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

124 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
undershaft [in towering excitement] It is the Undershaft inheritance.
(3:120)
“How do you suppose it got there?” is not a question worthy of Cusins,
but it allows Undershaft to makes his paradoxical point.
This conflict of purpose may be the reason Shaw found it necessary to
do the must extensive revision he had yet undertaken of any play since
The Philanderer. The changes were of a different nature from those applied
to the early play. The revisions of The Philanderer tended to cut out Shaw’s
penchant for letting the characters dictate to their author where to take
the play and to bring it more into the familiar, structured pattern of farcical
comedy, that is, to make it less “organic” and more conventional; the
changes made to Major Barbara help resolve potential conflicts between
Shaw’s “organic” and didactic tendencies and so help make it even more
Shavian, rather than more conventional. The most sweeping changes were
to the second scene of the third act, which was entirely rewritten. Shaw
was right in his dissatisfaction with the original, for the first draft was
dramatically inferior to the final product, but missteps can be illuminating.
1 One of the most interesting changes is an alteration in the moral and
intellectual debate between Cusins and Undershaft. In the original draft
(called the “Derry” manuscript), Undershaft is unambiguously the winner
and Cusins is clearly brought around to Undershaft’s point of view. In the
final version, Cusins is changed but remains his own man at the end. The
resulting intellectual ambiguity is interesting, and the exact nature of its
significance is an important question in determining the play’s meaning.
Anomalies in the Action
The dramatic structure of the play is especially unusual. In all of the preceding
plays the action is a clear development of the desires of the characters
in conflict with each other and their circumstances: classic examples
for a teacher of play analysis. Caesar and Cleopatra may appear an exception,
but its episodic nature is merely a shell for the true action: the partly
successful education of Cleopatra. When Shaw uses a conventional “complication”
to change the course of the action, it helps complete the picture,
showing us more fully how the characters behave by altering their circumstances.
The change in the status of the slums proposed by Lickcheese in
Widowers’ Houses and the arrival of the American navy in Captain Brassbound’s
Conversion both change the action in order to illuminate it. The