SHAW'S EARLY DAYS
PLAYWRIGHT'S CONFIDENCES CONTAINED IN BOOK I ON LIFE. LONDON. Bernard Shaw, in his early days as a playwright, made an admission which doubtless he could not be induced to repeat to-day; this was that although he had a great genius for dialogue, he was not very strong in the matter of the invention and construction of plots. This and other intimate sidelights on the character of Shaw during his early years as a struggling playwright are revealed by a hook on the life of William Archer, noteworthy contemporary of Shaw's in the dramatic world, which has just been published here. This life of William Archer reveals the fact that although he and Shaw loved one another "almost as brothers, they were quarrelling as often as real brothers of the same family. For example : "You really are a curious charac-
ter," Shaw wrote to Archer apropos of the latter's review of one of Shaw's productions. "You admit the superi- . ority of my talent and wit. You are quite wrong. Incredible a$, it sometimes seems, you have just as much talent and wit as I have. "You have all the tools of the trade, but you have no conscience. There is an absolute gratuitousness about your perversity that it is inexplicable unles§ one sees you as a sort of child in fairyland who has never learned to live in the world and who resents the intrusion of moral problems as a.ngrily as it joyfully weclomes the advent of the poetic glamour." It appears from this biography of Archer that he was responsible for the plot of Shaw's "Widowers' Houses." In the words of Shaw, Archer's contribution was "something to hang dialogue on." The biographer fux'ther cites Shaw's experience — taken from the letter to Archer when he visited the great Seandinavian dramatist, Strindberg. i "After some further conversation, ! consisting mainly of embarrassed silences and a pale smile or two by Strindberg, and floods of energetic j eloquences by G.B.S., Strindberg took ' out his watch and said in German; "At 2 o'cloclc I am going to be sick.' '
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Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 45, 15 October 1931, Page 6
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347SHAW'S EARLY DAYS Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 45, 15 October 1931, Page 6
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