With this month's focus on Bernard Shaw and our forthcoming production of King Lear in sight, we begin the first part of a fascinating three part article by Hilary Potts on Shaw's rather eccentric attitude towards the Bard.

Shaw liked to present himself as an enfant terrible, especially as he approached old age, and rarely more so than when criticising Shakespeare. For instance, to an invitation to attend Shakespeare celebrations at Stratford, he replied that as he never celebrated his own birthday he could hardly be expected to honour that of a lesser dramatist. In 1937 he had the audacity to put on at the Embassy Theatre "Cymbeline by William Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw" with his own version of the last act. (So far as I know, it has not been performed since). Othello was "a farce". Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was "immeasurably superior to anything and everything of Shakespeare's", and in any comparison Ibsen came out with a "double-first class" leaving Shakespeare hardly anywhere. Shaw himself, of course, had written much better plays than As You Like It and "never wrote anything half so bad in matter". It was perfectly acceptable to cut the "dead and false" bits.

Much of this was a pose: Shaw knew several of the plays off by heart and all in close detail; as a theatre critic during the 1890s he must have put the fear of God into actors, since he could, and did, point out misquotations. He deeply admired Shakespeare's dramatic power which lay in "his enormous command of word-music which gives fascination to his most blackguardly repartees and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes, besides raising to the highest force all his gifts as an observer, an imitator of personal mannerisms and characteristics, a humorist and a story-teller."

Much of Shaw's eccentric attitude towards Shakespeare was a pose. What was not a pose was largely a protest against Bardolatry, the process roughly datable to the Jubilee of 1769 whereby the dramatist was praised to the skies even while being hacked to pieces on the stage - Shaw's rewrites were only the last in a long line. Dr Johnson with his edition of The Plays, would have nothing of Bardolatry; he himself might only have once tried, and failed, to write for the stage, but he laid into Shakespeare with gusto: - the plots were barbaric and "rude" and historically anachronistic, the set speeches laboured, the comic quibbles irritating, there is a lack of refinement or moral purpose. To a generation which treasured the rhyming couplets of Pope's Iliad, the Bard must have seemed pretty rough-hewn. But the effect was nonetheless totally gripping - "Every man finds his mind more strongly seized by the tragedies of Shakespeare than by those of any other writer." Johnson acknowledged the power of the writing and the humanity of the characterisation, which could survive the tacking on of happy endings (Shakespeare's own ending to "King Lear" was not heard for over a century) and the antics of over-mighty actor-managers. Some "improvements" of course are not to be spat upon; Irving made the part of Shylock into what GBS described as "The Martyrdom of Irving" long before political correctness. Shaw, a successful critic before he became a successful dramatist, also found the religious awe surrounding the Bard an irresistible target. "An adverse criticism of him need only be quoted to be accepted as damning evidence against itself" he wrote.

Bernard Shaw and Doctor Johnson agreed on two fundamental matters. Firstly, they both thought plays should have a sociological purpose. "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing", wrote Johnson, and was cross with Shakespeare for pleasing without necessarily instructing. Shaw complained that his characters had no religion or politics or convictions of any sort and therefore that Shakespeare was "an incompetent thinker". Whereas Ibsen, and presumably himself, was a genius. We might well argue that Shavian characters often have nothing but opinions and that Johnson was perhaps a little too fond of instructing others.

The other blind spot might be related to it; passion. "Love", wrote Johnson, "is only one of many passions, and has no great influence on the sum of life". Shaw considered the glorification of sexual infatuation in "Antony and Cleopatra" unforgivable; "To ask us to subject our souls to its ruinous glamour, to worship it, deify it, and imply that it alone makes our lives worth living, is nothing but folly gone mad erotically." They may well have been right, and the older one gets the more likely one is to agree, in life if not in the theatre. Perhaps it is this moralistic lack of passion which left Johnson the dramatist dead in the water and Shaw an interesting but unfeeling windbag like so many of his characters.

Hilary Potts