Title: Arms and the Man
Author: George Bernard Shaw
ISBN-10: 0140450351
ISBN-13: 978-0140450354
Publisher: Penguin/80 pages
George Bernard Shaw takes the title for this play from the opening life of Vergil's epic poem Aeneid, which begins Of arms and the man I sing. Vergil glorified war and the heroic feats of Aeneas on the battlefield. However, Shaw attacks the romantic notion of war by presenting a more realistic approach.
The action takes place in Bulgaria in 1885 against a backdrop of war between Bulgarian forces and Serbian and Austrian coalition army. Raina Petkoff is the young and beautiful daughter of the Bulgarian Major Petkoff who is engaged to Major Serguis Saranoff. Serguis is out in the battles. An enemy soldier, Captain Bluntschli, takes refuge in her room and this is what makes the whole drama happen. Next morning she and her mother Catherine see him off but consequences of sheltering an enemy soldier are not to be waved off so easily. Once the war is over, he comes back, forcing each of the primary characters to re-evaluate their values and their relationships
Raina's "hero" Serguis comes back from the war with the aura of heroism, gallantry and victory along with her father, Major Petkoff. The various dimensions of human nature are poignantly depicted, the character’s masks are exposed, and each one of them is stripped down into imperfect and susceptible individuals. Serguis turns out to be a flirt and far from a contented happy model of a soldier; Major Petkoff is discerned to be a man who cannot see beyond the battlefield.
There is a vivid usage of humour and comedy to convey the futility and harm of old-fashioned social analysis. The theme is effectively that of war and love---and by extension marriage---and a combination of both. The play is replete with brilliant dialogue, flashing wit, buoyant humour and bitter sarcasms which reach their acme in this statement of Captain Bluntschli to Serguis, "I'm a professional soldier: I fight when I have to, and am very glad to get out of it when I haven't to. You're only an amateur; you think fighting's an amusement". First published in 1894, Arms and the Man is also remarkable for its explicit treatment of sexuality, which was either denied or shyly elucidated, in early Victorian literature.
Even after 100+ years, this has a contemporary feel to it and is as relevant as it was then. War cannot be anything but futile and there is no heroism in it for those who resort to it.
Do visit my blog.
Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Most people will know the story of Pygmalion, from My Fair Lady if nowhere else, where Eliza Doolittle is taught to speak 'like a duchess' by Professor Henry Higgins. Shaw describes this as a didactic play in his preface, revelling in its success when popular opinion says that art should not be didactic. Yet it is also a charming play with likeable characters, which allows you to painlessly engage with the serious message underlying it.
It begins with a scene on a rainy London street. A flower girl begins causing a nuisance of herself, trying to sell her flowers to anyone standing still; gradually the people milling around realise that a man is noting down everything they say. After accusations that he is a copper's nark, the note-taker astounds everyone by being able to pinpoint exactly where they come from by how they speak.
'THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER: Yes: tell him where he come from if you want to go fortune-telling.
THE NOTE-TAKER: Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and India.
THE GENTLEMAN: Quite right.
Great laughter. Reaction in the note-taker's favour. Exclamations of He knows all about it. Told him proper. Hear him tell the toff where he come from? etc
THE GENTLEMAN:May I ask, sir, do you do this for your living at a music hall?
THE NOTE-TAKER: I've thought of that. Perhaps I shall some day.'
The note-taker is, as you will have gathered, Professor Higgins. The play concerns his attempt to take this cockney flower girl and teach her to speak properly, and how this affects both their lives.
'You see this creature with her kerb-stone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party.'
Reading this has reminded me that Shaw's plays are both eminently readable and, I've always found, eminently watchable. It is light and engaging, with witty dialogue. The play is dated in the sense that it is firmly set in the Edwardian era and I feel it would be hard to set it in the present without significantly changing the text (for instance, the swear word 'bloody' does not have the same capacity to shock in the twenty-first century), but the dialogue is clear and natural, and you can believe in the characters, no matter how bizarre the situation they are in.
However, there is a social commentary underlying the romantic veneer - Shaw's didacticism; this is a play very firmly about class. As Higgins says:
'This is an age of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with £80 a year, and end up in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths.'
Class is something that still obsesses us in England ninety years later, and for this reason the play stands the test of time. There are constantly new books written, television programmes being made about it; we have just recently had a furore in the press about 'middle-class drinking'. We all define ourselves and others as belonging to one class or another, and the way we use language is a large part of that. This obsession is satirised by Shaw in this play, this need to classify ourselves and others and present ourselves according to the station we believe we belong, or want to belong, to by the way we speak.
As time passes, Eliza comes to realise that there is more to becoming a lady than her accent. Her character develops throughout the play as she becomes a strong, dignified woman who is able at last to stand up to Higgins.
She also finally recognises in Higgins and her father the meaning of true classlessness, in the way that, with no thought for ceremony or situation, both treat everyone the same whether they be a duke or a dustman: Mr Doolittle with easy-going familiarity and Higgins with bored contempt.
Raymond Williams (in Drama from Ibsen to Brecht) describes how Shaw did not consider plays where there was little more than the dialogue to be a true art form, they need the directions of the playwright for the entire vision. For example, Shaw believed that we do not have the full genius of Shakespeare available to us because we lack his character notes and directions. Shaw will not allow this to happen to his plays, and with a preface, an epilogue and detailed directions throughout Pygmalion has more the air of a play-novella hybrid than a piece of drama. For reading purposes this is fine, but I wonder how restricting directors find this interference from Bernard Shaw.
An example of Shaw's control over his vision is the ending of the play, which does not make clear what will happen to Eliza. In case you should be tempted to romantically decide for yourself, however, in the epilogue Shaw provides a realistic and pleasing, if not romantic, future for Eliza, Henry and the other characters.
It is pleasing because I had grown very fond of the defiant yet vulnerable Eliza, and the infuriating but essentially innocent and child-like Higgins, as well as the other characters. So even if there is a slight irritation at Shaw's need to control even after the end of the play, there is also a certain satisfaction in ending with everything sorted, rather than having Eliza and Higgins teetering on the edge of either perfect happiness or abject misery.
It begins with a scene on a rainy London street. A flower girl begins causing a nuisance of herself, trying to sell her flowers to anyone standing still; gradually the people milling around realise that a man is noting down everything they say. After accusations that he is a copper's nark, the note-taker astounds everyone by being able to pinpoint exactly where they come from by how they speak.
'THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER: Yes: tell him where he come from if you want to go fortune-telling.
THE NOTE-TAKER: Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and India.
THE GENTLEMAN: Quite right.
Great laughter. Reaction in the note-taker's favour. Exclamations of He knows all about it. Told him proper. Hear him tell the toff where he come from? etc
THE GENTLEMAN:May I ask, sir, do you do this for your living at a music hall?
THE NOTE-TAKER: I've thought of that. Perhaps I shall some day.'
The note-taker is, as you will have gathered, Professor Higgins. The play concerns his attempt to take this cockney flower girl and teach her to speak properly, and how this affects both their lives.
'You see this creature with her kerb-stone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party.'
Reading this has reminded me that Shaw's plays are both eminently readable and, I've always found, eminently watchable. It is light and engaging, with witty dialogue. The play is dated in the sense that it is firmly set in the Edwardian era and I feel it would be hard to set it in the present without significantly changing the text (for instance, the swear word 'bloody' does not have the same capacity to shock in the twenty-first century), but the dialogue is clear and natural, and you can believe in the characters, no matter how bizarre the situation they are in.
However, there is a social commentary underlying the romantic veneer - Shaw's didacticism; this is a play very firmly about class. As Higgins says:
'This is an age of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with £80 a year, and end up in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths.'
Class is something that still obsesses us in England ninety years later, and for this reason the play stands the test of time. There are constantly new books written, television programmes being made about it; we have just recently had a furore in the press about 'middle-class drinking'. We all define ourselves and others as belonging to one class or another, and the way we use language is a large part of that. This obsession is satirised by Shaw in this play, this need to classify ourselves and others and present ourselves according to the station we believe we belong, or want to belong, to by the way we speak.
As time passes, Eliza comes to realise that there is more to becoming a lady than her accent. Her character develops throughout the play as she becomes a strong, dignified woman who is able at last to stand up to Higgins.
She also finally recognises in Higgins and her father the meaning of true classlessness, in the way that, with no thought for ceremony or situation, both treat everyone the same whether they be a duke or a dustman: Mr Doolittle with easy-going familiarity and Higgins with bored contempt.
Raymond Williams (in Drama from Ibsen to Brecht) describes how Shaw did not consider plays where there was little more than the dialogue to be a true art form, they need the directions of the playwright for the entire vision. For example, Shaw believed that we do not have the full genius of Shakespeare available to us because we lack his character notes and directions. Shaw will not allow this to happen to his plays, and with a preface, an epilogue and detailed directions throughout Pygmalion has more the air of a play-novella hybrid than a piece of drama. For reading purposes this is fine, but I wonder how restricting directors find this interference from Bernard Shaw.
An example of Shaw's control over his vision is the ending of the play, which does not make clear what will happen to Eliza. In case you should be tempted to romantically decide for yourself, however, in the epilogue Shaw provides a realistic and pleasing, if not romantic, future for Eliza, Henry and the other characters.
It is pleasing because I had grown very fond of the defiant yet vulnerable Eliza, and the infuriating but essentially innocent and child-like Higgins, as well as the other characters. So even if there is a slight irritation at Shaw's need to control even after the end of the play, there is also a certain satisfaction in ending with everything sorted, rather than having Eliza and Higgins teetering on the edge of either perfect happiness or abject misery.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
I own a vague memory of reading this play in grade 9 but I may as well have come to it for the first time for this second read. In a rare turn of events the preface, written by Shaw, is as energetic and memorable a piece as the play. He displayed dissatisfaction with previous historical and fictional accounts of Joan of Arc's life; exhibited a Protestant take on the saint's actions while rejecting (what he described as) the virulent anti-Catholicism in the Victorian Protestant perspective; briefly elucidated religious, historical and political aspects of medieval Catholic Christendom, often by comparing it to his modern times; and tops it off by concurrently explaining certain authorial decisions and puncturing shallow, fashionable interest in theatre. It may seem like quite a lot to take in but Shaw deals with his many points in only one or two pages, often less, and revealed a wonderful capability of treating serious ideas both sombrely and with humour, one that is reflected in the play.
He makes some very good points on how an understanding of Joan is often hindered by the typical mistakes people make by confusing the middle ages with the dark ages, the blanket assumption the participants in the Vatican's Inquisition were morally dark monsters, engaging in the most heinous acts at the slightest provocation, and the modern persons smug assurance that the human race has only been on a steady, wholesale march to improvement from then on.
From the quotes one can see that Shaw is pretty in-your-face about his ideas and Saint Joan, while a more subtle work in comparison the preface, is not so to a remarkable difference. Words like "Nationalism" and "Protestantism" are sprinkled into the script, and Shaw's ideas about English patriotism, as mentioned in the preface, are easily discerned in the actions and lines of certain characters. My disappointment at the ideas being so readily discernible, at least superficially not being under the impression that I've understood the book inside out, did not significantly impede on the play's quality until the horrid epilogue. (Is there a good one in existence, I'd like to know.) Shaw damns subtlety and goes for an all out maudlin reunion of Joan d'Arc's and all her colleagues' ghosts in the bedroom of King Charles, the man she crowned King. They are even visited by a Vatican official from the future who lets her know that she became a saint.
The play's plot charts selected major moments of Joan's life, from her fateful meeting with Robert de Baudricourt in order to gain access to the Dauphin to her excommunication by the Catholic church and burning by the "secular arm" of rule. To my delight Shaw did not skimp on stage directions, and the reader is able to imagine the actors moving on stage and intoning lines as the writer intended. (Perhaps this is how it is with modern plays?) In fact, I would often re-read lines because I did not think that my mind's reading voice matched Shaw's direction.
Joan as a character on the page did make the deep impression Shaw intended, particularly during her brief speeches in which she expressed the most fervour. With her and with other characters Shaw, as in his preface, is able to combine humour satisfactorily with weighty issues, which makes his thinly veiled ideas a lot easier to swallow. No character was written without given some breadth or hint of multi-dimensions, not even the spoiled, cowardly Dauphin who complained when his army was losing, when he was crowned, and when his stance had been made secure by a rehabilitation of Joan's reputation after her death.
All in all it's a quick read and makes me eager to read not only more of Shaw's plays but more from the genre, in general. I changed my mind about a few of the authors I was going to read. I found my picks too conventional. I've started Andrew Salkey's, a Jamaican author, A Quality of Violence, but will pick up a Jesse Hill Ford book instead, along with one or two of Rosalyn Drexler's. At some point, I wouldn't mind getting around to something of Violette Leduc's.
He makes some very good points on how an understanding of Joan is often hindered by the typical mistakes people make by confusing the middle ages with the dark ages, the blanket assumption the participants in the Vatican's Inquisition were morally dark monsters, engaging in the most heinous acts at the slightest provocation, and the modern persons smug assurance that the human race has only been on a steady, wholesale march to improvement from then on.
As to the assessor's [at Joan d'Arc's trial], the objection to them is not that they were a row of uniform rascals, but that they were political partisans of Joan's enemies. This is a valid objection to all such trials; but in the absence of neutral tribunals they are unavoidable. A trial by Joan's French partisans would have been as unfair as the trial by her French opponents; an an equally mixed tribunal would have produced a deadlock. Such recent rials as Edith Cavell by a German tribunal and Roger Casement by an English one were open to the same objection; but they went forward to the death nevertheless, because neutral tribunals were not available. Edith, like Joan, was an arch heretic: in the middle of the war she declared before the world that 'Patriotism is not enough'. She nursed enemies back to health, and assisted their prisoners to escape, making it abundantly clear that she would help any fugitive or distressed person without asking whose side he was on, and acknowledging no distinction before Christ between Tommy and Jerry and Pitou the poilu. Well might Edith have wished that she could bring the Middle Ages back, and have fifty civilians, learned in the law or vowed to the service of God, to support two skilled judges in trying her case according to the Catholic law of Christendom, and to argue it out with her at sitting after sitting for many weeks. The modern military Inquisition was not so squeamish. It shot her out of hand; and her countrymen, seeing in this a good opportunity for lecturing the enemy on his intolerance, put up a statue to her, but took particular care not to inscribe on the pedestal 'Patriotism is not enough', for which omission, and the lie it implies, they will need Edith's intercession when they are themselves brought to judgment, if any heavenly power think such moral cowards capable of pleading to an intelligible indictment.Shaw wrote the preface in 1924 and I do not find the core of his remarks less salient close to a century later. As a reader I found myself stubbornly holding on to my assumptions as Shaw did his best to wrest them away in his criticism of the Catholic church at the time with his dedicated stance to analysing the situation as any proper historian would -- in the context of the times, with an eye to the moral, philosophical, social, and practical constraints of the time rather than with the hindsight of the 20th century values. (In other words, I was looking for comfortable blanket condemnation and was presented with something more complex. How awful of him.) His criticism of scientists and the scientific community I found to be considerably weaker. He rightly mocked, in an almost merciless manner, how the general public takes as gospel any new piece of information scientists provide without being able to even attempt a simple explanation of any of it.
The point need be no further laboured. Joan was persecuted essentially a she would be persecuted today. The change from burning to hanging or shooting may strikes us as a change for the better. The change from careful trial under ordinary to recklessly summary military terrorism may strike us as a change for the worse. But as far as toleration is concerned the trail and execution in Rouen in 1431 might have been an event of today; and we may charge our consciences accordingly. If Joan had to be dealt with by us in London she would be treated with no more toleration that Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, or the Peculiar People, or the parents who keep their children from the elementary school, or any of the others who cross the line we have to draw, rightly or wrongly, between the tolerable and the intolerable.
In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one percent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbably, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.He was quick to assert that he only wishes to defend his "own age against the charge of being less imaginative than the Middle Ages" but I could not shake the impression that he held something more than a healthy scepticism about the existence of atoms. He presented the differences between the ages in too simplified a difference for my taste, and does it throughout, perhaps in an admittedly acknowledged attempt and knocking down assumptions we hold about the past and the present. In any case, it was only 1924.
From the quotes one can see that Shaw is pretty in-your-face about his ideas and Saint Joan, while a more subtle work in comparison the preface, is not so to a remarkable difference. Words like "Nationalism" and "Protestantism" are sprinkled into the script, and Shaw's ideas about English patriotism, as mentioned in the preface, are easily discerned in the actions and lines of certain characters. My disappointment at the ideas being so readily discernible, at least superficially not being under the impression that I've understood the book inside out, did not significantly impede on the play's quality until the horrid epilogue. (Is there a good one in existence, I'd like to know.) Shaw damns subtlety and goes for an all out maudlin reunion of Joan d'Arc's and all her colleagues' ghosts in the bedroom of King Charles, the man she crowned King. They are even visited by a Vatican official from the future who lets her know that she became a saint.
The play's plot charts selected major moments of Joan's life, from her fateful meeting with Robert de Baudricourt in order to gain access to the Dauphin to her excommunication by the Catholic church and burning by the "secular arm" of rule. To my delight Shaw did not skimp on stage directions, and the reader is able to imagine the actors moving on stage and intoning lines as the writer intended. (Perhaps this is how it is with modern plays?) In fact, I would often re-read lines because I did not think that my mind's reading voice matched Shaw's direction.
Joan as a character on the page did make the deep impression Shaw intended, particularly during her brief speeches in which she expressed the most fervour. With her and with other characters Shaw, as in his preface, is able to combine humour satisfactorily with weighty issues, which makes his thinly veiled ideas a lot easier to swallow. No character was written without given some breadth or hint of multi-dimensions, not even the spoiled, cowardly Dauphin who complained when his army was losing, when he was crowned, and when his stance had been made secure by a rehabilitation of Joan's reputation after her death.
All in all it's a quick read and makes me eager to read not only more of Shaw's plays but more from the genre, in general. I changed my mind about a few of the authors I was going to read. I found my picks too conventional. I've started Andrew Salkey's, a Jamaican author, A Quality of Violence, but will pick up a Jesse Hill Ford book instead, along with one or two of Rosalyn Drexler's. At some point, I wouldn't mind getting around to something of Violette Leduc's.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
