Read Online Man and Superman and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw - Free Book Online Page A

odious and mischievous than a ramrod could if it were stuck into the wheels of a steam engine, am loth to stir up the question lest the Press, having now lost all tradition of liberty, and being able to conceive no alternative to a Queen’s Reader of Plays but a County Council’s Reader or some other seven-headed devil to replace the oneheaded one, should make the remedy worse than the disease. Thus I cling to the Censorship as many Radicals cling to the House of Lords or the Throne, or as domineering women marry weak and amiable men who only desire a quiet life and whose judgment nobody respects, rather than masterful men. Until the nation is prepared to establish Freedom of The Stage on the same terms as we now enjoy Freedom of The Press, by allowing the dramatist and manager to perform anything they please and take the consequence as authors and editors do, I shall cherish the court reader as the apple of my eye. I once thought of organizing a Petition of Right from all the managers and authors to the Prime Minister; but as it was obvious that nine out of ten of these victims of oppression, far from daring to offend their despot, would promptly extol him as the most salutary of English institutions, and spread themselves with unctious flattery on the perfectly irrelevant question of his estimable personal character, I abandoned the notion. What is more, many of them, in taking this course, would be pursuing a sound business policy, since the managers and authors to whom the existing system has brought success have not only no incentive to change it for another which would expose them to wider competition, but have for the most part the greatest dread of the “New” ideas which the abolition of the Censorship would let loose on the stage. And so long live the Queen’s Reader of Plays!
    In 1893 the obnoxious post was occupied by a gentleman, now deceased, whose ideas had in the course of nature become quite obsolete. He was openly hostile to the New movement, and declared before a Royal Commission his honest belief that the reputation of Ibsen in England was a spurious product of a system of puffery initiated by Mr. William Archer with the corrupt object of profiting by translations of his works. In dealing with him Mr. Grein was at a heavy disadvantage. Without a license “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” could only be performed in some building not a theatre, and therefore not subject to reprisals from the Lord Chamberlain. The audience would have to be invited as guests only; so that the support of the public paying money at the doors, a support with which the Independent Theatre could not afford to dispense, was out of the question. To apply for a license was to court a practically certain refusal entailing the £50 penalty on all concerned in any subsequent performance whatever. The deadlock was complete. The play was ready; the Independent Theatre was ready; two actresses, Mrs. Theodore Wright and Miss Jane Achurch, whose creations of Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts” and Nora in “A Doll’s House” had stamped them as the best in the new style in England, were ready; but the mere existence of the Censorship, without any action or knowledge of the play on its part, was sufficient to paralyse all these forces. So I threw “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” too, aside, and, like another Fielding, closed my career as playwright in ordinary to the Independent Theatre.
    Fortunately, though the Stage is bound, the Press is free. And even if the Stage were freed, none the less would it be necessary to publish plays as well as perform them. Had the two performances of “Widowers’ Houses” achieved by Mr. Grein been multiplied by fifty—nay, had “The Philanderer” and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” been so adapted to the taste of the general public as to have run as long as “Charlie’s Aunt,” d they would still have remained mere