Write a note on Shaw as a realist.

Ans.

Bernard Shaw is considered to be one of the greatest English dramatists. He was also one of the greatest realists in English literature. Realism is the keynote of Shaw’s dramatic art. Shaw was deeply influenced by the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen who was also a great realist. Following the footsteps of Ibsen, Shaw also believed that drama should be the image of human beings as they are. He always strove to create characters who uttered truths as naked thoughts from the subconscious. He analyzed the ordinary man’s mind and put the analysis into the man’s mouth. But even his great heroes like Caesar and Napoleon are not the statuesque hero. Shaw held that the really great man “might well have a very commonplace appearance and manner because his superiority rests to a large extent on his unusual closeness to the prosaic facts. Tanner a character in Shaw’s ‘Man and Superman’ speaks about the business of an artist as follows: The artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are.” This is actually what Bernard Shaw himself did in his plays. He depicted life as he saw it, not as he wanted to see it. Indeed he was a realist who saw things better, that is, he could uncover the reality behind phenomena.”

He went into the depth of social and political institution to find out their essential reality. He presented democracy, war, religion, morality, romance, respectability, justice, personal righteousness, idealism, heresy, marriage, philanthropy and scores of other things, past, present and future in real perspective. He is actually interested in exposing the hard reality behind the veil. He stresses on reality with a purpose to explain his view of life, how life is being lived and how it ought to work.

Both Ibsen and Shaw are problem playwrighters, but unlike Ibsen Shaw’s characters and themes are not emotional or sentimental. Ibsen struck the note of realism in terms of content, style and technique and this note found a fuller expression in the works of Shaw. Exactly in the manner of Ibsen, Shaw almost did away with the Elizabethan practice of dividing his plays into acts and scenes and eliminated some of artificial devices like asides, monologues or soliloquies. In respect of the setting, just like Ibsen Shaw exercised independence of mind and placed his drama both indoor and outdoor. Similarly both Ibsen and Shaw sometimes conformed to an end sometimes violated the observance of dramatic unities according to the need of the dramatic situations. In Shaw’s plays romantics face disillusionment and appear to be fools, while, on the other hand those, who are realistic in thought and approaches get success at every stage in life. In Arms and The Man Sergius is seen lost in ‘romantic love’. He is contrasted with the brilliant comic figure captain Bluntschli. As soon as Raina comes into close contact with realistic Bluntschli, her romanticism disappears. The realist wins what the romantic one loses.

Shaw always takes his themes from real social life. They are actually identical with the prevailing problems of society. In his preface to ‘Back of Methuselah’ Shaw listed the subjects which he has dealt with in his plays- “landlordism, doctrinaire free love (pseudo-ibsenism), prostitution, militarism, marriage, history, current, politics, natural Christianity, national and individual character, paradoxes of conventional society, husband hunting, questions on conscience, professional delusions and impostures.” The problem of bad housing is the theme of his first play “Widower’s Houses (1982). His another play Mrs. Werren’s Profession deals with the problem of prostitution. As regards the themes of Arms and the Man, A. C. Ward observes: “The play has two themes. One is ‘War’ the other is marriage. These too themes are interwoven, for Shaw believed that while war is wild and stupid, marriage is desirable and good, both had became wrapped in romantic illusions which led to disasterous wars and also to unhappy marriage.” The Apple cart is another important play by Shaw. In it he sketches the diplomatic manoeuvre and disloyal activities of parliamentarians.

Maurice Valency writes about Shaws attitude towards realism! “For Shaw realism was not a technique that involved the laboratory method of the School of Medan. The realistic imagination was the power to imagine things as they are actually sensing them.” Shaw was consciously engaged on the side of that down to earth view of life.

In short, Bernard Shaw was a thorough rationalist and antiromantic. He was a stark realist. He completely rejected romantic ideals and sentiments.. The salient feature of his realism is that it is absolutely unromantic and unsentimental. At the beginning of his literary career Shaw made the following declaration which shows how he advocated art based on reality: “I am among other things, a dramatist; but I am not an original one, and so have to take all my dramatic material either from real life at first hand or from authentic documents.” In this regard S. C. Sen Gupta writes: “For him, what is wrong with society is not that there is one injustice here or another there but in the whole understanding of the life force.”