Shaw, George Bernard

dramatist

[Archive rare] (ENG) George Bernard Shaw lit une introduction à "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets"

Artesquieu · Jun 9, 2022 · partial coverage

• George Bernard Shaw
• The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
• Shakespeare
• Queen Elizabeth I
• national theatre
• sonnets
• Mr W. H.
• Whitehall
• radio
• archive

Coverage note: full (a complete short preface of about thirty lines; the play itself is not included in the recording)

Core ideas

The announcer introduces Shaw as the most eminent of dramatists, who has written a "Shavian preface" for the occasion. Shaw explains that the play, about Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, is "really only an appeal for the national theatre" that the English nation had been urged to establish for thirty years. The play was invented in 1910 by Dame Edith Lyttelton (name transcribed "Littleton"); he wrote the dialogue, and it was performed at the Haymarket Theatre with Granville Barker as Shakespeare. He declines to say more about the national theatre, leaving it to Shakespeare's speech and Elizabeth's reply in the play, and instead tells the listener how far the play is historical. It is set in the old royal palace of Whitehall, where Shakespeare often acted for King James, as Ben Jonson says of the "sweet swan of Avon" who "did often delight Eliza and our James". Shaw doubts that Elizabeth cared for the theatre: she was an out-of-doors woman who liked riding, hunting, dancing, flirting and magnificent dresses, and a stage player was to her at best a nobleman's servant of less importance than his cook, at worst a rogue and a vagabond. He jokes that playwrights of her time were less illiterate than today's: Chapman and Jonson wrote their stage directions in good Latin, and even Shakespeare, with "little Latin and less Greek", knew better, so that Elizabeth would have granted him at most a disreputable middle-class professional rank, and Shaw believes she never heard of him. Hence the idea of introducing them to one another.

He then explains the "dark lady", whom nobody can identify but who existed: besides his plays, Shakespeare wrote a batch of about 150 sonnets, most addressed to a young man known as "Mr W. H.", one of those "world's sweethearts" adored by men and women alike for beauty and charm rather than sex (today, he says, film stars). The sonnets to this young man are more affectionate than any addressed to a woman, and are interrupted by sonnets to a woman with whom Shakespeare had fallen in love against his will: a black-haired beauty, unfashionable when Elizabeth had red hair, for whose character he had no respect. He took revenge in savage sonnets, one a terrible denunciation of that kind of love and another pointing out all her defects so mercilessly that the concluding couplet ("and yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she belied with false compare") can hardly console her, a quarrel with Mr W. H. following when she preferred him. In the play Shaw has assumed that she was a maid of honour at Elizabeth's court, using Mary Fitton, whom his late friend Thomas Tyler found to have got into scrapes there. He ends with a personal, humorous digression: Whitehall Palace burned long before he came to London 62 years ago, but it exists in his imagination, and the site is now under his bedroom window, called Horse Guards Avenue, where tourists stare at the mounted guards and nobody looks for Shakespeare's spot. He had wanted the national theatre built there, but the government had never heard of Shakespeare, and the theatre site was bought instead in Kensington, a village Shakespeare knew only as far-off. He asks the listener to imagine the palace at eleven at night, a terrace over the river, the queen's apartments on one side and a gateway on the other, "and now up goes the curtain".

Excerpts