Shaw’s Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal 1st

Edition Joan Templeton (Auth.)

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/shaws-ibsen-a-re-appraisal-1st-edition-joan-templeto
n-auth/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan George

Bernard Shaw

https://ebookmass.com/product/pygmalion-heartbreak-house-and-
saint-joan-george-bernard-shaw/

John Gabriel Borkman Henrik Ibsen

https://ebookmass.com/product/john-gabriel-borkman-henrik-ibsen/

A Critical Theory of Global Justice. The Frankfurt

School and World Society Malte Frøslee Ibsen

https://ebookmass.com/product/a-critical-theory-of-global-
justice-the-frankfurt-school-and-world-society-malte-froslee-
ibsen/

UNA LITURGIA COMÚN Joan Didion

https://ebookmass.com/product/una-liturgia-comun-joan-didion/
Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory 2nd
Edition Alan R. Templeton

https://ebookmass.com/product/population-genetics-and-
microevolutionary-theory-2nd-edition-alan-r-templeton/

McGraw-Hill handbook of English Harry Shaw [Shaw

https://ebookmass.com/product/mcgraw-hill-handbook-of-english-
harry-shaw-shaw/

Paradigm Shift in Business: Critical Appraisal of Agile

Management Practices 1st Edition Rajagopal

https://ebookmass.com/product/paradigm-shift-in-business-
critical-appraisal-of-agile-management-practices-1st-edition-
rajagopal/

Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising 1st ed. Edition

Christopher Wixson

https://ebookmass.com/product/bernard-shaw-and-modern-
advertising-1st-ed-edition-christopher-wixson/

Urban Disasters and Resilience in Asia 1st Edition

Rajib Shaw

https://ebookmass.com/product/urban-disasters-and-resilience-in-
asia-1st-edition-rajib-shaw/
Bernard Shaw
and His
Contemporaries

SHAW’S IBSEN
A Re-Appraisal

Joan Templeton
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

Series Editors
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
Massachusetts Maritime Academy
Pocasset, MA, USA

Peter Gahan
Independent Scholar
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and
most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse
range of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic
understanding of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in
reaction against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as
a leading writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and
American following.
Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a
vehicle for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival
Shakespeare’s. His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist,
lecturer, socialist, feminist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape
­
the modern world as well as pointed the way towards modernism. No
one engaged with his contemporaries more than Shaw, whether as
controversialist, or in his support of other, often younger writers. In
­
many respects, therefore, the series as it develops will offer a survey of
the rise of the modern at the beginning of the twentieth century and the
subsequent varied cultural movements covered by the term modernism
that arose in the wake of World War 1.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14785
 Joan Templeton

Shaw’s Ibsen
A Re-Appraisal
Joan Templeton
New York, NY, USA

Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

ISBN 978-1-137-54341-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54044-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944577

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: Age fotostock/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
 For Eric Bentley,
The Mentor of Us All
 Preface

The Quintessence of Ibsenism is perhaps the most famous book ever

­written by one author about another. Published in 1891 and revised and
enlarged in 1913, it has been reprinted over and over and is regarded as
a classic. But the book’s value is usually considered to lie less in what it
reveals about its subject—Henrik Ibsen—than about its author—Bernard
Shaw. For many readers, this is not much of a detriment. Shaw’s latest
British biographer, Michael Holroyd, finds that the joy of reading the
Quintessence “is that of feeling Shaw’s agile and ingenious mind working
with such vitality on material so sympathetic to him.” Although Shaw’s
conversion of Ibsen “into a wholesale warrior does involve distortions
to some of the plays,” Holroyd notes, Shaw’s purpose, after all, was to
present his own “credentials as a man who was carrying on Ibsen’s busi-
ness of ‘changing the mind of Europe’” (H 1:199). The Quintessence is
­considered to be the most important of Shaw’s nondramatic works for
explaining his view of the world and a “blueprint,” in Christopher Innes’s
term, for understanding his plays.1 In a recent statement on the book’s
usefulness, Matthew Yde notes that the Quintessence “has usually been
understood as a good indicator of Shaw’s own thinking, rather than a reli-
able guide to understanding Ibsen’s dramaturgical strategy and philoso-
phy of life; the quintessence of Shavianism rather than the quintessence
of Ibsenism.”2 Eric Bentley was blunter; although he appreciated Shaw’s
understanding of Ibsen, nevertheless, in his classic Bernard Shaw (1947),
he directed readers of the Quintessence to substitute the word “Shaw”
for the word “Ibsen” throughout.3 Blunter still was Charles Carpenter,

vii
viii Preface

over twenty years later, who noted: “Despite its subject (and its value as
an analysis of Ibsen), the book is still an uncamouflaged piece of Shavian
propaganda.”4
A considerably more critical view of Quintessence is that whatever it
tells us about Shaw, it is a seriously misleading book about Ibsen. Shortly
after Shaw read a first version—a lecture to the Fabian Society—in
1890, he was accused of transforming Ibsen into a socialist like himself.
This false charge, which still lingers, is the crudest version of the popu-
lar notion that Shaw wrongly regarded Ibsen as a reformer rather than
an artist. A month after the Quintessence appeared, Shaw’s great friend
William Archer, Ibsen’s devoted champion in England, published what
was essentially a review of the book, “The Quintessence of Ibsenism: An
Open Letter to George Bernard Shaw.” In it, he noted that Shaw’s argu-
ment would “strengthen the predisposition . . . to regard Ibsen, not
as a poet, but as the showman of a moral wax-work.” He noted, how-
ever, that this “cannot be helped” because “it is a drawback inseparable
from expository criticism” (A 31). By 1905, fourteen years later, Ibsen,
now established as a great dramatist, had been the subject of a number
of books in several languages that heralded his plays as arguments for
women’s rights and other causes. Greatly irritated, Archer took it upon
himself to respond in a lengthy essay, “Henrik Ibsen: Philosopher or
Poet?,” in which he vehemently denounced the irksome critics who read
Ibsen as “primarily a thinker, and only in the second place a poet”; he
briefly named “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant little study, The Quintessence
of Ibsenism” as “the type of this method of criticism” (A 81). Other
­critics, who found the Quintessence less than “brilliant,” blamed Shaw
outright for Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of social protest. In the same
year as Archer’s essay, 1905, the American critic James Huneker pub-
lished his landmark survey of early modern drama, Iconoclasts: A Book
of Dramatists, in which he claimed that in the Quintessence, Shaw had
transformed Ibsen into “a magnified image” of himself, “dropping ideas
from on high with Olympian indifference,” with the result that “we
are never shown Ibsen the artist, but always the social reformer with an
awful frown.”5
As Shaw became famous as a dramatist in the first decade of the
­twentieth century, his plays influenced his reputation as a critic, and he
was accused of being a didactic writer incapable of understanding the art-
ist Ibsen, and even, in one well-known instance, of having been Ibsen’s
“butcher.”6 By the 1930s, George Orwell could remark in passing in a
 Preface ix

letter to a friend that Shaw “had slandered Ibsen in a way that must make
poor old I[bsen] turn in his grave” (W 3), and Edmund Wilson, in The
Triple Thinkers (1938), declared that Shaw, in turning Ibsen into a social
reformer, creates “a false impression” and “seriously misrepresents him.”7
In the 1940s and 1950s, Shaw became a whipping boy of the New
Critics as a foremost example of the unpoetic soul. The movement’s
most famous arbiter of taste, T. S. Eliot, famously and somewhat nastily
attacked Shaw in his imaginary conversation, “A Dialogue on Dramatic
Poetry,” in which “B,” one of the participants, explains that “Shaw
was a poet—until he was born, and the poet in Shaw was stillborn.
Shaw has a great deal of poetry but all stillborn; Shaw is dramatically pre-
cocious and poetically less than immature.”8 Following Eliot, Raymond
Williams took on the task of saving Ibsen from the officially unpoetic
Shaw in his influential Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1953). Explaining
that his book is intended to be literary criticism in the manner of “Mr.
Eliot,” Williams offers a “revaluation of Ibsen.”9 He seems almost to be
holding his nose as he regrets that Ibsen’s mode was realism, “a tradition
which was acutely inimical to art”; in spite of this impediment, however,
Ibsen somehow managed to achieve “work as valid and as permanent as
our century has” (97). But because of the pernicious influence of The
Quintessence of Ibsenism, which “has to do with Ibsen only in the sense
that it seriously misrepresents him” (138), Ibsen has been mistaken for
sixty years as a writer who focused on moral issues that were incidental
to his art. For having committed this blunder, Williams believes, Shaw
and the other “Ibsenites” deserve to be blamed as “the disintegrators
of Ibsen” (43). Williams is especially indignant at what he claims is the
Ibsenites’ dismissal of Ibsen’s last four plays, and he cites as proof the
subtitle of Shaw’s essay on them in the Quintessence: “‘Down among the
Dead Men,’ said Shaw, and Down, Down, Down was the estimate of the
last plays as they appeared” (86). But while some of the Ibsenites were
puzzled by the late plays, others praised them, most especially Shaw him-
self, whose “Down Among the Dead Men” is among the most laudatory
of all his writings on Ibsen. Here, Shaw writes, Ibsen passes “into the
shadow of death, or rather into the splendor of his sunset glory; for his
magic is extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more
powerful” (Q2 136). Clearly, Williams did not bother to read past the
subtitle of the essay he was denigrating.
Seven years later, in 1960, James Walter McFarlane, editor of The
Oxford Ibsen, the standard scholarly edition of Ibsen’s works in English,
x Preface

reiterated Williams’s general gripe against Shaw as a reader of Ibsen,

although in a politer tone. McFarlane scolded Shaw for having claimed
that Ibsen’s plays are “first and foremost the embodiment of a lesson,
illustrations of a thesis, exercises in moral persuasion.” To “ask for the
quintessence of Ibsenism” is specious because it is “to formulate a wholly
misleading question; there is nothing to be got by boiling down, there is
no extract of wisdom that would allow us to regard [Ibsen’s] drama as a
linctus for the ills of mankind.”10
Three years after this, the American drama scholar Maurice Valency,
in his survey of modern drama, The Flower and the Castle (1963),
blamed Shaw for Ibsen’s “reputation as primarily a social dramatist”
and claimed that “a brilliant rhetorician and a wit” like Shaw could not
understand Ibsen, “an artist.”11 Another well-known American writer on
the modern theater, Robert Brustein, in The Theatre of Revolt (1964),
takes the same viewpoint: “The Ibsen who tried so hard to disassociate
himself from any consistent position would not have recognized himself
in the ‘social pioneer’ of The Quintessence, whose ‘gospel’ is designed to
save the human race.”12
Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen, appearing from 1967 to 1971,
consolidated the anti-Shaw tradition. Castigating Shaw several times
over, Meyer dismissed the Quintessence as “one of the most misleading
books about a great writer that can ever have been written. Had it been
entitled Ibsen Considered as a Socialist, or The Quintessence of Shavianism,
one would have no quarrel with it” (M 636). Like Archer, Huneker,
McFarlane, Williams, Wilson, and Valency, Meyer blamed Shaw for
Ibsen’s reputation as a writer of thesis plays, complaining that Shaw was
responsible for the notion that A Doll’s House was “a play about the
hoary problem of women’s rights” (M 457). In 1972, Michael Egan,
editor of Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, followed Meyer, noting that in
the Quintessence, “the definition of Ibsenism implicitly offered (a literary
campaign for moral reform through the exposure of middle-class hypoc-
risy) was the quintessence of Shavianism. It tells us more about Shaw and
the way he used and misunderstood Ibsen than it tells us about the com-
plexities of, say, Hedda Gabler or Little Eyolf.”13
By 1975, the notion of Shaw’s distortion of Ibsen was so widely
accepted that Daniel Dervin could write: “As we know [my italics], after
a certain point when Shaw scrutinized Ibsen, he began to see what
Narcissus saw in the pool.”14 For Dervin, Shaw’s own plays are enough
to condemn him as a bad reader of Ibsen: the famous confrontation
 Preface xi

scene between wife and husband in the third act of A Doll’s House “is
not intended to provoke thought and reform by educating the audience
to social realities as Shaw’s plays increasingly attempt to do” (185). Ten
years later, in 1985, in Ibsen and Shaw, Keith May claimed that Shaw
was wrong about Ibsen because his own optimism prevented him from
understanding that Ibsen, who believed in “timeless human weakness,”
was a skeptic: “All that mattered fundamentally to Ibsen was the noble
spirit which flickered here and there in every generation.”15
The notion that Shaw’s “Ibsenism” is merely “Shavianism” in disguise
is curiously ahistorical. In 1891, when he wrote the Quintessence, Shaw
had not yet found his way as a writer. He had been an art critic and a
music critic and had written five unknown novels. If this work were all he
produced in his lifetime, he would deserve some notice in the history of
English criticism for his brilliant writing on music, but what we know as
“Shavianism” would not exist. The Shaw of 1891, even with all his bril-
liance, could hardly set out to make Ibsen’s works contain the quintes-
sence of a way of thinking embodied in an oeuvre as yet unwritten.
A second troubling aspect of the argument against Shaw is the notion
that because he reads Ibsen as an anti-idealist like himself, he is ipso facto
wrong. Apart from the odd implication that all writers possess a sensibil-
ity that is wholly sui generis—which denies the notion of influence, let
alone movements, like Realism, or Symbolism—the assumption is that
Ibsen did not share Shaw’s anti-idealism. No critic has felt it necessary
to offer any biographical or textual support for this position, which is
presented as self-evident, but the critical logic is clear: Moral and social
questions are not concerns of art; Ibsen’s work is art; therefore, Ibsen’s
work is not concerned with moral and social issues.
My aim in this book is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that
the Quintessence is not about its subject, but its author, and that Shaw
misunderstood Ibsen and misread his works. The notion that Shaw
attempted to turn Ibsen into a socialist is surely one of the most egre-
gious errors in the literary criticism of the twentieth century, and I have
tried to establish the record of inattention, flawed scholarship, and bias
that resulted in this widespread misconception. I have also tested Shaw’s
claim that Ibsen was an anti-idealist against Ibsen’s own idea of himself
as a writer, expressed over many years in speeches and in letters, the most
important of which were written to his friend and fellow fighter for mod-
ernism, the great Danish critic Georg Brandes. I aim to show that writers
who are determined to save Ibsen the poet from the taint of social and
xii Preface

cultural history ignore Ibsen’s own interests and concerns, as well as his
strong conviction that his work was a “calling” through which he could
speak truth to lies.
But, as Inga-Stina Ewbank has written of Ibsen in another context,
“the proof of the pudding is in the eating,”16 i.e., in the text itself, and
my main subject is Shaw’s analyses of Ibsen’s plays. The Quintessence is
the first book on Ibsen in English, and of all the early books on Ibsen,
both inside and outside of Norway, it is the most ambitious, examining
Ibsen’s dramas both as an oeuvre—a collected body of works—and as
individual plays. I consider Shaw’s readings both in the context of what
his contemporaries wrote about Ibsen, in England and elsewhere, and on
their own terms. Shaw as an actual reader of Ibsen has been buried under
the idea of a Shaw who saw Ibsen as a social critic and a lecturer on mor-
als. I present the “other Shaw” of the Quintessence, the Shaw who had so
thoroughly absorbed Ibsen’s plays that they were as much a part of his
mental and spiritual universe as were the works of Shakespeare, Dickens,
Bunyan, and the King James Bible. Shaw’s great quarrel with the nine-
teenth-century theater—in his journalism, in the Quintessence, and in his
columns as drama critic for the Saturday Review—was that it was irrel-
evant to actual life. For Shaw, one of the chief glories of Ibsen’s “new
drama” was its scrupulously detailed characters: living, breathing people
who were the opposite of the stock characters of the contemporary stage.
Shaw was one of the first writers on Ibsen to offer detailed analyses of his
characters, including astute psychological studies of Nora Helmer of A
Doll’s House, Mrs. Alving of Ghosts, Rebecca West and John Rosmer of
Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, Halvard Solness of The Master Builder, and
Rita and Alfred Allmers of Little Eyolf. I want to show that Shaw read
Ibsen’s plays not from the outside in, but vice versa, and read him per-
ceptively and often brilliantly. The number of Shaw’s observations and
analyses about Ibsen’s plays that have become standard, though unac-
knowledged, in the literature on Ibsen, is an interesting phenomenon.
Equally interesting is that many of Shaw’s harshest critics echo his analy-
ses in their own readings of Ibsen’s plays.
Another goal, both historical and biographical, has been to trace
Shaw’s personal response to Ibsen from his lukewarm initial opinion to
his epiphanic reading of Peer Gynt, with William Archer, to his awaken-
ing, through A Doll’s House, to a new, modern drama that he himself
would help to create. I have tried to shed light on Shaw’s and Archer’s
deep friendship, their shared love of Ibsen, and their agreements and
 Preface xiii

disagreements regarding both his work and the “new drama” in general.
I have also tried to establish a record of Shaw’s participation in the Ibsen
campaign in London. While Michael Holroyd repeats the popular notion
that when Shaw joined the campaign, he assumed its “generalship”
(H 200), Michael Egan, editor of a 500-page anthology of pieces from
Ibsen’s early English reception, claims that Shaw was “far less important
than Archer, [Edmund] Gosse, or even Philip Wicksteed” [an economist
who was one of the first English writers on Ibsen]” (Ibsen: The Critical
Heritage, 21). Using Shaw’s diaries and letters, as well as the letters of
his friends and fellow “Ibsenites,” along with other records, I have tried
to clarify Shaw’s important role in the campaign, not as its “general”—
Archer has the right to that title—but as a journalist and drama critic
who used his columns as a bully pulpit for Ibsen, and as a man of the
theatre who tirelessly gave his support—and his criticisms—to the val-
iant men and women who introduced Ibsen to the English stage, the
most important of whom were producer J. T. Grein of the Independent
Theatre, actor-managers Charles Charrington, Elizabeth Robins, and
Florence Farr, and actress Janet Achurch.
The discussion of Shaw as a reader of Ibsen has been dominated by
the Quintessence. But Shaw is the author of other significant work on
Ibsen that merits attention, including his exuberant reporting on early
Doll’s House performances and his vehement defense of the play against
its English abusers. Among his most interesting and lively commentar-
ies on Ibsen’s plays are those in his Saturday Review columns, collected
in Our Theatres in the Nineties, a neglected body of work that is among
the best dramatic criticism in English (and hands down the wittiest). It
is hugely entertaining to follow Shaw through three and a half years of
a personal campaign in which Ibsen serves as a battering ram to attack
the “claptrap” and the “twaddle” of the London theatre, including the
stagey spectacles of Shaw’s favorite target Henry Irving. Among Shaw’s
columns are also reviews of eight productions of Ibsen’s plays that are
historical and critical gems, among which are his delightful account of
the landmark 1896 French premiere of Peer Gynt, directed by Lugné-
Poë, his skewering of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the Independent
Theatre’s calamitous 1896 production of Little Eyolf, and, in a column
of 1897, his brilliant juxtaposition of the Independent Theatre’s revival
of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
While it has been widely recognized that the dramaturgy, i.e., the
play-making, of Shaw and Ibsen is very different, it is the custom to
xiv Preface

consider Shaw’s first dramas, written in the 1890s, during the Ibsen cam-
paign, as his “Ibsenite” plays. It has been fascinating to try to identify
influence and affinity—or lack of them—in the themes and the drama-
turgy of Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Candida—the
Shaw play most associated with Ibsen—and to elucidate a drama long
deemed a puzzle, the “topical comedy” The Philanderer, Shaw’s only
direct dramatization of “Ibsenism.”
Throughout my study, I have tried to engage Shaw critically. Famous
for taking up the roles of devil’s advocate and agent provocateur, Shaw
habitually used his analytical genius in the service of polemics, and he
does not hesitate to exaggerate to bolster his positions. This is especially
marked in his arguments against Shakespeare worship, or “Bardolatry,”
as he called it, in which he habitually holds Ibsen up as a writer superior
to Shakespeare. It has been a very interesting task to examine these argu-
ments, warts and all.
Finally, a note on method: In 1913, in the second edition of the
Quintessence, Shaw’s additions and revisions were incorporated into the
original book of 1891, as though they had been there all along, and it
is this combined version that constitutes the text as we know it. But the
Shaw of 1913 was no longer the Shaw of 1891. I have studied the two
texts separately in order to establish the critical record, and, more impor-
tantly, to show how Shaw’s revisions and additions, including three new
chapters, reveal his deepened vision both of Ibsen’s dramas and Ibsen’s
revolutionary transformation of the theater.

New York, USA Joan Templeton

Notes
1. “‘Nothing but talk, talk, talk—Shaw talk’: Discussion Plays and the
Making of Modern Drama,” The Cambridge Companion to George
Bernard Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 163.
2. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 26.
3. Bernard Shaw (1947; New York: Applause Books, 2002), 139.
4. Bernard Shaw and the Art of Destroying Ideals: The Early Plays (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 9.
5. (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 243.
6. Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in Drama and Art (London: Frank
Palmer, 1912), 36–37.
 Preface xv

7. (New York: Farrar-Straus, 1977), 185.

8. Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 38.
9. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 95.
10. “Ibsen and Ibsenism,” from Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian
Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), reprinted in James
McFarlane, Ibsen and Meaning: Studies, Essays, and Prefaces 1953–1987
(Norwich: Norvik Press, 1989), 61.
11. (New York: Schocken, 1963), 386.
12. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 187.
13. (London: Routledge, 1972), 21.
14. Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study (Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press, 1975), 184.
15. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 120, 123. May’s book of ninety-
eight pages on Ibsen and a hundred and eight pages on Shaw is not the
comparative study its title suggests. May repeats the conventional contrast
between Ibsen the poet and Shaw the moralist, but after arguing that
Shaw misunderstood Ibsen, he offers a “reminder” that “Shaw’s analy-
sis of Ibsen’s plays was far ahead of his contemporaries, including the
shrewdly appreciative William Archer” (124).
16. “Ibsen on the English Stage: ‘The Proof of the Pudding is in the
Eating,’” Ibsen and the Theatre: The Dramatist in Production, ed. Errol
Durbach (London: New York University Press, 1980), 27–48.
 Acknowledgements

The greatest joy of finishing a book lies in thanking those who have con-
tributed to it, and it is with immense pleasure that I express my gratitude
to five Shaw scholars and friends who have made this book far better
than it would otherwise be. Richard F. Dietrich urged me long ago to
take up the subject of Shaw and Ibsen, and when I finally had time to do
it, he gave me great help along the way. Thank you, Dick, for encour-
aging me to plunge into the fascinating waters of the world of GBS; it
has been a splendid swim. I also express my deep gratitude to Martin
Meisel, who was kind enough to offer to read my manuscript and who
did so painstakingly, offering helpful emendations and suggestions, and,
most of all, saving me from errors. A thousand thanks to you, Martin. To
Michel Pharand goes my heartfelt appreciation for two different kinds of
services: his fine copy-editing skills and his support and encouragement
during a trying time. Merci infiniment. I am also very happy to thank
Ellen Dolgin for many conversations about Shaw and his plays that were
immensely helpful to me in clarifying my ideas (and a lot of fun, besides).
Finally, I express my gratitude to my editor, Peter Gahan, for his enthu-
siasm, his corrections, his excellent suggestions about organization, and
his help with the cover.
I would also like to thank my Palgrave Editor, Tomas René, and
Palgrave Assistant Editor Vicky Bates, for their enthusiastic support and
help. It was a pleasure to work with them.
My thanks go also to Michael O’Hara, President of the International
Shaw Society, and his organizing committee for the 2015 Shaw

xvii
xviii Acknowledgements

conference at Fordham University, Manhattan, and to Frode Helland,

Director of the Ibsen Center, University of Oslo, for inviting me to speak
on occasions at which I could test my argument of Shaw as a reader of
Ibsen before knowledgeable audiences. The responses I received from
both groups were immensely important to me.
Once again, I have the pleasure of acknowledging the singular impor-
tance of my “home away from home,” the New York Public Library at
42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where I did much of the work on this
book in the quiet confines of the Wertheim Room; I thank Jay Barksdale,
librarian extraordinaire, for his help. I would also like to thank the librar-
ians of the National Library, Oslo, and the British Library, London.
For help with photographs, I am grateful to Patricia Perez of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Susannah Mayor of Smallhythe
Place, the Ellen Terry Museum; the curators of the Fales Library
archives, New York University; and the rights and images departments of
the Senate House Library, University of London, the National Trust of
Great Britain, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.
I would like to signal my great debt to four exemplary collections
that were essential to my work: Dan R. Laurence’s Bernard Shaw:
Collected Letters, Stanley Weintraub’s Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, Evert
Sprinchorn’s Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, and Jonathan Wisenthal’s
Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings.
I gratefully acknowledge the Society of Authors on behalf of the
Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from his works.
Lastly, I would like to thank all the members of the International
Shaw Society who welcomed a newcomer and made her feel at home.
 Contents

The Road to the Quintessence 1

1 Becoming an Ibsen Critic: Shaw, Archer,
and the New Drama 1
2 The Fabian Society Lecture: Shaw, Ibsen, and Socialism 38

The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891 53

1 The Framing Chapters: Ibsen’s Modernism 57
2 Ibsen’s Revolutionary Calling 72
3 Reading Ibsen’s Texts: “The Plays”  85
4 The Open Mind of Ibsenism: “The Moral of the Plays” 131
5 Ibsen and the English Theatre: “The Appendix” 136

The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898 151

1 The Dramatist: Widowers’ Houses to Candida151
2 The Dramatic Critic: Our Theatres in the Nineties 184

The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed

to the Death of Ibsen, 1913 253
1 Shaw’s Obituary of Ibsen 253
2 An Old and a New Ibsen 261
3 “The Last Four Plays: Down Among the Dead Men” 271

xix
xx Contents

4 A Modernist Manifesto: “What is the

New Element in the Norwegian School?” 291
5 The Playwright as Thinker: “The Technical
Novelty in Ibsen’s Plays” 299
6 Then and Now: 1891 and 1913 308
7 Postscript: “Needed: An Ibsen Theatre” 309
8 The Last Envoy: “Preface to the Third Edition,” 1922 311

Works Cited 321

Index 329
 Abbreviations

A  William Archer on Ibsen. The Major Essays, 1889–1919. Ed. Thomas

Postlewait. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984.
CA Charles Archer. William Archer. Life—Work—and Friendships. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1931.
CL  Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874–1897; 1898–1910. Ed. Dan
H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985, 1988.
D  Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, 1885–1897. 2 vols. Ed. Stanley Weintraub.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.
H Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw. 3 vols. New York: Random House,
1988, 1989, 1991.
I  Henrik Ibsen. Samlede Verker [Collected Works]. 3 vols. Oslo:
Gyldendal, 1978.
LS  Ibsen. Letters and Speeches. Ed. and trans. Evert Sprinchorn. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1964.
M Michael Meyer. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971.
OTN Bernard Shaw. Our Theatres in the Nineties. 3 vols. London: Constable,
1932.
P Margot Peters. Bernard Shaw and the Actresses. Garden City: Doubleday,
1980.
P Bernard Shaw: Prefaces. London: Constable, 1934.
Q G. Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Walter Scott, 1891.
Q2 Bernard Shaw. The Quintessence of Ibsenism Now Completed to the Death
of Ibsen. New York: Brentano’s, 1913.
W  Shaw and Ibsen. Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and
Related Writings. Ed. J. L. Wisenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1979.

xxi
 List of Figures

The Road to the Quintessence

Fig. 1 George Bernard Shaw at 35. 1891. The National Portrait Gallery,
London 8
Fig. 2 William Archer at 35. 1891. The Elizabeth Robins Papers.
Fales Library, New York University 9
Fig. 3 Theatre Program. A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre,
London. 1889. Author’s personal collection 14
Fig. 4 Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer and Charles Charrington as
Doctor Rank in A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London.
June, 1889. Enthoven Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London 15
Fig. 5 Florence Farr. 1890. The Senate House Library,
University of London 29
Fig. 6 Elizabeth Robins as Hedda Gabler. London, 1891. The Elizabeth
Robins Papers. Fales Library, New York University 34

The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891

Fig. 1 Title page of the first edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. 1891.
Author’s personal collection 56
Fig. 2 William. T. Stead. Ca. 1910. The W. T. Stead Resource Site.
http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk 64
Fig. 3 Marie Bashkirtseff. Self-Portrait with Palette. 1883.
Oil on canvas. 92 × 72 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice 65

xxiii
xxiv List of Figures

Fig. 4 Henrik Ibsen at the age of 35. 1863.

Author’s personal collection 73
Fig. 5 Georg Brandes. 1870s. Frontispiece. Georg Brandes,
Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Trans.
Rasmus Anderson. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1886 79

The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898

Fig. 1 Elizabeth Robins. Early 1890s. The Elizabeth Robins Papers.
Fales Library, New York University 162
Fig. 2 Janet Achurch. Early 1890s. Enthoven Collection,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London 171
Fig. 3 Henry Irving. Late 1880s. Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo 197
Fig. 4 Ellen Terry. Ca. 1890. The National Trust, Great Britain 201
Fig. 5 Edvard Munch. Theatre Program for Peer Gynt. Théâtre de
l’Oeuvre, Paris. 1896. Lithographic crayon on paper.
250 × 298 mm. The Munch Museum, Oslo 216

The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death

of Ibsen, 1913
Fig. 1 Bernard Shaw. 1913-14. George Grantham Bain Collection,
Library of Congress, Washington, D. C 262
 Author’s Note

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations, including those from Ibsen’s

Collected Works, are mine. In quoting from Shaw, I have left his spelling
and punctuation intact, except for silent corrections of very rare misspell-
ings of Norwegian names and occasional additions of commas in brack-
ets; to avoid confusion, I have also italicized the titles of works.

xxv
 The Road to the Quintessence

1  Becoming an Ibsen Critic: Shaw, Archer,

and the New Drama

It is sixty years since Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House,

and fifty since it reached England. Few people now

alive can remember, as I do, the force of its impact.

. . . We had to revalue all our values; and it is this

revaluation that gives Ibsen his supreme rank as a

playwright who changed the mind of Europe. (Shaw,

Nordisk Tidene [The Nordic Times], Brooklyn, June 2, 1938)

By the mid-1880s, when news of Ibsen’s dramas began to reach progressive

circles in London, Shaw had written five ignored novels and was pursuing a
thwarted career as a journalist. He was also following an assiduous program of
self-education—in political theory, economic theory, literature, art, music—
in the Reading Room of the British Museum. An active member of a host of
organizations, both political and cultural, he was a deeply committed socialist
and Fabian Society member who worked hard for the cause, speaking whenever
and wherever he was needed.
Ibsen was very much in the air in the leftist circles Shaw moved in.
In 1884, Henrietta Frances Lord’s translation of Ghosts appeared in the

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Templeton, Shaw’s Ibsen, Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54044-7_1
2 J. Templeton

socialist magazine To-Day, along with the first installment of a good-

natured debate on Marxist value theory between Shaw and Philip
Wicksteed, a noted economist who was on his way to becoming one of
England’s first writers on Ibsen. Wicksteed and Shaw, fellow members of
the English Land Restoration League, an organization devoted to promot-
ing the ideas of the political economist Henry George, were friends and
frequent companions. Shaw called Wicksteed his “master in economics”1
and was an active member of his prestigious “Economic Circle,” a club
which met twice a month to discuss economic reform. Shaw undoubtedly
knew about the futile attempts of Wicksteed, a popular lecturer, to speak
on Ibsen, whose reputation was so pernicious that even Wicksteed’s own
alma mater, University College, London, refused him their premises.
Shaw was also friends with another Ibsen admirer, Eleanor Marx, Karl
Marx’s daughter, who was the first translator in English of two of Ibsen’s
plays, An Enemy of the People (her title was An Enemy of Society) and
The Lady from the Sea. In 1886, Shaw participated in her Bloomsbury
lodgings in a private reading of Nora, the first full English translation,
by Henrietta Frances Lord, of the play now known as A Doll’s House.2
Eleanor Marx read the role of Nora, her common-law husband Edward
Aveling, the role of Helmer, and Shaw, the role of Krogstad. Afterwards,
Shaw took pains to establish his indifference to this event, noting that
he participated only to please Eleanor Marx and had “a very vague
notion of what it was all about.” What he mostly remembered was eat-
ing caramels back stage. His own radicalism had made him, in his word,
“immune” to “the shock of Ibsen’s advent,” which “did not exist for
me, nor indeed for anyone who was not living in the Victorian fools’ par-
adise. All the institutions and superstitions and rascalities [sic] that Ibsen
had attacked had lost their hold on me.”3
Shaw also liked to point out that he had been working along the same
lines as Ibsen before he heard of him. In 1905, when Shaw’s dramas had
begun to arouse interest in his novels, The Irrational Knot, his second
novel (1880), which had appeared serially, was published as a book; in
the “Preface,” Shaw claimed that the novel shared a great affinity with A
Doll’s House. When he was introduced to Ibsen’s play at Eleanor Marx’s
reading, he wrote, “its novelty as a morally original study of a marriage
did not stagger me as it staggered Europe. I had made a morally original
study of a marriage myself, and made it, too, without any melodramatic
forgeries, spinal diseases, and suicides” (P 657). Emphasizing his “final
chapter, so close to Ibsen,” Shaw declared: “I seriously suggest that The
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 3

Irrational Knot may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the

Life Force to write A Doll’s House in English by the instrumentality of a
very immature writer aged twenty-four.”
The Irrational Knot focuses on a misalliance between Marian Lind, a
beautiful, intelligent, and sensible upper-class lady, and Edward Conolly,
a self-made, American electrical engineer grown rich through a mechani-
cal invention. He seems efficient at everything, including playing Bach’s
fugues for organ; Marian’s best friend calls him “a cast-iron walking
machine.”4 Marian admires him greatly and marries him in spite of her
father’s horror at his working-class origins. Intellectually, Conolly is a
staunch anti-Victorian, but in his marriage, he falls short; the unhappy
Marian complains to her friend: “A courtier, a lover, a man who will not let
the winds of heaven visit your face too harshly, is very nice, no doubt; but
he is not a husband. I want to be a wife and not a fragile ornament kept
in a glass case. He would as soon think of submitting any project of his to
a judgment of a doll as to mine” (254). Marian runs away from Conolly
with an old suitor who swears adoration but turns out to be a spoiled bore
who loves only himself. They separate, after which she finds herself preg-
nant. In the end, her stalwart husband crosses the ocean to New York
to rescue her, but she refuses to go back to him. She would shame him,
she argues, and she finds him “too wise” (421). Although Marian, unlike
Ibsen’s intrepid Nora, undergoes no epiphany of the self, as a pregnant
“fallen woman” who chooses disgrace over security, she is Nora’s partner
in courage. The imperturbable Conolly insists that he would raise her child
as if it were his own, but he is so coolly imperious that Marian’s refusal
to remain his wife seems, in spite of her circumstances, understandable;
although Shaw called the anti-Victorian Conolly the “Nora” of his novel,
he also wrote that “long before I got to the writing of the last chapter I
could hardly stand him myself.”5 The novel trails off, open-ended, with the
exit of Conolly, who gets the last word: “It is impossible to be too wise,
dearest” (422). Shaw had written himself into an impasse in a genre that
was uncongenial to him, but the “very immature writer” he called himself
had indeed, like Ibsen, written “a morally original study of a marriage.”

“The Magic of the Great Poet”: William Archer and Peer Gynt
In 1888, about two years after he read the role of Krogstad, Shaw was
re-introduced to Ibsen in an entirely different way, with consequences
so important that he would write, forty-three years after the fact, in a
4 J. Templeton

slip, that he had first “heard of Ibsen from William Archer” (“An Aside,”
2). A polyglot journalist and critic who would become one of the clos-
est friends of Shaw’s life, Archer began his career at the London Figaro,
making trips to Paris to cover the Comédie Française. He then wrote for
a variety of newspapers, including the World, the Nation, the Tribune,
and the Manchester Guardian. Whenever he could find the time, he
worked on his own project of translating Ibsen’s plays into English. He
had been devoted to Ibsen since adolescence, encountering his works on
visits to the branch of the Archer clan that lived in Norway, where he
learned to speak Norwegian. In love with the theatre since childhood, on
his sixteenth birthday he wrote to a friend from Copenhagen that he had
seen eight performances in the nine days he had been there, mostly at
the “house of Holberg,” the Royal Theatre (where the fledgling dram-
atist Ibsen had gone on a study trip). He also mentioned that he was
looking forward to the next night’s performance in Hamburg (CA 37).
In December of 1881, in Rome, the twenty-five-year-old Archer
met the fifty-three-year-old Ibsen. Archer’s friends teased him that he
had gone to Italy precisely toward that end, and not as a much needed
holiday from a work schedule that had exhausted him. The verse dra-
mas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) had made Ibsen famous in
Scandinavia; now, thanks to the prose dramas Pillars of Society (1877)
and, especially, A Doll’s House (1879), he was famous in Europe. Archer
described his first meeting with Ibsen in a letter to his brother, future
biographer, and sometime co-translator of Ibsen, Charles Archer: he
had bravely asked to be introduced to “the great Henrik” one evening
in Rome’s Scandinavian Club, presenting himself as the English transla-
tor of Pillars of Society, the only Ibsen play to have been performed in
England thus far (in a single, mostly unremarked matinee in London
the preceding year). Archer undoubtedly did not tell Ibsen that he had
agreed to abridge the text for actor-manager W. H. Vernon and had
added an enticing title: Quicksands; or The Pillars of Society. Archer
reports to his brother with great satisfaction that his and Ibsen’s conver-
sation was convivial and that Ibsen invited him to call (CA 101-02).
Ibsen liked the deferential and erudite Archer, and by the end of
Archer’s Roman holiday, they had become friends. Over the years,
Archer would pay Ibsen occasional visits, and their correspondence
lasted until Ibsen’s final illness almost twenty years later. An indefatigable
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 5

champion of Ibsen for four decades, Archer was the leader of the English
Ibsen campaign and the first major translator of Ibsen’s plays into
English. Correcting the proofs of the five volumes of Ibsen’s Prose
Dramas, brought out by Walter Scott in 1890-91, Archer wrote to his
brother, making, as was his habit, a literary allusion, that they were “on
the whole the most satisfactory job of my life, even with all their imper-
fections on their heads” (CA 186). Later, Archer would provide most of
the translations for the first English edition of Ibsen’s complete works,
The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, brought out by William Heinemann
in eleven volumes (1906-08). Besides his reverence for Ibsen as a writer,
Archer was fond of him personally, and called him, affectionately (and
privately), in a Scots accent, “the old min.”
In 1883, Archer went to Christiania (later Oslo), where he saw A
Doll’s House, returning night after night to marvel at the last scene, the
confrontation between wife and husband. He also saw the Norwegian
premiere of the even more scandalous Ghosts, the great Swedish actor-
manager August Lindberg’s landmark production in which Lindberg
played the syphilitic Oswald. Both productions confirmed Archer’s con-
viction that the strict censorship exercised by the Lord Chamberlain’s
Office would make performance of both plays impossible in England.
The next London season saw a performance meant to make Ibsen
acceptable to the British playgoer. The young playwright Henry Arthur
Jones, fresh from his first success, the melodrama The Silver King
(1882), was asked by a West End manager to produce a “sympathetic”
Nora, and, with the help of his collaborator Henry Herman, Jones trans-
formed Ibsen’s disturbing play into the innocuous Breaking A Butterfly.
Harley Granville Barker, the actor, director, critic, and playwright who
would become Shaw’s beloved friend and important collaborator at the
Royal Court Theatre, called the adaptation a “perversion” and gave the
following account of it in his delightful essay, “The Coming of Ibsen”:

Nora becomes Flora, and, to her husband, rather terribly,

Flossie. . . . The morbid Dr. Rank is replaced by Charles

his-friend, called, as if to wipe out every trace of his original,

Ben Birdseye! He is not in love with Nora, of course; that

6 J. Templeton

would never do. . . . [T]he tarantella is left intact, of course.

But the third act sees the parent play stood deliberately on its

head, and every ounce of Ibsen emptied out of it. Burlesque

could do no more. Torvald-Humphrey behaves like the pasteboard

hero of Nora’ doll’s-house dream; he does strike his chest and say:

“I am the guilty one!” And Nora-Flora cries that she is a poor weak

foolish girl, “no wife for a man like you. You are a thousand times

too good for me,” and never wakes up and walks out of her doll’s

house at all.6

In his review of Breaking A Butterfly, in a quip that is often quoted,

Archer noted that the phrase in the playbill “founded on Ibsen’s Nora”
should have read “founded on the ruins of Ibsen’s Nora”; Jones and
Herman had “trivialized” Ibsen’s play. But he also added a caveat to this
judgment, one that has been largely ignored: “I am the last to blame
them for doing so. Ibsen on the English stage is impossible. He must be
trivialized, and I believe that Messrs. Jones and Herman have performed
that office as well as could reasonably be expected.”7 (To his credit,
Jones later apologized for Breaking A Butterfly.)
Shaw and Archer, both born in 1856 (Shaw was two months older),
met during the winter of 1882-83 in the Reading Room of the British
Museum, where both were habitués. Archer’s description of Shaw is now
iconic: “I frequently sat next to a man of about my own age (twenty-
five) [actually, twenty-six] who attracted my attention, partly by his
peculiar colouring—his pallid skin and bright red hair and beard—partly
by the odd combination of authors whom he used to study—for I saw
him, day after day, poring over Karl Marx’s Das Kapital [in French] and
an orchestral score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. How we first made
acquaintance I have forgotten; but one did not need to meet him twice
to be sure that George Bernard Shaw was a personality to be noted and
studied.” He adds: “At any rate, we became fast friends” (CA 119).
Recognizing Shaw’s brilliance and wanting to help him out of his pov-
erty, Archer was of primary importance in Shaw’s belated start as a jour-
nalist. He passed on to him a number of book reviewing assignments,
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 7

and in 1886, the post of art critic for the fashionable World. Archer,
who was the newspaper’s dramatic critic, had been persuaded to add
art reviewing to his task; when, as he later wrote, his “conscience could
endure it no longer” (CA 135), he suggested to Shaw, a self-taught stu-
dent of art history who had spent countless hours in Dublin’s National
Gallery, that he send the editor a writing sample. Shaw was hired on
the spot. A few years later, when the music critic of the World resigned,
Archer once again did Shaw (and the World) another good turn. Shaw
had been steeped in music since his boyhood in Dublin; his mother was
a leading amateur singer, and Shaw learned songs and operas from her
vocal scores, teaching himself to play the piano using the score of Don
Giovanni. In London, where both Shaw’s mother and sister had music
careers, Shaw continued to immerse himself in music at concerts and in
the books and scores of the British Museum library. Archer secured the
job for Shaw, he wrote, by simply telling Edmund Yates, the newspaper’s
editor, “the truth: namely that he was at once the most competent and
the most brilliant writer on music then living in England” (CA 135).
Charles Archer notes that the friendship between his brother and
Shaw was “founded on a common idealism in fundamentals” and that
it stood “the strain of radical difference of temperament and wide diver-
gence of views” (CA 119). Both men held a deep belief in the worth of
the individual, but the gentlemanly Archer, in spite of his strong anti-
clericalism, was conservative in many ways and was far less demand-
ing than Shaw as a critic, appreciating the popular, well-made plays of
Eugène Scribe and his followers and saluting Arthur Wing Pinero as
the regenerator of English drama. Shaw, one of whose pen names was
“N. G.” (No Gentleman), was an ardent socialist with critical views
on virtually everything, including the theatre, which, like Archer, he
had learned to love in his youth. He escaped from a series of dreary
schools in Dublin at the Theatre Royal, whose stock company put on
Shakespeare, farces, intrigue dramas, melodramas, and of course the
Christmas pantomime. There were touring companies as well, which
allowed him to see Henry Irving and the actor he considered the great-
est of all, Barry Sullivan. Shaw, like Archer, loved the theatre and had
very eclectic tastes, but he despised drama that pretended to be better
than it was; he scorned the artificialities of Scribean drama, which he
called “Sardoodledom,” after Victorien Sardou, Scribe’s most popular
follower, and castigated the plays of Pinero as melodrama pretending to
8 J. Templeton

be realism. One cannot imagine Shaw accepting Breaking A Butterfly on

the grounds that travestied Ibsen is better than no Ibsen. On the other
hand, Shaw himself was not immune to overpraise when it concerned
some of the plays of his friend Henry Arthur Jones. In any case, Shaw
and Archer were the best of friends, holding each other in such esteem
that they could agree to disagree, with various degrees of ardor, for
forty-three years, until Archer’s death in 1924.

Fig. 1 George Bernard Shaw at 35. 1891

 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 9

Fig. 2 William Archer at 35. 1891

From the beginning of their friendship, Shaw was, of course, aware

of Archer’s admiration of Ibsen and his translations of Ibsen’s plays. His
own transformative experience with Ibsen began when Archer read aloud
to him from Peer Gynt, translating as he went along, sometime in the late
summer or early autumn of 1888. Shaw would later describe his epiph-
any: “Indeed I concerned myself very little about Ibsen until, later on,
William Archer translated Peer Gynt to me viva voce, when the magic of
the great poet opened my eyes in a flash to the importance of the social
philosopher” (P 657).
10 J. Templeton

Even in another language, without the rhyme and meter of the origi-
nal, Peer Gynt shocked Shaw into an awareness of Ibsen’s power. That it
was the realist-expressionist-phantasmagorical verse drama that drew Shaw
to Ibsen is crucial to understanding Shaw’s notion of Ibsen as a writer.
While biographers and critics would later accuse Shaw of seeing in Ibsen
a mere social (and often socialist) theorist who wrote plays to advance his
ideas, what drew Shaw to Ibsen was “the magic of the great poet.” After
all, as Shaw himself explained: “I was a strong Shelleyan long before I ever
heard of Ibsen from William Archer. And long after Shelley and still yet
longer before Ibsen, came Karl Marx, whose indictment of bourgeois civi-
lization, based wholly on English facts, utterly destroyed its high moral
reputation and started throughout Europe a fire of passionate resolution
to dethrone it . . . compared to which the commotion raised by Ibsen’s
Doll’s House and Ghosts was a storm in a teacup” (“An Aside,” 2-3). Now,
listening to Archer read Peer Gynt, Shaw was no longer “immune” to
Ibsen but exhilarated by him, and not because he had found a congenial
social thinker but because he had discovered a great artist.
Shaw’s diary entry of September 14, 1888, records tersely that Archer
“read Peer Gynt to me” (D 1:412), but the epiphanic reading may have
taken place earlier, for on August 28, Shaw had approached Hans Lien
Brækstad, a bookseller and literary man who served as the Norwegian
vice consul in London, to ask him for help with a highly ambitious pro-
ject: Shaw had decided to translate Peer Gynt. “The idea is,” Shaw wrote
in his diary, “that I should go down to the [Scandinavian] club, and that
he should read out the play to me, giving me the meaning in English,
and that I should put it into shape” (D 1:406). On his own, Shaw began
to learn Ibsen’s language, Riksmaal, sometimes referred to as “Dano-
Norwegian” (which was virtually identical to Danish), making periodic
notes in his diary for September that he worked on “Danish lessons” at
the British Museum, presumably studying grammar books and diction-
aries. During October and November, he recorded six arranged meet-
ings with Brækstad at the Scandinavian Club, one that he “clean forgot”
(D 1:425) and another that was “put off” because of Brækstad’s departure
for Sweden (D 1:438). He duly records on December 4 that he had no
meeting with him. On December 18, he writes,“Brækstad. Put off,” noting
that he “set to work at the Museum transcribing Peer Gynt into longhand”
and then went to Archer’s to borrow his copy of the play to take home,
where “I set to Peer Gynt again, but found it very slow and difficult work”
(D 1:446). The next reference to the project comes six weeks later, on
February 12, 1889, when he notes that he called on Brækstad “to resume
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 11

the translation of Peer Gynt” (D 1:468). A week later, Shaw records that
a meeting with Brækstad “for Peer Gynt” has been “put off” (D 1:470),
and the last entry referring to the project is that of March 25: “Call on
Brækstad at the Scandinavian Club between 17 and 18” (D 1:482).
After six months of very sporadic work, including what seem to have
been seven or eight sessions with his tutor, Shaw abandoned his plan to
translate Peer Gynt; in all likelihood, his enthusiasm had kept him from
realizing the difficulty of the project. And it must have occurred to him
that his friend Archer had a substantial head start as an Ibsen translator.
Still, Shaw’s desire to translate Peer Gynt is a touching proof of his love
of Ibsen’s dramatic poetry.

Championing A Doll’s House

Meanwhile, the campaign for Ibsen was getting underway. Shaw’s friend
Wicksteed’s plan to introduce Ibsen to the general public began to take
shape when he was given permission to hold lectures at the Chelsea
Town Hall in December of 1888, and on January 7, 1889, Shaw records
in his diary that he attended lectures on Peer Gynt by Wicksteed and
Archer in Saint John’s Wood (D 1:456).8 Shaw had now begun to read
Ibsen’s plays in earnest, and in the spring, on a trip to Belgium and
Holland, on April 21, he saw his first Ibsen production, A Doll’s House,
at the Municipal Theatre in Haarlem, which fascinated him and which he
would soon make use of in his first contribution to the Ibsen campaign.
In the spring of 1889, Charles Charrington, a young and courageous
actor-manager, and his equally courageous wife and partner, the actress
Janet Achurch, made the daring decision to produce Nora in London.
To Archer’s great surprise, the Lord Chamberlain’s office did not ban
the play; the censor would later explain that Ibsen’s dramas were so obvi-
ously nonsense that they could do no harm. The production took place
at the aptly named Novelty Theatre, a run-down house that was cheap to
rent. In place of Mrs. Lord’s stilted translation, the Charringtons asked
Archer to provide a more playable script, which he was delighted to do.
Abandoning Mrs. Lord’s title Nora, he brilliantly translated Ibsen’s title Et
Dukkehjem (A Doll Home) into a phrase that was much more metaphori-
cally suggestive in English, A Doll’s House, the British term for the minia-
ture construction. As busy as he was, Archer also found time to help at the
rehearsals; “there are always little things in which I can put them straight,
and I want to give the production as much chance as possible,” he wrote
to his brother (CA 167). Archer’s participation was the first example of
12 J. Templeton

his providing both the script and directorial assistance for performances of
Ibsen’s plays in London. Of the twenty-four productions that took place
between 1889 and 1897, twenty-two used Archer’s translations, and his
work on the productions themselves—supervising rehearsals, giving myr-
iad notes to the actors, and in some cases, directing—was crucial to the
seven most important premieres: A Doll’s House (1889), Rosmersholm
(1891), Ghosts (1891), Hedda Gabler (1891), The Master Builder (1893),
Little Eyolf (1896), and John Gabriel Borkman (1897).9
On June 1, 1899, Shaw began a personal, unflagging nine-year effort
to promote Ibsen on the English stage. His first step was a contribution
to the column “Asides” in the popular Penny Illustrated Paper in which,
under the pen name, “N[o] G[entleman],” he encouraged the public to
see A Doll’s House. Here is the heart of Shaw’s first piece of Ibsen criticism:

The drama takes place in a charming little household,

the home of a rising young man of business . . . who

works hard to get on in the world, and finds relaxation,

recreation, and pure domestic joy in the attachment of his

wife, Nora. Her good looks are so precious to him that he

not only will not let the winds of heaven visit her face too

harshly,10 but he objects to her eating lollipops lest they

should spoil her teeth. An ideal husband, dear reader; a type

of steady, hearth-and-home, healthy, middle-class chivalry.

But what, do you suppose, comes of it all? The young

wife suddenly begins to wake up to the fact that the arrange-

ment narrows her life to a mere functioning as his plaything

and nursery-maid, a view which strikes him as extremely

unladylike, but which he is unable to deny when she makes

him face it fairly. So she, there and then, walks out of the house

which is nothing but his nursery and harem, and vanishes. (W 75)
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 13

Shaw then guesses his readers’ response—“Rather an unsatisfac-

tory ending for a play, you will say”—and counters: “Do not be too
sure of that. I saw it once, in Amsterdam [Haarlem]; and I never saw
a play listened to with closer attention. Even a knot of noisy young
Dutch bloods, who had evidently paid at the doors under a quite mis-
taken notion of the character of the entertainment, got interested, and
eventually quite absorbed. The applause had a specially-earnest tone; and
at the close, the performers were called three times before the curtain”
(W 75-76).
Shaw goes on to ask Charrington to take note that “not a word of the
play was altered except so far as was necessary to turn it from Norwegian
into Dutch; and the final situation was presented exactly as Ibsen con-
trived it” (W 76). He then comments that the play “set women think-
ing hard in Norway, and it will set them thinking equally hard here,
where the break-up of the doll’s house conception of woman’s sphere
has gone further than in Norway.” Shaw’s prophecy would come true
when A Doll’s House became an important text for the English suffrage
movement.
Shaw’s first writing on Ibsen embodies the distinct style and critical
approach that would inform both The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)
and Shaw’s dramatic criticism for the Saturday Review (1895-98). In a
straightforward, conversational, and witty tone, he offers a pithy, ana-
lytical précis of the work in question and judges it on the grounds of
its relation to the actual lives of its audience, a criterion which marks a
new era in English dramatic criticism. Writing in the authoritative voice
of a man who feels compelled to champion the truth, “No Gentleman”
expresses for the first time Shaw’s abiding regard for Ibsen as a dramatist
of modern life.
The English premiere of A Doll’s House, on June 7, 1889, like its
Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and German predecessors, was a succès de
scandale. It intrigued the public and was the talk of the town. Archer
wrote to his brother: “We have fought a good fight for the Old Min, and
have won a really glorious victory. . . . It holds the B. P. [British Public]
like a vice—and what’s more, they pay to see it. . . . Of course, Miss
Achurch has the lioness’s share in the success” (CA 181). Archer sent
Ibsen a copy of a deluxe, limited edition of his translation of A Doll’s
House and suggested that he send an autographed portrait to Achurch,
14 J. Templeton

which he did. He also sent Archer the following message: “I shall always
feel that I owe you a great debt of gratitude for all that you have done,
and are still doing, to introduce my works into England. . . . I keep the
book always lying on my table” (LS 284).

Fig. 3 Theatre Program. A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London.

June, 1889
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 15

Fig. 4 Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer and Charles Charrington as

Doctor Rank in A Doll’s House. Novelty Theatre, London. June, 1889

The Charringtons’ Doll’s House kickstarted both the battle over Ibsen
and the personal anti-Ibsen campaign of the leader of the dramatic estab-
lishment, Clement Scott, the drama critic of the Daily Telegraph (which
had the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the world). In the
1860s, Scott had championed Tom Robertson’s “cup-and-saucer”
16 J. Templeton

plays, dramas of the domestic interior whose dialogue was based on

actual speech and which were known for using real stage properties;
Robertson’s best-known play, Caste, was famous for a scene in which
tea was poured. But Scott was unwilling to go further than Robertson’s
sentimental brand of “realism.” The probable inventor of the derogatory
term “Ibsenite,” which Ibsen’s supporters provocatively embraced, Scott
earned a place in theatrical history as Ibsen’s most important excoriator
in any language. Shaw would later caricature him as the fusty drama critic
of his second play, The Philanderer.
A Doll’s House spurred Scott to attack Ibsen both in the Daily
Telegraph and in other publications where he had influence. In the maga-
zine Truth, he wrote an anonymous attack on Ibsen’s admirers: “a scant
audience of egotists and Positivists assembled to see Ibsen . . . and to
gloat over the Ibsen theory of woman’s degradation and man’s unnatural
supremacy”; in another, signed account, in the magazine Theatre, which
he owned and edited, he lambasted Ibsen’s characters as “a congregation
of men and women without one spark of nobility in their nature, men
without conscience and women without affection, an unlovable, unlovely
and detestable crew” (M 608).
Archer would publish many of Scott’s comments in his famous sur-
vey of the inane reviews published during the first few years of the
Ibsen campaign, “The Mausoleum of Ibsen,” which appeared in the
Fortnightly Review in 1893. The title refers to a review in the Illustrated
Sporting and Dramatic News that had announced the building of a figu-
rative “mausoleum in which the Ibsen craze may be conveniently buried
and consigned to oblivion” (A 35). Among the snippets Archer gleaned
from the press on A Doll’s House are the following: “It would be a mis-
fortune were such a morbid and unwholesome play to gain the favour
of the public” (Standard); “Unnatural, immoral, and, in its conclud-
ing scene, essentially undramatic” (People); Ibsen “is too faddy and too
obstinately unsympathetic to please English playgoers” (Sunday Times)
(A 37).
Even though he refused performance royalties, Archer’s policy was
not to review Ibsen productions that used his translations (a stance
that Shaw found over scrupulous and convinced him to abandon later).
And in the case of A Doll’s House, Archer was so deeply involved in the
production itself that to review it would be to judge his own work. He
sent Shaw in his place to write the review for the Manchester Guardian,
and Shaw went to the newspaper’s London office immediately after
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 17

the performance to write his account. His earlier concern that Ibsen’s
text might not be respected had proved unwarranted, and he begins his
review by setting the record straight: this “is the first time that a play of
Ibsen’s has been presented in an English theatre exactly as the author
wrote it” (W 76). Documenting this declaration, he cites the perfor-
mance history of Ibsen in England: Quicksands, Archer’s abridged adap-
tation of Pillars of Society; Jones’s travesty Breaking A Butterfly; and a
private performance of A Doll’s House in a “literal translation” by ama-
teurs who “can scarcely be said to have acted it” (the reading in Eleanor
Marx’s lodgings in which he had participated). As a champion of Ibsen,
Shaw was particularly interested in how the audience responded:

[T]hroughout the first act the house unsuspiciously

accepted the husband, Helmer (Mr. Herbert Waring),

as a fine, manly fellow. But in the second act, when the

crucial line comes wherein he says to his wife, “Your

father, to say the least, was not unimpeachable, but I am,”

the shock was perceptible, but the situation was seized

with wonderful intelligence by the gallery, who thenceforth

saw plainly that Helmer and not Krogstad (Mr. R[oyce]

Carleton) is the true “villain” of the piece, and when the

same discovery flashes on the wife [i]n the last act they were

in perfect sympathy with the situation and with Miss Achurch

(W 77).

Shaw is lenient with the audience members’ naïve expectations; used to

melodrama, they naturally expected a villain. The good news was that
they were able to identify the right one.
Still, Shaw notes, it was impossible for the audience to understand the
full implications of Nora’s door slam as the result of a “duty to herself
before which all the institutions and prejudices of society must yield”;
the reason is that audiences are “not yet trained” in Schopenhauer’s
theory of the “will to live.” Thus, “when Miss Archurch said, ‘I must, I
18 J. Templeton

must’,” the audience “did not quite see it” (W 77). This is an example of
Shaw’s insistent plugging of Schopenhauer’s notion of the will, or rather
Shaw’s version of that notion, a practice that some people, including
Archer, found tedious, and others, like Shaw’s friend and Fabian com-
panion Sydney Webb, morally confused. Whereas Schopenhauer found
the force of the human will self-serving and ultimately horrifying, Shaw
chose to find it exhilarating; merging the idea of the will with the con-
ception of the soul, he created the notion of a voice within that identifies
individual purpose (the most famous example in his own plays is that of
Saint Joan). In explaining to her husband what she “must” do, Nora is
listening to her own self-will: “I have to stand all alone. That is why I
must leave you” (I 3:111).
In summarizing Nora’s explanations to her husband with “I must, I
must,” Shaw performs a subtle critical coup; he is quoting the first words
of Ibsen’s first play Catiline, spoken by the great Roman dissenter,
the first example in Ibsen’s drama of the individual who takes on the
world (I 1:9). In 1889, when Shaw wrote his review of A Doll’s House,
Catiline, written by candlelight by apothecary apprentice Ibsen in the
revolutionary year of 1848-49 and privately printed, in 1850, under a
pseudonym, was virtually unknown in England. Archer had not trans-
lated Catiline and would never do so; on the odd grounds that there
were two versions of the play, he decided to omit it from the Collected
Works. But he may have had a copy of the original and translated
parts of it to Shaw. It is also possible that Shaw had come across a lit-
tle known, anonymous book, perhaps lent him by Archer or Brækstad,
called Translations from the Norse, issued by the British Society of
Scandinavians in the late 1870s, which included the first act of Catiline
and a summary of acts two and three.11 But however Shaw came across
Ibsen’s text, his identification of Nora with the Roman conspirator is
proof of his deep understanding of Ibsen’s allegiance to the primacy of
each person, including a little Norwegian husfru, over any prescribed
doctrine, or any assigned duty, including those demanded by “all the
institutions and prejudices of society.” Here, after a year and a half’s
acquaintance with his plays, Shaw strikes to the heart of Ibsen’s work:
the refusal of all external allegiances in favor of the realization of the
self. As Ibsen wrote to his protégée Laura Petersen Kieler, the model for
Nora Helmer, “It is not a question of deciding to do this, that, or the
other thing, but of deciding to do what one must do because one is one-
self. All the rest simply leads to lies” (LS 99). In his first formal review
 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 19

of an Ibsen performance, Shaw insists on precisely what James Huneker

would accuse him fifteen years later of ignoring: Ibsen’s overriding
theme of “the conflict between one’s duty to society as a unit in the
social organism and the individual’s duty to himself” (Iconoclasts, 243).
On June 11, four days after the opening, Shaw saw A Doll’s House
again and took on a self-assigned role that he would continue to play for
the next nine years: a watchdog of the integrity of Ibsen performances.
On arriving home from the theatre, he sent Archer a note: “I noticed a
good many shortcomings tonight that escaped me before, & that ought
to be remedied somehow. The cardinal one is that the situation in the
second act is not made clear. The audience does not understand her
[Nora’s] idea that Helmer will take the forgery on himself.” Shaw also
mentions that he was in the fourth row of the pit yet could not hear
all the lines, and that the scene between Nora and the nurse should be
“brought out.” He was also concerned by the actors’ failure to keep
to the natural style of acting that Ibsen’s plays required: “They are all
relapsing into their ordinary stage tricks now that they are at their ease &
the strain of the first night [is] off. Miss A[church] actually bowed to the
applause on her entrance. . . . I have resorted to the ‘last device of a cow-
ard,’ an anonymous letter, begging her not to do it again. If she shews it
to you—mum!” (CL 1:214.)
The same day, the Pall Mall Gazette published a letter to the editor
by the minor playwright and man of letters Robert Buchanan, who had
earlier gained infamy as the author of the essay “The Fleshly School of
Poetry” (1871), a vicious attack on Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Rossetti.
Buchanan’s new target was Ibsen and his letter to the editor was called
“Is Ibsen a Zola with a Wooden Leg?” (Buchanan imagined Ibsen
stumping for immoral causes.) Shaw fell on Buchanan like a tiger on a
serpent in a stinging retort, “Is Mr. Buchanan a Critic with a Wooden
Head?” Shaw’s third defense of Ibsen, his piece introduces one of Shaw’s
most important perceptions about Ibsen’s plays: their significance as a
revolutionary antidote to the contemporary theatre.
Shaw begins with a blast en masse: “It happens that the dramatic crit-
ics of London have had this month the great chance that comes once in
the lifetime of every critic—the chance that Wagner, not so long ago,
offered to the musical critics. Most of them have missed it most miser-
ably” (W 78). Buchanan, who “voluntarily concentrates all that is blind
and puerile in their notices into one intense half-column,” then becomes
a handy generic punching bag as Shaw, in the role of the complaining,
20 J. Templeton

under-served citizen, contrasts the London critics’ dominant, bad taste

with his own minor, superior one:

I represent that section of the community which is

almost cut off from the enjoyment of dramatic art because

theatrical managers refuse to provide entertainment for it,

and insist on providing entertainment for Mr. Buchanan. . . .

His description of A Doll’s House as a play in which we are

presented with a maundering physician, a cashier who has

been cashiered (mark the pun!), the unpleasant widow of an

unpleasant husband, &c., &c., is exactly the sort of work a

Texas cowboy produces when he turns “dramatic editor,”

and begins by being smart at the expense of Shakespear. Mr.

Buchanan has not the Texan felicity of epigram; but he has

the Texan inadequacy (W 78-79).

Continuing in the persona of aggrieved theatregoer, Shaw offers a

damning précis of the nineteenth-century English stage, which Buchanan
so adored and which he himself had politely refrained from denouncing:
plays full of “idle twaddling, in which mere spite against unconventional
conduct was held up as morality, in which the most serious problems
of life and conduct were either glozed [sic] or shirked, in which mar-
riage was treated as the end instead of the beginning of life, in which the
underlying assumptions were known by every one in the theatre to be
hypocrisies, and in which the whole action was devitalized by a mechani-
cal stagecraft” (W 79). In contrast to this sentimental, melodramatic
rubbish, Shaw and other like-minded theatregoers have at last been given
something to their taste:

I saw the Doll’s House on the first night. I went again

on Tuesday; I shall go again if I can get another night

free before the piece is withdrawn. I find people enjoying

 THE ROAD TO THE QUINTESSENCE 21

themselves there who have been practically driven from

the other theatres by the intolerable emptiness of the

ordinary performances. I miss the conventional lies of the

stage there; and I do not droop, wither, and protest I am

being poisoned for want of them. . . . [I] see a vital truth

searched out and held up in a light intense enough to dispel

all the mists and shadows that obscure it in actual life. I see

people silent, attentive, thoughtful, startled—struck to the

heart, some of them (W 79).

By creating a theatre of “vital truth” in opposition to “the conventional

lies of the stage,” Ibsen had replaced a drama of frivolity with one of
seriousness, engaging the minds and hearts of the audience. For Shaw,
Ibsen’s drama was a moving, thought-provoking mirror of life.
After the successful run of A Doll’s House, Archer devoted an essay,
“Ibsen and English Criticism,” to chastising the English reviewers who
had criticized the play on the basis that it was mere didacticism and that
Nora was a mouthpiece for women’s rights. Archer cleverly pointed
out that “Nora Helmer lives with an intense and palpitating life such as
belongs to few fictitious characters. Habitually and instinctively men pay
Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing her
as though she were a real woman. . . . The very critics who begin by
railing at her as a puppet end by denouncing her as a woman. She irri-
tates, troubles, fascinates them as no puppet ever could” (A 15). Archer
protests against the notion of Ibsen “as a dour dogmatist, a vendor of
social nostrums in pilule [pill] form” and insists that the true nature of
his genius lies in “giving intense dramatic life to modern ideas” (A 17).
The notion is widespread that Shaw is among the unnamed tar-
gets of Archer’s essay. The originator of the error seems to have been
Miriam Franc, in Ibsen in England, a doctoral dissertation written at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1918 and published the following year,
the only book on the subject of Ibsen’s early English reception and a
popular reference. The hero of Franc’s whole narrative is Archer, who,
she claims, rightly viewed Ibsen as an artist, and the villain is Shaw, who,
as “a preacher lacking all poetry . . . misread Ibsen as a moralist rather
22 J. Templeton

than as a poet.”12 Archer was blaming Shaw for the misreading of Ibsen,
Franc asserts, and Archibald Henderson, Shaw’s authorized biogra-
pher, follows Franc, writing that Archer was “clearly hitting at Shaw”;
at least four other scholars have followed suit, one of them claiming that
Archer’s essay was an attack on The Quintessence of Ibsenism.13 Archer’s
piece was written two years before the Quintessence, but the more impor-
tant point is that nothing in the three articles that Shaw had thus far
written on Ibsen—the piece in the Penny Illustrated Paper, the review of
A Doll’s House, or the attack on Buchanan—suggests that Shaw viewed
Ibsen as a preacher. His analysis of Ibsen’s dramatic art, in which “a vital
truth [is] searched out and held up in a light intense enough to dispel all
the mists and shadows that obscure it in actual life” is, in fact, very close
to Archer’s own analysis that Ibsen’s plays give “intense dramatic life to
modern ideas.” For Archer, as for Shaw, Ibsen’s dramas were integral
works; separating Ibsen the artist from Ibsen the dramatist of contempo-
rary life would have been as impossible as it was simplistic. Archer would
later become irritated by the influence of the Quintessence on critics who
used it to argue that Ibsen was a social reformer, and he would say so,
but attacking his great friend anonymously was not Archer’s way. Nor
was it Shaw’s; when they quarreled, which was often, they did it openly,
whether orally or in print.
It may have been Shaw’s spirited defense of A Doll’s House in “Is
Mr. Buchanan a Critic with a Wooden Head?” that procured him a seat
next to Janet Achurch at a celebratory dinner at the Novelty Theatre on
June 16. The Ibsen champion and the Ibsen actress took to each other
immediately, beginning the first of Shaw’s romantic, sometimes obsessive
relations with actresses in which he played the roles of fascinated swain,
acting instructor, and guide to life. Janet Achurch had a strong physi-
cal presence, on stage and off, and an Amazonian beauty. She was exu-
berant, and she charmed and sometimes electrified her audiences. That
she was the first English actress to play an important Ibsen role; that
the role was that of the irresistible Nora Helmer; and that she played
it triumphantly, winning accolades, made her, for Shaw, a resplendent
being. He determined to charm her and began his campaign in a letter
he wrote her the day after their meeting, using his singular blend of flat-
tery, self-deprecation, and wit: “[F]or years past every Sunday evening of
mine has been spent on some more or less squalid platform, lecturing,
lecturing, lecturing, and lecturing. . . . [I]magine the effect of being sud-
denly magnetized, irradiated, transported, fired, rejuvenated, bewitched
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Combination of Frock and Sack.
Diagrams I, II and III are the same, and are made over the same
pattern. Dia. I represents the center of the back running parallel to
the center of front, as it must be when the garment is on the body.
Back and sidepiece are connected at the hollow of the waist, within a
square of 20½ numbers. The back’s position, running parallel to the
center of the back of the body, requires a spring over the seat and
hip, starting at the hollow of the waist. Here it will be noticed that that
square running parallel to the back of the body, meets the seat, and
must spread apart to cover the seat, and the inserted spring
furnishes the cloth required over the seat and hips. But what is put
on behind must be taken off in front, for the run of the square brings
it outside of the body in front of the waist, and must be reduced 15
deg. from the front of waist down, and the bottom of the front must
be lengthened 15 deg. in order to make it level. If the center of the
front and the center of the back be of any value as a base, then the
base lines must run parallel to the front and back, or at least they
must be so considered in order to obtain the amount which gores
and wedges may require, or the location of the same.
In Dia. II we find the fore part in the same position as in Dia. I.;
and, in fact, all fore parts are in the same position, and whatever
change is seen is caused by the turning of the sidepiece or back, or
both. But the back and sidepieces have been changed, and in place
of their being 15 deg. out of plumb, we find them on a plumb line
resting at the shoulder blade, and thence straight downward. Thus
turning the back base 15 deg. will cause the original square of 20 to
form an angle of 15 deg., or a curved line of 20½ numbers, which is
the position of Dia. II. This diagram represents an angle of 15 deg. at
such a width that it will cover the whole body, seams included, for a
man’s coat.
In order to find the width, the starting point for a garment is at a
point where the angle of 15 deg. has a width of 17½, as in Dia. XIII.
Hence the square of 17½ within the angle of 15 deg. That angle of
15 deg. represents a sheet wound around the body, which body we
must here consider without arms. Said sheet closes in at the breast
and shoulder blade, and at the side of the thigh and the back of the
seat. In this position the back of the waist must be reduced by one or
two gores, as on a sack or a frock coat.
Now let me say, that the theory of deducting the actual waist
measure from the breast measure, and thereby finding the amount of
gores to be cut out in the back of the waist, is a delusion, because
the space which is taken up by that sheet at and around the waist is
never measured. It so happens that the angle of 15 deg. requires a
reduction of about 2 in. in all at the back of the waist, which is equal
to 2 in. less than half breast. But the angle of 15 deg. is always the
same, while the waist proportion changes. But suppose that the
actual waist measure is as much as, or more than, the breast
measure. Would not that same sheet, wound around such a form,
require a reduction in the back? By using two bases in front, as the
front base of the square of 20 and the front base of the square of
17½, which are just 15 deg. apart, we are able to shift the back from
one base to the other—not to uncertain points, but just 15 deg.
The general plan upon which this book treats, is to work from the
corner of a square, or from the centre of a circle, or from certain
other angles, such as 7½ deg., 15 deg., 45 deg., 135 deg., etc. Dia.
III is made for a purpose. It is likewise drawn within the angle of 15
deg., and is intended to represent the difference between sack and
frock coats. Dia. II is arranged with a view to cutting purposes, for all
parts are separate on a smooth surface, not in their natural position;
but, by the aid of science, we know just how much they are out of
their natural positions. Dia. III has the sidepiece changed, so that it
laps with the forepart at the waist seam. In so turning the sidepiece
down, the back will necessarily come along, and we find that it has
shortened one-half of a number, on line 9 over the front. By turning
the sidepiece in at the waist, the top of the back sidepiece seam falls
backward one-half, thus making the square 18 for a three-seamed
sack, as it is for a five-seamed frock.
The top of the sidepiece and back lap two seams, as they must be
when sewed up, and the armholes are the same for both sack and
frock coats. The lap of the sidepiece and forepart, and the lap of the
bottom of the sidepiece and top of the back skirt, are explained as
follows: A sack coat is wider at the back of the waist and runs down
straighter than a frock. A straight line from the shoulder blade down
to the seat is shorter than a line running down closer and in a greater
curve toward the body. The circumference which the sack coat
occupies at the back of waist is larger than that of a frock. The closer
the garment fits to the body of the back the narrower it must become,
and at the same time it must become longer.
Now, the position of the sidepiece in Dia. III just furnishes that
extra length required, as well as the greater reduction in width. When
the sidepiece is drawn even with the forepart at the waist seam, the
lap of the sidepiece and the top of the skirt behind will crawl inward
to the more hollow part of the waist, and the extra length is thereby
taken up. The spring is not used in a sack, neither is the larger gore
between the back and front; but both are omitted and a gore of about
1 in. is cut out, as for a sack, thus obtaining the larger width for the
shorter back. The frock coat back has lost ¾ in length, hence the
frock coat back on Dia. III is 14¼, while the sack coat back is only
13½, for the reason that it is broader at the junction with line 9 over
the front. When both backs are thrown down and into a square of
20½, or in the shape of Dia. I, the frock coat back reaches line 9 at a
depth of 14¼, and the sack coat back reaches line 9 at a depth of
13½, but actually both have the same length from O. The extra
length of the frock coat back and sidepiece above the bottom of the
armhole is really a delusion, but the extra length of the sidepiece at
the waist and at the back is used up, while the closer frock coat waist
crawls more inward to the body.
Compare Article on “Narrow and Broad Backs.” For illustration, let
us suppose we have before us a man with a well-fitting sack,—not
one that fits skin-tight at the waist and spreads out below over the
seat, but one that is just what the ideal sack should be, which is
loose, yet showing the outlines of the form. Say we button it in front,
and draw over the waist a tape-line. We shall find that the more we
draw it together the looser and wider it will appear to be; and the
bottom of the back will become too short, because the line closer to
the body requires more length, which in this case will be drawn up
from the bottom. It shows too much width, because the circle closest
to the body requires less of it. But more of this will be said in the
article on “Erect Forms.”
For particulars, it should be observed that Dia. III is in a square of
18, and that Dia. VIII, or the three-seamed sack, is in the same
square. A three-seamed sack would naturally be two seams less in
the square than a five-seamed frock, which would bring the square
for a three-seamed sack to 17½. But the turning of the sidepiece
causes the square to enlarge ½, hence the square of a three-
seamed sack is the same as on a five-seamed frock, or 20½
numbers. See Dia. VIII B.
 Overcoats.
Frock, Three and Five-seamed Sacks.

(SEE DIA. X AND Xa.)

The breast measure is to be taken over the undercoat, but close.
The difference between an undercoat and an overcoat is just as
much as the difference between a vest and an undercoat, and
though all three garments pass over the same surface, and must fit
the same body, each one has a different function to perform, and
each of them is used for a different purpose. In comparing the vest
and frock coat on the angle of 15 deg., we find that the vest has a
gore under the arm at line 17½ of say 3¼, while the frock undercoat
has only about 2 numbers cut out in both gores, and, besides, the
waist seam of the frock is to be stretched from ½ to ¾ inches—all of
which will make the half frock coat about 2 in. larger over the hips
than the vest. The frock overcoat requires the full angle of 15 deg. at
the under arm cut and at line 17½, and a trifle lap at line 20. Besides,
there may be a trifle more width allowed in the center of the back as
well as in the gore between the sidepiece and back, say from ¼ to ⅜
at each point, all of which constitutes the difference at the side and
back of waist between the vest, undercoat and overcoat. As long as
the front of the overcoat falls straight downward ½ inch more or less
such width amounts to very little, because the coat being open in
front the buttons may be set forward or backward. If coats were open
behind there would never be any trouble to fit the back, but the
cutter’s vexation would then be found in front.
Again, in comparing the vest, under and overcoats at the neck, we
find another distinct difference. While the shoulder for a vest may be
fitted with the angle of 135 deg., and could be produced equally as
well without any shoulder seam, the undercoat requires say ½ inch
spring toward the neck. The curving of the forepart at the shoulder
seam is done to throw roundness toward the shoulder blade, for
which purpose the shoulder seam is thrown backward at the arm. If
the shoulder seam was located at the top of the shoulder, or where a
vest shoulder seam is located, then that seam would admit of no
curve, but would necessarily be cut straight, or with a spring toward
the neck.
When a vest is finished, the collar will create a spring at the side of
the neck, say about 1 in. on each side, which spring is required to
turn upward and let the neck pass through. At and around the neck,
there is perhaps a tie and a shirt collar, all of which is under the vest,
and all require about ¾ spring on each side. Now, when an
undercoat is worn over that vest and anything that is under it at the
neck, it follows that the coat requires at least the same spring, and it
must be produced as shown in the diagrams, and when we proceed
further, and put on an overcoat over the undercoat, we must again
make our provision for a spring at the side of the neck, particularly so
when we know that the undercoat collar takes its full share of extra
bulk at and around the neck.
The height or the top of back of the different garments must also
be observed. While the top of a vest back is placed at three and
three-fourths, the top of an undercoat back stands at three to three
and a quarter, and the top of an overcoat back is at two and three-
fourths to two and a half. The undercoat must cover the vest, say by
at least half an inch, and the overcoat must cover the undercoat the
same distance, and the nearer a garment comes to the neck the
more spring is required at the side of the neck. No spring is required
at the back of the neck, but at the side, and is put in by the aid of the
shoulder seam, or by stretching the sides of the neck.
 The foregoing descriptions correspond with the body, but they will
amount to nothing if we destroy the relative balance of the front and
bottom of the armhole. It is true all coats can be cut without that
spring, by moving the fore part downward on the base until the two
points meet; but by so doing all other points are changed, and new
points will form. And while it is true that the new position of the points
and parts will fit the same, it is equally true that the balance of the
armhole and sleeve will also be destroyed, at least it will become
necessary to readjust them, when each garment will then have a
balance of its own. The purpose herein intended is to harmonize
coats and vests on one base, and simply make the changes for each
garment according to the requirements of the body at each particular
point, and in all cases maintain the angle of 135 deg. and the
balance of the armhole.
By saying that the balance of the armhole must be retained, I do
not mean that the overcoat armhole must be cut just like that of the
undercoat; on the contrary, an overcoat requires an armhole that is
cut deeper as well as more forward. Cutting the armhole deeper, or
more forward, does not destroy its balance as long as the sleeve
follows. My reason why the armhole of an overcoat must be cut
deeper and more forward, and consequently larger, than what will be
obtained by a scale say 2 in. larger than the undercoat, is this: The
armhole of an undercoat is always larger than the arm itself, and the
body of the undercoat is also cut larger than the body itself, even
over the vest. Undercoats are made up the heaviest at and around
the armhole, and if any padding or wadding is put in, it is at the
armholes and shoulders. All of which requires the overcoat armhole
to be larger in proportion than the difference as obtained between
the measure over the vest and over the undercoat. Besides, an
overcoat to be comfortable must be looser in comparison with the
undercoat—not only in the arms, but over the hips and seat. We may
cut our armholes as large as we please, but if the coat has not
enough cloth over the hips and seat the front of the armhole will be
drawn backward, and it will strike the arm and cut it; and behind and
below the arm, the back will appear too long and too wide, all of
which will correct itself, if more width is given over the hips and seat.
After all other parts are properly balanced, the overcoat armhole
ought to be from ¼ to ⅜ deeper and more forward than that given by
the scale for the undercoat.
In this connection I will repeat, that for the undercoat the normal
form may have the armhole 2 seams back of the angle of 45 deg.,
and at the bottom the armhole may be from ⅝ to 1 in. above lines 9
and 11¼. The overcoat requires about ½ inch more, forward and
downward, and in all cases the sleeve must follow by striking a line
for the sleeve base 2 seams in front of the armhole, without
disturbing the center of the back sleeve seam at 8.
All this must be observed in cutting any under or overcoat,
because as soon as the armhole is cut forward the sleeve must
follow in width, which must be started at the highest point of the top
sleeve, and allowing all around in front. All calculations backward as
to the center of the sleeve behind must be made from the same point
for all, and which point is a right angle from the center of the back
through the point of the angle of 135 deg.,—for all of which further
explanation will be found in the Article on “Armhole and Sleeves.”
To recapitulate: A three-seamed overcoat can be cut over a three-
seamed under sack, and two sizes larger, by the following changes:
Top of back ½ higher; back ½ shorter, over the blade; armhole ½
more forward and ½ lower; ½ allowance at the front sleeve seam to
follow the armhole; ¼ to ⅜ more spring toward the neck in the
shoulder seam. At the center of back 1 inch more spring over the
seat, and 1 inch more spring over the seat in the side seam, which
must be started pretty well up, so that the hollow of waist receives
about ½ inch.
In Dia. X the front of the neck is placed at 4, resting on the front
line of the angle of 135 deg., which is as low and as far forward as it
ought to be made for a short roll. Overcoats which are intended to
button clear up, should have that point ½ higher and ½ backward,
and the same may be said for the long roll. A long roll requires a
smaller lapel, but a larger gore. Reducing the top of the front by a
gore under the lapel will make a far better front than if the top of the
front edge is shaved off that much, because it produces an oval
shape to the breast, and takes up the surplus cloth in the center of
the front—and more so on an overcoat where the front may lap the
distance of 3 inches.
To produce a three-seamed over sack for a larger or fuller waist,
allow say 1 in. more at line 20 and at the side seam, starting
somewhere below lines 9 and 13½ and above line 15; but this
allowance should not be more at the bottom than at the seat. It is not
required, however, behind, or in the side seam, but more forward,
and in order to throw that allowance of an inch forward to the side of
the waist, the side seam of the forepart must be stretched perhaps ⅜
of an inch at the hollow of the waist and above, because stretching
below the waist would do no good, as the width must be thrown to
the waist and hip. A three-seamed over sack can be very much
improved by judicious stretching, as well as by shrinking, for the
reason that the forepart is a very large sheet, and if made up flat will
never fit the outlines of a man. At least, if all parts are first properly
stretched or shrunk a better result can be obtained than if made up
flat. For instance, the front edge will never lap over the center of the
body 3 or 4 in., and button smoothly, if it be not drawn in at least 1 in.
all the way across the chest, unless the surplus length is drawn
upward and balanced by a gore under the lapel. Now, although a
three-seamed over sack can be made, I know that a five-seamed
one can be made better. Cutters and tailors may try ever so long to
bring a three-seamed overcoat correctly to the body without
stretching or shrinking some parts, but they will never succeed as
well as with a five-seamed one, and I refer you to Dia. X.
It must be admitted that a great deal of the spread of the body is
sidewise over the hips, or say in the middle of the forepart. On a
three-seamed garment, this must be put on either in front or at the
side seam, but on a five-seamed one this can be put just where it
belongs, by enlarging the square and cutting the surplus width out
again under the arm as the fifth seam. By so doing, the lap of the
forepart and back over the seat of a three-seamed garment is thrown
sidewise, and the back and sidepiece of the five-seamed one just
meet at the largest part of the seat. All other points are the same in
either the three or the five-seamed garment, except the length of
back above the armscye, which must be shortened ½ inch on a five-
seamer, and the side seam stretched ½ upward, which stretching
upward will re-balance the length of back again over the shoulder
blades.
The height of back, from line 9 upward, should be a trifle shorter
on all overcoats than on undercoats. All overcoats should be cut so
that they lean more toward the erect form, and also toward a large-
waisted form. It is a fact, which should be well understood by cutters,
that a good-fitting overcoat for the normal form will fit well, as an
undercoat for the large-waisted form, because a large waist requires
a shorter back, and again, the waist of an overcoat cannot be cut
according to a waist measure with the tape drawn tightly over the
undercoat, and as closely as the body will allow it to be drawn
together, but the waist measure must be taken over the undercoat,
as loosely as it hangs on the body, and this represents a large waist.
If an overcoat be buttoned up, it must just pass around the undercoat
as it hangs loose at the waist, and as soon as the overcoat is
compelled to draw the undercoat together at the waist, it will be too
tight for the purpose.
Dia. X is intended for a loose coat, and if a close fit be desired, the
measure must be taken very close, and for such, a loose measure
over the vest may be used, and in no case should a reduction be
made in one place unless for an abnormal form. Dia. X is purposely
made large, but it will hang well on three or four different sizes, or on
anybody who can put it on, and is not of the odd forms. Furthermore,
it will produce an overcoat which goes on, or comes off almost by
itself, and which will not require the whole household to help to pull it
on or off.
Dia. Xa is intended for a closer fit, but I will here warn trying to
make overcoats fit very closely, for more are spoiled in the attempt
than are made better. It is without gore under the roll, and may be
used for a soft roll, either long or short. Being without gore under the
lapel requires the coat drawn in pretty well over the front. It may be
cut with a gore, by which surplus cloth may be drawn upward from
the center of front, providing the amount used up for the gore is
again allowed in front.
 I will again repeat that Dia. X is for an erect form, and will cut a
large but good-hanging coat. If this diagram be used for a more
forward-leaning form, the spring in the center of the back may be
reduced to 1¼ at line 30, starting at line 17½. All overcoats are the
better off by having plenty spring over the seat, and if there be too
much spring, it is easy to sew it in. Dia. Xa will be found to represent
an overcoat for a more forward-leaning form, but not for the stooping
form. The neck is cut pretty well upward, and besides the three-
eighths spring at the shoulder seam, the side of the neck must be
stretched at least ⅜ to ½ inch on each side, or else the collar will be
too tight. Stretching the side of the neck, as directed in this work,
requires that the shoulders at and around the side of the neck must
be made up thin, and that all canvas and all padding must be cut
away gradually, so that the facing can be stretched also. Holding the
collar full, and without stretching the neck, or working the shoulders
according to the shape of the body, may result in a fit, but one
coatmaker may put life in that fit, while another makes the fit dead, or
flat, or stale, or whatever it may be called.
Now a word about the bottom of the back. It may look odd to some
cutters to see the bottom of the back shorter behind than at the side;
but the whole bottom of Dia. X may be considered correct for the
normal form, and it is the same in Dia. II. The shortness behind of
any back is caused by the back being laid out in such a position that
nothing is hollowed out at the waist behind, but a spring thrown
outside of the center over the seat. The backs are laid out in such a
position, because the armhole and the sleeve can not be connected,
as they are, on either Dia. VII or X, in any other way. But though,
most all Fashion Reports have the backs hollowed out behind, and
at the hollow of the waist; still I claim that it is a natural way, to lay
out the upper parts of the backs on straight lines. When we observe
the run of the center of the back, and when a coat fits the body well,
we find that it runs down straight from the shoulder blade, to the
hollow of the waist, no matter on what lines, or bases such backs are
cut, but below the hollow of the waist, the back comes in contact with
the seat and must be sprung out gradually.
 To run a line for the center of the back inside of the square, can be
done with the same result, but all other points must change, and it
would show that the draft does not conform to the natural run of the
body, which is flat behind and on straight lines. Now, right here, it
might be observed by some that the seat and the shoulder blades
are on about the same line, and which line may be called a plumb
line, and that the back should be hollow at the waist and not come
outside of that plumb line. If we observe the Fashion Reports we
come to the conclusion that all diagrams are based upon that idea,
and for more than twenty years I have labored under the same
delusion. If I claim that the back of a coat runs straight down behind,
I do not mean it to run straight down over the seat, like a shirt, but to
run straight down from the shoulder blades to the hollow of the waist,
which is about 15 deg. from a plumb line. Consequently the back of
the seat is outside of that line, and the natural run of the coat back is
outside of that base, but may be divided between the center of the
back and the sidepiece of a frock coat, and also partly between the
center of the back and the side of the back on a sack.
It is true that in Fig. II the plumb line as a base for the angle of 15
deg. is outside the body of the seat, but when the coat is on the
body, the gores which are cut sidewise cause the back to be turned
about 15 deg., running along with the body from the shoulder blades
to the hollow of the waist, which is well illustrated in Dia. I.
Figures and Diagrams.
 Figures and Diagrams.
FIG. AND DIA. I.
This figure shows the front and the back views of the normal form, as
adopted in this work. It illustrates the slopes of the shoulders, and
the measurement of said slopes on the angle of 135 deg., and each
separate shoulder slope on an angle of 22½ deg. from the side of
the neck. It also illustrates the pants bases, on the angle of 7½ deg.,
and shows the reason why the top of the front of a pants waist is
thrown forward of the front base line. It shows the front pants base ⅝
sidewise of the center of the body, and runs down parallel to the
inside of each leg. This figure is calculated to be in such a standing
position that the ankles are 1¼ inches apart, so that ½ of that
distance is ⅝ of an inch to the center, hence the ⅝ to be thrown
forward of the base, on top of waist, as the smallest amount for any
form.
In front of the center of the figure will be seen another dotted line,
which is marked 1¼ from the base, which is intended to show the
front of a pants for a fuller waist, or for a more forward leaning waist.
This addition may be the most that can be allowed for a forward-
leaning waist, and may also be considered to be the most that can
be allowed for a medium large waist, as to such forms which require
a made up waist of 40 inches, but whose seat measure is only 40
inches. Forms which measure 42 seat and require a waist of 44
made up, may have 1½ allowed in front of the base, and a 46 seat
which requires a waist 50 inches made up, may be given 2 numbers,
as shown in Dia. XX, but 2 numbers may be considered the most
which any pants will require.
The position of the front pants base, on the front line of the angle
of 7½ deg., must be considered, as it will be, when the pants are on
the body, that is, running parallel to the front of the leg, which is
forward on top of the waist, and which slope may again be called 7½
deg. From this line, most of the normal forms carry the top and front
of waists a trifle backward, but it is very little, and we will call such
waists even on that line, in order to make a standard.
Now, it must not be supposed, that when a waist grows larger in
proportion, that it grows, or spreads very much forward of that line.
Whenever the waist grows larger, the body becomes more erect, in
order to keep in balance, and the relation between the front of such a
waist, and the line running parallel to the front of the leg, change
very little, and Dia. XX may be considered to be large enough at that
point for almost any form. On the other hand, we find large-waisted
forms which do not carry their fronts of waists in front of that line at
all, though their abdomen may curve outside of it. Such pants may
be cut with a normal front of waist—but with a trifle more curve over
the center of the abdomen, and plenty full at the side so that the
forepart is thrown forward from the side, forming another curve over
the oval front on the same principle, as the back is thrown backward
from the side, to form the curve over the seat.
There is an endless variation of such forms, and it is fortunate for
cutters that a trifle more or less will not kill a pants. The difference in
Dia. XIX, XX and XXI is not so great that a great mistake would be
made. All the small diagrams were made with the top of front of waist
thrown forward of the base 1¼, but as they are used for illustration
only, and as there are a great many pants which require it, they have
been left that way. Otherwise they are the same as Dia. XIX, XX and
XXI.
Fig. 1.
 FIG. II.
Fig. II illustrates the side view of the angle of 135 deg. as applied
on the draft, and shows the reduction of the square in front and
below the waist, as well as the addition behind and below the waist.
The diagram on this figure is a simple vest, on the square of 17½,
and hence the under arm cut is 3¼ at the circle.
 Fig. 2.

DIA. I.
Dia. I is intended for illustration only. It is on a square of 20½, and
the ½ is intended for the extra seam which the frock coat requires.
The center of the back and center of the front run in the same
direction as they must run when on the body. It also illustrates the
spring over the hips as the body actually requires it.
The gore between the side-piece and back illustrates what may be
buckled up on a vest. The front represents a straight single-breasted
coat, as worn by the military or clergy, and may be depended upon if
placed as in Dia. II. The front of such a coat must have a large gore
in the center, which gore must be made at least 1¼ to 1½ inches,
seams included, and must start well up above line 15, and the edges
cut oval, not hollow; and the canvas and all padding and lining must
be cut and worked in the same way, in which case the front requires
no drawing in. The stay is put on close merely to keep the edge from
stretching.
Above line fifteen the button-holes are cut, and the buttons are set
plumb on the front line, but below line 15 the button line turns
backward as shown. To meet the collar in front, nick one seam back
of the front line, for military, but for a clergyman’s coat place the nick
¾ back of said line. The top of the skirt laps 1 inch in front of the
forepart, and drops ½ inch on the bottom of the front. The standing
collar must be a straight piece, and its width depends upon
regulation. For a clergyman’s coat the standing collar should not be