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Hay Fever by Noel Coward (1925)

JUDITH: You must forgive me for having rather peculiar children.

SOREL: We’re a beastly family, and I hate us… we’ve spent our lives cultivating the Arts and not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners and things.

MYRA (furiously): Well, I’m not going to spare your feelings, or anyone else’s. You’re the most infuriating set of hypocrites I’ve ever seen. This house is a complete feather-bed of false emotions—you’re posing, self-centred egotists, and I’m sick to death of you.

SIMON (over his shoulder): Ha, ha!—very funny.

Executive summary

In a country house near Cookham live the Bliss family, father, mother, young adult son and daughter. Without telling the others, they each invite a guest down for the weekend, but behave so selfishly and rudely that after an embarrassing Saturday afternoon, and excruciating Saturday evening, on the Sunday morning all four guests run away while the Blisses are so busy having a massive family row that they don’t notice their departure.

More froth. Having come across the word ‘flippant’ to describe Coward it’s stuck in my mind as the best word to describe his approach. Flippant, sarcastic, lofty, dismissive, it may well have captured the cynicism of the younger generation of upper-middle-class families he portrays, but it makes for tiresome reading.

‘Hay Fever’ is said by some to be Coward’s most perfect comedy. In my opinion a comedy has to be funny, or it at least helps. Coward characters overflow with deliberately silly and frivolous comments which aren’t funny in themselves, but continually signal the facetious flippant mentality which is his schtick.

SOREL: Everybody’s heard of Richard Greatham.
SIMON: How lovely for them.

That strikes me as being schoolboy level and indeed a lot of Coward’s characters behave like children, like spoiled adolescents, have the psychology of sarcastic teenagers. When Sorel (a young woman) tells her sarcastic brother, Simon, that she’s invited a guest to come and stay, Richard Greatham, a chap who works in the Foreign Office, Simon says:

SIMON: Will he have the papers with him?
SOREL: What papers?
SIMON (vaguely): Oh, any papers.
SOREL: I wish you’d confine your biting irony to your caricatures, Simon.

Is this biting irony? No, it’s a mildly amusing bit of banter. And this is characteristic of the way all the characters, and by implication the author, talk themselves up, make grandiose gestures out of what are, in reality, very mundane arguments and misunderstandings. Which is why Coward’s plays have this peculiar quality of making quite a big impact at the time and then later, in memory, feel so empty.

Or else the tone is just camply bitchy. When Sorel asks the maid, Clara, whether she’s put flowers in the Japanese room, where he’s going to be put up, Simon, having taken against this chap Greatly, bitchily comments:

SOREL: You haven’t forgotten to put those flowers in the Japanese room?
SIMON: The Japanese room is essentially feminine, and entirely unsuited to the Pet of the Foreign Office.
SOREL: Shut up, Simon.

This could be delivered as camp bitchiness, but is really teenage sarcasm. It’s mildly distracting but not funny. As the play progressed I realised the most important bit was Sorel’s immediate anger. The point of the play is how quick each member of the Bliss family is to get angry with any of the others. Very self-absorbed argumentative family, that’s the point.

Then there’s the comedy of snobbery pure and simple.

SOREL: Clara says Amy’s got toothache.
JUDITH: Poor dear! There’s some oil of cloves in my medicine cupboard. Who is Amy?
SOREL: The scullery-maid, I think.
JUDITH: How extraordinary! She doesn’t look Amy a bit, does she? Much more Flossie.

This is the familiar caricature figure of the loveably out-of-touch parent or posh bourgeois who has no idea about their own servants. Hilarious.

Act 1. Saturday afternoon

All three acts are set in the same scene, the living room of the Blisses’ house at Cookham, in June.

Simon and Sorel are brother and sister (19), young whimsical and self-absorbed. Just like Florence and Nicky Lancaster in The Vortex, they consider themselves ‘abnormal’ and lament how they suffer for their ‘difference’.

SIMON: It’s no use worrying, darling; we see things differently, I suppose, and if people don’t like it they must lump it.

This is just another way of saying they’re special, which is, of course, what all narcissistic self-absorbed people think. And it is, notoriously, what self-involved theatre people, or ‘luvvies’, think about themselves. Different, special – more sensitive, spiritual, artistic and aware than ‘normal’ people.

And theatre audiences who have paid to attend the theatre have made a fairly obvious agreement that they will find the people on stage in some sense ‘special’, participants in a shaped narrative, otherwise why bother going to the theatre at all?

Actors on stage playing actors claiming the narcissistic attention which (some) actors notoriously think due to themselves – it’s like watching a baby or child in an adult body – this genre or trope has entertained audiences for over a century, and Simon and Sorel’s mother Judith is a prime example. She claims to have retired from the stage, though her children suspect it won’t be long before she takes it back up, because of the addiction to feeling special, to being in the limelight and the centre of attention. She tells us she’s invited a friend to stay this weekend, and goes on to explain:

JUDITH: He’s a perfect darling, and madly in love with me—at least, it isn’t me really, it’s my Celebrated Actress glamour—but it gives me a divinely cosy feeling.

An actress on stage describing how wonderful it is to be adored as an actress on stage. This is what the kids call ‘meta’, meaning ‘self-referential, referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre.’ I think Oscar Wilde’s characters, in plays and stories, constantly refer to playing a part, acting a role, posing, but do it as part of a consciously worked-out attitude to life, explained in great depth in his long essays. In Coward it just feels like a trick and a mannerism.

Anyway, brief summary: Simon is allegedly an artist, Sorel is his quick-tempered sister, mother Judith affects the absent-minded self-importance of a Grande Dame of the theatre, and the father, David, hides away in his study finishing his novel.

The four guests they’ve invited arrive, being:

Sandy Tyrell, a sporty young chap invited by Judith – ‘He’s a perfect darling, and madly in love with me’
Myra Arundel, sexy and strong-minded, invited by Simon – according to Judith ‘She’s far too old for you, and she goes about using Sex as a sort of shrimping net’ and calls her a ‘self-conscious vampire’ or vamp – a word just coming into common usage
Richard Greatham, an older man, iron-grey and tall, ‘a frightfully well-known diplomatist’, invited by Sorel
Jackie Coryton, small and shingled, ‘a perfectly sweet flapper’ invited by David – ‘she’s an abject fool, but a useful type, and I want to study her a little in domestic surroundings’

The Bliss family have a disconcerting habit of, without warning, dropping into a team performance of plays their mother once performed in. At several points during the weekend they suddenly drop into acting out one of Judith’s great hits, ‘Love’s Whirlwind’ and they’re acting out the climactic scene when the first of the guests arrive.

The guests arrive and are disconcerted to be very cursorily greeted, almost ignored by the Blisses.

MYRA: It’s useless to wait for introductions with the Blisses.

There are various moments of embarrassment. For example Sandy is taken aback when Judith tells him her husband is upstairs. He thought she was a widow. Simon fancies Myra like mad but she’s suave and standoffish. Soon after they’ve arrived urbane Richard and dim Jackie find themselves abandoned by their hosts, and left alone find they have nothing to talk about. Slowly they all realise they’re all there for various types of misunderstanding.

The casual rudeness of the Bliss’s, leaving various guests to work out where to go or try and make conversation, leads up to tea for everyone served by Clara the servant, at which conversation fizzles out as it starts to rain and they’re all stuck indoors with each other.

Act 2. Saturday evening

Everyone’s dressed for dinner. The first half of the act is taken up with an enormous squabble about which party game they should play, with the Blisses snapping at each other while the other guests try to understand what’s going on.

The game breaks up amid recriminations and arguments with David and Judith blaming each other from bringing up the children so badly. The characters break away, David going to his room, the others into the library or out into the garden. This leaves Judith the theatrical mother alone with Richard the mature diplomat and it turns out Richard doesn’t like Sorel at all, it’s Judith he’s in love with. There’s lots of flirting which leads up to him kissing her.

At this she leaps to her feet and melodramatically behaves as if they are having a torrid affair and agonising over how to tell her husband that their life together is over etc. This, I grant you, is very funny. Telling him she needs space to compose herself she pushes Richard out into the garden and preens in the mirror before going into the library. But here she discovers young Sandy the sportsman, who she invited down, locked in an embrace with Sorel.

Once again Judith switches into the role of the betrayed woman, making a Grand Scene.

SOREL: Mother, be natural for a minute.
JUDITH: I don’t know what you mean, Sorel.

Comically, Judith says she will make the Great Sacrifice of giving up Sandy and letting his and Sorel’s love prosper. As soon as she’s swept out, Sorel lights a cigarette and tells Sandy she doesn’t love him. But what about the scene they just had?

SORE: One always plays up to Mother in this house; it’s a sort of unwritten law… her sense of the theatre is always fatal.

They go back into the library leaving the stage empty. This is the setting for the third love scene, this time between the father, David, and wilful Myra. Note how the Blisses are pairing off not with the guests they invited. Musical chairs.

An enormous long scene as they flirt leading up to his taking her hand. She repeatedly tells him to let go and then slaps him. With sixpenny psychology, this leads them to suddenly fall into a passionate clinch. And with arch contrivance, this is precisely when Judith re-enters from her bedroom, coming down the stairs and capturing them in mid-kiss.

Obviously David and Myra are embarrassed but once again this is the pretext for Judith to play the Grande Dame, this time not with a florid burst of hysteria but with quite the opposite, an exaggerated display of Noble Restraint.

JUDITH: Life has dealt me another blow, but I don’t mind.

Cold-eyed Myra sees that this is all part of their family dynamic:

MYRA: You’re both making a mountain out of a mole-hill.

But Judith sweeps on in the part of Noble Self-Sacrificing Wife, saying she will leave the house now it has become too full of painful memories.

JUDITH: October is such a mournful month in England. I think I shall probably go abroad—perhaps a pension somewhere in Italy, with cypresses in the garden. I’ve always loved cypresses.

This is funny, as is the way David completely forgets that he’s supposed to be ‘in love’ with Myra in his admiration for Judith’s performance.

At the height of her display Simon comes running in from the garden and, in the fourth and final reshuffling of the characters’ initial allegiances, announces that he and the brainless flapper Jackie are engaged. And this triggers what, by now I’ve realised, is yet another performance from Judith, this time as The Mother Whose Children Are Growing Up And Leaving Home.

JUDITH (picturesquely): All my chicks leaving the nest. Now I shall only have my memories left. Jackie, come and kiss me.

There’s only one snag, which is that Jackie in no way loves Simon and eventually gets to explain that they had one little kiss then he leapt up and ran off to the house to tell his family. What you realise is that they’re all acting, all the Blisses seize on mundane events and blow them up out of all proportion in order to feed their own sense of the theatrical. Against this Myra is the voice of clear-eyed realism (as Helen is in The Vortex), and angrily tells them the truth:

MYRA: Don’t speak to me—I’ve been working up for this, only every time I opened my mouth I’ve been mowed down by theatrical effects. You haven’t got one sincere or genuine feeling among the lot of you—you’re artificial to the point of lunacy.

So that’s the key to the whole thing. It’s a group portrait of a family who live in their own incestuous over-dramatic theatrical reality.

And to seal the point, as all the characters descend into a huge bickering squabble, Richard the diplomat innocently asks ‘Is this a game’ without realising this is a line from the play the family often perform, ‘Love’s Whirlwind’ and, at a drop of a hat, Judith, Simon and Sorel drop into a performance of the melodramatic final scene while David enthusiastically applauds – leaving the four invited guests puzzled and aghast.

Act 3. Sunday morning

First thing in the morning in the dining room. Clara the servant has set the breakfast things in warming dishes on the side table. One by one the guests come down, Sandy, Jackie, Myra, Richard.

There’s a lot of comic business with Sandy developing hiccups and dim Jackie clumsily trying to help cure them, and then a comic thread where Richard taps the barometer in the hall and it promptly falls off the wall onto the floor and breaks and, mortified, he tries to hide it…

But the thrust of the scene is simple: all four guests agree the Bliss household is a madhouse and they can’t get away soon enough. They agree to pack their bags in a hurry and sneak out to Richard’s car, and this is what they do.

Once they’ve left the Blisses arrive one by one for breakfast. In a minor way they each do something symptomatic of their interests. Judith is gratified to find that she’s mentioned in a newspaper gossip column, Simon has drawn a new caricature which he shows the others to admire, and David comes downstairs excited because he’s completed the last chapter of the novel he’s writing (titled ‘The Sinful Woman’).

Excitedly he starts reading this final chapter to his family. It opens with a description of the heroine (Jane Sefton) driving her car (a Hispano cf Iris Storm’s car in The Green Hat) round Paris. Except that his family interrupt him to point out he’s got the geography of Paris wrong. To be precise they deny that the Rue St. Honoré leads into the Place de la Concorde, while David insists that it does. This escalates into a full-scale shouting match and it is during the family’s flaming argument that their four poor guests, unseen, sneak down the stairs carrying their bags, and out the front door.

The family argument is reaching a climax when the front door slams shut loudly which shuts them up. After a moment’s silence they then fall to criticising their guests and their extraordinary behaviour in leaving without even saying goodbye or thank you.

DAVID: People really do behave in the most extraordinary manner these days…

Thoughts

Taken for what it is, ‘Hay Fever’ is an affable evening’s entertainment, clocking in at an hour and a half, leaving plenty of time for drinks beforehand and supper somewhere nice afterwards. It is a perfect example of theatre as harmless entertainment and part of a charming night out, civilised and amusing.

It’s a kind of standing reproach to all those critics and intellectuals who want theatre to tear the mask off bourgeois society in the manner of Ibsen and Shaw or any of the post 1960s playwrights who see it as their task to question society’s values and address Big Issues. I can see how Coward fans see his work as a welcome antidote to all that, and his frothy emptiness as a statement in its own right.

Related reviews

Noel Coward reviews
The Green Hat by Michael Arlen (1924)

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by Simon on May 19, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on May 19, 2025

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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:

Mangan is not the millionaire everyone thought
Hector never hunted tigers, as he told her
Lady Utterword’s beautiful hair is fake
even the Captain’s seventh degree of concentration turns out to be rum!

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)

Bernard Shaw reviews

More play reviews

Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw (1894)

The comic play ‘Arms and The Man’ by George Bernard Shaw was first staged in 1894. It was published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s ‘Plays Pleasant’ volume which also included ‘Candida’, ‘You Never Can Tell’, and ‘The Man of Destiny’.

I’ve been reading about Shaw’s plays for decades but have never actually managed to read any. This one has a strikingly heroic title, the first words of John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, so I was surprised to discover that it is a light and rather silly social comedy.

Act 1. A lady’s bedchamber in Bulgaria

The play is set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War, a comically short conflict that lasted from 14 to 28 November 1885.

We are in the bedroom of Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman, daughter of one of the wealthiest families in the land and a high-minded naive romantic. Her grand and domineering mother, Catherine, tells her that the Bulgarian cavalry have won the Battle of Slivnitza against the Serbs and that Sergius Saranoff, Raina’s fiancé, was at the head of the charge. Raina keeps a picture of Sergius in her bedroom and is girlishly thrilled that he is as heroic in real life as in his picture.

Louka, their attractive and sometimes impudent young servant, comes in to warn the ladies that escaped Serbs fleeing the battlefield might be in the area, seeking refuge in the houses of Bulgarian families, and they are promptly terrified to hear firing and shots in the streets.

Raina refuses to be scared and defiantly keeps her window unlocked but this turns out to be unwise because during the night an unknown man climbs up the drainpipe, onto the balcony and into her room. When terrified Raina calls out to ask who it is, he says he will kill Raina if she makes a noise and gives him away.

Overcoming her initial terror, Raina gets talking to the (unnamed) man who turns out to be very calm and reasonable and not at all a threat. He tells her he is not himself a Serb but a Swiss mercenary fighting for the Serbs.

The point of the scene and of the whole play is that this (still unnamed) soldier mocks soldiers and warfare. He tells her that ‘nine soldiers out of ten are born fools’. Nonetheless, Raina warms to him so that when there’s a knock at the door, Raina helps him hide behind a curtain just as Catherine, Louka, and a Bulgarian officer enter to search the room for any Serbs. Raina convinces them that no one is in her room, and they leave.

Raina gives the man chocolate creams, which she keeps in a box in her room, and is shocked to hear that the man has no ammunition for his pistol, as he normally uses his holster to store chocolate. The man argues that Sergius’s cavalry charge against the Serbs was foolish, and succeeded only by sheer luck. The Serbs had machine guns but were given the wrong ammunition by accident, and therefore could not mow down Sergius and his men.

Raina agrees to help the man escape later that night, though she rebukes him for making fun of her fiancé Sergius. The man goes to sleep and Raina goes to see her mother to ask for her help. When Raina and Catherine return, they allow the man to rest since he has not slept for days. A little later Raina and Catherine sneak the still unnamed enemy soldier out of the house, disguised in one of Raina’s father’s old coats.

Act 2. The garden of Major Petkoff’s house

The second act begins in the garden of the same house, though it is now the spring of 1886. The war is over and the Bulgarians and Serbians have signed a peace treaty. The pretty servant girl Louka is engaged to the house’s head male servant, Nicola. Louka tells Nicola that he will never be more than a servant, and that she has higher aspirations. Louka tells him she knows many secrets about the Petkoff family, and Nicola says that he does, too, but would never blackmail his masters.

Major Petkoff, the head of the family, returns from the war. He reports to Catherine that Sergius will never receive the military promotion he craves because he has no command of military strategy. Sergius enters and is greeted warmly by the family, and especially by Raina, who still considers him a hero. Sergius says he has abandoned his commission in the army out of anger that he will never move up in the ranks.

Sergius and Petkoff tell a story they heard about this Swiss soldier being hidden by two Bulgarian women during the soldier’s retreat. Catherine and Raina realize the story is about them, but do not say anything.

Rain and Catherine go indoors and the second her back is turned Sergius reveals what a creep he is by trying to chat up the pretty Louka. To his surprise, Louka warns Sergius that Raina might not remain faithful to him Sergius before they exit.

Into the civilised peaceful garden of the Petkoff family comes a Serbian soldier named Bluntschli. The serving girl Louka brings him to Catherine. Catherine realizes that he is the man that hid in Raina’s room, the same man that she and Raina helped escape.

Catherine worries that Sergius and Petkoff, who are conferring over military plans in the library, might meet Bluntschli and learn that the story about the two Bulgarian women who helped an enemy soldier refers to them!

On questioning Bluntschli tells her he has come to return Major Petkoff’s coat that Catherine and Raina lent him to escape. Raina walks in and is so happy to see him that she blurts out ‘the chocolate cream soldier!’ only to try and recover herself and blame her outburst, implausibly, on Nicola.

But it turns out that Petkoff and Sergius already know Bluntschli, they met him during the war. Now they ask him to stay for lunch and help them solve a tricky military problem which is how to send the troops home now the war is over.

Act 3. In library of major Petkoff’s house after lunch

In the final act all the different strands unravel, are reconnected and happily tied up.

Left alone with Bluntschli, Raina realizes that he sees through her romantic posturing but that he respects her as a woman in a way her formal fiancé, Sergius, does not. She reveals that she put a photograph of herself in the pocket of the greatcoat they lent him, inscribed ‘To my chocolate-cream soldier’. Bluntschli tells her he never found it and that it must still be in the coat pocket.

Meanwhile Sergius has a second crack at seducing the serving girl, Louka, who maliciously tells him that Raina is not in love with him (Sergius) but with Bluntschli. She reveals that Raina and Catherine are the two women in the story of the Bulgarian women who helped a Serb officer and that Bluntschli is that officer. As a result Sergius challenges Bluntschli to a duel but the non-aggressive Bluntschli manages to talk his way out of it.

It’s at this point that the picture of herself which Raina slipped into her father’s coat for Bluntschli to find is discovered, proving that Raina has not been entirely truthful to Sergius and Raina admits that she has had feelings for Bluntschli since they first met. Sergius and Raina break off their engagement, with some relief on both sides.

Major Petkoff is aghast. When Bluntschli acknowledges that he loves Raina, Sergius and Louka reveal that they, too, have been having a secret affair at Sergius’ instigation, with the result that Nicola graciously releases Louka from their engagement.

During all this Bluntschli had received a telegram informing him of his father’s death and that he has inherited the family business, several luxury hotels in Switzerland. Now, recognising Nicola’s dedication and ability, he offers him a job as hotel manager.

For some reason Bluntschli had been labouring under the misapprehension that Raina was just 17. Now she declares she is in fact 23 there is nothing to stop Bluntschli asking for her hand in marriage. The revelation of Bluntschli’s newfound wealth and good prospects mean that Raina’s parents are glad to marry her off to him.

Hankering after her former simplicity, Raina says that she would prefer her poor ‘chocolate-cream soldier’ to the man who is now revealed to be a wealthy businessman but Bluntschli insists he is still the same person, and the play ends with Raina growing up a bit and proclaiming her love for him.

As to the logistical problem which Sergius and Petkoff were fretting about, Bluntschli, with Swiss precision, solves the problem of the major’s troop movements (‘Send them home by way of Lom Palanka!’) then goes on to inform everyone that he will return to be married to Raina exactly two weeks from that day. The play ends with Sergius exclaiming, of Bluntschli, ‘What a man!’

What a load of twaddle.

Verbosity

Isn’t Shaw verbose? Some playwrights leave the actors and director to deduce the characters from their behaviour and dialogue but not Shaw. He can’t stop himself giving immense long prose descriptions of each of the characters. Here’s just one sentence from his page-long description of Sergius:

By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history, that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.

This more like a novelist than a playwright, or the notes a novelist might make about a character. However you approach it is, above all, very wordy. Coming to Shaw after reading Wilde, Ibsen and Strindberg, the most obviously distinctive thing about Shaw is the fantastic, obsessive detail of his stage and dialogue descriptions. He thinks like a novelist, pointing out exactly how each gesture should be made and each phrase spoken. He has none of a playwright’s tact and restraint, no ability to let go and trust the director and actors. Take this little comic moment:

NICOLA: (after a moment’s bewilderment, picking up the bag as he addresses Bluntschli with the very perfection of servile discretion). I beg your pardon, sir, I am sure.

Note how the stage direction is longer than the dialogue. Another playwright would rely on the dialogue to convey the tone of voice, and/or trust the director and actor to deduce it from the words. Shaw is incapable of doing this. He has to explain exactly how every single utterance should be delivered.

BLUNTSCHLI (confidentially)
PETKOFF (officiously)
BLUNTSCHLI (deeply concerned and half incredulous)
RAINA (full of reproach for his levity)

After a while I began to wonder if Shaw was doing this partly to guy directors and actors, aiming not to help but to mock theatre’s unavoidable staginess.

BLUNTSCHLI (sceptically)
BLUNTSCHLI (dubiously)
RAINA (superbly)
BLUNTSCHLI (promptly)
RAINA (wonderingly)

All these ‘-lys’. I began to suspect Shaw was having a private joke to see just how many adverbs he could attach to the dialogue without repeating himself.

RAINA (quickly)
SERGIUS (cordially)
RAINA (indignantly)
SERGIUS (tormentedly)
PETKOFF (heartily)
SERGIUS (commandingly)
BLUNTSCHLI (warmly)
SERGIUS (cynically)
BLUNTSCHLI (goodhumoredly)
RAINA (sarcastically)
BLUNTSCHLI (apologetically)

But Shaw not only explains his characters but goes on to give opinions about them. Shaw overflowed with opinions about everything and so do his stage directions. Take the start of Act 3:

In the library after lunch. It is not much of a library, its literary equipment consisting of a single fixed shelf stocked with old paper-covered novels, broken backed, coffee stained, torn and thumbed, and a couple of little hanging shelves with a few gift books on them, the rest of the wall space being occupied by trophies of war and the chase…

The same quality of verbosity which makes his notorious prefaces such a trial to read also informs the long-winded directions.

At the head of [the table] sits Sergius, who is also supposed to be at work, but who is actually gnawing the feather of a pen, and contemplating Bluntschli’s quick, sure, businesslike progress with a mixture of envious irritation at his own incapacity, and awestruck wonder at an ability which seems to him almost miraculous, though its prosaic character forbids him to esteem it.

I suppose Shaw’s plays had ‘subjects’ and dealt with ‘issues’ but a) in such a journalistic, superficial way as to make them, nowadays, appear almost ridiculously superficial; and b) his thoughts and conclusions, at the time of their staging provocative and controversial (war isn’t as glorious as people think it is), now seem so prehistorically dated that they made no impression on me at all.

To put it mildly, as an anti-war play ‘Arms and The Man’ was to be swept away in the deluge of writing which followed the First World War, vastly eclipsed and outclassed. Then again, maybe I’m taking far too seriously a play which was designed to be a light and frivolous comic entertainment, a charming evening out at a London theatre, with only the hint of a ‘serious’ subject underlying it. Yes, maybe that’s the way to think about it, a frivolous and funny comic play with as much serious content as Anthony Hope’s exactly contemporary novel, The Prisoner of Zenda.

Completely ignoring whatever ‘message’ there’s meant to be, I found myself fascinated by the way that Shaw’s plays are so obviously really novels manqués, comic novels cut and spliced into the two-hour traffic of the stage with the severe constriction of the limitations of a fixed location, but overflowing with a novelist’s unstoppable impulse to describe every aspect of their characters.

Credit

‘Arms and The Man’ by George Bernard Shaw was first staged in 1894 and published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s ‘Plays Pleasant’ volume which also included ‘Candida’, ‘You Never Can Tell’, and ‘The Man of Destiny’. I read this in the 1946 Penguin paperback edition, 1964 reprint.

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The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888)

This is unashamedly a children’s book. It was published as a monthly serial in Young Folks: A Boys’ and Girls’ Paper of Instructive and Entertaining Literature from June to October 1883 under the pseudonym ‘Captain George North’ (the same pen name Stevenson used for Treasure Island). Still, I am reading and experiencing it as an adult.

Cover of The Black Arrow illustrated by N.C. Wyeth

The Wars of the Roses

The story is set against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses, a confusing conflict when the weakness and mental illness of King Henry VI allowed a major civil war to develop between followers of two large noble families – York and Lancaster, each fighting for the crown – which dragged on for a generation, from 1455 to 1485. (Hence the novel’s sub-title, A Tale of the Two Roses.)

There is no high-level explanation of any of this in the novel, and no date given to help the reader orientate themself. We see the conflict not from the vantage of courts and kings, but reflected in the microcosm of what seems to be a small area of the Fenland i.e East Anglia, around the fictional village of Tunstall, with its Moat House and nearby Holyrood Abbey.

The novel opens with a confused throng of villagers, the publican, the local parson Sir Oliver Oates, the lord of the manor Sir Daniel Brackley, and his ward the young teenager Dick Shelton, as they get confused reports of a battle, or at least of another nobleman in some kind of warlike trouble, nearby.

Things are further confused when Brackley’s man, Bennet Hatch, takes Dick to go and talk to old Nick Appleyard, the oldest man in the village who saw service under Henry the Fifth. Hatch wants to ask him to form a small troop to defend the village while the other men ride off to the battle. But they’ve barely started talking before out of nowhere a big arrow whizzes past them, embeds itself between Appleyard’s shoulders and, after a few, shudders, he dies. There are enemies in the woods across the valley. But who? Why?

Brackley is rallying his men outside the village pub when some of them spot a figure fleeing from the churchyard across fields and into the nearby woods. Dick runs over to the church and finds a parchment nailed to the door which promises revenge against oppressors and is signed ‘Jon Amend-All of the Green Wood, And his jolly fellaweship’. It is in the form of doggerel verse:

I had four blak arrows under my belt,
Four for the greefs that I have felt,
Four for the nomber of ill menne
That have opressid me now and then.

it goes on to name four specific individuals who it threatens with death for their ‘crimes’.

One is gone; one is wele sped;
Old Apulyaird is ded.

One is for Maister Bennet Hatch,
That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch.

One for Sir Oliver Oates,
That cut Sir Harry Shelton’s throat.

Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt;
We shall think it fair sport.

It seems to be blaming all four for taking part in the murder of Harry Shelton (Dick’s father) and the burning down of his house. When, in the next scene, we see the slippery and corrupt Sir Daniel Brackley extracting money with menaces i.e. doubling his tenants’ rents to him or else promising to hang them, we quickly come to suspect the poetic accusation is correct. Brackley has brought Dick up, harsh but fair, but the poem seems to implicate him in the murder of Dick’s father when Dick was a small child, and the burning down of his family’s house, Grimstone. You don’t have to be a genius to suspect that young Dick will find himself falling out with his guardian and in with Jon and the romantic woodland ‘fellaweship’.

Adventure and excitement

Stevenson possesses in abundance the boys adventure skill of creating tense moments which set the pulses racing and inflame the teenage mind in all of us. When Brackley (not suspecting the boy’s growing suspicions) sends Dick on an errand to nearby Tunstall Moat House, he finds himself falling in with another young lad who was at the inn and is (for some reason) also going the same way. Once they’ve identified themselves to each other, they carry on through the snowy woods (the novel is set in the depths of winter).

In this scene, the boys have arrived at the ruins of the burnt-out mansion, only to realise there are other people around in the neighbourhood, then realising it is the ‘woodland fellaweship’. They climb warily through the debris and look out through a ruined windowframe:

Peering through this, they were struck stiff with terror at their predicament. To retreat was impossible; they scarce dared to breathe. Upon the very margin of the ditch, not thirty feet from where they crouched, an iron caldron bubbled and steamed above a glowing fire; and close by, in an attitude of listening, as though he had caught some sound of their clambering among the ruins, a tall, red-faced, battered-looking man stood poised, an iron spoon in his right hand, a horn and a formidable dagger at his belt.
(Chapter 4. A Greenwood Company)

The story is chock full of such moments of suspense, confrontation, escape, fights, battles, storms at sea – Stevenson threw everything he could think of and the kitchen sink into the plot.

Fast-moving plot

This other lad Dick has teamed up with is called John Matcham. They watch the outlaws interrupt their meal in the clearing to go off and attack a line of Brackley’s men who are wending through a different part of the woods. Continuing on their way, they encounter a strange leper slowly ringing a mournful hand bell, who reveals himself to be Brackley in a disguise he’s adopted to navigate the dangerous woods. All three finally make it to the safety of Tunstall Moat, Brackley’s base.

Book 2. The Moat House

Here, Dick confronts Brackley with his suspicions and makes him swear he had nothing to do with murdering his (Dick’s) father – which he does with easy fluency. But the parson also named in the doggerel accusation, Sir Oliver Oates, can’t bring himself to take an oath, stuttering and hesitating and turning red, pretty much incriminating himself.

Moreover, one of Brackley’s men brought wounded to the Moat House after the attack on them by the outlaws which Dick and John witnessed, and who is now dying – one John Carter – more or less confesses to the murder and implicates Brackley.

Right. So we have established that Sir Daniel Brackley is the man who helped or was responsible for murdering Dick Shelton’s father and burning down his ancestral home, years ago, but who then adopted and raised Dick. The scales fallen from his eyes, Dick and John decide to escape from the Moat House. But this proves easier said than done since it is a medieval fortress and full of Brackley’s men on high alert for an attack. There is a lot of creeping along spooky, dark castle corridors holding only a rushlight.

Illustration for The Black Arrow by the wonderful N.C. Wyeth

Illustration for The Black Arrow by N.C. Wyeth (1916)

Eventually they are discovered and flee into a vacant room, barricading themselves in against attackers. After repelling an attack through an unsuspected trap door – John Matcham finally reveals that ‘he’ is a maid in disguise. ‘He’ is Joanna Sedley, heir to a fine estate etc etc. whose family are all dead and so has spent her life being held hostage by a number of great lords, all planning marriage deals for her.

Now Brackley has possession of her and wants to marry her off to another lord who will pay a fine price. There is just time for Dick and Joanna to realise they are in love with each other! before the door is forced open by Brackley’s men who seize Joanna and almost grab Dick, who wriggles free, plunges out the window into the moat below, swims across it and scrambles to safety under cover of darkness. Phew!

Book 3. My Lord Foxham

Several months have gone by and the House of Lancaster is in the ascendant with the Yorkists defeated – the small port of Shoreby-on-the-Till is full of Lancastrian nobles including Brackley, sucking up to the new masters of the land. Now we learn that Dick has been hiding out all this time with the outlaws in the forest and that their leader is called Ellis Duckworth. He has loaned Dick some of his cut-throats, criminals and deserters to tail Brackley to Shoreby and now the chapter opens with them hiding out, drinking and grumbling, in a low pub.

One of their spies comes in to report that Brackley is going to a midnight assignation at a house by the sea – Dick and his men follow, Dick climbs over the wall and peers through the window and sees the house contains Joanna Sedley, now magically transformed from the ‘boy’ he shared adventures with in book one into a tall, stately, womanly figure – he is even more in love with her, though a little daunted by her fine womanhood.

Other figures are seen moving suspiciously around the walls and so Dick’s men attack them, leading to a scrappy fight. Dick kills one then tackles a good-sized man in a fight which spills into the sea – Dick manages to trip him, get him under the waves and forces him to yield. It turns out to be Lord Foxham, himself no friend of Brackley, himself come to spy on Joanna. Realising they’re on sort of the same side, Dick and Foxham arrange to meet next day at St Bride’s Cross, just outside Shoreby, ‘on the skirts of Tunstall Forest’. Here Lord Foxham confirms his identity and that he is the rightful protector of the fair Joanna Sedley. Dick’s passionate protestations about her safety persuade Foxham that Dick truly loves her, and he declares that Dick shall marry her. Only the slight problem that she is held captive by Brackly and betrothed to Lord Shoreby stands in the way.

So Dick resolves to rescue fair Joanna from the house by the sea. Since his fight with Foxham’s men the night before was pretty conspicuous, Brackley has doubled his guard, placing armed men round the house and knights on the approach roads, so Dick has the bright idea of approaching by sea. In a series of rather contorted events which are typical of the novel’s contrived storyline, Dick commissions his pack of criminals to steal a ship, which they do by hailing the master of a boat newly arrived in the port of Shoreby, as he comes ashore, then plying him with so much drink that he is easy to lure outside, mug and tie up. Then the gang row back out to the ship – the ironically named Good Hope – take command of it and sail it to a rough pier not far from the isolated house where Joanna is being held.

But when our men leave the ship and walk along the rough pier they find themselves instantly attacked, coming under bow and arrow fire, killing and injuring many, the whole crew panicking and rushing back to the ship, some falling into the water and drowning, others expiring on the deck. Quite a bloody scene.

Even Lord Foxham, who we only met ten pages earlier, is wounded, and carried to a cabin below decks. Here, once the ship has weighed anchor, he tells Dick that he was scheduled to meet the young Duke of Gloucester (the future King Richard III) of the house of York, with notes about the deployment of the Lancastrian forces around Shoreby. Dick must now undertake this mission. And Foxham names Dick the rightful husband of Lady Joanna in the letters he asks Dick to bear – but it is up to him to actually secure her.

In further melodrama the ship is now driven by heavy seas to shipwreck on the sand not far from Shoreby. Once the tide has gone out all the survivors of the vain attack on Brackley’s house struggle ashore and traipse inland, but not without – in yet more action – briefly coming under attack from a platoon of men apparently place there to defend the coast. But they escape without any more casualties.

All of this, by the way, takes place in the depth of winter, with darkening stormy skies, high seas, and snow storms. It is all very atmospheric and well described but the underlying scenario is too far-fetched for the reader to buy into.

Book 4. The Disguise

Dick pays off the motley crew, all too happy to leave their unlucky (and very young) leader, and elects to stick with Lawless. This outlaw has emerged with higher stature then the other cut-throats: it was he who Dick saw in the clearing cooking the outlaws’ meal; it was he who took control of the Good Hope‘s helm, steered it through the storm and ensured it survived the wreck. Now Lawless takes Dick through the snow-struck forest to his secret lair in the woods, a warren created when a tall beech tree was blown over, with the sides shored up with earth and turf and the entrance covered with brushwood.

Lawless leading young Dick to his den in the woods, illustration by N.C. Wyeth

It is, in other words, a fantasy version of a boy’s den in the woods. Inside it is surprisingly warm and snug, especially after Lawless lights a fire, they cook and eat some food and share some sweet wine, and Dick tells his story. ‘You want Lady Joan?’ Lawless asks Dick. ‘Let’s go and get her.’ So Lawless opens one of the several trunks stashed round his den and gets out several friar’s cassocks, complete with rope belts. And a tray of make-up pencils (a sort of indication of the theatrical origins or references of much of the language and plot of the novel). He gets Dick to put on the friar’s costume and then applies make-up to make him seem older, a wise old wandering friar. They head off through the snowy woods, back towards Sir Daniel Brackley’s residence in Shoreby.

Here, in the chaos of an over-packed lord’s house, Dick sees two fine ladies heading upstairs and follows them, till he encounters Lady Joan again, in the company of her serving lady. But oh alas and alack! Joanna reveals that she is to be married next day to Lord Shoreby. She and the lady must go back downstairs to the marriage feast while Dick stays hidden. Off they go but only a few minutes later a malevolent dwarf-jester comes snooping around and, as he discovers evidence of Dick hiding, Dick leaps out, they tussle, and Dick stabs him to death with his poniard. (For the hero of a children’s story Dick kills quite a few people – he killed one of Foxham’s men in the fight by the sea, he kills the dwarf – and all this pales next to the slaughter in book 5. It’s a surprisingly violent book.)

When the dwarf’s body is discovered by servants there is much alarm and shouting but Dick stays hidden in Lady J’s room, when she returns for a further clasping of hands and bosoms and protestations of love – all watched by the ironic lady-in-waiting, before Dick tries to make his escape.

Since he is still in his disguise as a friar, he tells the house guards that he is going to the nearby church to pray for the dwarf’s soul (his body having been laid in state there), but the guards take him at his word and frog-march him to the church. Here he is no sooner introduced to the parson, Sir Oliver Oates, who begins to recognise him through is disguise than Dick throws himself on his mercy. In an unguarded moment the parson, for his part, admits that he was used as a decoy to lure Dick’s father to his death all those years ago, but swears he didn’t know that was what was going to happen. The soldiers are sitting in the pews watching him suspiciously so there’s no way Dick can escape the church, and so he spends the night next to Sir Oliver, pretending to mutter prayers for the dead dwarf.

Next morning they are woken early by the grand procession for the wedding of Lord Shoreham to Lady Joanna. But barely has the fine lord entered the church, richly caparisoned and accompanied by his fragrant retinue than a brace of arrows ring out, shooting him dead on the spot, injuring Brackley, creating hysteria and panic among the attendants and ladies.

This is stilled by the imperious voice of Lord Risingham, the noblest man present. To Dick’s dismay the parson immediately betrays him and Lawless (his fellow fake friar) and they are dragged before Risingham and all kinds of accusations thrown at them of being in league with the fellowship of the Black Arrow and therefore involved in this sacrilegious outrage.

Brackley is incensed and wants to drag Dick off and torture him to death, but Lady Joanna intercedes to say she never wanted to marry Lord Shoreby and loves Dick, and her (cheeky) lady in waiting backs up the story and so Risingham, who has seniority, has Dick taken by soldiers to his own chambers to judge.

Here Dick saves the day by admitting that he guilty to some extent of falling in with the fellowship of forest crooks, but he only did so after learning that Brackley murdered his father. He clinches his case by handing over to Risingham a letter he had conveniently found on the murdered dwarf in which the villain Brackley plots to overthrow the Yorkist interest – which includes Risingham – and then hand over Risingham’s lands to Lord Shoreby. Risingham is incensed and instantly releases Dick, making him swear to mend his ways.

So Dick finally gets to escape the house and trouble and is walking free across Shoreby when, of all the bad luck, as he is passing one of the inns on the dockside, out of it stumble some very drunk sailors which include Arblaster, the unfortunate captain who Dick’s men got drunk, mugged and then whose ship they stole and wrecked. He doesn’t recognise him but his wretched dog does, coming barking up to him and lawless, still in their silly friar disguises. The drunks grow in suspicion and when he tries to bolt, grab him, tie him up and drag him back into the pub. Here Dick spins a long cock and bull story, admitting he is one of the outlaws but has grudges against them, and that the outlaws have a vast pile of treasure in the woods, and persuading Arblaster and his mates that he’ll lead them to it. In its way this is a curious and flavoursome scene. They are by this stage very drunk and Dick makes them show him the only possession of his which they found and therefore took off him – Lord Foxham’s signet ring with which he was to identify himself to Richard of Gloucester – when Dick snatches it, up ends the tables in their faces, and scarpers out the door and along the quayside into the night. Phew.

Book 5. Crookback

Though as convoluted in detail as the others, this is in some ways the simplest book. If you remember, Dick had promised Lord Foxham he would rendezvous with Richard Duke of Gloucester and give him Foxham’s writings on the disposition of enemy (Lancastrian) forces in Shoreby. Now, Dick hid those papers when he was at Lawless’s den in the woods, which is why Arblaster and his drunk shipmates didn’t find them when they searched Dick the night before.

Now, the next morning, Dick is on his way through the woods back to Lawless’s den to get them, when he comes across a man defending himself against several attackers. Dick throws himself into the fray, coming to his defence, and together they beat the men off. At which point the other blows his horn and a brace of horsemen arrive and quickly identify the man he’s saved as Richard Duke of Gloucester, known as Crookback and as every schoolboy in 1888 knew, the man who would become King Richard III, according to legend the most wicked monarch in England’s history.

At this point, if it hadn’t been obvious before, the reader realises that this is a novel not only about two roses but about two Richards. For immediately the duke of Gloucester reveals the manic glint in his eye and the intensity of his ambition.

Gloucester explains to Dick that he is about to attack Shoreby and Dick gives him an eye-witness description of the Lancastrian forces every bit as good as Foxham’s. Gloucester knights Dick on the spot, from this point onwards Sir Richard Shelton. But says now he must command a troop during the forthcoming battle of Shoreby.

The (fictional) Battle of Shoreby is described across two chapters in impressive detail. The reader feels this is what it must be like to attack a medieval town through narrows streets and, as Dick does, command his men to raise a barricade with furniture looted from the rickety houses and then withstand attacks from massed archers and from armoured knights on horseback. It is rip-roaring exciting stuff.

Eventually the battle is won and Richard asks permission to ride and rescue his lady love, and Gloucester gives him a troop of men. Off they go trailing Brackly and his forces through the forest. After various delays and losing of the tracks, Dick and his men creep up on Brackley’s party gathered round a fire which includes Lady Joanna. They gather and attack, but Brackley’s men were waiting for them and mount a a surprise counter-attack. Joanna runs to Dick in the confusion and they escape the confusion of battle into the dense forest.

(It’s worth noting that although the novel is made of clichés, there keep coming unexpected complications and rebuffs, which give it a sort of realistic but also quite a frustrating feel. When Dick and his gang stole the ship and sailed it round to attack Brackley’s house by the sea I thought it would be a storming triumph, so was very surprised when they are beaten back and many killed or injured by bowfire before they’ve barely got off the jetty.)

Briefly, Dick and Joanna make it back to the safety of Lord Foxham’s house. There is a further encounter with Gloucester where Dick displeases the great man with a notable request. Gloucester says he will give Dick anything he desires, and at that moment – as it happens – amid the chaos of post-battle Shoreby, some troops come past hustling some captives who Gloucester, barely bothering to look, orders to be hanged. And Dick recognises among them Arblaster, the wretched sea captain who Richard has twice wronged, stealing his ship and ruining his livelihood, then throwing a table at him in the quayside pub. Now Dick sees a way to atone for his past sins and asks Gloucester to spare this man’s life. Irritated at the triviality of the request, Gloucester agrees to do so – since he has given his word – but fiercely tells Dick that he can’t expect to rise in his army, in his cause, if he throws away favours on trifle. And so Gloucester gallops off.

Next morning Dick is up betimes, accoutred and arrayed in the finest regalia Foxham can provide, ready for his wedding to Lady Joanna. He strolls around the town, surveying the triumphant Yorkist troops, before straying further afield and ends up walking through the (by now very familiar) snowy woods.

And it is here that the psychological climax of the book comes, when Dick disturbs a figure lurking in the woods in disguise and it turns out to be none other than Sir Daniel Brackley. They argue. They nearly fight but Dick refuses to shed blood on his wedding day. In fact he admits – to Brackley, to the reader, to himself – that he has done too many bloody deeds recently, spilled too much blood. Although he has all the justification for it, he will not harm Brackley. He tells him to go before he calls the guards. And so Brackley shuffles off, suspiciously.

At which point there is the twang of a bow and from a nearby thicket an arrow is despatched which embeds itself in Brackley, who falls to the ground. Dick rushes to him and just has time to tell him that, yes, it is a Black Arrow, when Brackley expires. And Ellis Duckworth comes from the thicket holding his bow. He heard Dick forgive Brackley, but he can’t forgive. He asks Dick to pray for his soul. And Dick notes that vengeance hasn’t made Duckworth feel good, in fact he feels sick and guilty. Give it up, says Dick. Hatch died in the Battle of Shoreham. So three of the four mentioned in the original verse threat are now despatched. Dick asks forgiveness for the parson and Duckworth, reluctantly agrees.

‘Be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore—the fellowship is broken.’

‘But be at rest; the Black Arrow flieth nevermore’. Illustration by N. C. Wyeth

In the short conclusion to the book, Dick marries his Joan. Richard Crookback makes a last appearance riding by with the long train of his armed men, going towards the next battle, and parries banter with Foxham, Joan and Dick, offering Joan the husband of her choice. Of course she cleaves to honest Dick, and Gloucester pshaws, turns his horse and gallops off towards his destiny.

And in the last few sentences we learn that Dick and Joan lived out their lives in peace and happiness far from the wars and that two old men – Arblaster the shipman and Lawless the rogue – also live out their lives in peace. Dick has, in some measure, atoned for his youthful bloodthirstiness, by at key moments, interceding and saving both their lives. And with that thought, or moral, the book ends.

Reasons for The Black Arrow’s relative failure

The relative failure and comparative neglect of this novel makes you appreciate the elements which made the classics Treasure Island and Kidnapped such successes. I identify four reasons:

1. One hero

In those novels there is one boy hero (Jim Hawkins, David Balfour) – clearly identified in the first sentence – and you are thrown immediately into his plight – which is also described clearly and obviously. In The Black Arrow the picture is much more confused: it takes fifty pages or more to become really clear that the story is about a young lad, Master Richard (‘Dick’) Shelton, the ward of the wicked Sir Daniel Brackley, and this is because quite a few characters are introduced in the confused and busy opening scenes.

2. Third person narrator

The successful tales are first-person narratives, throwing you directly and immediately into the adventure at first hand. The Black Arrow has a third-person narrator who is not, for some reason, very believable, partly because of the confusion of plot which dogs a lot of the story.

3. Good guys and bad guys

In his classic works you know who the good guys and bad guys are – the pirates in Treasure Island, the ship’s crew and then the loyalist British army in Kidnapped. In this book it is much harder to tell for several reasons:

a) it’s a civil war so there’s no immediate way of knowing who’s on whose side, except by asking
b) characters change sides, including the hero who is not wholeheartedly for either side

4. A charismatic anti-hero

When Richard Crookback appears in the fifth act, the reader realises that this is the fourth reason why this novel isn’t as successful as Kidnapped or Treasure Island – the presence of a charismatic baddy.

Both those stories introduce fairly early on a hugely charismatic, charming, threatening, adult hero who enthrals the boy narrator and comes to dominate the story – namely Long John Silver and Alan Breck Stewart. Their presence, their charming rogueish amorality, lifts both books onto a completely different level.

In this book, the dangerous charismatic adult is Richard Crookback – he immediately captures our attention by his spirited self-defence against four or five attackers, and then with his arrogant nonchalance as soon as he starts talking to Dick. From now to the end of the novel the story lifts and sails whenever he is present – he is a pantomime villain like Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But his arrival makes you realise that he is what the preceding four-fifths of the book have been missing.

Medieval vocabulary

Apparently Stevenson used the Paston Letters, a collection of authentic correspondence from the period, as his model, and – as someone who studied medieval literature at university – I did feel the text had some of the tang and hempen antiquity of the older language, albeit interlarded with what I thought were Shakespearian usages from 200 years later, and some speeches which had a Scots ring to me. You have to be prepared to enjoy exchanges like this:

She was groping for the bolt, when Dick at last comprehended.
‘By the mass!’ he cried, ‘y’ are no Jack; y’ are Joanna Sedley; y’ are the maid that would not marry me!’
The girl paused, and stood silent and motionless. Dick, too, was silent for a little; then he spoke again.
‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘y’ ’ave saved my life, and I have saved yours; and we have seen blood flow, and been friends and enemies—ay, and I took my belt to thrash you; and all that time I thought ye were a boy. But now death has me, and my time’s out, and before I die I must say this: Y’ are the best maid and the bravest under heaven, and, if only I could live, I would marry you blithely; and, live or die, I love you.’
She answered nothing.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘speak up, Jack. Come, be a good maid, and say ye love me!’
‘Why, Dick,’ she cried, ‘would I be here?’
‘Well, see ye here,’ continued Dick, ‘an we but escape whole we’ll marry; and an we’re to die, we die, and there’s an end on’t.’
(Chapter 3. The Room Over The Chapel)

On the other hand, one of the pleasures of reading old literature, especially something as conventional in its way as this ripping yarn, is the logical habits of mind of writers brought up in previous ages. There is a lovely logic to the deployment of the material in the opening of the chapter ‘In Mine Enemies’ House’ – the way the place is identified, then described, then the attitude behind its busy state, then a specific setting in time given, and then the weather: the whole impression being rounded up and summarised in the witty sentence about the eye of the modern.

Sir Daniel’s residence in Shoreby was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and overlooked from the far end by the tower of the abbey church.
The house might contain, upon a pinch, the retinue of a greater person than Sir Daniel; but even now it was filled with hubbub. The court rang with arms and horseshoe-iron; the kitchens roared with cookery like a bees’-hive; minstrels, and the players of instruments, and the cries of tumblers, sounded from the hall. Sir Daniel, in his profusion, in the gaiety and gallantry of his establishment, rivalled with Lord Shoreby, and eclipsed Lord Risingham.

All guests were made welcome. Minstrels, tumblers, players of chess, the sellers of relics, medicines, perfumes, and enchantments, and along with these every sort of priest, friar, or pilgrim, were made welcome to the lower table, and slept together in the ample lofts, or on the bare boards of the long dining-hall.

On the afternoon following the wreck of the Good Hope, the buttery, the kitchens, the stables, the covered cartshed that surrounded two sides of the court, were all crowded by idle people, partly belonging to Sir Daniel’s establishment, and attired in his livery of murrey and blue, partly nondescript strangers attracted to the town by greed, and received by the knight through policy, and because it was the fashion of the time.

The snow, which still fell without interruption, the extreme chill of the air, and the approach of night, combined to keep them under shelter. Wine, ale, and money were all plentiful; many sprawled gambling in the straw of the barn, many were still drunken from the noontide meal. To the eye of a modern it would have looked like the sack of a city; to the eye of a contemporary it was like any other rich and noble household at a festive season.

There is a pleasure and a seduction in the logical disposition of the material, a pleasing old-fashioned storytellingness. I made a note of sundry medieval words which, although I’ve often read before, I don’t actually fully understand.

arbalest – a crossbow with a special mechanism for drawing back and releasing the string
baldric – a belt worn over one shoulder to carry a weapon (usually a sword) or other implement such as a bugle or drum
brigandine – a cloth garment, generally canvas or leather, lined with small oblong steel plates riveted to the fabric
buckler – a small shield, up to 18 inches in diameter, held in the fist with a central handle behind the boss
cresset – a metal cup or basket, mounted to a pole, containing flammable substance like oil, pitch or a rope steeped in rosin, burned as a light or beacon
gyves – a shackle, especially for the leg
losels – a worthless person or scoundrel
lout – verb: to bow or stoop
murrain – a plague, epidemic, or crop blight
poniard – a small, slim dagger
pottage – a thick soup or stew made by boiling vegetables, grains, and, if available, meat or fish
sallet – a light medieval helmet, usually with a vision slit or a movable visor
shaw – a coppice or thicket of trees
tippet – a scarf-like narrow piece of clothing, worn over the shoulders
tucket – a flourish on a trumpet
windac – a piece of equipment to pull back the tight string of a crossbow

Books & Boots

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged shaw

Hay Fever by Noel Coward (1925)

Executive summary

Act 1. Saturday afternoon

Act 2. Saturday evening

Act 3. Sunday morning

Thoughts

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Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes by George Bernard Shaw (1919)

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Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw (1894)

Act 1. A lady’s bedchamber in Bulgaria

Act 2. The garden of Major Petkoff’s house

Act 3. In library of major Petkoff’s house after lunch

Verbosity

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson (1888)

The Wars of the Roses

Adventure and excitement

Fast-moving plot

Book 2. The Moat House

Book 3. My Lord Foxham

Book 4. The Disguise

Book 5. Crookback

Reasons for The Black Arrow’s relative failure

1. One hero

2. Third person narrator

3. Good guys and bad guys

4. A charismatic anti-hero

Medieval vocabulary

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Follow

Topics

Categories