We read novels. We are made to read poetry. We hardly ever read plays. And it is something of an acquired art to read plays. Every time I have ventured into reading plays I have had to adjust my eye, and sensibility: it takes some time. And plays are a great art form. Theatre. Drama. Comedy. Tragedy. The great tradition from Aeschylus, via Sophocles and Euripides, through the Romans like Terence and Seneca and through Mystery plays to the revived drama of, eminently, Shakespeare, Marlow and Jonson and Calderon and Lope de Vega, and then everyone: Corneille, Racine, Dryden, Sheridan, even Tennyson, and then Ibsen, Shaw, Yeats, Eliot, Brecht and so on: with a last burst of enthusiasm in the 1950s, with Osborne, Arden, Bond, running through to the 1970s with Hare, Brenton et al.: who more or less murdered the drama in agitprop, though it was also eaten away by film and television.
A century ago the consensus was that the two greatest playwrights in English were Shakespeare (1550-1604) and Shaw (1856-1950). We would dispute this now: Shaw’s flame is down. I think it will revive. Disagree? Try You Never Can Tell or The Man of Destiny or The Doctor’s Dilemma or Getting Married or, hell’s bells, even Shakes Versus Shav, a very late play in which Shaw put himself and Shakespeare on the stage at the same time to knock each other about. Shaw put himself in the same category as Shakespeare: not only admiring him, but asking, famously, in the 1890s, whether he, Shaw, was ‘Better than Shakespear?’, and also refinishing Cymbeline, which he thought was a terrible clockwork plot of Shakespeare’s making. Shakespeare had written Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra: so Shaw gave us Caesar and Cleopatra. The hero of Man and Superman was his Hamlet, overcoming confusion and therefore of interest to his Ophelia. Etc.
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