Letter from George Bernard Shaw to Gilbert Murray [manuscript] : signed typescript with manuscript additions, 1944 July 16.
1944
Available at Vault - Deck C
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Linked Resource
Title
Letter from George Bernard Shaw to Gilbert Murray [manuscript] : signed typescript with manuscript additions, 1944 July 16.
Created/published
England, 1944 July 16.
Description
1 letter, 26 x 21 cm
Associated name
Note
This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance.
On letterhead with pre-printed addresses for Ayot St. Lawrence and London with "From Bernard Shaw" in between.
Addressed to "Gilbert Murray Esq. O.M., Yatscombe, Boars Hill, Oxford."
On letterhead with pre-printed addresses for Ayot St. Lawrence and London with "From Bernard Shaw" in between.
Addressed to "Gilbert Murray Esq. O.M., Yatscombe, Boars Hill, Oxford."
Linked resources
Call number
272575 MS
Folger-specific note
Ordered from Richard Ford, D9496, 2021-06-29, ordered online.
From dealer's description: "Two pages, 4to, good condition. He commences: "Your Moncure Conway lecture was entirely hidden from me by the newspapers. Meanwhile the jingo romance of Churchill and the rancorous explosions of Vansittart were shoved down my throat, and the war atrocities rubbed into me by the wireless set most sedulously. " He comments that Geoffrey Crowther of "The Economist" had praised Murray's lesser achievements (President of the League of Nations Union, etc) but "Not a word about your resuscitation of the ancient Greek drama in immortal verse [...]". He has just finished a "Credo" for the Rationalist Press Annual, entitled "What is my Religious Faith?". "I will send you [word added in MS] a proof when I get one." He devotes a paragraph to a technical issue in blank verse with reference to "The Arbitrators" [not traced], then argues that "'Conversational' is a dangerous word, like 'natural or 'realistic'. Blank verse, or any other sort of verse, is neither natural or conversational nor realistic in the normal slipshod sense: the moment it becomes so it ceases to be verse, and your artistic form is gone. Readers and listeners either accept this form as pleasurable or they don't. In which case they neither read nor listen: they get another book> But if they do they rightly resent every lapse into unmusical prose. None the less every speech must have a 'natural" and intelligible cadence so as not to worry or puzzle the customer. Henry James made his later plays impossible by filling them with speeches that no listener could understand, though a grammarian could gather the meaning from the printed page." He then discusses "the fifth act [he] wrote for Cymbeline, Shakespeare's ending having been spoiled by the passing fashion which obliged him to introduce a masque at all costs, just as a ballet was indispensable at the Paris Opera and Wagner had to perpetrate the Venusberg atrocity in his Tannhauser? The Stratford people funk[ed][ending added in MS]; but it came off all right in the theatre at Swiss Cottage. It contained 70 lines of Shakespear; and when I read it to Charlotte [wife] she protested, whenever I came to an original passage, that I must cut that out. But then one day at Stratford when we were at a performance of Lear, Charlotte rose at the interval, as I thought for tea, and when I said 'Remember you have only 15 minutes' countered with 'Haven't you had enough of this drivel? I am not coming back' and she meant it too." [From now on Shaw writes in longhand, a little shakily] "She didn't come back. She never read Shakespeare nor spoke of him. | Casson may be right about The Rape from the point of view of popular audiences. They prefer East Lynne to The Trojan Women. And all that can be said for The Arbitrators [see above] is that it is more workmanlike and fully matured. It is no deeper." Postscript: As Pitman's shorthand has to [be] drawn, not written, I can make it legible in a joggling train when longhand is impossible. Many of my immortal lines have been penned between Kings Cross and Hatfield. A ticket collector once burst out at me with 'Are you ALWAYS workin?'" Shaw has obviously re-read his text carefully from the number of minor additions, elisions and corrections in his hand."
From dealer's description: "Two pages, 4to, good condition. He commences: "Your Moncure Conway lecture was entirely hidden from me by the newspapers. Meanwhile the jingo romance of Churchill and the rancorous explosions of Vansittart were shoved down my throat, and the war atrocities rubbed into me by the wireless set most sedulously. " He comments that Geoffrey Crowther of "The Economist" had praised Murray's lesser achievements (President of the League of Nations Union, etc) but "Not a word about your resuscitation of the ancient Greek drama in immortal verse [...]". He has just finished a "Credo" for the Rationalist Press Annual, entitled "What is my Religious Faith?". "I will send you [word added in MS] a proof when I get one." He devotes a paragraph to a technical issue in blank verse with reference to "The Arbitrators" [not traced], then argues that "'Conversational' is a dangerous word, like 'natural or 'realistic'. Blank verse, or any other sort of verse, is neither natural or conversational nor realistic in the normal slipshod sense: the moment it becomes so it ceases to be verse, and your artistic form is gone. Readers and listeners either accept this form as pleasurable or they don't. In which case they neither read nor listen: they get another book> But if they do they rightly resent every lapse into unmusical prose. None the less every speech must have a 'natural" and intelligible cadence so as not to worry or puzzle the customer. Henry James made his later plays impossible by filling them with speeches that no listener could understand, though a grammarian could gather the meaning from the printed page." He then discusses "the fifth act [he] wrote for Cymbeline, Shakespeare's ending having been spoiled by the passing fashion which obliged him to introduce a masque at all costs, just as a ballet was indispensable at the Paris Opera and Wagner had to perpetrate the Venusberg atrocity in his Tannhauser? The Stratford people funk[ed][ending added in MS]; but it came off all right in the theatre at Swiss Cottage. It contained 70 lines of Shakespear; and when I read it to Charlotte [wife] she protested, whenever I came to an original passage, that I must cut that out. But then one day at Stratford when we were at a performance of Lear, Charlotte rose at the interval, as I thought for tea, and when I said 'Remember you have only 15 minutes' countered with 'Haven't you had enough of this drivel? I am not coming back' and she meant it too." [From now on Shaw writes in longhand, a little shakily] "She didn't come back. She never read Shakespeare nor spoke of him. | Casson may be right about The Rape from the point of view of popular audiences. They prefer East Lynne to The Trojan Women. And all that can be said for The Arbitrators [see above] is that it is more workmanlike and fully matured. It is no deeper." Postscript: As Pitman's shorthand has to [be] drawn, not written, I can make it legible in a joggling train when longhand is impossible. Many of my immortal lines have been penned between Kings Cross and Hatfield. A ticket collector once burst out at me with 'Are you ALWAYS workin?'" Shaw has obviously re-read his text carefully from the number of minor additions, elisions and corrections in his hand."
Folger accession
272575