Bernard Shaw - Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

How are you?

In haste, ever dearest Ellen,

your

GBS

58/ To Janet Achurch

23rd July 1897

Wretch!—to drag me all the way to Islington for such an inconceivably bad performance. I declare before outraged Heaven that acting is to you and Charrington not an honest night’s work, but a form of reckless self-indulgence. You’d much better have got me to rehearse “ A Doll’s House ” than “ Candida ”: it’s all gone to the deepest devil. Rank is literally on his last legs: it is time for C.C. to change to Krogstad, and I strongly advise you to take a turn at Ellen. You have driven a red hot harrow over my heart & soul: I will never enter a theatre again.

GBS

59/ To Ellen Terry

27th July 1897

The “ Candida ” people are off to Aberdeen at last; and I have struck Saturday work for a month or two; so now I have nothing to do but get my seven plays through the press; write the prefaces to the two volumes; read the proof sheets of the Webbs’ great book “ Problems of Democracy ” (doesn’t it sound succulent?); answer two years’ arrears of letters; and write a play & a few articles & Fabian tracts or so before October. Holiday times, dearest Ellen, holiday times!

Johnston F.R. [Forbes-Robertson] is in tribulation over his “ Hamlet .” He turned up here the other day beating his breast, and wanting to know whether I couldn’t write a nicer third act for “ The Devil’s Disciple ,” since Cleopatra was not ready for Campbell-patra [Mrs Patrick Campbell]. I wrote him out a lovely cast for “ Hamlet ,” including [your son] Teddy as Osric (if Edward [Gordon] Craig Esquire will so far condescend). Will you, however, give Ted this hint. Courtenay Thorpe lately played the Ghost, and made a hit in it. I put him down for it in my suggested cast; but I sincerely hope that F.R. won’t take the suggestion, because it is (or may be) important to me to have Thorpe free for “ Candida .” In that case, Ted, with his pathetic voice, might play the Ghost himself, if Thorpe has broken the tradition sufficiently to make the notion acceptable. At all events, put it into Ted’s head that it is a possible thing; so that if he gets chatting with F. R. or anyone else in the affair, he may say that his three parts are Hamlet (of course), the Ghost & Osric.

I am certain I could make “ Hamlet ” a success by having it played as Shakspere meant it. H. I. [Henry Irving] makes it a sentimental affair of his own; and this generation has consequently never seen the real thing. However, I am afraid F. R. will do the usual dreary business in the old way, & play the bass clarinet for four hours on end, with disastrous results. Lord! how I would make that play jump along at the Lyceum [Theatre] if I were manager. I’d make short work of that everlasting “room in the castle.” You should have the most beautiful old English garden to go mad in, with the flowers to pluck fresh from the bushes, and a trout stream of the streamiest and ripplingest to drown yourself in. I’d make such a scene of “How all occasions do inform against me! “—Hamlet in his travelling furs on a heath like a polar desert, and Fortinbras and his men “going to their graves like beds”—as should never be forgotten. I’d make lightning & thunder (comedy & tragedy) of the second & third acts: the people should say they had never seen such a play before. I’d—but no matter.

I was at the opera last night: “Tristan [and Isolde].” O Ellen, Ellen, Ellen, think of it! [Jean] De Reszke, at 48, playing his second season of Tristan, to a perfectly crazy house, and cursing himself in his old age for not doing what I told him years ago when I cannonaded the Opera and himself just as I now cannonade the Lyceum & Henry. And now Henry capitulates and orders a play from the musical critic of The World (my successor [Robert] Hichens) and [Henry Duff] Traill. In a year or two or three, you and he will be doing what I have told you, and saying, like De Reszke, “Why, oh why didn’t we realize the godlike wisdom of this extraordinary man before!” . . .

GBS

60/ Ellen Terry to Bernard Shaw

28th July 1897

. . . I wonder what you are doing? I am wondering something about you two. How I do think and think of it. I am inane. To be obsessed by a thought is the way of so many women, and I’ve always noted it and guarded against it for it is ruin.

You couldnt be dull, could you? So strange many clever people dont see the sun shines in the sky.

Have you been down to see Candida yet? I had no idea it was to be done yet awhile and was surprised to get a newspaper telling of it. (Thanks by the way for the newscutting you sent me.) Is Johnston Forbes-Robertson going to do the Devil [ ’s Disciple ]? Are you going to alter the last act?

I’m told you are going to Leamington. True? Edy is dying to do the Housekeeper in Rosmersholm [by Henrik Ibsen] when it is played. She tells me, “Miss Achurch has been very nice to me about my parts.” Edy with children is at her best, unselfish and devoted, so I’m delighted that little Nora (Charrington’s and Janet’s daughter) is about with her a good deal. I’m hoping they will all come near here, either Eastbourne or Brighton, for then I shall go there. Edy won’t write to me of Candida but says she will tell me when we meet.

I’m going to sleep! (in the hammock—just where I am!) although it is 12—noon—

Cant keep my eyes open! (Generally cant keep ‘em shut!)

Farewell, dearly beloved.

E. T.

61/ William Archer to Bernard Shaw

31st July 1897

‘For the performance of an unpleasant duty,’ says Mrs Porcher, in [Arthur Wing Pinero’s] The Hobby Horse , ‘no time can be inappropriate.’ Therefore, my dear G. B. S., I take this somewhat belated opportunity of informing you that I didn’t like your Man of Destiny a bit, and begging you not to make ducks-and-drakes of your dramatic talent in this wanton fashion. For you have dramatic talent, if only you would condescend to use, in place of abusing, it. You have falsified my prophecy of many years ago that you would never write a play. You have written one play, at least, and possible more. The one play I mean is neither Widower’s Houses , nor Arms and the Man . Were these and The Man of Destiny all your dramatic works, I should say you had fulfilled my prophecy, not falsified it. But you have written Candida —and the fact that it is known only by rumour to the playgoing public shows that there is something very rotten in the state of the theatre. Well, we are to see it in print in the autumn, along with other Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant , which as yet I do not know. This is well, since no better may be: but you really do not give the managers a chance to discover the error of their ways when you put your name to nondescript eccentricities like this Man of Destiny .

It was not very well acted when I saw it at Croydon [Theatre] the other afternoon. The performance was ‘the first on any stage’; the part of the Lieutenant had been taken, at short notice apparently, by a gentleman who was very shaky in his words; and his natural nervousness communicated itself to the other actors. I had intended to make this an excuse for saying nothing about it at present, and reserving my remarks until it is produced at a West End theatre. But playwrights of talent are not so plentiful on the English stage that we can afford to let one of them fritter himself away like this without a word of protest. I don’t for a moment suppose that you will listen to it, but I shall have done what I can, and, like the aforesaid Mrs Porcher, shall enjoy the reward of a good conscience. Pray forget, for the sake of argument, that you wrote The Man of Destiny. Forget that you are a playwright; remember that you are a critic. . . .