Shaw Abroad—Art Without Dragons (Bernard Shaw and the Spanish-Speaking World)

I was surprised when Christopher Wixson, editor of SHAW, invited me, a non-Spanish speaker, to review Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martin’s book, which, as the title explains, elucidates Shaw’s place in Hispanic culture and society. Wixson quickly assured me that most readers of SHAW likely do not speak or read Spanish and that my perspective would thus be appropriate. I then readily accepted the honor of reviewing Rodríguez Martin’s fine collection of sixteen essays by leading authorities on Spanish literature and culture. The editor of this volume acknowledges that, in many ways, this collection answers the earlier Bernard Shaw and the French by Michel Pharand, who set a fine example for studies of Bernard Shaw in other languages and cultures.The introduction by Rodríguez Martin presents a broad overview of Shaw’s influence in the Spanish-speaking world, noting that appraisals of Shaw as a thinker and playwright began to appear as early as 1903 and 1906, casting Shaw as a pioneer in “cynical theatre” because he exposed the vices of the English bourgeoisie. Rodríguez Martin continues that Shaw had a great influence on writers world-wide as he dissected universal issues, including women’s rights, poverty, and war. This universality led to Shaw’s place as one of the three British authors most often translated into Spanish in the 1920s, along with H.G. Wells and J.M. Barrie.Part I of the collection features “Spanish-Speaking Countries in Shaw’s Writings.” Of particular interest is the chapter by Oscar Giner, “Shaw and the Spanish Myth of Don Juan.” Giner compares Act 3 of Shaw’s Man and Superman to the medieval mysteries and moralities in the latter part of the sixteenth century, Spain’s Golden Age, which were propagated in Spain by Lope de Vega and other Catholic priests whom Giner describes as “artist philosophers” in the manner of Shaw. Giner also traces the genealogy of Don Juan/John Tanner as descending from the mythological Prometheus, Bunyan’s Christian, Mozart’s Don Giovani, Molière’s Don Juan, and other heroes of serious literature. The author concludes with a comparison of the life force as portrayed by the Spanish Don Juan of Tirso de Molina and the Don Juan of Bernard Shaw.Rodríguez Martin continues the section on Spanish-speaking countries in Shaw’s writing by describing the influences of Cervantes’s Don Quixote on Shaw’s work and on Shaw himself. Calling Shaw a quixotic figure—a tilter at windmills—Rodríguez Martin notes that Shaw included Don Quixote in a listing of his favorite dramatic works, while acknowledging that it was not written for the stage. Classifying Cervantes with Ibsen in the Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw described Don Quixote as one of the standards against which he measured all subsequent works.Rodríguez Martin also considers the prevalence of Quixotic language in Shaw’s novels, plays, and prefaces, including Love Among the Artists, Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, Man and Superman, and Androcles and the Lion. Thematically, Saint Joan most clearly reflects the struggles of Don Quixote, while Fanny’s First Play and Don Quixote reveal Cervantes’s and Shaw’s preferences for dialogue over plot. With these examples, Rodríguez Martin clearly shows the influence of the Spanish classic and its author throughout Shaw’s life and work.How would a controversial revolutionary writer like Shaw be accepted in his own time in a relative conservative, predominantly Catholic country such as Spain? Guadalupe Nieto Caballero considers this question in chapter 7 of the collection, “The Reception of Bernard Shaw’s Works and Ideas in Spain.” Caballero notes that Shaw’s work garnered little critical attention there until the 1910s and then his reception was fraught with a familiar problem—censorship. The Spanish intelligentsia, mainly men, first acknowledged Shaw as a worthy thinker and writer, not as a dramatist, because his works appeared only in print, rarely in performance. Staging plays such as Mrs Warren’s Profession proved difficult, as Caballero reports that seven actresses refused the role of a brothel keeper. Critical reviews reflect this “narrow mindedness” (a form of censorship), calling the leading role “most repulsive, distasteful, and ignoble.” The reviewer continued that Shaw could not be mentioned in polite society. However, this arch-conservatism alone did not hinder Shaw’s acceptance. The quality of translation of Shaw’s work also led to his not being read by most Spaniards.Shaw’s political writings, which included praise for Spain for its neutral position in World War One, became more well known around 1915, and Caballero demonstrates how Shaw’s ideas began to influence Spanish writers and how he was praised for eliciting “laughter with very serious ideas.” Shaw’s dramas appeared in Spanish theaters in the 1920s and 1930s, with Pygmalion, Saint Joan, and Candida being most often performed. Pygmalion made Shaw well-known in Spain, although a popular adaptation omitted the first act and revised Shaw’s ending to imply a marriage between Eliza and Higgins, in yet another form of censorship that would have enraged the playwright. Saint Joan premiered in Spain in 1925, and the producers had great expectations for a successful run. However, the play closed after only twenty-five performances, perhaps, as one reviewer stated, because Shaw delivered “untheatrical theater.” The play was warmly received shortly after its initial production, possibly because of the superior acting in the second production. Candida also proved difficult to produce successfully, apparently because of the “love-triangle” involving a protestant minister, his wife, and her young friend.While his Nobel Prize (1925) brought renewed interest in Shaw’s work, the Spanish Civil War limited Spain’s cultural life, and the censorship imposed by General Franco’s regime “to maintain the social order” resulted in no plays by foreign authors being performed. After the war, the cultural scene improved slowly; however, dramas that had previously been performed were required to be reviewed again by the government censor. Because of his often controversial topics and the rumor that Shaw was affiliated with the Communist Party, Candida and Pygmalion were suppressed several times for supposedly political and moral reasons, with Pygmalion being labeled a “rude and coarse” recreation of certain social classes in England. Performances were allowed only after revisions were made by the theater company (not by Shaw!).Caballero concludes by acknowledging that Shaw had been received at first only reluctantly by Spanish critics and theatrical audiences, and, as the social and political climate become more open, Shaw’s work eventually “permeated Spanish cultural life.” This important chapter accentuates the difficulties that Shaw encountered much of his artistic and political life—the introduction of new ideas, especially those designed to improve society, rarely find a smooth path to acceptance.One of the Spanish-speaking world’s most prodigious writers, Jorge Luis Borges, discovered Shaw by reading The Quintessence of Ibsenism in the 1920s, according to Jason Wilson. His chapter entitled “Borges’s Admiration for George Bernard Shaw” explains how reading Shaw helped to develop Borges’s critical stance, even as he was already an early leader of Argentina’s avant-garde. Borges had great affinity with Irish writers, including James Joyce and Shaw, for their “outsider” perspectives on European cultures and shared their “agitator” status in his writing in Hispanic literature. Both Shaw and Borges were autodidacts who read frequently in public libraries, a fact that strengthened Borges’s admiration for Shaw, as did their shared first names—Borges often referred to Shaw as “Jorge Bernard Shaw.”Interestingly, Borges was not a live-theater aficionado and preferred to read plays, especially those of Shaw, thereby conceiving his own version of Shaw and his work. He eventually defined himself as a reader and wrote essays in a hybrid style that featured “mischievous ideas and speculations” rather than traditional ideas of history, philosophy, and lived experiences. Wilson links this concept, which Borges called “ficcion,” to Roland Barthes’s “death of the author,” a theory developed years later.Wilson also critiques Borges’s writings about Shaw, which appeared in several prestigious publications. Borges figured prominently among the early editions of the literary magazine Sur, along with other cosmopolitan writers, including Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and Octavio Paz. The contributions of Borges “made his name” in Western literary circles, and gave him a platform to discuss “Shaw’s latest comedies” in 1936. He maintained that Shaw’s emphasis on “ideas,” along with his rhetorical style and ability to think in dramatic form, solidified Shaw’s place as “the best prose writer of his day.” In 1952, Borges published a book of essays entitled Otras inquisiciones, in which he again suggests that a book should facilitate a dialogue between writer and reader. He then proclaimed that Shaw’s characters form the best of his creations, dismissing his social writings, prefaces, and humor in favor of his dynamic characters.Wilson concludes by noting that few critics have acknowledged Shaw’s influence on Borges’s writing but cites the works of Roland Christ and Leonard Cheever as having the prescience to do so. However, he acknowledges that, more importantly, Borges himself revealed his affinity with Shaw, claiming that reading Shaw had “liberated” his own thinking.Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora continues the discussion of the Shavian influence on Spanish-speaking writers with “Bernard Shaw and Rodolfo Usigli: Where Playwrights Converge,” in which he describes Usigli’s attempt to found a national theater in Mexico whose plays could reach beyond any one ethnic group to create universal characters. The young playwright sought to fulfill this desire by writing history plays to allow theater audiences to reflect on their social and historic past as a nation as a means of improving their society. When searching for a “mentor” to guide his quest, Usigli “discovered Shaw.” Shaw’s Overruled, Candida, and Saint Joan all influence Usigli, who saw in Shaw’s works “art without dragons,” possibly referring to Shaw’s clarity of thought without the trappings of older art forms, among other qualities. Usigli realized that theater is an excellent medium for “human learning,” in the Shavian tradition.Usigli honed his knowledge of GBS and his dramatic methods when the younger playwright translated and directed Overruled in 1940. De la Mora also mentions parallels in the biographies of the two artists, including being “outsiders” because they left the land of their forebears, both achieved success relatively late in life, and both were mainly self-taught, although de la Mora reports that Usigli studied drama at Yale on a Rockefeller Scholarship. These personal similarities may have contributed to Usigli’s adapting the “Shavian style,” which Usigli describes simply as Shaw’s dramatic light and clarity. This adaption of his mentor’s writing techniques is seen most clearly in a comparison of the trial scene in Shaw’s Saint Joan and Usigli’s second act of Corona de Luz. De la Mora includes a line-by-line comparison of these two sections and concludes that both works rely on secondary characters to provide a chorus-like response to the main characters, form a scene of climactic importance, and stress the wide-ranging repercussions of the protagonist’s actions. These stylistic similarities produce characters of a strikingly individualized nature whose lines reveal a clarity that brings believability to the seemingly impossible mission of both.A highpoint of the article is de la Mora’s description of Usigli’s attempts to visit Shaw at Ayot St. Lawrence. After four rebuffs by Shaw’s staff, Usigli “showed up at Shaw’s door” in April, 1945. Shaw eventually admitted the younger man and actually sent a letter critiquing sections of Usigli’s Corona de sombra. Remarkably, Shaw closed his letter by stating, “Mexico can starve you, but it cannot deny your genius.”Overall, the chapters are written in clear, concise prose that illuminates the Shavian legacy. The collection also contains many relevant tables, charts, and comparisons that trace Shaw’s place in the Spanish-speaking world. The collective work also reveals a pattern in Shaw’s appearance in this culture: recognition, scrutiny, hesitation (sometimes including revisions or censorship), followed by acceptance. The importance of the collection is not only its illumination of Shaw’s early appearance and eventual position in the Spanish-speaking world but that it also provides an important perspective on Shaw’s role as an artist and public intellectual of global importance.

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