoenix Park Murders (which Skin-the-Goat in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ was meant to be the getaway driver for). Here and in his Easter Rising book, O’Connor thinks Parnell’s achievement was to bring together land reformers, constitutionalists and physical force advocates into one party to win the electoral success which gave them 70 or so seats in the London House of Commons and so made them the decisive force in British politics during the 1880s.
Parnell generated an energy which fuelled the elation unleashed in the national being.
Parnell had been having an affair with Katherine ‘Kitty’ O’Shea, a married woman, lived with her and fathered two children by her, when her husband, Captain O’Shea, brought a divorce suit against her, citing Parnell as co-respondent. The case came to court in November 1890 causing a scandal. The Catholic hierarchy turned against him, Gladstone was forced to criticise him. His closest associates in his own party deserted him to form the Irish National federation. The alliance of nationalist forces he had carefully assembled fragmented, and Irish nationalism was set back by a generation.
The following year he died of tuberculosis in Hove, aged just 45. His body was brought back to Dublin and given the biggest funeral procession ever seen. Yeats wrote several poems about it. So did the 9-year-old James Joyce, who went on to dramatise the bitterness surrounding his fall in the famous Christmas dinner scene in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
O’Connor thinks Parnell united the Anglo-Irish and the Gaelic Irish into the new identity of the nationalist Irish. (O’Connor nowhere really tackles the more obvious divide between Protestant and Catholic.)
Yeats believed part of the inspiration for the Irish Literary Renaissance was that the people’s creative energies were turned away from politics by Parnell’s fall and sought alternative outlets: folk stories, pagan religion, poetry and drama.
Lady Gregory (1852 to 1932)
Isabelle Augusta Persse, Lady Gregory was the 14th of 18 children! From a Protestant low church background but had a Catholic nanny who told her rebel stories. Met and married Sir William Gregory, recently retired as governor of Ceylon, 62 to her 28. Engaged in political campaigns. Affair with Wilfrid Blunt, the explorer, adventurer, poet and anti-imperialist. Jailed for chairing an anti-eviction meeting in Galway. Husband Sir William died in 1892 aged 74, leaving Augusta aged 40, mistress of Coole Park. She needed income so set about writing, and turning the Park into a venue for Irish nationalist writers. Her momentous meeting with 31 year-old Years was in 1896.
Agreed to create an Irish Literary Theatre for him, to be funded by Edward Martyn.
Studied Gaelic and collected folktales in west of Ireland, heading towards ‘Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland’, published in 1920 with notes and two essays by W.B. Yeats.
Memorably wrote: ‘I defy anyone to study Irish history without getting a dislike and distrust of England’ (p.201).
By the later 1890s Coole Park was recognised as a meeting place for writers, with Yeats often there, and AE, Douglas Hyde, Martin. George Bernard Shaw visited and John Masefield. When she heard Irish literature being condemned by Trinity College academics it inspired her to devote two years to retelling the stories from O’Grady’s History of Ireland but in her own style which she had developed over years of translating. The result was ‘Cuchulainn of Muirthemne: The Story Of The Men of the Red Branch Of Ulster arranged and put into English by Lady Gregory, with a preface by W. B. Yeats’, published in 1902. The book is a centrepiece of the literary renaissance. It was well reviewed, and Yeats later used stories in it as the basis for no fewer than five plays, and Synge based his last play, Deirdre, on it.
George Moore (1852 to 1933)
Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist. Moore came from a landed family of Catholics who lived at Moore Hall in Carra, County Mayo. The estate had 12,000 acres and his father had not only a stables but a full scale racecourse built on the model of Aintree racecourse in Liverpool.
Moore’s father wanted him to go into the Army but young George wanted to be a painter and so went to Paris in 1873 to study art. There, he befriended many of the leading French artists such as Manet (who painted his portrait) and Degas, and writers such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Mallarmé. Failing as a painter he had a go at poetry but was bad at that, too. At which point he commenced writing prose fiction which turned out to be his metier. He wrote in the naturalist style pioneered by Émile Zola. According to Richard Ellmann, his writings influenced the early James Joyce.
In 1880 he heard his estate was in trouble and so returned. The 1879 harvest had been as bad as the potato famine years and tenants were refusing to pay rents. Moore toured the estate and was shocked at their abject poverty. Having sorted out new, lower rents in order to maintain the estate, he moved to London and started writing at a prodigious rate:
- A Modern Lover, 1883
- A Mummer’s Wife, 1885 – Kate Ede, bored housewife in the Potteries, runs away to join a troupe of travelling actors
- A Drama in Muslin, 1886 – satire on the annual season at Dublin Castle
- A Mere Accident, 1887
- Parnell and His Island, 1887 – factual often scathing essays and portraits
- Confessions of a Young Man, 1888
- Modern Painting, 1893 – factual book introducing the French Impressionists
- Esther Waters, 1894 – portrait of a serving girl
- Celibates, 1895 – three characters explore love, sex and social conventions
- Evelyn Innes, 1898
He had a love-hate relationship with his country, writing in the factual book ‘Parnell and His People‘ that Ireland was ‘a primitive country and barbarous people’, and:
Ireland is a bog, and the aborigines are a degenerate race — short, squat little men — with low foreheads and wide jaws.
Fifteen years later he would write about the British Empire and its administrators in much the same terms. O’Connor quotes Martyn saying Moore observed himself, his actions and beliefs with the detached attitude of a scientist.
Edward Martyn (1859 to 1923)
Another landlord of a large estate and urban property except that Martyn’s family was Catholic. He was cousin and boyhood friend with George Moore: George the sensualist and Edward the ascetic. They visited Bayreuth together.
Tulira Castle Martyn was eccentric. He comprehensively renovated the family property, the Gothic Tulira Castle, but chose to live in a spartan bedroom. He was a connoisseur of church music. Tulira was and is only 4 or so miles from Coole Park, home of Lady Gregory.
Music He was a fine musician in his own right, giving memorable performances for guests on an organ he had installed at Tullira.
Cultural sponsor Martyn used his wealth to benefit Irish culture. His activities and sponsorships included:
- 1897: co-founder and endowing of the Feis Ceoil
- 1903: foundation of the Palestrina Choir (the resident choir at the St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin)
- funding and direction of St. Brendan’s Cathedral, Loughrea
- president of Na hAisteoirí, the Irish-language drama group
- sponsored and guided An Túr Gloine, Ireland’s first stained-glass workshop
- sponsored the Irish Theatre
Martyn was reportedly pivotal in introducing William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory to each other in 1896. The three founded the Irish Literary Theatre, for whom Martyn wrote his best and most popular plays ‘The Heather Field’ and ‘A Tale of a Town’. He covered the costs of the company’s first three seasons, which proved crucial to establishing the company and the future of the Abbey Theatre.
Irish republicanism He became involved with the political work of Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith. He was a vocal opponent of the visit of Queen Victoria to Ireland in 1897 and of Edward VII in 1903, this time as chairman of the People’s Protection Committee.
He became close friends with Griffith and funded the publication of his tract ‘The Resurrection of Hungary in 1904’ which publicised Griffith’s abstentionist strategy i.e. non-cooperation with every aspect of the British administration.
From 1905 to 1908 he was the first president of Sinn Féin (the party only taking that name in the latter year). In 1908, he resigned from the party and politics in general to concentrate on writing and his other activities.
He was on close personal terms with Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Mary Plunkett and Patrick Pearse and mourned their executions in the aftermath of the Easter Rising. A parish hall and church that he founded at Labane, near Tullira, were burned by the Black and Tans. In ‘A Terrible Beauty’ O’Connor quotes the letter Yeats wrote to the Times protesting this.
John Butler Yeats (1839 to 1922)
From an Anglo-Irish = Protestant family, he studied at Trinity College, briefly pursued the law before switching to painting. He became a prolific portrait painter but was not a good businessman, so he and his family were always hard up and regularly moved. ‘In a material sense he had been a hopeless parent’ (p.110).
In 1863 he married Susan Pollexfen (1841 to 1900) daughter of a Sligo merchant and shipowner. She was dismayed when he abandoned the law. They had six children: three sons and three daughters, the oldest son being the Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats. The two daughters most mentioned are Lily and Elizabeth, known as Lolly. Apparently, Susan went slowly mad.
Surprisingly, in 1907 at the age of 68, he travelled to New York aboard the RMS Campania with his daughter Lily and never returned to Ireland, dying in a boarding house in New York.
William Butler (W.B.) Yeats
J.B. was an atheist materialist, a follower of Comte and Darwin. His son, Willie, reacted against this into his Celtic Dawn love of fairies and spiritualism, describing himself as ‘a voice of the revolt of the soul against the intellect’ (p.150). In reaction against his Victorian materialist father, from his teenage years onwards Yeats subscribed to every spiritualist fad available, setting up the Hermetic Society with a friend, meeting Madame Blavatsky and getting into Theosophy, studying ancient Indian texts etc.
In the 1880s father John moved the family to London, to Bedford Park, introducing young Willie to Oscar Wilde among others. One day in June 1889, Maud Gonne turned up on their doorstep. She was already a legend and said to be the most beautiful women in Europe.
Yeats joined the Order of the Golden Dawn led by Mcgregor Mathers. He took to Rosicrucianism as an ideal synthesis of Christianity and paganism. In 1889 he had published his first book of poems, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin and other poems’, supported by the Fenian John O’Leary.
In 1890 Yeats along with Welsh poet Ernest Rhys founded The Rhymers’ Club which met at the London pub ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ in Fleet Street.
Later Yeats and others glamorised members of the club as the ‘doomed generation’ because so many died of poverty, alcoholism or disease. Hmm. This is a typical example of literary types’ self-mythologisation. Compare the peace and plenty they enjoyed with the experience of the generation who reached manhood as the First World War broke out; who were the real doomed generation?
The most notable of the Rhymesters was Arthur Symons who wrote an excellent book ‘The Symbolist Movement in Literature’; read to Yeats from French and Latin poetry; and gave Yeats introductions to key literary figures in Paris (Verlaine, d’Adam) when he went to visit the French capital.
1894 production of his first play, ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ in London. In it a young woman about to be married is lured into the otherworld by a fairy. George Moore attended and was put off Yeats by his posing in a big black cloak and walking up and down the back of the dress circle wearing a ridiculous sombrero. He had a pathological dislike of Ibsen and issue-led theatre, thus profoundly disliked Shaw’s plays.
Hard up, in autumn 1894 Yeats went to stay out in Sligo with his uncle George Pollexfen. Although a successful merchant, George was also into mysticism and a member of the Hermetic Dawn. He was single, living alone apart from a serving girl he was convinced had second sight.
In 1896 Yeats, aged 30, moved to rented rooms at 18 Woburn Buildings in London where he would live for the next 15 years.
In August the same year, Edward Martyn invited Yeats and Arthur Symons to visit him at Tulira. The visitors asked if they could take a boat to the Isles of Aran, the most remote and unspoiled part of Ireland, which they did for five days. During the visit Lady Gregory invited them to nearby Coole Park. This was the decisive visit which began their collaboration. Amusingly, Symons witnessed their conversation and instantly realised that she would seduce Yeats away from lyric poetry. He ever afterwards referred to her as ‘the witch’ (p.182).
In 1897 Yeats went for another stay with Martyn. While Martyn was elsewhere Yeats was left with Lady Gregory, lamenting that there was nowhere for him to get his plays produced in a Dublin dominated by plays and entertainments imported from England. Within an hour she had mapped out a scheme to set up an Irish national theatre. She would call on her connections via her dead husband with establishment figures and ask them all to cough up £25 for three years to fund the thing. When Martyn rejoined them and heard the plan, he immediately signed up.
In 1898 Yeats, exhausted by his unrequited love for Gonne, came back to Coole. Lady Gregory let him rest in bed, created a daily timetable, had his food sent up, let him walk through the grounds and round the lake where he got to know the wild swans. For the next 20 years she was to be his rock and support until he married in 1917, and she had a hand in arranging that.
George Russell (A.E.) (1867 to 1935)
Met Yeats at art school. The Russell and Yeats families lived near each other. Professional seer of visions which he depicted in his drawings, sacred mountains, druids, the Hindu and Irish gods were related. He did a painting of a divine being and, wondering what to call it, heard the word ‘aeon’ being whispered to him, a few weeks later opening a book about the Gnostics and discovering ‘aeon’ was the name they gave to the first order of beings created by the Divine Mind. From that moment till his dying day he signed his works AE and the brand stuck. He used to go to the esplanade at Bray and hold forth to passersby about the glories of the ancient religion of mankind. Standish O’Grady heard him and was impressed.
In the late 1880s he gave up painting and got a job as a draper’s assistant during the day, so as to be free to practice mystical mind exercises at night.
Despite all this he had a practical side: at Yeats’s suggestion, Horace Plunkett appointed Russell assistant secretary of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), an agricultural co-operative society Plunkett founded in 1894. He was responsible for developing the credit societies and establishing Co-operative Banks in the south and west of the country.
From 1905 to 1923 he was editor of the influential Irish Homestead, the journal of the IAOS.
O’Connor quotes a good thing A.E. said to a Catholic friend who was twitting him about his mystical beliefs: ‘Like all Irish Catholics you are an atheist at heart’ (quoted page 157).
Sir William Wilde (1815 to 1876)
From a Protestant family, Wilde was an ophthalmologic surgeon and the author of significant works on medicine, archaeology and folklore, particularly concerning his native Ireland. Also, the father of Oscar Wilde.
Wilde was a founder member of the Irish nationalist Home Government Association, established by his Trinity College Dublin colleague Isaac Butt as the precursor to the Irish Parliamentary Party.
In 1851 Wilde married the poet Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee, who wrote and published under the name of Speranza. The couple had two sons, William (Willie) and Oscar, and a daughter, Isola Francesca, who died in childhood.
He was knighted in 1864, mostly for his help conducting a census in Ireland.
Wilde was promiscuous (‘Sir William had a name as a lecher’, p.101). He fathered three children by two women before he married Jane. In 1864 his reputation was damaged by the Travers libel trial. There’s a good summary in the Irish Times:
Wilde is important for O’Connor because he a) spoke Irish like a native and b) collected folklore from his estate in the west of Ireland.
Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee Wilde (Speranza) (1821 to 1896)
From a prosperous Protestant family in Dublin. The plaque on the grave of her husband describes her as ‘Speranza of The Nation, writer, translator, poet and nationalist, author of works on Irish folklore, early advocate of equality for women, and founder of a leading literary salon’.
Speranza As a young woman in the 1840s, Elgee wrote for the Young Ireland movement, publishing patriotic ballads in The Nation under the pseudonym of Speranza, calling for Irish independence and anti-British. Charles Gavan Duffy was the editor when ‘Speranza’ wrote commentary calling for armed revolution in Ireland as a result of which the authorities at Dublin Castle shut down the paper and brought Charles Duffy to court but he refused to name the person who had written the offending article.
Marriage In 1851 Elgee married the successful society doctor and ophthalmologist, William Wilde, thus becoming Jane Wilde. When he was knighted in 1864, she became Lady Wilde.
Folklore When Wilde died in 1876, the family discovered that he was virtually bankrupt. Lady Wilde joined her sons in London in 1879, living with Willie in poverty, supplementing their meagre income by writing for fashionable magazines. She wrote several books based on the research of her late husband into Irish folklore, notably ‘Ancient legends, mystic charms, and superstitions of Ireland’ (1887). O’Connor thinks it ‘contains some of the most beautiful folk tales in existence’ (p.100), although he tells us that the expert, Douglas Hyde, was sceptical about them, given that Jane didn’t actually speak Gaelic. Yeats on the other hand thought they were so good he didn’t care if Lady Jane had embellished them or not (p.115). There’s an obvious study to be done comparing Jane’s folk stories and her son Oscar’s fairy stories…
Feminist Jane was an early advocate of women’s rights, and campaigned for better education for women. She invited the suffragist Millicent Fawcett to her home to speak on female liberty. She praised the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, which prevented a woman from having to enter marriage ‘as a bond slave, disenfranchised of all rights over her fortune’.
Oscar Wilde (1854 to 1900)
Yeats’s father moved the family to London and introduced young Willie to Oscar, who he knew through his parents. Wilde was ten years older than Willie and tried to help the young poet. Willie was impressed by Oscar’s attempt to make every aspect of his life beautiful but he deprecated the older man’s sloth. O’Connor points out that when Oscar toured the USA for almost the whole of 1882, he was feted among Irish audiences as much for being the son of the nationalist Speranza as for being a London aesthete. George Bernard Shaw, 2 years older than Oscar, thought him ‘a very Irish Irishman’.
John O’Leary (1830 to 1907)
An Irish separatist and a leading Fenian. He studied both law and medicine but did not take a degree. For his involvement in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he was imprisoned for five years in England. He spent time in Paris among other political exiles and developed a strong sense of the importance of having a national culture in order to promote independence. He’s important to this narrative because he got to see W.B. Yeats debate and orate and came to believe he was the national poet Ireland was waiting for.
O’Leary was on the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and inducted Yeats into it. Yeats was to remain involved for the rest of his life. The IRB would regard Yeats as ‘their man’ in the literary movement. Later Yeats would say ‘to him I owe everything I set my hand to’. O’Leary arranged for the publication of Yeats’s first volume, and introduced him to folklorists who supplied the material for his books ‘
Maud Gonne MacBride (1866 to 1953)
Born of an English mother and father in the army, brought up in the barracks, lived with the family in Austria and the south of France, attended the 1886 season at Dublin Castle, attended balls and was presented to the Prince of Wales. But Maud rebelled against her upbringing to become a firebrand Irish nationalist and suffragette.
In 1889 she was introduced to W.B. Yeats who was driven mad with love for her, but she refused to become his lover a) because she was already having an affair with a Frenchman Lucien Millevoye, later b) because she later fell in love with and married (in 1903) the nationalist activist John MacBride (one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, executed by the British in 1916).
William Morris (1834 to 1896)
English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. In the late 1880s and 90s he was for a while an idol of Yeats’s (‘one of the few men he ever really worshipped’, p.138), who visited him at Kelmscott House and attended meetings of his Socialist League. When Yeats’s collection of essays, ‘the Celtic Twilight’ was published in 1893, the Morris group hailed it as the Irish equivalent of their own pre-Raphaelite movement. What they had in common was a rejection of Victorian pragmatism, mercantilism and science in favour of romantic worlds of faerie. But O’Connor suggests the difference was that the pre-Raphaelites were nostalgic for a vanished English past whereas Yeats was trying to instil the folk culture of Ireland in the here and now.
Eventually they split after Yeats sat through a socialist meeting consisting of attacks on religion before getting to his feet and insisting that only through religion and imagination could the revolution come, before being told to desist and sit down. He never attended another meeting.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 to 1950)
Of Protestant Anglo-Irish descent, Bernard Shaw was a playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His father was an alcoholic corn merchant, but his mother, Lucinda, was a noted opera singer, she sang at the Castle and was congratulated by the Lord Lieutenant. Shaw grew up in a household saturated with classical music which is why he was able to become a music critic when he moved to London in 1876. This was encouraged by the mentorship of George Lee who formed a sort of menage with the Shaw household and organised classical concerts. He was also a Catholic who introduced young George to Irish nationalism.
He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). He worshipped Ibsen for confronting the middle classes with truths they’d prefer to ignore.
His first success was Arms and The Man, first staged in 1894. It was funded by Shaw’s lover, Florence Farr and staged alongside Yeats’s first play ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’. Wilde wrote to congratulate Shaw.
John Millington Synge (1871 to 1909)
Another protestant, from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background, Synge went to Paris to study music. Realising he was not going to become a composer, he met Yeats on a visit to the capital, who advised him to go to the Aran Islands (which Yeats had visited only months before) to learn from the peasants. Two years later, in May 1898, Synge did just that. He made five visits over the next few years. By the end he was fluent in Gaelic. It helped that he was a fine violinist and picked up many airs and tunes which he played for the locals.
(In between these trips he spent five successive summers at Coole Park, collecting stories and folklore, perfecting his Irish, but living in Paris for most of the rest of each year.)
Then he set about writing the half a dozen plays that he is remembered as a key figure of the Irish Literary Revival.
Horace Plunkett (1854 to 1932)
Phenomenally posh, Plunkett was born in Sherborne, Gloucestershire, the third son of Admiral Edward Plunkett, the 16th Baron of Dunsany, of Dunsany Castle, Dunsany, near Dunshaughlin, County Meath, and the Honourable Anne Constance Dutton (daughter of John Dutton, 2nd Baron Sherborne).
Raised in County Meath, Plunkett was Anglo-Irish, raised in the Church of Ireland, educated at Eton College and University College, Oxford.
However, he appears in this story because he went to Wyoming in America to try and cure his incipient tuberculosis, spending ten years there and turning out to have a talent for running ranches at a profit. And when he returned to Ireland, in 1891, he ended up, through a series of initiatives, becoming a pioneer of agricultural cooperatives. In 1894 he set up the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS).
Among many other appointments, he heard about Lady Gregory’s good works in Galway and went down to visit. Here he met Yeats who he initially thought an ass until he heard him address a meeting of local farmers and realised there was more to him than first appeared. Plunkett needed an organiser to tour the west of Ireland. Yeats recommended his friend AE who had developed practical experience working for his draper’s company. After years on the road, in 1901 he became editor of the co-op’s magazine, The Irish Homestead.
Irish Literary Theatre
The first plays staged in the theatre’s first season, in 1899, were:
- Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, first published in 1892: is set during a famine in Ireland, where the noblewoman Countess Cathleen sells her soul to demons to save the starving peasantry.
- Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field: Carden Tyrrell, a visionary landowner, becomes obsessed with reclaiming a barren, heather-covered field and transforming it into fertile pasture, mortgaging his estate and ignoring his family’s needs, causing conflict with his practical wife, Grace; as the project fails, Tyrrell withdraws into madness.
O’Connor gives a humorous account of the runup to the productions, which Yeats got George Moore to help with, and he was a tyrant who enraged everyone, writing a letter to Martyn so offensive that the latter threatened to withdraw his play.
The famous thing is that the Catholic hierarchy and traditional nationalists got wind of the plot and decided it was a libel on Irish peasantry and Irish womanhood etc. A claque of students attended the first night to yell abuse and boo, but they were combated with cheers. George Moore had played a vital role in securing appropriate actors and directing them. He now sent London critics over to Dublin who loved it. So he had a big hand in launching the theatre.
A celebration dinner was held for all involved at the Shelborne Hotel. Moore described it in his Autobiography:
Yeats rose, and a beautiful commanding figure he seemed at the end of the table, pale and in profile, with long nervous hands and a voice resonant and clear as a silver trumpet. He drew himself up and spoke against Trinity College, saying that it had always taught the ideas of the stranger, and the songs of the stranger, and the literature of the stranger, and that was why Ireland had never listened and Trinity College had been a sterile influence. The influences that had moved Ireland deeply were the old influences that had come down from generation to generation, handed on by the story-tellers that collected in the evenings round the fire, creating for learned and unlearned a communion of heroes.
The second season was staged in 1900 at the Gaiety Theatre and featured two plays by Edward Martyn – Maeve, The Tale of a Town – and The Last of the Fianna by Alice Milligan. The mere fact that these were successfully staged at the 1,200 seat Gaiety and not the 500-seat Antient Common Rooms, showed how the theatre was becoming a commercial as well as cultural success.
Arthur Griffith (1871 to 1922)
Griffith was a key but complicated figure. He was an Irish writer, newspaper editor and politician who founded the political party Sinn Féin. He led the Irish delegation at the negotiations that produced the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, and served as the president of Dáil Éireann from January 1922 until his death that August.
But back in the period O’Connor is covering Griffith is important because he articulated an entirely new strategy for achieving independence. Parnell thought he could do it in the English Parliament; physical force revolutionaries thought they could do it through targeted assassinations and taking on the British Army of occupation. Griffith suggested a third way which was for the Irish to retire entirely from British politics – the policy of ‘abstentionism’ – and instead set up their own administration entirely separate from the British: for the MPs elected in the (British defined) constituencies to not only not go to London, but to set up their own Parliament (the Dail), giving everything Irish Gaelic names, to create their own laws, their own budget, their own courts and system of justice, to create a parallel and independently Irish administration at all levels. Hence the name of his organisation, Sinn Fein which means ‘ourselves alone’.
This was a compelling new idea which caught everyone’s imagination (it’s even mentioned several times in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’).
Yeats’s anti-Britishness
1898 – elected president of the committee to celebrate the centenary of the 1798 uprising.
1899 – October, second Boer War broke out and Yeats, Gonne and Martyn became members of the Transvaal Committee protesting Britain’s treatment of the Boers.
1900 – April, the same group plus others formed a committee to protest a planned visit of Queen Victoria to Dublin. (The old queen was 81). (Here as in his Easter rising book, O’Connor tells us that Maud Gonne’s future husband, John Macbride, was in South Africa leading a brigade of Boers against the British.)
O’Connor quotes a letter by Yeats to the Daily Express on 3 April 1900 which gives you a real feeling of his anti-British republicanism. Speaking of Victoria, he writes:
She is the official head and symbol of an empire that is robbing the South African republics of their liberty, as it robbed Ireland of hers. Whoever stands by the roadway cheering for Queen Victoria cheers for that empire, dishonours Ireland, and condones a crime. But whoever goes tomorrow night to the meeting of the people and protests within the law against the welcome of that Unionists and time-servers will have given this English Queen, honours Ireland and condemns a crime.
Moore moves back to Dublin
The Boer War prompted George Moore to revise his opinions of England and Ireland. He began to hate the former and romanticise the latter, forgetting all about his amusingly insulting opinions of 15 years earlier. Strikingly, he is quoted saying he has come to hate the English language and wants to flee the English country and English people (p.282).
He moved back to Dublin in 1901. He’s in this account a) because he was an important novelist in his own right but b) because of his close relationship with the founders of the Literary Theatre, which extended, as O’Connor shows, to a major rewrite of one of Edward Martyn’s plays, which infuriated his old friend. It must be said, his droll insouciance and wit make him one of the most attractive characters in the book. O’Connor devotes quite a few pages to just comic anecdotes from his own autobiography and other people’s reminiscences.
O’Connor gives a comic account of Moore and Yeats struggling to collaborate on a play based on the legend of Diarmuid and Grania, Moore’s attitude is priceless. He was then chosen to direct a production of Douglas Hyde’s play ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ but resigns after 3 weeks. Hyde himself played the lead role of Hanrahan the poet and turned out to be sprightly and antic onstage, completely the opposite of his sober, scholarly everyday persona. The two plays were performed in October 1901. Grania wasn’t a success whereas ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ was the first play to be performed in Irish and was joyously received by nationalists. The audience sang patriotic songs. The audience mobbed Yeats at the stage door. In the audience was John Millington Synge, who saw the language and imagery he had been collecting on the Aran Isles come to life onstage. Within a few months he’d written his first play and within a year the first of his five masterpieces.
Joyce
Joyce loathed these productions and wrote a savage indictment of their success titled ‘The Day of the Rabblement’. He thought Yeats and Co were catering to the low, debased tastes of the Irish people by sinking themselves deeper into the mire of illiterate peasant superstition, whereas Joyce wanted to join and become a star in the great European tradition. Which is why he had to leave Ireland altogether.
Joyce walked across Dublin one night to AE’s house and waited till the established writer returned at midnight. They talked till 4 in the morning. Easy-going AE was impressed and wrote to Lady Gregory warning him about this ‘spectre of fastidiousness’ (p.296). When Joyce left Ireland for Paris in 1904, Lady Gregory gave him money.
The Fays and the Abbey Theatre
The origins of the famous Abbey Theatre in the work of two brothers, William and Frank Fay. In the 1890s, William had worked with a touring company in Ireland, Scotland and Wales while Frank was heavily involved in amateur dramatics in Dublin. After William returned, the brothers began to stage productions in halls around the city. O’Connor gives his usual pen portrait and explains how Frank asked AE permission to use a play which he, AE, had written solely for literary interest, ‘Deirdre’. Discovering it wouldn’t fill a whole evening they approached Yeats for a short filler and he gave them ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’ and suggested Maud Gonne play the lead role. Amazingly, she agreed. The brothers hired the cramped St Theresa’s Hall on Clarendon Street for the production. Opening night was 2 April 1902. Deirdre was well received but the Yeats play is about the allegorical figure of Ireland depicted as a long-suffering old crone, who is transformed into a beautiful queen by the sacrifice of a young man. There were cheers throughout and, at the end, a standing ovation. Partisans like Arthur Griffith saw it as the start of a national revival. I’ll now quote from Wikipedia because the events surrounding the foundation of the Abbey Theatre are a bit convoluted and not fully explained by O’Connor:
Encouraged by the St Theresa’s Hall success, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Æ, Martyn, and John Millington Synge founded the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903 with funding from Annie Horniman. Horniman was a middle-class Englishwoman with previous experience in theatre production, having been involved in the presentation of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man in London in 1894. An acquaintance of Yeats from London circles, including the Order of the Golden Dawn, she came to Dublin in 1903 to act as Yeats’ unpaid secretary and to make costumes for a production of his play ‘The King’s Threshold’. They were joined by actors and playwrights from Fay’s company.
At first, they staged performances in the Molesworth Hall. When the Mechanics’ Theatre in Lower Abbey Street and an adjacent building in Marlborough Street became available after fire safety authorities closed it, Horniman and William Fay agreed to buy and refit the space to meet the society’s needs.
On 11 May 1904, the Society formally accepted Horniman’s offer of the use of the building. As Horniman did not usually reside in Ireland, the royal letters patent required were granted in the name of Lady Gregory, although paid for by Horniman. The founders appointed William Fay theatre manager, responsible for training the actors in the newly established repertory company. They commissioned Yeats’ brother Jack to paint portraits of all the leading figures in the society for the foyer, and hired Sarah Purser to design stained glass for the same space.
On 27 December 1904, the curtains went up on opening night. The bill consisted of three one-act plays, ‘On Baile’s Strand’ and ‘Cathleen Ní Houlihan’ by Yeats, and ‘Spreading the News’ by Lady Gregory. On the second night, ‘In the Shadow of the Glen’ by Synge replaced the second Yeats play. These two bills alternated over a five-night run.
In addition to providing funding, Horniman’s chief role with the Abbey over the coming years was to organise publicity and bookings for their touring productions in London and provincial England.
‘The Shadow of the Glen’ caused a furor. I have written a separate blog post about it.
Codas
Towards the end of the book, O’Connor deals increasingly briskly with his charges.
Joyce He portrays Joyce leaving for the continent, helped with cash from Lady Gregory, and even Yeats who met him at Euston station, bought him breakfast and helped him catch the boat train to Paris. In O’Connor’s portrait Joyce comes over as fiercely arrogant, angry, bitter and determined. In Paris he met Synge but the two didn’t get on at all. He’d only been there a few months when his father telegraphed him to return to Dublin because his mother was dying. It was then that occurred the famous occasion when Joyce refused to kneel and pray for his mother, letting her die distraught that her son was an atheist, leaving him gnawed with guilt which provides a central thread to ‘Ulysses’, where he grandly renames it ‘agenbite of inwit’. It was on 16 June 1904 that he had a second date with an uninhibited Galway girl who kissed him and touched his willy through his trousers, thus persuading the highly sexed Joyce that she was the girl for him, and indeed they spent the rest of their lives together, and she was the rock which enabled him to write his masterpieces.
Lady Gregory Having been midwife to numerous plays, Lady Gregory now started writing her own. Amazingly, she ended up writing about 100, and many were very popular. Her best works are probably ‘The Rising of the Moon’ and ‘The Workhouse Ward’. It was seeing plays like these on the Abbey Theatre’s first tour of America, which apparently inspired American playwright Eugene O’Neill to write his first plays. In the 1920s, when finances were tight, she persuaded the new Free State government to give the Abbey Theatre a stipend, making it the first state-sponsored theatre in the world.
Climax and aftermath
It turns out that those 1904 productions are the climax of O’Connor’s book. The precursor to the Abbey Theatre had been created and Yeats, Gregory, AE had seen their vision of a native Irish theatre based on native Irish legends and themes come true. From left-field came J.M. Synge whose Aran Island-inspired plays would expand and consolidate the genre.
So instead of continuing to take things forward at the slow incremental pace he’d used up till now, rather surprisingly O’Connor leaps forward to the first night of Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ in 1926. After a vivid description of the protests and catcalling which forced Yeats to call in the police, again, O’Connor relaxes on the final pages of his book and turns into lists. The renaissance was underway and he lists the next generation of playwrights which came through along with a sudden interest in painting, which had until these last few pages only received passing mention in reference to John Yeats. Now there’s a sudden list of Irish painters who flourished in the 00s, 10s and 20s. The outstanding art collector Hugh Lane left his collection to the Dublin Art Gallery. In less than a page he skips over the East Rising and civil war to the creation of the Irish Free State, and then the last 3 or 4 pages concern the afterlives of his central characters.
Edward Martyn broke with the Abbey Theatre founders, founded his own rival theatre, died in 1924.
George Moore argued with everyone in the movement and, in 1912, left Ireland a second time, reverting to his initial contempt for his homeland. He died in 1933. He always felt James Joyce had plagiarised his ‘Confessions of a Young Man’ in his ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and stole his famous short story ‘The Dead’ from the end of his novel ‘Vain Fortune’. But the pair met in Paris in 1929 when Joyce was eager to conciliate the older man and they got on surprisingly well.
Lady Gregory stopped writing plays in the 1920s, negotiated a government subsidy for the Abbey Theatre in 1925. Her son Robert was killed serving in the air force in 1918. Coole Park had to be sold off, along with its wild swans and the tree she had her famous writers carve their names into. She died in 1932.
W.B. Yeats came to be recognised as one of the greatest poets of the age, receiving the Nobel Prize in 1924. He was made a senator in the new Free State. In 1928 he entered a late flowering period of creativity with ‘The Tower’. He died in the south of France in 1939.
Douglas Hyde was installed as president of Ireland in 1938. He had faded out of public life after refusing to let his Gaelic League get involved in politics. The decision to bring him out of retirement paid homage to his work as a young man in rescuing the Celtic language and its stories.
O’Connor ends with a charming story, of how the following year, when war broke out, coal became scarce, so Hyde opened the coal cellars of the Viceregal Lodge to the population of Dublin. Instead he had turf brought from the countryside so that the grand dinning, ball and state rooms of the palace, which had echoed to the social life of the conqueror for so many years, were now filled with the aromatic smoke betokening authentic Irish peasant life.
Firesides
O’Connor is a romantic, sometimes sentimental author. Peasants are noble. Aristocrats are noble. All his upper class characters are fine riders and excellent shots. He takes a heroic view of Irish patriots. One aspect of this is his fondness for ‘firesides’ as a symbol of authenticity, especially, of course, the firesides of the people and peasants.
[Henry Grattan]’s speech at the inauguration [of the 1782 parliament] would become a hymn of nationalism recited around the firesides of nationalist Ireland in the nineteenth century. (p.15)
Under the name of Speranza [Francesca Elgee] wrote patriotic ballads about the Fenians and English misrule, like ‘The Famine Year’ which was recited around firesides throughout the country. (p.100)
Soon [Synge] had mastered the Irish jigs and reels and slow airs, and he would sit at night near the firelight in the cottages and play his airs for the dancing boys and girls. (p.191)
This [lines from a Yeats poem] could be from the court of Aquitaine; or that its sentiment is a trifle extravagant, the address of a Cavalier. Least of all does one think of it as a poet’s address to his country in one of the traditional names which were used for Ireland in the seventeenth century, and that this was perfectly understood by the people when it was sung for them round their firesides or in the fields. (p.214)
[Of ‘In the Shadow of the Glen’] It was, after all, a daring theme for those days to depict a wife leaving a husband, however aged, for a tramp travelling the roads. The fact that it was based on an Irish folk tale told around the firesides of the west would not make it any more palatable when it would be acted out in front of urban audiences who would lack the Rabelaisian acceptance of farmyard life. (p.333)
The story of how Cuchulain inadvertently kills his own son whom he had had (unknown to him) by a Scottish princess, Aoife, was still told around the country firesides in the west. (p.352)
Documentary
There are many documentaries on the subject. This one is an easy-going complexity-free example, bolstered by extensive interviews with the eminent academic Fintan O’Toole. Most interesting for me was the section about Patrick Pearse’s objections to the movement which he said ought to be ‘strangled at birth’. He thought Yeats and Lady Gregory, Protestants both, were denying the Catholic faith of the peasants they depicted, and Ireland as a whole, in order to promote their own personal vision of a pagan Ireland, the Ireland of the myths and legends they collected and they promoted.
There was also a class aspect, because the revivalists’ plays focused on peasants or aristocrats, itself an ancient binary, with no space for the majority population of working and middle class. In this sense, their vision was utterly unrepresentative of Ireland’s realities. (Just one reason for James Joyce’s complete rejection of their vision and aesthetic, although the movement was, eventually, to be large enough for the working class dramas of Sean O’Casey.)
Credit
‘Celtic Dawn: A Portrait of the Irish Literary Renaissance’ by Ulick O’Connor was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1984.
Related reviews
- Irish reviews
Books & Boots 
Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes by George Bernard Shaw (1919)
NURSE GUINNESS: You’ll get used to it, miss: this house is full of surprises for them that don’t know our ways.
This is, until the last few pages, a very funny comic play, comparable to Pygmalion for its vivid characters and the frequency of its comic moments.
In the characteristically long (13,800 words) preface, Shaw informs us that he began the play in 1913, before a shot had been fired, but worked on and completed it in the first two years of the First World War. He didn’t let it be performed during the conflict out of tact and patriotism so it was first staged in 1919.
Shaw is so keen to emphasise that he began it before the war because he wants to give a prophetic force. He goes on to tell us that ‘Heartbreak House’ is not just a location in his play but is a symbol for the entire leisured lifestyle of the rich in the pre-war years, their heedlessness of the volcano they were dancing on, their selfishness and self-centredness.
The setting of a country house weekend is very appropriate. Maybe these kinds of civilised long weekends continue to this day, but country house parties where a diverse group of guests are brought together to interact are certainly a feature of Edwardian, Georgian and 1920s literature. Think of all those Agatha Christie novels where a bunch of suspects gather at the charming house of Lord or Lady something before one of them dies in mysterious circumstances, or the country house party novels of Aldous Huxley (although, admittedly, Captain Shotover’s house isn’t as grand as all that).
Act 1. Captain Shotover’s villa in Sussex, the poop: evening
We are in the living room at Heartbreak House, located in north Sussex, with (as so often in plays) French windows giving on to the garden where the author can conveniently dispose of characters when they aren’t needed or retrieve them from when they are.
It is however a very odd-looking room and sets the tone for a lot of the comedy to come, for it is built and decorated to resemble ‘the after part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery. Thus the windows are ship-built with heavy timbering and run right across the room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows; a row of lockers under the windows provides an un-upholstered window seat interrupted by twin glass doors, and the stage directions from start to finish refer not to stage left or right but to port and starboard.
This visual oddity sets the tone for the room and the house belong to the 88-year-old eccentric (or plain senile) inventor Captain Shotover. A modern reader might wonder whether Shotover has dementia, certainly several of the characters describe him as ‘mad’, but really he’s a comic invention, a man, already eccentric, who has reached the age where he doesn’t mind what he says to anyone, with the result that he is continually blunt to the point of rudeness, and beyond.
NURSE GUINNESS: They say he sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the more I believe them.
Among his many inventions (which he makes good money from) are for the ship with the magnetic keel that sucked up submarines and a patent lifeboat, but he is currently engaged on a grand visionary notion of creating some kind of rather Wellsian-sounding Death Ray which will defeat The Enemy before he can lift a finger.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: But I go on with the dynamite none the less. I will discover a ray mightier than any X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at me…
To this end he has a store of dynamite in the quarry. Rather like the introduction of a revolver in a Chekhov play, as soon as we learn this we wonder how long it’ll be before it explodes although this, like everything, is turned into suave comedy.
MRS HUSHABYE: There’s nothing to see in the garden except papa’s observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and things of that sort. However, it’s pleasanter out of doors; so come along.
RANDALL: Dynamite! Isn’t that rather risky?
MRS HUSHABYE: Well, we don’t sit in the gravel pit when there’s a thunderstorm.
Shotover is also given an obscure hobbyhorse, repeatedly banging on about striving to achieve ‘the seventh degree of concentration, whatever that may be.
One by one the cast appear, introduced to us and to each other in increasingly complex sequences and revealing a number of sometimes complex relationships. Here’s my attempt at a summary.
Cast
Captain Shotover – ‘an ancient but still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a whistle hanging from his neck’. Father to two daughters, Ariadne (now Lady Utterword) and Hesione (Mrs Hushabye). The second, married to Hector Hushabye, still lives with him. The first, (Lady Utterword) couldn’t wait to leave home, married Hasting Utterword 23 years ago, and was whisked off as his wife to umpteen colonies where he served as governor.
Shotover has a kind of cartoon version of senile dementia or at least is completely heedless of manners and conventions. He is entertainingly rude to everyone. As his daughter explains:
MRS HUSHABYE: You will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own way than try to explain.
As to his ‘eccentricity’ it’s genuinely funny the way he mistakes an invited guest to his house, Ellie, as his daughter, and then refuses to believe Lady Utterword – who he hasn’t seen for 25 years – is his other daughter.
Nurse Guinness – the house is looked after by Nurse Guinness, ‘an elderly womanservant’ who, in the best comic tradition, calmly ignored Shotover’s criticisms and indeed, everyone else’s, whilst quietly, efficiently getting on.
Ellie Dunn – ‘a pretty girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively dressed, evidently not a smart idler’, has been invited to stay by Mrs Hushabye aka Hesione. Three things about her: 1) her father is poor Mazzini Dunn, who set up a business which went bankrupt, was bought for a song by the pirate capitalist Mangan (who he went to school with), who re-employed him as manager. 2) This same Mangan (same age as her father) subsequently bumped into Ellie a couple of times and now assumes they are now engaged, despite not having asked Ellie, who is extremely reluctant. 3) Not least because she has fallen in love with a handsome charismatic man who’s had the most marvellous adventures, the improbably named Marcus Darnley.
Mazzini Dunn, poor bankrupt father of Ellie Dunn, has also been invited to stay. His Italian first name is a reference to Giuseppe Mazzini the spearhead of the movement for Italian Reunification (they were poets and visionaries).
‘Boss’ Alfred Mangan, ‘the bloated capitalist’ in Hector’s view who, it is strongly implied, stitched up his schoolfriend Mazzini Dunn. A very ordinary looking man he is driven by strong ambition and can be very assertive. He bumped into Ellie at the National Gallery, took her for a ride in his carriage and now assumes she is ‘his’.
Lady Utterword (Ariadne or ‘Addy’) – ‘a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous) is one of comic silliness’. She has spent 23 years abroad with her posh husband, Sir Hastings Uttword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in succession. Shotover several times refers to him as a ‘numskull’ and he never appears in the play. Instead:
Randall Utterword, younger brother of Hastings Utterword, Ariadne’s husband, turns up.
Hesione Hushabye (‘Miss Hessy’), married to dashing lover and fantasist Hector Hushabye. She was born when Shotover was 46 and since he is now 88, she must be
Hector Hushabye the seducer. It is a very funny moment when Ellie has just finished telling Hesione all about the marvellous man she’s met who tells the most amazing stories, and he walks through the door onto the stage and Hesione announces that he is her husband! Ellie is genuinely devastated (to some extent she’s the only character in the play with realistic feelings) but it turns out that Hector and Hesione have a very ‘modern’ marriage and she totally understand his addiction to falling in love with and flirting with numerous other women.
HECTOR: She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love to her automatically. What am I to do?
This frank admission of his inability to stop philandering is still funny today but it’s just one of the
Act 1 ends with a dialogue between Hector and Shotover which is so disturbing it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. It begins with Hector asking why the Captain has a store of dynamite (to blow up The Enemy) and develops into the notion that it might be a good idea to blow up everyone.
HECTOR: I tell you I have often thought of this killing of human vermin. Many men have thought of it. Decent men are like Daniel in the lion’s den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always survive. We live among the Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I’ll spare them in sheer –
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]: Fellow feeling?
HECTOR: No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must believe that my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their door is hell fire. I should spare them in simple magnanimous pity.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: You can’t spare them until you have the power to kill them. At present they have the power to kill you. There are millions of blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. They’re going to do it. They’re doing it already.
HECTOR: They are too stupid to use their power.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the sofa]: Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill the better half of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The knowledge that these people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having the aspirations. And when we are tempted to seek their destruction they bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.
HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]: May not Hesione be such a demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: That is possible. She has used you up, and left you nothing but dreams, as some women do.
HECTOR: Vampire women, demon women.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Men think the world well lost for them, and lose it accordingly.
Is this fantastical comedy? Is sane Hector egging mad Shotover onto ever more outrageous pronouncements? Or are they both maniacs feeding each other’s paranoid fantasies? When Shotover talks about ‘millions of blacks’ about to be let loose on ‘us’, is this clinical paranoia? And the conceit at the end about pretty women being a kind of distraction created by The Enemy so we ‘spare them’, what?
In fact things are clarified just a few minutes later. Hesione enters, breaking the spell of this dialogue, and the Captain scuttles off into his pantry, to one side of the room – at which Hector comments to his wife that, ‘He is madder than usual.’ So it was an act. So Hector was just egging the old madman on to wilder fantasies.
In his day the standard criticism of Shaw was that his plays were wordy expositions of his views, arguments spouted by two-dimensional mouthpieces. But the little scene I’ve just quoted shows how wrong this is. There are many purely comic passages, but also passages like this of wild fantasia, which are beyond argumentation, which take you into strange visionary places (cf the scenes with Peter Keegan in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, especially the long scene where he talks to a grasshopper!).
And the notion of an all-killing death ray is treated comically by all the members of his family, who take it as another one of Daddy’s madcap schemes. At the very end of Act 1 Hesione complains to Shotover and Hector that they’re broke and they both beg him to come up with a new invention.
MRS HUSHABYE: Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic keel that sucked up submarines. Living at the rate we do, you cannot afford life-saving inventions. Can’t you think of something that will murder half Europe at one bang?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on slaughter as it did when I was a boy.
I suppose passages like this are what Shaw meant by ‘prophetic’ of the huge slaughter about to commence across Europe, and/or satirise the wish of perfectly respectable middle-class types to devise ever-more destructive weapons of mass murder. But what makes ‘Heartbreak House’ so attractive is the way even quite bitter sentiments are embedded in lovely humour.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Why doesn’t your husband invent something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.
HECTOR: Well, that is a form of invention, is it not?
Act 2. Same as Act 1: after dinner
Mangan deliberately tells Ellie that he cold-bloodedly ruined her father, sitting her down and carefully explaining how he gave her money the seed money for his business knowing he’d work his fingers to the bone to get it going, but lack the business nous to make a go of it, leading to bankruptcy, at which point Mangan could pick it up for a song and make a fortune.
He tells her all this to put her off him, but to his amazement Ellie says she’ll still have him. Further paradoxes follow in an amusing tumble. He tries to dismay her by saying he’s in love with someone else, but she just says, so is she! All this cut and thrust makes Mangan think ‘this is a crazy house’ till Ellie goes behind him and draws her hands from his forehead to his ears again and again and lulls him to sleep, turns out the light and tiptoes out.
Nurse Guinness comes into the darkened room, trips over Mangan’s legs, tries to wake him then screams that she’s killed him. Mrs Hushabye and Mazzini come running and, when they can’t wake him up, Mazzini quickly guesses that he’s been hypnotised by Ellie and describes how she did it to him once, at a family party.
Their conversation turns into a very inappropriate flirtation which Mazzini resists because he says he has only ever loved once (his wife). Also, Mazzini claims that Mangan is actually useless at business, doesn’t manage the men or the day to day. He’s only rich because he obsesses over every penny and does that because he is terrified of being poor.
Ellie is fetched and denies having hypnotised Mangan. The two women send Mazzini packing then have a set-to about the sleeping Captain of Industry. Hesione thinks she has to save Ellie from this dreadful marriage but Ellie surprises her by being utterly, cynically clear eyed about her motives in marrying Mangan: it is for his money and also because, being old, he can’t expect her to love him, which she doesn’t.
This verbal sparring on goes on for a while, with Ellie lamenting that Hector is spoken for and didn’t wait for her, and during which Hesione naughtily admits that her lovely head of hair is mostly fake. I think the fake hair stands for all sorts of other attitudes, fronts and statements which are fake.
They wake Mangan and it turns out he was conscious the whole time and heard everything they said about him, Mazzini saying he’s rubbish at business, Hesione and Ellie calling him a lump. He sets about accusing Ellie, again, but once again she trumps him, defeating everything he says with irony, paradox or strong will, making him feel hysterical, like he’s going mad:
MANGAN [desperately]: In this house a man’s mind might as well be a football. I’m going…
The others come in and mock Mangan, whose Christian name, they’ve discovered is Alfred, but in the middle there’s a shot from upstairs.
All the characters run upstairs, then return in dribs and drabs with the knackered old burglar they’ve caught. it was Mazzini who meant to scare him with Hector’s duelling pistol which went off at the slightest touch.
The burglar says it’s a fair cop but gives a speech embodying one of Shaw’s hobby horses, how barbaric it is to lock people in prison (discussed at length in the preface to Major Barbara). Hector, and then all the guests, suggest they let him go but the burglar insists he should serve his time, which prompts Mangan to remark that even the burglars don’t behave naturally in this house.
Mazzini suggests the burglar could turn himself into an honest locksmith and the burglar says, yes, he could set up shop for £20 and then, somehow, the situation turns all the way round so that the burglar who they only apprehended a little earlier, is now demanding that they have a whip round to cough up at least £20 for him.
Hector gives him a sovereign and tells him to be off but he bumps into Captain Shotover in the doorway who surprises everyone by declaring that this is the mate of his old ship, Billy Dunn. Dunn explains that he breaks into houses in order to get caught and then shames the liberal guests into giving him a whip round.
More amazement when the calmly competent housekeeper, Nurse Guinness, reveals that Billy is her husband! The captain orders that Billy be held in the kitchens.
Meanwhile, Alfred Mangan is put out because everyone is ignoring him so Mrs Hushabye invites him for a walk on the moonlit terrace and for some reason this makes him burst into tears. Ellie explains that his heart is breaking but this makes Lady Utterword furious and she berates Ellie then exits onto the terrace. Ellie is bewildered until Captain Shotover explains that all her life Lady Utterword (his daughter Ariadne) has wanted someone to break her heart but now she’s so old she wonders whether she has a heart to break. Humorously all the other characters go running out to comfort her leaving Mazzini, Ellie and the Captain. Mazzini kisses his daughter goodnight and goes out.
Long scene with Ellie and the Captain who is the only person she feels she can talk to. She finds out more about his life, that the happiest experience of his life was being on the bridge of his ship during a 168-hour-long typhoon, that he spread the story that he’d sold his soul to the Devil in order to cow men so degraded that otherwise he could only manage them with kicks and cuffs. She explains why she’s marrying Mangan i.e. for his money and because being rich is better than being poor and the Captain delivers a surprisingly coherent sermon about gaining his money but losing her soul.
But he also delivers some haunting speeches about what it’s like to be very old (in 1920 the life expectancy for men was 56, Shotover is more than 30 years older than that) like in this admission about why he keeps running off stage into the pantry. It’s to take a shot of rum but not because he’s an alcoholic:
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: No, I dread being drunk more than anything in the world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women. Drink does that for you when you are young. But when you are old: very, very old, like me, the dreams come by themselves. You don’t know how terrible that is: you are young: you sleep at night only, and sleep soundly. But later on you will sleep in the afternoon. Later still you will sleep even in the morning; and you will awake tired, tired of life. You will never be free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to keep sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: I have had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water.
Or:
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: I am too weary to resist, or too weak. I am in my second childhood. I do not see you as you really are. I can’t remember what I really am. I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
See what I mean by the strange visionary quality of some of these scenes and speeches? Startlingly, having listened to him, Ellie confirms that all she wants is to marry a rich old man and asks whether he is rich. Maybe she should marry him! When the Captain says what’s wrong with her to say something like that she admits her heart was broken; she was genuinely in love with ‘Marcus Darnley’ and was heartbroken to learn he is really Hector Hushabye and married to Hesione.
Hector and Randall come in which is Ellie’s prompt to take the Captain by the hand out into the garden and leave the two men. The crux of their scene is they both fancy Lady Utterword, Randall as her husband’s brother, Hector as her sister (Hesione)’s husband. Randall explains that Lady Utterword enjoys flirting with men everywhere, makes endless scenes, her husband (his brother) doesn’t notice because he works 16 hours a day. He is upset because Hector has flirted with her more in ten minutes than he has in ten years.
Hector calls Lady Utterword in, explains the situation and Lady U upbraids Randall for being so tiresome and jealous, as if they were married and proceeds to demolish his character, calling him selfish, lazy, whiney, as needy as a 3-year-old, and that his nickname is Randall the Rotter. This reduces Randall to tears and Lady U stands domineeringly over him and mocks him as a crybaby.
Hector is upset by her bullying and, grabbing her by the throat, throws her down into a chair. She rather enjoys this domination. She explains that she treats Randall like a child, bullies him into having a good cry and then he feels better afterwards. She stalks out and Randall, just as she predicted, after his good cry feels cleansed and sleepy. Feebly he says he’ll get his own back on her by going to bed without saying goodnight. Hector realises what a feeble specimen he is and is left raging against his subjugation by the Shotover sisters.
Act 3. In Captain Shotover’s garden: night
Late at night all the characters are outside under the stars, mooning and dreaming, or at least that’s what you’d hope. In actual fact, there are inklings and prophecies of doom. Inkling:
MRS HUSHABYE [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the light, with Mangan]: He keeps telling me he has a presentiment that he is going to die. I never met a man so greedy for sympathy.
MANGAN [plaintively]: But I have a presentiment. I really have. And you wouldn’t listen.
MRS HUSHABYE: I was listening for something else. There was a sort of splendid drumming in the sky. Did none of you hear it? It came from a distance and then died away.
MANGAN: I tell you it was a train.
MRS HUSHABYE: And I tell you, Alf, there is no train at this hour.
Prophecy:
HECTOR. Heaven’s threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile creatures. [Fiercely]. I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and destroy us.
Lady Utterword says the problem with Heartbreak House is there aren’t any horses.
LADY UTTERWORD: There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. It isn’t mere convention: everybody can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don’t are the wrong ones.
She delivers a diatribe against Randall’s immature self-centred character, imagining he is in bed asleep but is interrupted by the sound of the flute, an instrument he plays, from his bedroom.
The ladies turn their attention to Mr Mangan, asking him point blank whether he intends to marry Ellie and how much he is worth. After protesting at having his personal affairs discussed in public like this, Mangan makes the surprise admission that he has no money. Turns out he doesn’t own any of the factories and whatnot he’s associated with, he merely administers them for the real owners, the shareholders and syndicates.
When Mrs Hushabye jokes that, with his level of deception he ought to go into politics, Mangan jokes that he was invited to join the government, unelected, and be put in charge of a department. See how nothing changes. He didn’t achieve anything in his own department but managed to undermine his rivals in all the others, all the while keeping his eye on the title he’d been promised. Incompetence, corruption and complete lack of experience rose to high political positions 100 years ago as they do today. In our time he’d have been put in charge of screwing up the Brexit negotiations or procuring billions of pounds of unusable PPE equipment.
HECTOR. Is this England, or is it a madhouse?
Outraged, Lady Utterword says her husband could ‘save the country’ if only we got rid of this:
… ridiculous sham democracy and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses
I.e. set up a dictatorship. Mrs Hushabye mockingly trumps her by saying it doesn’t matter who claims to be running the country as long as ‘we’, i.e. women, are running the men. Ellie laments how everything has let her down and turned out to be fake:
All these admissions drive Mangan wild and he suggests that, since they have stripped themselves morally naked they might as well take all their clothes off and he commences. The others stop him and when he goes to leave, talk him out of it. Alright, the exhausted man says, I’ll stay and propose to Ellie.
But Ellie surprises by saying she doesn’t want him any more. She was just testing her strength. Anyway, it would be an act of bigamy because half an hour earlier she married Captain Shotover!!!!
ELLIE: Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father. [She draws the captain’s arm through hers, and pats his hand. The captain remains fast asleep.]
It is a spiritual wedding and she doesn’t even know what she means but it is a beautiful evening and she is happy. Her father, Mazzini appears, in pyjamas and a silk dressing gown, claiming he can’t sleep with such a fascinating conversation going on under his window and the others bring him up to speed, especially the news that her daughter is no longer going to marry Mangan who turns out not to be a millionaire. Mangan for his part complains about being perpetually ganged up on, which triggers the speech which explains the play’s title.
MANGAN: There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly house I have been made to look like a fool, though I’m as good a man in this house as in the city.
ELLIE [musically]: Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it Heartbreak House.
And further lucubrations which we know from Shaw’s preface that he intended allegorically or symbolically.
HECTOR: Do you accept that name for your house?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: It is not my house: it is only my kennel.
HECTOR: We have been too long here. We do not live in this house: we haunt it.
By contrast Lady Utterword, who escaped the place as soon as she could, aged 19, has no illusions.
LADY UTTERWORD: Thank you, Hesione… The place may be Heartbreak House to you, Miss Dunn, and to this gentleman from the city who seems to have so little self-control; but to me it is only a very ill-regulated and rather untidy villa without any stables.
Which leads into a comic-nostalgic passage where they all mock themselves or each other:
HECTOR: Inhabited by—?
ELLIE: A crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him.
MRS HUSHABYE: A sluttish female, trying to stave off a double chin and an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of freedom.
MANGAN: A member of His Majesty’s Government that everybody sets down as a nincompoop: don’t forget him, Lady Utterword.
LADY UTTERWORD: And a very fascinating gentleman whose chief occupation is to be married to my sister.
HECTOR: All heartbroken imbeciles.
All of which is rejected by Mazzini (Ellie’s Dad), surely the nicest character:
MAZZINI: Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favourable specimen of what is best in our English culture. You are very charming people, most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.
Mangan starts crying that nobody realises he has a soul and likes poetry as well as money and Mrs Hushabye, who is inexplicably infatuated with him drags him off into the darkness. The atmosphere i.e. the dialogue, becomes more heavy with symbolism.
HECTOR [impatiently]: How is all this going to end?
MAZZINI: It won’t end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn’t end: it goes on.
ELLIE: Oh, it can’t go on forever. I’m always expecting something. I don’t know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.
Both Mazzini and Captain Shotover are given poetic speeches explaining how (Mazzini) all the politicking and meetings of his young adulthood ended up changing anything (Shotover) how, from the bridge of a ship the moon changes and the sea changes and the stars change but nothing really changes. Rather as in an Ibsen play, everyone repeats a key phrase, in this case ‘nothing happens’.
But the Captain develops his metaphor of the country, England, as a ship, a ship heading for the rocks, echoed by Hector wondering what we should do about ‘this ship that we are all in? This soul’s prison we call England?’
But while they’re talking about ships heading for rocks and captains asleep at the wheel there is a distant explosion and Nurse Guinness comes running in to say the rector’s house has been bombed. The house light had gone out, as the police ordered, but Hector perversely insists on going back in and turning it back on, bright as blazes.
Nurse Guinness says the police said to take shelter in the cellars but half the characters refuse to and at that moment the burglar, Bob Dunn, arrives to say the cellars are no good, where’s the quarry he’s heard about, he wants to take shelter in the cave.
Another explosion nearer this time. Captain Shotover says the next one will hit them and orders ‘Stand by, all hands, for judgment.’ Hector is insanely running round the house turning on all the lights and tearing down the curtains to make the place the maximum target for whoever’s doing the bombing.
Randall comes running in and pleads with Lady Underword to go to the cellars. What, with the staff, she replies and remains in her hammock. When hector strides in proud of his work but wishing the place was brighter Ellie insanely suggests setting the house on fire.
The droning overhead becomes louder and they all turn to look up into the skies. Hector tells Ellie to take cover but she refuses.
A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their seats, or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of the shattered glass from the windows.
It was a direct hit on the gravel pit, itself full of dynamite, so there go Mangan and the burglar. Insanely Hector quips ‘One husband gone’ and then ‘Our turn next’. And they wait. And wait. But hear the droning of the planes diminishing and another explosion, but now in the distance. They are safe. It’s worth quoting the final lines in full to convey the full nihilistic madness of all the characters:
MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her grip]: Oh! they have passed us.
LADY UTTERWORD: The danger is over, Randall. Go to bed.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Turn in, all hands. The ship is safe. [He sits down and goes asleep].
ELLIE [disappointedly]: Safe!
HECTOR [disgustedly]: Yes, safe. And how damnably dull the world has become again suddenly! [he sits down].
MAZZINI [sitting down]: I was quite wrong, after all. It is we who have survived; and Mangan and the burglar –
HECTOR: – the two burglars –
LADY UTTERWORD: – the two practical men of business –
MAZZINI: – both gone. And the poor clergyman will have to get a new house.
MRS HUSHABYE: But what a glorious experience! I hope they’ll come again tomorrow night.
ELLIE [radiant at the prospect]: Oh, I hope so.
THE END.
Thoughts
I got the impression from the book’s blurb and skimmed summaries that at the end of the play the house was blown up with everyone inside, and this which would have been pleasing in an explosive and total way. However, Shaw’s actual ending is far more disturbing, leaving the audience with much the same feeling as the characters, who had all, secretly, been hoping for their silly lives, their pointless worries and their petty squabbles could just be wiped out and are left anticlimactic and disappointed…
The realisation that they’re not going to be blown up after all, and that they will have to resume the masks and roles they are so sick of, is far more harrowing. It’s a punch to the guts. For me, in this reading, it anticipated the grey nihilism of Samuel Beckett.
The mad house
The power of Captain Shotover’s house as a symbol is built up through multiple repetitions and redefinitions.
LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know what you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling.
THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly wanted in this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only moderately young. Her children are not youthful.
LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in this house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age.
ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There’s something odd about this house, Hesione, and even about you. I don’t know why I’m talking to you so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that heartbreak is not like what I thought it must be.
MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this house.
THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts and turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to remember but probably you don’t, as it occurred many years ago— that your younger daughter married a numskull?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she’d marry anybody to get away from this house.
MANGAN: In this house a man’s mind might as well be a football. I’m going. [He makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the Captain, who has just emerged from his pantry].
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Whither away, Boss Mangan?
MANGAN. To hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and all here.
MANGAN [exasperated]. The very burglars can’t behave naturally in this house.
HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The man under your pose is apparently Ellie’s favourite, Othello.
RANDALL. Some of your games in this house are damned annoying, let me tell you.
HECTOR. Yes: I have been their victim for many years. I used to writhe under them at first; but I became accustomed to them. At last I learned to play them.
RANDALL. If it’s all the same to you I had rather you didn’t play them on me. You evidently don’t quite understand my character, or my notions of good form.
HECTOR [rising]. Something in the air of the house has upset you. It often does have that effect.
Through these multiple iterations, the house acquires a series of characters or associations, a kind of multi-faceted significance for both the characters and audience. I’m not sure it entirely lives up to Shaw’s stated aim of making it symbolise all of pre-war Edwardian society, but you can see what he’s aiming at.
Husbands and wives
The play is packed with paradoxical lines about husbands and wives and marriage, which are reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s plays, saturated in one-liners on the subject. But then, as I pointed out when reviewing Wilde’s plays, the war between men and women, and jokes about husbands and wives, go back through Restoration comedy, back through Shakespeare, through Chaucer, back to the Classical world.
The inability of men and women to get on is one of the oldest subjects in literature, from married Helen running away with Paris and Eve disobeying God and her husband right up to the latest Hollywood movie all about marital infidelity or the endless traumas of the dating game.
I take a Darwinian view. I see the centrality and extraordinary longevity of this subject through all of recorded literature as demonstrating how finding and choosing a mate, building a nest, reproducing and raising young ones, is the single most important function in the lives of humans (or any other form of life come to that, mammals, birds etc).
What’s distinctive and impressive about humans is how terrible they are at it, how unhappy they make themselves because of it, and how it has remained a subject for mockery, satire or anger for millennia. And so the same hackneyed subject is reiterated here, again and again:
MANGAN: Well, I thought you were rather particular about people’s characters.
ELLIE: If we women were particular about men’s characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan.
ELLIE [turning on her]: Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of course. But how can you love a liar?
MRS HUSHABYE: I don’t know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much love in the world.
MANGAN [almost beside himself]: Do you think I’ll be made a convenience of like this?
ELLIE: Come, Mr Mangan! you made a business convenience of my father. Well, a woman’s business is marriage. Why shouldn’t I make a domestic convenience of you?
ELLIE: It is just because I want to save my soul that I am marrying for money. All the women who are not fools do.
ELLIE: Why do women always want other women’s husbands?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in to one that is wild?
Or… these are conventions developed and streamlined in literature. These are literary tropes which have been with us since the dawn of writing because… why? Because it is a subject any writer can write humorously about and know his audience will get the joke, groan, cheer, laugh, whatever, but it requires little or no effort. Seen this way, maybe men-women and husband-wife gags are just easy.
Leonard Woolf
Inn her splendid biography of Leonard Woolf, Victoria Glendinning decribes Woolf being invited in June 1916 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb to go stay for a weekend at their house in Wyndham Croft in Sussex.
Leonard always found Shaw charming and friendly, ‘though if you happened to look into that slightly fishy, ice-blue eye of his, you got a shock’. He was never looking at you, or even speaking to you, personally. That blue eye ‘was looking through you or over you into a distant world or universe inhabited almost entirely by GBS, his thoughts and feelings, fancies and phantasies.’ That weekend contributed to the apocalyptic Shavian fantasies of his play Heartbreak House; Leonard remembered him writing it in the garden on a pad on his knee. (Leonard Woolf: A Life by Victorian Glendinning, 2007 edition, page 202)
Related links
Bernard Shaw reviews
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Posted by Simon on November 8, 2024
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/11/08/heartbreak-house-george-bernard-shaw/