I've been an admirer of the great playwright, critic, and polemicist George Bernard Shaw since I first stumbled on his writing in high school. Since then I've become more aware of his limitations as well sa his brilliance, but I've also learned that many of the criticisms that have been leveled at him reflect willed misreading by people who hope to diminish his stature by any means necessary. The American critic Eric Bentley produced an excellent study of Shaw, originally published in the 1940s, that effectively answered many of those critics. I reread Bentley's book while I was slogging through Michael Holroyd's four-volume Shaw biography, which reinforced my sense that Holroyd, though a competent researcher, was in his judgments mainly recycling received attacks on Shaw.
One of those cliches was that as a playwright Shaw lacked emotion, and that his plays were primarily didactic intellectual contraptions, his characters mere ventriloquist's dummies for his ideas. Reading all six volumes of his collected plays a few decades ago disabused me of that notion. Seeing some of his plays performed confirmed my opinion.
But I also simply enjoy reading Shaw for his style. I'm amazed at how prolific he was, producing not only many plays but the notorious prefaces to the published plays, plus political pamphlets, some fiction, music criticism (collected in three big volumes) and theater criticism (four volumes), and correspondence, collected in at least four volumes. (I'm not sure yet if the collected letters include his correspondence, which had been published separately decades earlier, with notable ladies of the theater.) He did all this without word processors, and probably without a typewriter.* How did he do it? (But then T. S. Eliot seems have produced even more letters, and he didn't live as long as Shaw.)
Which brings me to my subject for today. I've owned the first two volumes of Shaw's letters, edited by Dan H. Lawrence, for some time without having read them, and decided it was time to get the second two and begin reading them.
Volume three (Viking Press, 1985) arrived in the mail last week. Flipping randomly through its pages I happened on this 1919 reply to an American named F. V. Connolly, who had asked Shaw, "Do you for instance think an all black company could depict Shakespeare, Shaw or Archer, or would they be limited by their colour to portray Comedy." Now Shakespeare and Shaw, at least, wrote comedies as well as "serious" dramas, so Connolly must have been using the term to refer to "low" comedy. Shaw's response is short enough that I'm going to quote it in full:
Negroes act very well, usually with much more delicacy and grace than white actors. The success of [Bert] Williams and [George] Walker in London was a genuine acting success. Their powers of physical expression are very effective on the stage.
So far... not bad, but not really good either. The next paragraph, however, delighted me:
The notion that there is anything funny in a man or woman being black is as childish as the notion that there is anything funny in being white, though no doubt the first white men in Africa must have elicited shouts of laughter from adults, and terrified the children into convulsions. The only difficulty about performances of Shakespear by negroes is that his characters are white Europeans, except Othello and the Prince of Morocco, neither of whom are negroes. But as English actors have never been prevented from playing Romeo and Juliet by the fact that they are not Italians, and nobody's enjoyment is spoilt by the fact that the play is not written in Italian, so a performance by a black company would be just as enjoyable as a performance by a white one if the acting were equally good. And the chances are that it would be better, as a black company would hardly venture on the play without some special qualifications for it.
The ideas expressed here are, I think, advanced even today, a century later. It brings to mind the objections that actors playing Romans in English-language movies should speak with British accents, not to mention the convention that Anglophone movies set in foreign parts should speak English with foreign accents. I first noticed this in the old Disney Zorro TV series, set in Spanish California, in which all the characters spoke broken English with Spanish accents. (Imagine a production of Romeo and Juliet in which the actors spoke with stereotypical Italian accents! Could be fun, but it would probably infuriate almost everybody.)
But just today I saw a trailer for a Chinese martial arts film, in which the characters speak stilted English with a faint Chinese accent. And of course we've seen many complaints about straight actors playing gay, Caucasian actors playing Asians, cisgender actors playing transgender, and don't even think about white actors playing black. (Or vice versa -- didn't Kenneth Branagh cast Denzel Washington to play an Italian in his film of Much Ado About Nothing? Why yes, he did.) There are real issues at stake here, because the objections can cut both ways: it's considered bigotry when someone argues that a gay actor shouldn't play a straight character, for example; how about a trans actor playing a cis character? Should Americans play Brits, or vice versa? Should Yankees play Southerners? Why or why not?
But as usual our normal discourse on race/ethnicity stinks to high heaven. Shaw cut through the confusion effortlessly over a hundred years ago.
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P.S. I glanced through volume 4 of Shaw's letters, which arrived in today's mail, and noticed that in his later years at least he refers to his typing. So he did use a typewriter, but even so I marvel at his productivity.
