Pleasant/Unpleasant

Abstract

With the publication of Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant in 1898, Shaw staked his claim to be regarded as a significant dramatist. He contrives to suggest in the Prefaces to the two volumes that his career as a playwright was accidental, begun out of a determination to ‘manufacture the evidence’ in the case for the New Drama in England, and continued out of habit. He paints an amusing picture of himself as an ageing and tiring journalist driven to the expedient of collecting his ephemera — ‘I will begin with small sins: I will publish my plays’ (CP, i, 16). And yet as always with Shaw, the self-puncturing buffoonery is combined with the attitude of self-advertising conceit. He does not blame the theatre managers for refusing to perform his plays — by 1898 he had still not had a major professional production in England; but he blames the contemporary theatre itself, the tastes of the theatre-going public, and the training of the actors for making his plays unplayable. It is not, he insists, the fastidious contempt of the literary man for the theatre which drives him to publication. In preparing the texts, he claims, ‘I have tried to put down nothing that is irrelevant to the actor’s performance, and, through it, to the audience’s comprehension of the play’ (CP, 1, 32).