The Theatre of Revolt by Robert Brustein

Author:Robert Brustein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Published: 1991-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

1 In a footnote later attached to The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw declares that “I attach great importance to the evidence that the movement voiced by Schopenhauer, Wagner, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Strindberg, was a world movement. . . . The movement is alive today in the philosophy of Bergson and the plays of Gorki, Tchekhov, and the post-Ibsen drama.” What he is describing is the modern tradition of revolt.

2 “A Doll’s House,” writes Shaw, “will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night’s Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.” Shaw’s utilitarian aesthetic theory is, of course, anti-Aristotelian, since Aristotle considered ethical motivation (ethos) and dramatic thought (dianoia) to be less important than plot (mythos). For Shaw, the drama is not so much an imitation of an action as a communication of an idea, its function less to purge the audience of its emotions than to arouse the audience’s moral passion. The differences between Aristotelian and Shavian theory are the differences between tragedy and comedy (or the problem play), and stem from two irreconcilable views of the function of art.

3 Explaining why he withheld Heartbreak House from the public until the conclusion of World War I, Shaw writes: “The art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism; recognizes no obligation but truth to natural history; cares not whether Germany or England perish; is ready to cry with Brynhild: Lass uns verderben, lachend zu grunde geh’n sooner than deceive or be deceived; and thus becomes in time of a war a greater military danger than poison, steel, or trinotrotoluene.” Still, if Shaw the “natural historian” and “dramatic poet” was capable of writing these lines and formulating this thought, then Shaw the social philosopher was also capable of suppressing the play until after the armistice, lest the war effort be damaged.

4 See the preface to the third edition (1922) where Shaw declares that the adoption of “Ibsenism” would possibly have prevented World War I: “Had the gospel of Ibsen been understood and heeded, these fifteen millions might have been alive today; for the war was a war of ideals.”

5 It is Shaw who defends the artist in The Sanity of Art (1895) against Max Nordau’s ridiculous charges of degeneracy — and defends him for aesthetic as well as utilitarian reasons: “The worthy artist or craftsman is he who serves the physical and moral senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good clothes and fine implements, fiction, essays, and dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable activity. The great artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds . . . in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.”

6 Shaw is no crude progressivist or educationist.

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