A series of plays of a new kind poured from his pen. The first was Brand (1866), the second that astonishing work, Peer Gynt (1867). This was followed by a collection of poems, the ten-act drama Emperor and Galilean (1873), and Pillars of Society (1877). He was approaching his major mode, but he had not yet quite reached it. Two years later, with A Doll’s House, he exploded into dramatic greatness.
Nora, the heroine of A Doll’s House, is the twittery, charming but incompetent wife of Torvald Helmer, who adores her. But he is unable to treat her as anything but a child. The play is about Nora’s awakening. A series of confrontations and events leads to her final recognition that she is not only—she is much more than—what her husband sees in her. In the last, great scene she leaves him, leaving all of her life behind, thus breaking not only his heart but her own as well. But even with a broken heart she will take on the world, endure her suffering, and make a life for herself that is hers alone.
The play created a scandal when it first appeared. In a sense it is still scandalous; even today, the majority of any audience viewing a good production believes that, after all, Nora does not really have to leave Torvald—has she not made her point, does he not now fully understand it, will he not treat her better from now on? Nora alone, perhaps, knows that it is impossible for Torvald to treat her any other way, for she is a woman and he is a man. A Doll’s House is a tragedy of sex—or of the failure of communication between the sexes.
The part of Nora is a superb one for any fine actress, and dozens have played her in their different ways. Ibsen, after all, was not just a social critic, he was also a wonderful playwright, a fact that became clear to all with the staging and subsequent publication of plays like An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890), and The Master Builder (1892). All of these read well and act even better, and no one should miss a good production of any of Ibsen’s later plays if one can be seen.
But no Ibsen play touches me so deeply as that first great success, A Doll’s House. My final impression of Ibsen is of Nora going out the door, with Torvald standing astounded and broken on an empty stage. There are few moments to equal it in the drama of the last 125 years.
BERNARD SHAW
1856–1950
Pygmalion
Saint Joan
George Bernard Shaw (he disliked the name “George” and in his will directed that his plays be produced in the future under the name Bernard Shaw) was born in Dublin in 1856, the son of an impractical and impecunious man whom Shaw disliked and whom his mother left, with her children, in 1875. Mother and son wound up in London, where for years Shaw was dependent on her meager earnings as a music teacher; he later remarked that he did not throw himself into the battle of life, he threw his mother.
His formal education having ended before he was sixteen, Shaw undertook to educate himself, reading in the British Museum, attending free lectures, and making speeches for political and other causes—he thus honed the edge of his polemical prose style. He began to write but was unable to publish before the later 1880s, when he was well into his thirties; but he emerged in 1888-90 as one of the best music critics ever to write in English and, later, as a superb drama critic as well. (In the first capacity he championed Wagner and Mozart; in the second, Ibsen and Shakespeare.)
Shaw’s first plays were not produced; they were thought to be too “unpleasant” for the stage. He published them, together with some later works, as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). But he soon was writing successfully for the stage, first abroad and then in London, and from 1901, with the production of Caesar and Cleopatra, he was hardly ever off the boards and sometimes had two or three hits running simultaneously.
Pygmalion was first produced in 1913 and published in 1916; it did not become My Fair Lady until 1956. It is probably Shaw’s best-known play, and his purest comedy. Shaw was always fascinated by language, particularly the English language, and by the social consequences that ensue from the way one spoke it. The heroine of Pygmalion is a flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, who parades her frightful Cockney accent; the hero is Professor Higgins, a brilliant but eccentric phonetician who determines to teach Eliza to speak like a lady, on the theory that if she speaks like a lady she will be taken for one.
The play is wonderfully funny, acute, and effective on at least three levels. First, the story of Eliza’s efforts to learn to speak like a Duchess at a garden party—she succeeds—is brilliantly effective theater, combining as it does not only the myth of Pygmalion—the sculptor who brought his finest sculpture, Galatea, to life—but also the great and powerful myth of Cinderella. Second, the play is an acute social commentary. As a poor Cockney flower girl earning half a crown a day by selling bouquets of violets, Eliza has an established, although not necessarily delightful, place in the world. But once she learns to speak like a lady, what, as she cries at the end of the play, is to become of her? She still has no money, but she can never go back to the gutter, where she was at least happy, if not comfortable. Finally, the play includes a deliciously complicated love affair. Eliza and her teacher fall in love, but Higgins is not perceptive enough to recognize that he loves Eliza, and Eliza is intelligent enough to know that he never will—and that she therefore should marry someone else. And so she does.
The play ends with the question of what will happen, and what Eliza will do, quite unsettled. The resolution of the uncertainties of the play—which, despite them, was and is a brilliant stage piece—was left for Shaw’s Epilogue, which he included in the published version. The Epilogue is as funny, acute, and effective as the play itself. Do not miss it when reading the play.
See a stage version of the play too if you can manage it—preferably one staged in England, where the accents will be true to life. My Fair Lady, the musical version, is just as good as the play, though different in some respects—for example, in it Eliza and Higgins do get together at the end.
Joan of Arc was finally canonized in 1920, five centuries after her death, and the profound fascination of this most human of saints affected Shaw as it did millions of others. Saint Joan, which many think is his greatest play, was produced in 1923, published in 1924, and in 1925 earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.