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Title: Great Catherine

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Release Date:  October, 2002  [Etext #3488]
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GREAT CATHERINE (WHOM GLORY STILL ADORES)

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW




"In Catherine's reign, whom Glory still adores"
                                           BYRON


THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY FOR GREAT CATHERINE

Exception has been taken to the title of this seeming tomfoolery
on the ground that the Catherine it represents is not Great
Catherine, but the Catherine whose gallantries provide some of
the lightest pages of modern history. Great Catherine, it is
said, was the Catherine whose diplomacy, whose campaigns and
conquests, whose plans of Liberal reform, whose correspondence
with Grimm and Voltaire enabled her to cut such a magnificent
figure in the eighteenth century. In reply, I can only confess
that Catherine's diplomacy and her conquests do not interest me.
It is clear to me that neither she nor the statesmen with whom
she played this mischievous kind of political chess had any
notion of the real history of their own times, or of the real
forces that were moulding Europe. The French Revolution, which
made such short work of Catherine's Voltairean principles,
surprised and scandalized her as much as it surprised and
scandalized any provincial governess in the French chateaux.

The main difference between her and our modern Liberal
Governments was that whereas she talked and wrote quite
intelligently about Liberal principles before she was frightened
into making such talking and writing a flogging matter, our
Liberal ministers take the name of Liberalism in vain without
knowing or caring enough about its meaning even to talk and
scribble about it, and pass their flogging Bills, and institute
their prosecutions for sedition and blasphemy and so forth,
without the faintest suspicion that such proceedings need any
apology from the Liberal point of view.

It was quite easy for Patiomkin to humbug Catherine as to the
condition of Russia by conducting her through sham cities run up
for the occasion by scenic artists; but in the little world of
European court intrigue and dynastic diplomacy which was the only
world she knew she was more than a match for him and for all the
rest of her contemporaries. In such intrigue and diplomacy,
however, there was no romance, no scientific political interest,
nothing that a sane mind can now retain even if it can be
persuaded to waste time in reading it up. But Catherine as a
woman with plenty of character and (as we should say) no morals,
still fascinates and amuses us as she fascinated and amused her
contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these
Peters, Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as
eccentric character parts, and produced scene after scene of
furious harlequinade with the monarch as clown, and of tragic
relief in the torture chamber with the monarch as pantomime demon
committing real atrocities, not forgetting the indispensable love
interest on an enormous and utterly indecorous scale. Catherine
kept this vast Guignol Theatre open for nearly half a century,
not as a Russian, but as a highly domesticated German lady whose
household routine was not at all so unlike that of Queen Victoria
as might be expected from the difference in their notions of
propriety in sexual relations.

In short, if Byron leaves you with an impression that he said
very little about Catherine, and that little not what was best
worth saying, I beg to correct your impression by assuring you
that what Byron said was all there really is to say that is worth
saying. His Catherine is my Catherine and everybody's Catherine.
The young man who gains her favor is a Spanish nobleman in his
version. I have made him an English country gentleman, who gets
out of his rather dangerous scrape, by simplicity, sincerity, and
the courage of these qualities. By this I have given some offence
to the many Britons who see themselves as heroes: what they mean
by heroes being theatrical snobs of superhuman pretensions which,
though quite groundless, are admitted with awe by the rest of the
human race. They say I think an Englishman a fool. When I do,
they have themselves to thank.

I must not, however, pretend that historical portraiture was the
motive of a play that will leave the reader as ignorant of
Russian history as he may be now before he has turned the page.
Nor is the sketch of Catherine complete even idiosyncratically,
leaving her politics out of the question. For example, she wrote
bushels of plays. I confess I have not yet read any of them. The
truth is, this play grew out of the relations which inevitably
exist in the theatre between authors and actors. If the actors
have sometimes to use their skill as the author's puppets rather
than in full self-expression, the author has sometimes to use his
skill as the actors' tailor, fitting them with parts written to
display the virtuosity of the performer rather than to solve
problems of life, character, or history. Feats of this kind may
tickle an author's technical vanity; but he is bound on such
occasions to admit that the performer for whom he writes is "the
onlie begetter" of his work, which must be regarded critically as
an addition to the debt dramatic literature owes to the art of
acting and its exponents. Those who have seen Miss Gertrude
Kingston play the part of Catherine will have no difficulty in
believing that it was her talent rather than mine that brought
the play into existence. I once recommended Miss Kingston
professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were
no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our
stage: did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur
Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens
are not worth a tinker's oath? Miss Kingston's comment on my
suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect;
and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing Great
Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of standing up
to our joint talents.

In composing such bravura pieces, the author limits himself only
by the range of the virtuoso, which by definition far transcends
the modesty of nature. If my Russians seem more Muscovite than
any Russian, and my English people more insular than any Briton,
I will not plead, as I honestly might, that the fiction has yet
to be written that can exaggerate the reality of such subjects;
that the apparently outrageous Patiomkin is but a timidly
bowdlerized ghost of the original; and that Captain Edstaston is
no more than a miniature that might hang appropriately on the
walls of nineteen out of twenty English country houses to this
day. An artistic presentment must not condescend to justify
itself by a comparison with crude nature; and I prefer to admit
that in this kind my dramatic personae are, as they should be, of
the stage stagey, challenging the actor to act up to them or
beyond them, if he can. The more heroic the overcharging, the
better for the performance.

In dragging the reader thus for a moment behind the scenes, I am
departing from a rule which I have hitherto imposed on myself so
rigidly that I never permit myself, even in a stage direction, to
let slip a word that could bludgeon the imagination of the reader
by reminding him of the boards and the footlights and the sky
borders and the rest of the theatrical scaffolding, for which
nevertheless I have to plan as carefully as if I were the head
carpenter as well as the author. But even at the risk of talking
shop, an honest playwright should take at least one opportunity
of acknowledging that his art is not only limited by the art of
the actor, but often stimulated and developed by it. No sane and
skilled author writes plays that present impossibilities to the
actor or to the stage engineer. If, as occasionally happens, he
asks them to do things that they have never done before and
cannot conceive as presentable or possible (as Wagner and Thomas
Hardy have done, for example), it is always found that the
difficulties are not really insuperable, the author having
foreseen unsuspected possibilities both in the actor and in the
audience, whose will-to-make-believe can perform the quaintest
miracles. Thus may authors advance the arts of acting and of
staging plays. But the actor also may enlarge the scope of the
drama by displaying powers not previously discovered by the
author. If the best available actors are only Horatios, the
authors will have to leave Hamlet out, and be content with
Horatios for heroes. Some of the difference between Shakespeare's
Orlandos and Bassanios and Bertrams and his Hamlets and Macbeths
must have been due not only to his development as a dramatic
poet, but to the development of Burbage as an actor. Playwrights
do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at stake:
if they did, they would write parts for heroes with twenty arms
like an Indian god. Indeed the actor often influences the author
too much; for I can remember a time(I am not implying that it is
yet wholly past) when the art of writing a fashionable play had
become very largely the art of writing it "round" the
personalities of a group of fashionable performers of whom
Burbage would certainly have said that their parts needed no
acting. Everything has its abuse as well as its use.

It is also to be considered that great plays live longer than
great actors, though little plays do not live nearly so long as
the worst of their exponents. The consequence is that the great
actor, instead of putting pressure on contemporary authors to
supply him with heroic parts, falls back on the Shakespearean
repertory, and takes what he needs from a dead hand. In the
nineteenth century, the careers of Kean, Macready, Barry
Sullivan, and Irving, ought to have produced a group of heroic
plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides; but nothing of the kind happened: these actors
played the works of dead authors, or, very occasionally, of live
poets who were hardly regular professional playwrights. Sheridan
Knowles, Bulwer Lytton, Wills, and Tennyson produced a few
glaringly artificial high horses for the great actors of their
time; but the playwrights proper, who really kept the theatre
going, and were kept going by the theatre, did not cater for the
great actors: they could not afford to compete with a bard who
was not for an age but for all time, and who had, moreover, the
overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not charging
author's fees. The result was that the playwrights and the great
actors ceased to think of themselves as having any concern with
one another: Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as
well have belonged to a different solar system as far as Irving
was concerned; and the same was true of their respective
predecessors.

Thus was established an evil tradition; but I at least can plead
that it does not always hold good. If Forbes Robertson had not
been there to play Caesar, I should not have written Caesar and
Cleopatra. If Ellen Terry had never been born, Captain
Brassbound's Conversion would never have been effected. The
Devil's Disciple, with which I won my cordon bleu in America as a
potboiler, would have had a different sort of hero if Richard
Mansfield had been a different sort of actor, though the actual
commission to write it came from an English actor, William
Terriss, who was assassinated before he recovered from the dismay
into which the result of his rash proposal threw him. For it must
be said that the actor or actress who inspires or commissions a
play as often as not regards it as a Frankenstein's monster, and
will have none of it. That does not make him or her any the less
parental in the fecundity of the playwright.

To an author who has any feeling of his business there is a keen
and whimsical joy in divining and revealing a side of an actor's
genius overlooked before, and unsuspected even by the actor
himself. When I snatched Mr Louis Calvert from Shakespeare, and
made him wear a frock coat and silk hat on the stage for perhaps
the first time in his life, I do not think he expected in the
least that his performance would enable me to boast of his Tom
Broadbent as a genuine stage classic. Mrs Patrick Campbell was
famous before I wrote for her, but not for playing illiterate
cockney flower-maidens. And in the case which is provoking me to
all these impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss Gertrude
Kingston, who first made her reputation as an impersonator of the
most delightfully feather-headed and inconsequent ingenues,
thought me more than usually mad when I persuaded her to play
the Helen of Euripides, and then launched her on a queenly career
as Catherine of Russia.

It is not the whole truth that if we take care of the actors the
plays will take care of themselves; nor is it any truer that if
we take care of the plays the actors will take care of
themselves. There is both give and take in the business. I have
seen plays written for actors that made me exclaim, "How oft the
sight of means to do ill deeds makes deeds ill done!" But Burbage
may have flourished the prompt copy of Hamlet under Shakespeare's
nose at the tenth rehearsal and cried, "How oft the sight of
means to do great deeds makes playwrights great!" I say the tenth
because I am convinced that at the first he denounced his part as
a rotten one; thought the ghost's speech ridiculously long; and
wanted to play the king. Anyhow, whether he had the wit to utter
it or not, the boast would have been a valid one. The best
conclusion is that every actor should say, "If I create the hero
in myself, God will send an author to write his part." For in the
long run the actors will get the authors, and the authors the
actors, they deserve.

Great Catherine was performed for the first time at the
Vaudeville Theatre in London on the 18th November 1913,
with Gertrude Kingston as Catherine, Miriam Lewes as
Yarinka, Dorothy Massingham as Claire, Norman McKinnell as
Patiomkin, Edmond Breon as Edstaston, Annie Hill as the
Princess Dashkoff, and Eugene Mayeur and F. Cooke Beresford
as Naryshkin and the Sergeant.
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