BERNARD SHAW

NEW YORKBRENTANO'S1913

Price 40 cents net

BRENTANO'S

Fifth Avenue and 27th Street New York

THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE

THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE OR, CONSTANCY UNREWARDED BEING THE NOVEL OF CASHEL BYRON'S PROFESSION DONE INTO A STAGE PLAY IN THREE ACTS AND IN BLANK VERSE · WITH A NOTE ON MODERN PRIZEFIGHTING · BY BERNARD SHAW

BRENTANO'S · NEW YORK MCMXIII

This play has been publicly performed within the United Kingdom. It is entered at Stationers' Hall and The Library of Congress, U. S. A.

Copyright, 1901, by Herbert S. Stone and Company ——— Copyright, 1907, by Bernard Shaw ——— All rights reserved

PREFACE

The Admirable Bashville is a product of the British law of copyright. As that law stands at present, the first person who patches up a stage version of a novel, however worthless and absurd that version may be, and has it read by himself and a few confederates to another confederate who has paid for admission in a hall licensed for theatrical performances, secures the stage rights of that novel, even as against the author himself; and the author must buy him out before he can touch his own work for the purposes of the stage.

A famous case in point is the drama of East Lynne, adapted from the late Mrs. Henry Wood's novel of that name. It was enormously popular, and is still the surest refuge of touring companies in distress. Many authors feel that Mrs. Henry Wood was hardly used in not getting any of the money which was plentifully made in this way through her story. To my mind, since her literary copyright probably brought her a fair wage for the work of writing the book, her real grievance was, first, that her name and credit were attached to a play with which she had nothing to do, and which may quite possibly have been to her a detestable travesty and profanation of her story; and second, that the authors of that play had the legal power to prevent her from having any version of her own performed, if she had wished to make one.

There is only one way in which the author can protect himself; and that is by making a version of his own and going through the same legal farce with it. But the legal farce involves the hire of a hall and the payment of a fee of two guineas to the King's Reader of Plays. When I wrote Cashel Byron's Profession I had no guineas to spare, a common disability of young authors. What is equally common, I did not know the law. A reasonable man may guess a reasonable law, but no man can guess a foolish anomaly. Fortunately, by the time my book so suddenly revived in America I was aware of the danger, and in a position to protect myself by writing and performing The Admirable Bashville. The prudence of doing so was soon demonstrated; for rumors soon reached me of several American stage versions; and one of these has actually been played in New York, with the boxing scenes under the management (so it is stated) of the eminent pugilist Mr. James J. Corbett. The New York press, in a somewhat derisive vein, conveyed the impression that in this version Cashel Byron

sought to interest the public rather as the last of the noble race of the Byrons of Dorsetshire than as his unromantic self; but in justice to a play which I never read, and an actor whom I never saw, and who honorably offered to treat me as if I had legal rights in the matter, I must not accept the newspaper evidence as conclusive.

As I write these words, I am promised by the King in his speech to Parliament a new Copyright Bill. I believe it embodies, in our British fashion, the recommendations of the book publishers as to the concerns of the authors, and the notions of the musical publishers as to the concerns of the playwrights. As author and playwright I am duly obliged to the Commission for saving me the trouble of speaking for myself, and to the witnesses for speaking for me. But unless Parliament takes the opportunity of giving the authors of all printed works of fiction, whether dramatic or narrative, both playwright and copyright (as in America), such to be independent of any insertions or omissions of formulas about "all rights reserved" or the like, I am afraid the new Copyright Bill will leave me with exactly the opinion both of the copyright law and the wisdom of Parliament I at present entertain. As a good Socialist I do not at all object to the limitation of my right of property in my own works to a comparatively brief period, followed by

complete Communism: in fact, I cannot see why the same salutary limitation should not be applied to all property rights whatsoever; but a system which enables any alert sharper to acquire property rights in my stories as against myself and the rest of the community would, it seems to me, justify a rebellion if authors were numerous and warlike enough to make one.

It may be asked why I have written The Admirable Bashville in blank verse. My answer is that I had but a week to write it in. Blank verse is so childishly easy and expeditious (hence, by the way, Shakespear's copious output), that by adopting it I was enabled to do within the week what would have cost me a month in prose.

Besides, I am fond of blank verse. Not nineteenth century blank verse, of course, nor indeed, with a very few exceptions, any post-Shakespearean blank verse. Nay, not Shakespearean blank verse itself later than the histories. When an author can write the prose dialogue of the first scene in As You Like It, or Hamlet's colloquies with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, there is really no excuse for The Seven Ages and "To be or not to be," except the excuse of a haste that made great facility indispensable. I am quite sure that any one who is to recover the charm of blank verse must frankly go back to its beginnings and start a literary pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I like the melodious sing-song, the clear simple one-line and two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half closes in an eighteenth century symphony, in Peele, Kyd, Greene, and the histories of Shakespear. How any one with music in him can turn from Henry VI., John, and the two Richards to such a mess of verse half developed into rhetorical prose as Cymbeline, is to me

explicable only by the uncivil hypothesis that the artistic qualities in the Elizabethan drama do not exist for most of its critics; so that they hang on to its purely prosaic content, and hypnotize themselves into absurd exaggerations of the value of that content. Even poets fall under the spell. Ben Jonson described Marlowe's line as "mighty"! As well put Michael Angelo's epitaph on the tombstone of Paolo Uccello. No wonder Jonson's blank verse is the most horribly disagreeable product in literature, and indicates his most prosaic mood as surely as his shorter rhymed measures indicate his poetic mood. Marlowe never wrote a mighty line in his life: Cowper's single phrase, "Toll for the brave," drowns all his mightinesses as Great Tom drowns a military band. But Marlowe took that very pleasant-sounding rigmarole of Peele and Greene, and added to its sunny daylight the insane splendors of night, and the cheap tragedy of crime. Because he had only a common sort of brain, he was hopelessly beaten by Shakespear; but he had a fine ear and a soaring

spirit: in short, one does not forget "wanton Arethusa's azure arms" and the like. But the pleasant-sounding rigmarole was the basis of the whole thing; and as long as that rigmarole was practised frankly for the sake of its pleasantness, it was readable and speakable. It lasted until Shakespear did to it what Raphael did to Italian painting; that is, overcharged and burst it by making it the vehicle of a new order of thought, involving a mass of intellectual ferment and psychological research. The rigmarole could not stand the strain; and Shakespear's style ended in a chaos of half-shattered old forms, half-emancipated new ones, with occasional bursts of prose eloquence on the one hand, occasional delicious echoes of the rigmarole, mostly from Calibans and masque personages, on the other, with, alas! a great deal of filling up with formulary blank verse which had no purpose except to save the author's time and thought.

When a great man destroys an art form in this way, its ruins make palaces for the clever would-be great. After Michael Angelo and Raphael, Giulio Romano and the Carracci. After Marlowe and Shakespear, Chapman and the Police News poet Webster. Webster's specialty was blood: Chapman's, balderdash. Many of us by this time find it difficult to believe that pre-Ruskinite art criticism used to prostrate itself before the works of Domenichino and Guido, and to patronize the modest little beginnings of those who came between Cimabue and Masaccio. But we have only to look at our own current criticism of Elizabethan drama to satisfy ourselves that in an art which has not yet found its Ruskin or its pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the same folly is still academically propagated. It is possible, and even usual, for men professing to have ears and a sense of poetry to snub Peele and Greene and grovel before Fletcher and Webster—Fletcher! a facile blank verse penny-a-liner: Webster! a turgid paper cut-throat. The subject is one which I really

cannot pursue without intemperance of language. The man who thinks The Duchess of Malfi better than David and Bethsabe is outside the pale, not merely of literature, but almost of humanity.

Yet some of the worst of these post-Shakespearean duffers, from Jonson to Heywood, suddenly became poets when they turned from the big drum of pseudo-Shakespearean drama to the pipe and tabor of the masque, exactly as Shakespear himself recovered the old charm of the rigmarole when he turned from Prospero to Ariel and Caliban. Cyril Tourneur and Heywood could certainly have produced very pretty rigmarole plays if they had begun where Shakespear began, instead of trying to begin where he left off. Jonson and Beaumont would very likely have done themselves credit on the same terms: Marston would have had at least a chance. Massinger was in his right place, such as it was; and one would not disturb the gentle Ford, who was never born to storm the footlights. Webster could have done no good anyhow or anywhere: the man was a fool. And Chapman would always have been a blathering unreadable pedant, like Landor, in spite of his classical amateurship and respectable strenuosity of character. But with these exceptions it may plausibly be held that if

Marlowe and Shakespear could have been kept out of their way, the rest would have done well enough on the lines of Peele and Greene. However, they thought otherwise; and now that their freethinking paganism, so dazzling to the pupils of Paley and the converts of Wesley, offers itself in vain to the disciples of Darwin and Nietzsche, there is an end of them. And a good riddance, too.

Accordingly, I have poetasted The Admirable Bashville in the rigmarole style. And lest the Webster worshippers should declare that there is not a single correct line in all my three acts, I have stolen or paraphrased a few from Marlowe and Shakespear (not to mention Henry Carey); so that if any man dares quote me derisively, he shall do so in peril of inadvertently lighting on a purple patch from Hamlet or Faustus.

I have also endeavored in this little play to prove that I am not the heartless creature some of my critics take me for. I have strictly observed the established laws of stage popularity and probability. I have simplified the character of the heroine, and summed up her sweetness in the one sacred word: Love. I have given consistency to the heroism of Cashel. I have paid to Morality, in the final scene, the tribute of poetic justice. I have restored to Patriotism its usual place on the stage, and gracefully acknowledged The Throne as the fountain of social honor. I have paid particular attention to the construction of the play, which will be found equal in this respect to the best contemporary models.

And I trust the result will be found satisfactory.

The Admirable Bashville; or, Constancy Unrewarded

ACT I

A glade in Wiltstoken Park

Enter Lydia Lydia. Ye leafy breasts and warm protecting wings Of mother trees that hatch our tender souls, And from the well of Nature in our hearts Thaw the intolerable inch of ice That bears the weight of all the stamping world. Hear ye me sing to solitude that I, Lydia Carew, the owner of these lands, Albeit most rich, most learned, and most wise, Am yet most lonely. What are riches worth When wisdom with them comes to show the purse bearer That life remains unpurchasable? Learning Learns but one lesson: doubt! To excel all Is, to be lonely. Oh, ye busy birds, Engrossed with real needs, ye shameless trees With arms outspread in welcome of the sun, Your minds, bent singly to enlarge your lives, Have given you wings and raised your delicate heads High heavens above us crawlers. [A rook sets up a great cawing; and the other birds chatter loudly as a gust of wind sets the branches swaying. She makes as though she would shew them her sleeves. Lo, the leaves That hide my drooping boughs! Mock me—poor maid!— Deride with joyous comfortable chatter

These stolen feathers. Laugh at me, the clothed one. Laugh at the mind fed on foul air and books. Books! Art! And Culture! Oh, I shall go mad. Give me a mate that never heard of these, A sylvan god, tree born in heart and sap; Or else, eternal maidhood be my hap. [Another gust of wind and bird-chatter. She sits on the mossy root of an oak and buries her face in her hands. Cashel Byron, in a white singlet and breeches, comes through the trees. CASHEL. What's this? Whom have we here? A woman! LYDIA [looking up]. Yes. CASHEL. You have no business here. I have. Away! Women distract me. Hence! LYDIA. Bid you me hence? I am upon mine own ground. Who are you? I take you for a god, a sylvan god. This place is mine: I share it with the birds, The trees, the sylvan gods, the lovely company Of haunted solitudes. CASHEL. A sylvan god! A goat-eared image! Do your statues speak? Walk? heave the chest with breath? or like a feather Lift you—like this? [He sets her on her feet. LYDIA [panting]. You take away my breath! You're strong. Your hands off, please. Thank you. Farewell.

CASHEL. Before you go: when shall we meet again? LYDIA. Why should we meet again? CASHEL. Who knows? We shall. That much I know by instinct. What's your name? LYDIA. Lydia Carew. CASHEL. Lydia's a pretty name. Where do you live? LYDIA. I' the castle. CASHEL [thunderstruck]. Do not say You are the lady of this great domain. LYDIA. I am. CASHEL. Accursed luck! I took you for The daughter of some farmer. Well, your pardon. I came too close: I looked too deep. Farewell. LYDIA. I pardon that. Now tell me who you are. CASHEL. Ask me not whence I come, nor what I am. You are the lady of the castle. I Have but this hard and blackened hand to live by. LYDIA. I have felt its strength and envied you. Your name? I have told you mine. CASHEL. My name is Cashel Byron. LYDIA. I never heard the name; and yet you utter it As men announce a celebrated name. Forgive my ignorance. CASHEL. I bless it, Lydia. I have forgot your other name. LYDIA. Carew. Cashel's a pretty name, too. MELLISH [calling through the wood]. Coo-ee! Byron! CASHEL. A thousand curses! Oh, I beg you, go.

This is a man you must not meet. MELLISH [further off]. Coo-ee! LYDIA. He's losing us. What does he in my woods? CASHEL. He is a part of what I am. What that is You must not know. It would end all between us. And yet there's no dishonor in't: your lawyer, Who let your lodge to me, will vouch me honest. I am ashamed to tell you what I am— At least, as yet. Some day, perhaps. MELLISH [nearer]. Coo-ee! LYDIA. His voice is nearer. Fare you well, my tenant. When next your rent falls due, come to the castle. Pay me in person. Sir: your most obedient. [She curtsies and goes. CASHEL. Lives in this castle! Owns this park! A lady Marry a prizefighter! Impossible. And yet the prizefighter must marry her. Enter Mellish Ensanguined swine, whelped by a doggish dam, Is this thy park, that thou, with voice obscene, Fillst it with yodeled yells, and screamst my name For all the world to know that Cashel Byron Is training here for combat. MELLISH. Swine you me? I've caught you, have I? You have found a woman. Let her shew here again, I'll set the dog on her.

I will. I say it. And my name's Bob Mellish. CASHEL. Change thy initial and be truly hight Hellish. As for thy dog, why dost thou keep one And bark thyself? Begone. MELLISH. I'll not begone. You shall come back with me and do your duty— Your duty to your backers, do you hear? You have not punched the bag this blessed day. CASHEL. The putrid bag engirdled by thy belt Invites my fist. MELLISH [weeping]. Ingrate! O wretched lot! Who would a trainer be? O Mellish, Mellish, Trainer of heroes, builder-up of brawn, Vicarious victor, thou createst champions That quickly turn thy tyrants. But beware: Without me thou art nothing. Disobey me, And all thy boasted strength shall fall from thee. With flaccid muscles and with failing breath Facing the fist of thy more faithful foe, I'll see thee on the grass cursing the day Thou didst forswear thy training. CASHEL. Noisome quack That canst not from thine own abhorrent visage Take one carbuncle, thou contaminat'st Even with thy presence my untainted blood Preach abstinence to rascals like thyself Rotten with surfeiting. Leave me in peace.

This grove is sacred: thou profanest it. Hence! I have business that concerns thee not. MELLISH. Ay, with your woman. You will lose your fight. Have you forgot your duty to your backers? Oh, what a sacred thing your duty is! What makes a man but duty? Where were we Without our duty? Think of Nelson's words: England expects that every man—— CASHEL. Shall twaddle About his duty. Mellish: at no hour Can I regard thee wholly without loathing; But when thou play'st the moralist, by Heaven, My soul flies to my fist, my fist to thee; And never did the Cyclops' hammer fall On Mars's armor—but enough of that. It does remind me of my mother. MELLISH. Ah, Byron, let it remind thee. Once I heard An old song: it ran thus. [He clears his throat.] Ahem, Ahem! [Sings]—They say there is no other Can take the place of mother— I am out o' voice: forgive me; but remember: Thy mother—were that sainted woman here— Would say, Obey thy trainer. CASHEL. Now, by Heaven, Some fate is pushing thee upon thy doom. Canst thou not hear thy sands as they run out?

They thunder like an avalanche. Old man: Two things I hate, my duty and my mother. Why dost thou urge them both upon me now? Presume not on thine age and on thy nastiness. Vanish, and promptly. MELLISH. Can I leave thee here Thus thinly clad, exposed to vernal dews? Come back with me, my son, unto our lodge. CASHEL. Within this breast a fire is newly lit Whose glow shall sun the dew away, whose radiance Shall make the orb of night hang in the heavens Unnoticed, like a glow-worm at high noon. MELLISH. Ah me, ah me, where wilt thou spend the night? CASHEL. Wiltstoken's windows wandering beneath, Wiltstoken's holy bell hearkening, Wiltstoken's lady loving breathlessly. MELLISH. The lady of the castle! Thou art mad. CASHEL. 'Tis thou art mad to trifle in my path. Thwart me no more. Begone. MELLISH. My boy, my son, I'd give my heart's blood for thy happiness. Thwart thee, my son! Ah, no. I'll go with thee. I'll brave the dews. I'll sacrifice my sleep. I am old—no matter: ne'er shall it be said Mellish deserted thee. CASHEL. You resolute gods That will not spare this man, upon your knees