Defining the history play

When the Players arrive at Elsinore, Polonius details the genres and subgenres of the Elizabethan theatre in which they excel: “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited” (Hamlet, II.ii). The joke makes clear that even at the time when histories were enjoying their greatest popularity, as Herbert Lindenberger puts it, “the boundaries between historical drama and recognizable genres such as tragedy and romance are often quite fluid.” Defining historical drama in the age of Shakespeare, Irving Ribner draws a distinction between plays in which the playwright “assumes the function of the historian,” and “romantic drama using historical figures” with “no attempt to accomplish the serious purpose of the historian.” What Ribner sees as the distinguishing feature of the Elizabethan history play Shaw singles out as his own special claim: Shaw, too, insists that he is a serious historian and that such dramas as Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, and “In Good King Charles's Golden Days” must be evaluated as contributions to historical knowledge. At the same time, Shaw, with characteristic playfulness, suggests that attention to detail, one “serious purpose of the historian,” is of little interest to him: “I never worry myself about historical details until the play is done; human nature is very much the same always and everywhere,” he told Clarence Rook. “Given Caesar, and a certain set of circumstances, I know what would happen, and when I have finished the play you will find I have written history.” Shaw's claim to find a higher historical truth than that found by pedants worrying the details draws its force from a long tradition of rivalry between historians and playwrights that characterizes discussion of historical drama ever since Shakespeare.

The careers of Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde followed very similar paths up until 1895. Both were born of Protestant stock in Dublin around the mid-fifties, and launched themselves as writers after settling in London during the seventies. For about five years both wrote apprentice work - trying out genres, seeking a style. At the same time, both were developing considerable skill as public speakers with a theatrical flair. From 1885 to 1888 they worked together, along with William Archer and George Moore, as anonymous book reviewers on the Pall Mall Gazette. Both were drawn to socialism, and probably it was an address of Shaw's at a Fabian meeting that inspired Wilde's “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” At the turn of the decade each wrote and published an important, defining volume of criticism: The Quintessence of lbsenism and Intentions (the latter including “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” and the essay on socialism). And during the next few years, until that fateful February of 1895, each wrote five accomplished and still produced plays: by Wilde, Salomé, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest; by Shaw, Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs, Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, and Candida.

In 1912-13, while a tuberculosis patient in the Gaylord Sanitarium, Eugene O'Neill decided to become a dramatist. As a result American drama during the first half of the twentieth century was totally changed, and a new high seriousness came into the theatrical market place. Dissatisfied with the old histrionic romantic theatre of his father (James O'Neill, the perennial Count of Monte Cristo), Eugene O'Neill made profitable use of his three-month hospital stay by reading philosophy, drama, and absorbing the influence of new theatrical movements in Ireland, France, Sweden, and Germany, led by J. M. Synge, Eugene Brieux, August Strindberg and Gerhart Hauptmann.

On his release from Gaylord he started to write, using his own life experiences as creative matrix. Thus he set the autobiographical pattern that was to culminate in the great family plays of his last years: Long Day's Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, with a return to the dissipation of his youth in The Iceman Cometh.

“An incredible heroine, a facile application of Freudian thought, a narrative that at times foreshadows today's soap operas, language that rarely rises above the commonplace”: here Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill's admiring biographer, describes Strange Interlude. “Yet, paradoxically,” he concludes, “its defects testify to the author's achievement.” Sheaffer's strategy here is commonly applied to O'Neill's work as a whole by critics determined to enlist O'Neill in the pantheon of dramatists of the first rank. First comes an enumeration of O'Neill's artistic flaws - the disparity between his “often egregious intentions” and his achievements; his clumsiness with language; his reliance upon pop-psychology and resynthesized versions of ancient myth - and his personal failings. Then follows the summation: by dint of hard work, a flawless instinct for theatre, wide and deep reading in modern philosophy and literature, courageous exploration of the psyche, O'Neill conquers these flaws. However confused and banal, hysterical and overblown, inadvertently ridiculous and condescending his output may be in its parts, its whole traces a triumphant coming of age and a fruition of talent in the late masterpieces, especially The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. This paradigm, in keeping with O'Neill's own insistence that he be seen large, makes of O'Neill, looking inward, tormented by but ultimately forgiving if not overcoming the ineluctable dynamics of family dysfunction, a model artist for modern times.

Perhaps because Eugene O'Neill tended to cast his work in universal terms, critics tend to write of him in relation to the world stage and to the recognizably seminal thinkers and playwrights of his time - Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Ibsen, Shaw. O'Neill is not often thought of as a distinctly American playwright working in an American theatrical tradition and living almost all of his life in the United States, keenly interested in the political, social, and moral developments in his country. Yet, in his last decade of playwriting, O'Neill was at work on a most ambitious treatment of American history, his projected play Cycle about the cultural history of the United States from 1775 to 1932, based on the story of a single American family, a union of the English Harfords and the Irish Melodys, which is dealt with in detail in other essays in this collection. The Cycle's overall title, A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed, indicates O'Neill's point of view, essentially an indictment of America's greed and materialism and its failure to value spirituality or beauty.

When Bernard Shaw died in late 1950, he was an international literary figure whose dramatic works were sought by the stage, cinema, radio, and television. A spokesperson for the Society of Authors noted that “a day never passes without a performance of some Shaw play being given somewhere in the world.” In 1951 five different Shaw plays appeared on Broadway, while six full-length and eighteen short scripts ran in London. The actors headlining these productions were among the world's most renowned performers, including Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, John Clements, Kay Hammond, Yvonne Mitchell, and Uta Hagen. Shavian drama was so ubiquitous in 1951 that the Shaw estate feared a “debasement of the coinage” and had “for the moment forbidden any further West End productions of Shaw's works.”

One reason for this popularity was (and still is) that actors found in Shaw's energetic, articulate characters attractive vehicles by which to showcase their talents, vehicles with the potential for bravura performances. Basil Langton attested that Shavian drama "offered me a multitude of fascinating, meaty and showy roles to act . . . Man and Superman is a good play, but above all it has the most glorious role any actor can dream of or wish for."

In 1923, Shaw wrote Saint Joan, which he called “A Chronicle,” a description that he had never previously given to a play. The play was performed with great success, first in New York in December 1923 and in London in the following year. Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for 1925 (despite his well-known aversion to such awards), and, although the prize was given for the entire corpus of a writer's contribution to literature, there can be little doubt that the judges were greatly influenced by the success of Saint Joan. After Saint Joan Shaw did not write another play for five years. In 1924, however, his sister-in-law Mrs. Mary Cholmondeley, asked him to send her “a few of your ideas of Socialism.” She wanted the notes for a study circle in her home county of Shropshire. This was when the Soviet Union had come into being and Britain had had her first Labor government. Shaw threw himself into the task with energy and enthusiasm. He said that he enjoyed the exercise because it was “real brain work, not romancing and inventing but reasoning hard” and “a real hard literary job, all brains instead of writing plays.”Exasperatingly, the work proved more demanding than he had expected. Originally planned as a booklet of about 50,000 words, it ended as a large volume of well over 200,000 words. The book was finally published in 1928 with the title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.

Playing around the edges of monolithic binaries is one of Shaw’s trademarked strategies. Some might call it his perversity, others the common stock of comedic reversal. A more precise technical term might be parataxis: the setting side by side of statements or concepts without explicitly indicating their relationship. As an ironicist, Shaw consistently draws out our assumptions about the relationship, teases out unexpected complications from the logical follow-through of those assumptions, then displays the fallacy of the universe being as simple and stable as we might ever assume. The paratactic concepts frequently resemble the most familiar tropes of dramatic literature: the struggle between the sexes, monogamy versus infidelity or polygamy, class conflict, and the native versus the foreign. But just as Britain was a hybrid of many nations, the Empire was a hybrid of many peoples, and iconoclasts were made by many forces, Shaw's plays are complicated by more than merely the rivalry of women and men, the contest between poet and philistine, the incompatibility of hero and coward, or the mutual exclusivity of respectability and unfettered naturism. Rather, his plays frequently are exercises in the theatricalization of performances around and between such concepts. Altogether, they suggest prolonged meditation on the dilemma of colonization: never achieving postcolonialism because institutions of power are not dismantled, but exploring the varieties of subjection resulting from policies of hegemony metonymically embodied.

On June 8, 1917, Bernard Shaw invited a few friends to hear him read a new play, his first full-length piece since Pygmalion, written in 1913. Four of them were people with special knowledge of the materials that had gone into Shaw's cauldron: Henry Massingham, Gilbert Murray, Sydney Olivier, and Kathleen Scott, the widow of Scott of the Antarctic. They seemed likelier than most listeners to understand what he was up to in this, his most difficult work. Some perhaps were in a better position to understand it than he was - Kathleen Scott, undoubtedly, knew better than the playwright what motives had driven her husband to try and outface death in the hardest, most dangerous place on earth. Shaw may even have hoped they might help him to understand his play better himself.

For Heartbreak House had given more trouble coming to birth than any of his previous plays. He had started to write it on March 4, 1916, but three months later still had no clear idea where it was going. "I, who once wrote plays d'un seul trait" he wrote to Mrs. Patrick Campbell on May 14, "am creeping through a new one (to prevent myself crying) at odd moments, two or three speeches at a time. I don't know what it is about." In November he read the first act to Lady Gregory, but told her he did not know how to go on, what he had written was so wild. In December he confessed to William Archer that he still had only one act, and was stuck.

“Bestial, cynical, disgusting, poisonous, sickly, delirious, indecent, loathsome, fetid, literary carrion, crapulous stuff”: in short, they did not much care for the play.

Nor for its admirers: “Lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety” . . . “Ninety-seven percent of the people who go to see Ghosts are nastyminded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste in exact proportion to their nastiness” . . . “The unwomanly woman, the unsexed females . . . Educated and muck-ferreting dogs . . . Effeminate men and male women . . . Outside a silly clique, there is not the slightest interest in the Scandinavian humbug or all his works”(Works, vol. xix, p. 17).

The target was Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts. The year was 1891, and these snippets from press reports appear in Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism, published in September. Historic revolutions in industry, society, politics, science, trade, and economics in nineteenth-century England had scarcely been matched by important events in its theatre until this occasion. But now, against all expectations, a Norwegian, a Scotsman, a Dutchman, and an Irishman jolted Victorian conventions, morals, and ideals, jumpstarting a thrust toward modern drama.

Eugene O'Neill came early to recognize the fakery of the commercial theatre. It was in that “hateful” institution, after all, that his own father had gained fortune and celebrity. Yet, no matter how much he ridiculed the cardboard world of popular melodrama, young O'Neill grew in knowledge as he moved about freely in his father's house. “. . . I was practically brought up in the theatre - in the wings - and I know all the technique of acting. I know everything that everyone is doing from the electrician to the stage hands” (Cargill et al., 112). In the same way he became acquainted with the sensational effects obtained by producer-illusionist David Belasco, who specialized in snapshot realism. But O'Neill, who criticized Belasco, was himself innovator enough to use any device he thought might advance his dramatic intention.

“It is not enough to see Richard III: you should be able to whistle it.” Such is Shaw's advice in his weekly music column in The Star in 1889, which he devoted to a current production of Shakespeare's history play. There was orchestral music that had been composed for the production, but Shaw's comment is directed at Richard III itself as a piece of music, and he reviews the acting as a musical performance, talking about a “magnificent duet,” for example, and a “striking solo.” Richard Mansfield's “execution of his opening scena was . . . deeply disappointing,” and in a staccato passage “he actually missed half a bar” by dropping a syllable from a word. Mansfield occasionally “made fine music for a moment,”but his performance as a whole was a musical failure. “It is a positive sin for a man with such a voice to give the words without the setting, like a Covent Garden libretto” (Shaw's Music, vol. 1, pp. 586-91).

If Eugene O'Neill here employs a cinematic image to recall his experiences as a young man at sea, directors and writers have sought for more than six decades - with varying degrees of success - to illuminate his drama in adaptations for the screen. Even when his reputation was at its lowest ebb in the decade between the premiere of The Iceman Cometh in 1946 and its triumphant 1956 revival, O'Neill's plays continued to appear with regularity in versions for film and television. The legacy of O'Neill on the screen has become essential to understanding the sustained patterns of his art and how it corresponds to more general patterns within American culture.

Especially during the formative years leading up to his emergence as a playwright with Widowers' Houses (1892), the course of Shaw's career was deeply influenced by his friend and self-proclaimed mentor, William Archer. Archer, born in the same year as Shaw (1856), became one of the foremost early translators of Ibsen's dramas and, next to Shaw, their most vigorous advocate in the English theatre of the late nineteenth century. He first came across Shaw, at the age of 26, in the British Museum Reading Room, where he noticed both the pale young man with the bright red beard and “the odd combination of authors whom he used to study - for I saw him day after day poring over Karl Marx's Das Kapital and an orchestral score of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.” Not long afterwards, early in 1884, Archer was hired by Edmund Yates's World as that newspaper's drama critic, and he soon persuaded his publisher to take on his unemployed friend as well, to serve as the paper's art critic. Some time later, Archer recalls, “the post of musical critic fell vacant, and I secured it for Shaw by the simple process of telling Yates the truth: namely, that he was at once the most competent and most brilliant writer on music then living in England.” Shaw himself could not have put it better in one of his prefaces.

O'Neill's own detailed record of his living and writing from 1924 to 1943, the Work Diary, now part of the O'Neill collection at Yale, makes possible the following account of the vast Cycle project: how it was conceived and developed, and how it eventually ended. Although much manuscript material relating to the plays was destroyed, their plots can be reconstructed from scenarios and other notes also preserved at Yale. Outlines of all the plays in the nine-play Cycle are given here in the sequence of their conception as part of the series. They are followed by a summary of the four plays outlined by O'Neill in October and November 1940 to replace plays one and two, actually written between 1935 and 1937, but later destroyed. The four gave the plan its final form - a Cycle of eleven plays.

In a moment of crisis in the 1890s masculine control of the theatre as an institution was shaken by the efforts of insurgent women and a few male sympathizers. Bernard Shaw, writing about the London theatre of 1894 - the annus mirabilis of the New Woman - described the importance of that revolt with a clearsightedness unusual, perhaps unique, among men of the theatre. Shaw declares in the preface he wrote for William Archer's Theatrical "World" of 1894, assessing developments of that year in the London stage: