MISALLIANCE
Shaw’s Edwardian Elegy: Life Under Glass
By Kate Farrington
Act I: The house is in Surrey, on the slope of Hindhead; and Johnny, reclining, novel in hand, in a swinging chair . . . is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and gorse, and wonderful cloud pictures. The glass pavilion . . . comes into a big hall with tiled flooring, which suggests that the proprietor’s notion of domestic luxury is founded on the lounges of week-end hotels.
A view of Hindhead from Gibbet Hill, 1908
The Tarleton family, of “Tarleton’s Underwear,” has it good. Risen from humble origins (in the not-too-distant past) to swell the ranks of the nouveau riche, they own a fine house in picturesque Hindhead. Their children can move in the highest social circles, and their vast fortune allows John Tarleton, the boisterous patriarch of this little clan, to bankroll his most eclectic whims, from endowing libraries to purchasing portable Turkish baths. And he’s certainly having fun: the Tarleton home is a whirlwind of words with father John at its center—debating, discussing and dissecting any subject that comes into his head with anyone who’ll sit still to listen.
But his daughter Hypatia is heartily sick of it all. After years of stuffy social gatherings and endless “cackle cackle cackle,” she’d jolly well like some action. Tarleton delights in his daughter’s discontent, proud to have raised such a spirited young woman: “She’s not satisfied. Restless. Wants things to happen. Wants adventures to drop out of the sky.” But since Hypatia’s adventure ex machina has failed to appear she’s resigned herself to marry the aristocratic but immature Bentley Summerhays: “I’m fond of him; and he never bores me; and I see that he’s very clever; but I’m not what you call gone about him.” Bentley, it seems, will have to do.
Until, that is, an “aeroplane” actually does drop out of the sky, grazing the roof of the glass pavilion, and crashing into the greenhouse beyond. Two people emerge from the wreckage: Lina, a captivating female acrobat, and Joey, a strapping young gentleman who (Hypatia can’t help but notice) is far more interesting than Bentley. Mr. Tarleton gleefully invites them to stay to dinner—with no notion of what chaos he’s unleashing in his house.
. . . An appalling crash of breaking glass is heard. Everybody shrieks . . .
“Smash it,” Lord Summerhays advises a fuming Johnny Tarleton, handing him a piece of crockery on which to vent his anger. Joey Percival, the pilot of the ill-fated aeroplane, enters the scene with an apology: “I’ve knocked your vinery [greenhouse] into a cocked hat. You don’t mind, do you?” Misalliance rings merrily with the sound of things breaking—from glass and china, to social niceties, to the occasional heart. And the Tarleton’s glass pavilion, poised between the solid safety of the house and the wild expanses beyond, forms a perfect setting for Shaw’s cheerful din of destruction—in a room that the playwright implies could stand a little smashing itself.
Mr. Bernard Shaw (who loathed the “George” and never used it) had a particular interest in smashing society’s expectations. He was the bull in everyone’s china shop, mischievously imploding assumptions about love and marriage, parents and children, politics and religion, class and culture. In his sprawling career he was a music and theatre critic, a powerful public speaker, a political activist, socialist, novelist, playwright, journalist, teetotaler, and vocal vegetarian. And in 1910 he was in the mood to break free—from theatrical tradition, outdated social structures, and too many years of Victorian vainglory and pomp. It was time to rattle some windows.
And Edwardian England ought to have offered the perfect chance to break free. For England’s social vanguard, “new” was the watchword of the day. A new century had dawned and with it came automobiles clattering down old cow paths and telephone wires sprouting up overnight. It was an era that proclaimed a New Fiction, New Journalism, New Drama, New Art, New Art Criticism…and a New Woman. One journalist joked that London was moving so fast it seemed to be suffering from “a morbid fear of being out of date.”
But even as the Edwardian movers and shakers dabbled in their brave new world, much of society clung to the Victorian morals and mores that had governed the nation for more than half a century. After all, why change them? Britain was still a leader in industry, the wealthy upper class still held much of the nation’s political power, and the British flag still flew over a quarter of the world. The day’s sun still never set on the British Empire—though it was a little later in the day than anyone was willing to admit.
George Bernard Shaw in 1909
Yet, in hindsight, the age has an air of in-between-ness. Lytton Strachey referred to it derogatorily as “the Glass Case Age,” resting on the laurels of the previous century’s accomplishments, content in its wealth and social standing, and still pleased with British power abroad. There was a danger of retrenchment, of not pushing forward to embrace all the possibilities of the dawning age.
Shaw couldn’t have that.
“I used to think this was the sort of thing that happened in other families,” John Tarleton moans. All it took was one crashed aeroplane for his world to be turned on its ear. Like so many of England’s leisure class, he has spent years trying on ideas as often as he changes clothes. But now, with Hypatia running down hills in pursuit of her “handsome young man,” he is brought face to face with what his talk of social change might mean . . . and the reality might be more than he can handle. For if greenhouses can be smashed to smithereens by all this new-fangledness, can glass pavilions—and carefully planned lives—be far behind? Perhaps it’s no longer possible to view the world from the calm remove of the pavilion. Perhaps it’s time to jump in, feet first.
For Shaw, Misalliance was a jump of a different sort. His career as a playwright had been patchy so far—some fine successes, some impressive defeats. And while his ideas, characters and themes were novel, his theatrical forms (comically subversive as they were) were very much based in the well-made plays and melodramas of his youth and young adulthood. Now he was ready to rid himself of the old conventions. The result was a play in which all the “plot” happened safely offstage and all the ideas sat front and center. For the man who based a career around his ability to talk, it was the ultimate challenge. “I can do silver bullets,” Lina the acrobat declares, sneering at jugglers who waste their time on hat stands and lanterns: bullets are “really hard.” Shaw the playwright juggles ideas—just as insubstantial: just as hard to control.
Hindhead, Beacon Hotel 1907
Critics threw up their hands in exasperation. This was not a play. It might be amusing, it might be engaging, it might even be important—but was it drama? The theatre management was no doubt secretly relieved when, after only eleven performances, the death of King Edward VII forced all theatres to close. In another generation Misalliance would be understood for what it was: a new dramatic form, poised between the genteel drawing room comedies of the 19th century and the absurdist romps of the 20th. But in 1910—before The Great War irrevocably shattered the fragile gentility of the Edwardian ethos—the world was not yet ready.
The Devil's Punch Bowl, from Gibbet Hill. From HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN SURREY, Illustrations by Hugh Thomson 1909
What, then, comes after the breaking glass? What comes after hurling yourself down a hill at breakneck speed? For some in the Tarleton household the reaction is one of uncertainty and fear. But for Hypatia (and obviously for Shaw) the answer is to keep charging forward, to embrace change, creativity, unconventionality, innovation, growth—and yes, the kind of adventures that drop down out of the sky.
Bernard Shaw’s head must have been an interesting “greenhouse” in itself. Born in 1856 and living until 1950, in his long life he shared the world stage with Charles Dickens and Jack Kerouac, with Henrik Ibsen and Tennessee Williams, with Queen Victoria and a general named Eisenhower. And somewhere in the middle of it all, in a strange “in between” place where corsets and aeroplanes co-existed in harmony, Shaw dreamed plays of a dawning age where anything might happen…but where people remained marvelously, comically, human.
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