Abstract
Initially, at least, Shaw seems to have invested a great deal of emotional capital in Candida. Some indication of the extraordinary quality of his investment is provided in one of his letters to Ellen Terry:
One does not get tired of adoring the Virgin Mother. Bless me! you will say, the man is a Roman Catholic. Not at all: the man is the author of Candida; and Candida, between you and me, is the Virgin Mother and nobody else. And my present difficulty is that I want to reincarnate her — to write another play for you.1
Only one thing struck me at the time as wrong. Towards quite the end of a play to say ‘Now let’s sit down and talk the matter over’. Several people took out their watches and some of them left to catch a train, or a drink!
(Ellen Terry to Shaw, 30 August 1897)
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Notes
James Huneker, The Truth about Candida’, Metropolitan Magazine, vol. xx (Aug. 1904) p. 635.
Maurice Valency, The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of George Bernard Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) p. 123.
John A. Mills, Language and Laughter: Comic Diction in the Plays of Bernard Shaw (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1969) p. 78.
See Margery M. Morgan, The Shavian Playground: An Exploration of the Art of George Bernard Shaw (London: Methuen, 1972) p. 72, n.1.
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© 1983 A. M. Gibbs
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Gibbs, A.M. (1983). The Case against Candida. In: The Art and Mind of Shaw. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17211-5_6
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