Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

A Playwright’s Progress 117
sexual scandal that impel the action of The Man of Destiny, but he strenuously
objected to the philosophy of the well-made play and intensely disliked
the specific form known at the time as “farcical comedy,” which epitomized
the values exploited by the well-made play. This is clear if one
compares the uses he made of melodrama with the way he exploited the
technique and form of farcical comedy. His use of melodrama in The Devil’s
Disciple and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion is relatively straightforward.
He had written in 1895 that a “really good Adelphi melodrama is
of first-rate literary importance, because it only needs elaboration to become
a masterpiece” (Drama Observed 1:312–13). Shaw unashamedly exploits
the heroics, the narrow escapes, the threats of violence, and the high
moral passion of melodrama. He merely substitutes genuine character psychology
for conventional stereotypes and a realist morality for the simple
black and white schema of traditional melodrama. From Shaw’s didactic
point of view, the Plays for Puritans succeed where Arms and the Man had
failed. Like Candida, they present moral conflict in such a way as not to
deny the underlying unity; they do not just reverse our perceptions of who
is the villain and who the hero, they undermine those concepts. Much
modern drama does this; Shaw’s distinction is that instead of implying that
we are all villains, he tries to show that we are all capable of heroism.
Caesar and Cleopatra and The Devil’s Disciple are elaborations of standard
melodrama; to a lesser degree The Philanderer is an elaboration of
farcical comedy. Shaw exploits the techniques of farcical comedy, but
where The Devil’s Disciple is true to the spirit of melodrama, The Philanderer
is at odds with the spirit of farcical comedy. It plays with the form
and comments on it, subverting its traditional ends. A farcical comedy such
as Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear depends on the acceptance of a rigid standard
of sexual morality in which appearances are of the highest value. It is
the ultimate expression of the well-made play. In it, the playwright and
audience play a game of peek-a-boo with sexual scandal. Its object is like
that of a roller-coaster ride: to provide the maximum thrill of danger in an
environment of total safety. The Philanderer certainly has a superficial resemblance
to farcical comedy. The theme of sexual impropriety is not lacking,
and there is a fair amount of lying and evasion—another staple of
farcical comedy. The most distinctive feature of the form is the second act
setting in some notorious den of iniquity, a place where the characters may
experience the maximum temptation to sin together with the maximum
threat of exposure. For the usual trysting place, Shaw substitutes the Ibsen