Year's Work in Shaw

The Year's Work in English Studies is not a publication I generally review. By the time it comes out, the "year" is two years ago, but it can help in keeping up with recent trends.

Recently, a colleague in the International Shaw Society alerted me to a chapter in it written by Claudio Francesco Favazza, published this month, called "Modern Literature: George Bernard Shaw."

Much of the chapter is taken up by a review of a special issue of Shaw edited by Mary Christian on "Victorian Shaw." I wrote a piece for the issue on The Devil's Disciple, which Favazza astutely summarized:

A comparable concern with formal innovation and transformation underlies James Armstrong’s ‘Subverting the Melodramatic in The Devil’s Disciple’ (ShawR 44:i[2024] 48–61). Armstrong argues that in The Devil’s Disciple [1897] Shaw both adopts and overturns the conventions of Victorian melodrama, using them not for sensation but to expose the illusions of respectability, marriage and social order. He notes that the familiar opposition between a woman’s legal marriage and a ‘true’ marriage with another man—a theme common in melodrama—is here recast to question the legitimacy of marriage itself.

My interest in melodrama should be well known to anyone who reads this blog regularly. (I recently wrote a post about Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight.) Though Victorian melodramas are rarely read or performed today, they can tell us a lot about the development of theatrical techniques. Favazza notes this, continuing:

Comparing the play with Sydney Grundy’s Slaves of the Ring [1894], the first melodrama Shaw reviewed, Armstrong shows how Shaw moves beyond conventional moral contrasts. Unlike Grundy’s heroine, who acts under illusion, Judith acts consciously, making her near-adultery all the more destabilizing. Armstrong also points out that the play resists the redemptive closure typical of the genre: Dick Dudgeon’s willingness to die is not an act of romantic sacrifice but a deliberate rejection of social norms. As he observes, Shaw even opposed stage interpretations that sentimentalized the relationship between Judith and Dick. In this way, Armstrong concludes, Shaw transforms melodrama’s emotional energy into a medium for cultural and ideological revolt. 

That's a fair assessment of the article. It's nice to know my work is getting read.

Under the Gaslight

Augustin Daly's 1867 melodrama Under the Gaslight first provided the stage with the image of a helpless victim tied to the railroad tracks.

Who was that helpless victim? A beautiful damsel in distress? Nope. He was a one-armed Civil War veteran who was trying to thwart the villain's wicked plans.

The damsel in distress was the one who takes a hatchet, brakes out of the railroad station where she is locked up, and saves the man. This scene was hardly apolitical, as the veteran remarks after being saved: "And these are the women who ain't to have a vote!"

Under the Gaslight catapulted Daly to success when it first opened at the New York Theatre under the management of the Worrell Sisters. It followed a rich gentleman named Ray Trafford who is in love with Laura Courtland. She appears to be from a good family, though Ray later learns that as a young child Laura was rescued from a life of crime as a six-year-old pickpocket in the employ of a criminal named Mother Judas.

When the secret gets out, Laura runs away, wanting to save her sweetheart from a socially disastrous marriage. The audience gets to see various well-known New York locations onstage, including Delmonico's Restaurant, the "Tombs" jail and courthouse, and a pier looking out over Jersey City. At one point, Mother Judas throws Laura off of the pier, and Ray leaps in after her. The audience must have been on the edge of their seats.

It is the next act that contains the play's true sensation scene, though. It opens in Long Branch, New Jersey, where the fashionable rich New Yorkers have all assembled. They are being shadowed, however, by Mother Judas and the villainous Byke, who claims to be Laura's father (though this turns out to be a lie). Snorkey, who like many disabled veterans at the time was making his living as a messenger, tracks Byke to a railroad station at Shrewsbury Bend. It is there he is overpowered and tied to the tracks.

Onstage trains nearly missing their victims became a staple of melodrama. The year after Under the Gaslight opened, Irish dramatist Dion Boucicault tried to go one better, and have a near-miss with an underground train in London in his play After Dark. Daly sued Boucicault, claiming that scene infringed on his copyright.

Under the Gaslight doesn't get revived very much these days, unlike some Boucicault plays, including The Streets of New York. Still, it's great fun!