III.

High Comedy

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh,” wrote Shaw in The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906). It is this double focus—on both the hilarious absurdity and the crushing seriousness of life—that blurs the distinctions between high drama and comedy in Shaw’s works. His mature comedies are, in fact, very serious plays. Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) are both vehicles for an examination of society’s complicity in its own evils. In Major Barbara, Shaw questions the easy habits of morality that vilify the principles and practices of a munitions manufacturer while applauding the members and benefactors of the Salvation Army. By the end of the play Barbara has realized that the Salvation Army’s solutions are inadequate and the power of Undershaft, the industrialist, must be confronted and redirected—as she puts it, “[t]here is no wicked side: life is all one”. Ideas of power and social intervention fascinated Shaw, and the action of Major Barbara pivots around the Platonic recommendation that “society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek”. The former in fact happens in the play, when the Classical scholar, Adolphus Cusins, agrees to join Undershaft’s business.

In The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw uses a satire both on the professions and on the artistic temperament to make serious points about human suffering. Several discussion plays followed: Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny’s First Play (1911). Although Fanny became his longest-running hit up to that time, the most durable of the three has proved to be Misalliance. The mystical side of Shaw, meanwhile, found expression in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), about the sudden conversion of a horse thief, and in Androcles and the Lion (1913), which concerned true and false religious exaltation, and used the traditions of both the medieval mystery play and the Victorian Christmas pantomime.

Shaw’s comic masterpiece Pygmalion (1913; the basis for the musical comedy and film My Fair Lady) was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; but it also deals with issues of class and social power, and exposes the power politics between Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins. “Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I’m a slave now, for all my fine clothes,” opines Eliza after Higgins has transformed her into a “lady”, taking her away from her flower-selling and leaving her with nothing to sell but herself. When Eliza finally defies Higgins and reasserts her independence (“I’m not afraid of you and can do without you”), Higgins is impressed: “By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have...Now you’re a tower of strength: a consort battleship.” With few of the romantic implications at the end of My Fair Lady, Shaw’s play ends, more radically, with Eliza’s self-assertion.