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The Absurd and the Hyper-Articulate in Shaw's Dramatic Language

SHAW'S THEATRICAL RHETORIC, with its great expressive strength, is, essentially, an old language in a new frame. Shaw played parodistic variations on this or that speech-style borrowed from an "imaginary museum." Despite its inner flexibility, this rhetoric, with its "euphemistic" syntax and vocabulary, was backward-looking, and it tended to inhibit the expression of new states of experience in new play-forms. Yet, certain experiences particularly the despair and the sense of waste left behind by World War 1are repeatedly given voice in the late plays; and the search for new forms is clear in Back to Methuselah and the political extravaganzas. There are signs of a corresponding impatience with the glib rationality that often went with the received language signs of a desire to break it down, to let a new voice come through. Instead, Shaw tended, as I shall attempt to show, to use the old dramatic language to fend off the need for new expression. Already in the confident pre-war plays, there were those settings for "speech in the void," or speech against an object that mocks it. In the Don Juan in Hell sequence it is out of the "omnipresent nothing" that there emerges, to the sound of ghostly violins, "a man in the void ... seated, absurdly enough, on nothing"; but the speech of this man, John Tanner/ Don Juan, is as reassuringly operatic as the Devil's recital of the evidence for man's destructiveness. Keegan, another of Shaw's personae for the visionary Talker, is heard to conduct, at the beginning of Act II of John Bull's Other Island, a solo dialogue: the Grashopper's "responses" mock his accent, his lyrical idealism, his questioning. But the framework is so explicit, and the parody so gentle, that only Patsy, the young Irish labourer, is terrified by what he takes for a diabolical voice. Barbara's "transfigured" speech at the end of Act III in Major Barbara is to be spoken against a stage dominated by the shell (a visual