There's something so vital about Greek invocations. Their figurative language is so crisp, precise, and yet allusive. Aeschylus was the great innovatoThere's something so vital about Greek invocations. Their figurative language is so crisp, precise, and yet allusive. Aeschylus was the great innovator of tragedy, taking to heart the spirit of fearless meddling that infected all Greek genius. 'The Suppliants' is a brief but solid example of his power.
Cookson's translation transmits the evocation and originality of the work, but his penchant for rendering the chorus with rhyme is awkward and not true to Greek traditions. English is too large, complex, and variable to respond well to couplets. It is a wild and many-fathered bastard of a language, made easily silly by such constraints if they linger for more than a sonnet's length.
For me, the effect is that of a bright-colored mix of fonts and interchanging capitals: it may be technically legible, but detracts more meaning from the text than it adds. I will not go as far as Milton and declare it
"the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter"
but I do agree that it should be used sparingly. For verse, English is better served by alliteration, meter, and more subtle sound-play, sparing rhyme--as Shakespeare did--for the occasional unmistakably heavy accent.
It is one thing to rhyme in a language like Italian, where the musicality and continuous aesthetic make such a thing natural, even inescapable, as it might flow from everyday speech. To try to transfer that directly to English is like a painter who, desiring to produce the visual equivalent of a song, paints his canvas in strips of verses and identical choruses; there are methods which are more effective and less artificial....more
Here, notable dramatist and theater critic Bentley presents a compelling argument about Shaw, if not for Shaw. Shaw said many things, and his most proHere, notable dramatist and theater critic Bentley presents a compelling argument about Shaw, if not for Shaw. Shaw said many things, and his most prominent and notorious utterances have come to define him, and they do not paint a very flattering picture. His Prefaces, in particular, are filled with infamous remarks, incomplete arguments, and unclear sarcasm.
A reader with a passing familiarity with Shaw has almost no choice but to take all of these statements at face value, and to conclude that Shaw is either scatterbrained or hypocritical. Yet it is Bentley's assertion that Shaw has a fully-developed, concrete philosophy which underpins all of his writing.
He suggests that Shaw purposefully created an infamous front, saying things which were sure to invite vitriolic responses. He reveled in the role of Devil's Advocate, defending the undefendable and attacking the sacred. Attacking the sacred has always been the prerogative of the author, defending the awful, less so. The problem with devilish advocacy is that it is an attempt to promote the bad over the good. It is not merely a reasonable defense of the unpopular, but an unreasonable defense of a bad concept.
But it does get you attention. For Bentley, Shaw's downfall is that his bombastic public persona so overtakes him that he can never be taken seriously, nor can he discourse reasonably. He is trapped in the role of the eternal iconoclast, and Bentley gives several examples of Shaw's disappointment with the fact that his philosophies are never taken seriously, but his inflammatory remarks always are.
Bentley's argument holds up because he draws from so many sources. It could not be made even from a familiarity with Shaw's major works. Bentley has to rely a great deal on letters, individual lectures, and other such detritus of Shaw's long career–and it is long.
He has quotes by Shaw to support every point he makes, and others to contradict the arguments of other Shaw critics. Yet Bentley also points out that Shaw has said so much, on so many subjects, that his critics may simply pick and choose and support their own interpretation. These critics take those things they agree with and group them under the 'good Shaw' and place all the rest under a separate, 'flawed Shaw'. But is Bentley doing the same thing?
He has separated the private, thoughtful Shaw from the public, caustic Shaw. Bentley doesn't shy away from Shaw's most notorious remarks; his defense of Hitler, of Stalin, of culling political dissidents, his hatred of inoculation. Bentley shows his character and his completeness by trying to make these statements fit into Shaw's overall philosophy of humanitarianism.
Easiest are the statements about Hitler and Stalin, which were meant not as direct praise, but as slights against politics at home. Shaw sought to wake people up to the fact that tyranny and inequality were not solely of the continent. As a young socialist, he criticized the communists for resorting so quickly to violence, and as an old socialist, he used Stalin to criticize British Socialism for resorting to upheaval too late. FDR and Churchill praised Hitler and Stalin before their regimes resorted to mass killings.
Shaw's hatred of inoculation, which was vitriolic and lasted his whole life, repeatedly popping up in his prefaces apropos of nothing, can also be explained, at least in part. To Shaw, the emerging class of doctors was just a new priesthood, swindling the people and passing down holy truths from on high. Bentley quotes a doctor who says that in the early stages, inoculation and germ theory did reach the level of religious fervor, leading to widespread quackery. So we may forgive Shaw slightly for this opinion.
His support of the secret police and their killings of 'undesirables' and 'radicals' is not explained away so easily. After all, it conflicts directly with his equally vehement dislike of censorship of any type. Clearly, if the secret police are going to kill the unpopular, outspoken rebels, then Shaw would be first on the chopping block.
If we accept that Shaw does have a reasonable philosophy behind what he says, then we have to assume that this is another sarcastic metaphor which he never bothers to explain. Bentley mentions and tries to come to terms with many of these, and they are very common among his lengthy prefaces.
One, in his preface to Androcles and the Lion, I took to be a sudden, inexplicable resort to the 'skeptic's argument' which was apparently unrelated to the text before or after it. Shaw argued that since the number seven was sacred to medievalists, they would be right in saying that the sun was seven miles away. He then proceeds to say that therefore, since our scientists say the sun is several million miles away, it is only because our sacred number is a million.
I saw a man who doesn't know the difference between a million and seven, but Bentley has another take: Shaw is saying that to the common man, seven miles sounds just as reasonable as a million, and that the astrologist and the astronomer are passing down sacred truths on the populace in the same ways.
One flaw in the argument is that while mystical astrology is secretive, the methods and purposes of science are easier to devise. There are certainly scientists who treat it as sacred, but that isn't usually the intent. The bigger flaw with the metaphor is that Shaw never makes it clear what he's getting at. The argument doesn't flow from what comes before it (an analysis of the conflicts between the gospels) or what comes after (Shaw arguing Jesus was a socialist).
Like a great deal of Shaw, the point of the argument might be interesting, but Shaw never makes it there. Bentley argues that Shaw never intended to write for a particular audience, but this makes Shaw's constant disappointment in being misunderstood seem disingenuous. I'd suggest that Shaw's writing is for a very specific audience, but one that never existed. He seems to expect his reader to be clever enough to understand his convoluted, acerbic, sarcastic arguments, but not clever enough to have already reached a reasonable conclusion on their own.
Shaw didn't actually write for a 'genius born yesterday', his inability to get his point across comes from another source. Bentley succeeds in presenting a fairly strong front for Shaw's ideas, but never addresses whether or not the ideas were good per se. Bentley likely didn't consider this to be his role as a critic, instead preferring to present Shaw as he is and let us decide.
But Bentley does show that Shaw was not in the habit of researching the theories behind his ideas. His plays were often filled with bizarre anachronisms, beggaring the question: why did Shaw bother to write plays set in colonial America if he doesn't even know where Boston is in relation to New York?
His philosophies are likewise beset with difficulties; he is another moral socialist with no concept of economic or social theory. He believes in things because he likes to believe in them, and he adopts new ideas quickly, rarely bothering to fact-check. He immerses himself in the dialogue about wrong and right, but not in the theory that it was developed from. It is then no wonder that he criticizes the scientific community a a church, because he does not put much stock in basing ideas upon fundamental knowledge.
Shaw isn't the first author to be widely misunderstood and vilified. He mentions Nietzsche in some of his plays, and there were a number of concepts on which they agreed; but anyone who has heard the horror stories about Nietzsche can prove them wrong simply by reading him. Shaw is not so lucky. In order to believe he is reasonable and deliberate requires not only the tireless work of a clever apologist synthesizing all of his works into a whole, but to constantly give Shaw the benefit of the doubt and assume he's being reasonable, even when he is being deliberately unreasonable.
It's all a bit much for me. Shaw can be interesting, funny, and clever, but I'm not convinced he knows what he's doing. He's far too spotty. He'll follow one of his best works with one of his worst, and write a preface that tells you nothing about the play, and likely conflicts directly with the points the play makes.
Shaw isn't brilliant, he never had things figured out, and the fact that he acted as if he did was his worst and most destructive affectation. His need to be taken seriously was always undermined by the fact that he never took his own arguments seriously. He used every perceived failure as an excuse to be difficult.
This might at first seem to be merely a failing of character, but I find Shaw's hyperbolistic iconoclasm to be unsettlingly familiar. The man of ideas who puts himself on a public stage is hazarding himself and his philosophy. There will always be backlash, always critics, and while some of them may be interesting and make viable points, the vast majority will simply be ignorant and angry.
At this point, it is easy to paint the audience at large as an ill-informed, overly emotional mob. Once this has been acknowledged, the author feels no reason to address them directly, instead making jokes, asides, and baiting comments. He becomes entrapped in his own small world where may not be right, but is at least reasonable, and certainly isn't one of the rabid idiots.
This kind of hopelessness is almost guaranteed in an author who chooses to be both public and controversial. His first few attempts at correction or argument will be directed and thoughtful, but here's the problem: his thoughtful, patient responses will receive almost exactly the same response as his ridiculous posturing, and posturing takes less of an emotional toll than trying to be reasonable to a crowd of the proudly ignorant.
So Shaw, like so many authors, hardened himself and distanced himself, unable to convince anyone with his best arguments, he saw no reason to continue putting them forth to the world, and began simply criticizing the world for not taking his well-meaning advice. This posture, even when half-jest, is a mirroring of the antagonism of the masses; the author feels he must become as self-assured and dismissive at the mob, but you can't beat the mod at it's own game.
If you play the game of aggressive histrionics, the mob already has you; at least, it has a part of you. And so Shaw got caught up in his own public image, feeling attacked and disrespected from all sides and changing his style so that every time he intended to write to a public of intelligent, open-minded readers, he fell back on a defensive and overwrought posture that was bound to alienate many of them.
But this is not Bentley's argument, but my own observation. I feel it is closer to the truth regarding Shaw's internal conflicts and the difference between his public and private faces.
This conflict makes it even more remarkable that he was able to write some entertaining, thoughtful works, works which undeniably have their moments of philosophical intrigue. Apparently, if a confused and misguided man produces a large enough oeuvre, some of his uncorrupted thought will still shine through. At least, as long as he's reasonably funny, clever, and willing to take risks.
All I can think of is what he might have done with his talents if he had written not for the ignorant audience with which he constantly clashed, but for the ideal intelligent, reasonable audience. Just because you cannot see them out there, cannot hear them over the clamor, does not mean they aren't there to listen; and this is the greatest lesson we can learn from the Shaw: that descending to the level of our most vocal critics makes less of our work, our ideas, and our arguments.
Perhaps this is why so many great thinkers were also hermits: not because thinking and hermitage go hand in hand, but because the lone thinker can write purely without condescending to the least of men. There is an irony in the fact that Nietzsche's silent, sickly life alone produced a philosophy that celebrates and longs for humanity, in all its dark, emotional fervor, while Socrates, who spent each day ridiculing and condescending to men, created a philosophy that makes man, living, and the world nothing, and his own, alternative, internal world everything.
I can never trust a philosopher who disregards and talks around an idea; it makes him more sure of himself than he has reason to be....more
J.G. Keely
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