Man and Superman and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw Page B

not produced a single original piece of any magnitude by an English author. In this humiliating national emergency, I proposed to Mr. Grein that he should boldly announce a play by me. Being an extraordinarily sanguine and enterprising man, he took this step without hesitation. I then raked out, from my dustiest pile of discarded and rejected manuscripts, two acts of a play I had begun in 1885, shortly after the close of my novel writing period, in collaboration with my friend Mr. William Archer.
    Mr. Archer has himself described how I proved the most impossible of collaborators. Laying violent hands on his thoroughly planned scheme for a sympathetically romantic “well made play” of the type then in vogue, I perversely distorted it into a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism, municipal jobbery, and the pecuniary and matrimonial ties between it and the pleasant people of “independent” incomes who imagine that such sordid matters do not touch their own lives. The result was most horribly incongruous; for though I took my theme seriously enough, I did not then take the theatre more seriously, though I took it more seriously than it took itself. The farcical trivialities in which I followed the fashion of the times, some flagrant but artistic and amusing examples of which may be studied in Mr. Pinero’s “Hobby Horse,” written a year later and now familiar in the repertory of Mr. John Hare, became silly and irritating beyond all endurance when intruded upon a subject of such depth, reality, and force as that into which I had plunged my drama. Mr. Archer, perceiving that I had played the fool both with his plan and my own theme, promptly disowned me; and the project, which neither of us had much at heart, was dropped, leaving me with two abortive acts of an unfinished and condemned play. Exhuming this as aforesaid seven years later, I saw that the very qualities which had made it impossible for ordinary commercial purposes in 1885, might be exactly those needed by the Independent Theatre in 1892. So I completed it by a third act; gave it the far-fetched mock-Scriptural title of “Widowers’ Houses”; and handed it over to Mr. Grein, who launched it at the public in the Royalty Theatre with all its original tomfooleries on its head. It made a sensation out of all proportion to its merits or even its demerits; and I at once became infamous as a dramatist. The first performance was sufficiently exciting: the Socialists and Independents applauded me furiously on principle; the ordinary play-going first-nighters hooted me frantically on the same ground; I, being at that time in some practice as what is impolitely called a mob-orator, made a speech before the curtain; the newspapers discussed the play for a whole fortnight not only in the ordinary theatrical notices and criticisms, but in leading articles and letters; and finally the text of the play was published with an introduction by Mr. Grein, an amusing account by Mr. Archer of the original collaboration, and a long preface and several elaborate controversial appendices in the author’s most energetically egotistical fighting style. The volume, forming number one of the Independent Theatre series of plays, is still extant, a curious relic of that nine days wonder; and as it contains the original text of the play with all its silly pleasantries, I can recommend it to collectors of quarto Hamlets, and of all those scarce and superseded early editions which the unfortunate author would so gladly annihilate if he could.
    I had not achieved a success; but I had provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again. In the following year, 1893, when the discussion about Isbenism, “the New Woman,” and the like, was at its height, I wrote for the Independent Theatre the topical comedy called “The Philanderer.” But even before I finished it, it was apparent that its demands on