Bernard Shaw

“ EDSTASTON. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
He goes out backwards, bowing, with Claire curtseying, having been listened to in utter dumbfoundedness by Patiomkin and Naryshkin, in childlike awe by Yarinka, and with quite inexpressible feelings by Catherine. When he is out of sight she rises with clinched fists and raises her arms and her closed eyes to Heaven. Patiomkin: rousing himself from his stupor of amazement, springs to her like a tiger, and throws himself at her feet. ”

“ EDSTASTON. They tied me up, dear. I couldn't help it. I fought for all I was worth.
THE SERGEANT [at the curtains] . He fought with the strength of lions and bears. God knows I shall carry a broken sweetbread to my grave.
EDSTASTON. You can't mean to throw me over, Claire. [Urgently.] Claire. Claire.
VARINKA [in a transport of sympathetic emotion, pleading with clasped hands to Claire] . Oh, sweet little angel lamb, he loves you: it shines in his darling eyes. Pardon him, pardon him.
PATIOMKIN [rushing from the Empress's side to Claire and falling on his knees to her] . ”

“ CLAIRE [seeing him and throwing herself on her knees at his side] . Oh, how dare they tie you up like that! [To Catherine.] You wicked wretch! You Russian savage! [She pounces on the straps, and begins unbuckling them.]
CATHERINE [conquering herself with a mighty effort] . Now self-control. Self-control, Catherine. Philosophy. Europe is looking on. [She forces herself to sit down.]
EDSTASTON. Steady, dearest: it is the Empress. Call her your Imperial Majesty. Call her Star of the North, Little Mother, Little Darling: that's what she likes; but get the straps off. ”

“ Varinka!
VARINKA. Yes?
PATIOMKIN. Go and look through the keyhole of the Imperial bed-chamber; and bring me word whether the Empress is awake yet.
VARINKA. Fi donc! I do not look through keyholes.
PATIOMKIN [emerging, having arranged his shirt and put on his diamonded coat] . You have been badly brought up, little darling. Would any lady or gentleman walk unannounced into a room without first looking through the keyhole? [Taking his sword from the table and putting it on.] The great thing in life is to be simple; and the perfectly simple thing is to look through keyholes. ”

“ And in the case which is provoking me to all these impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss Gertrude Kingston, who first made her reputation as an impersonator of the most delightfully feather-headed and inconsequent ingenues, thought me more than usually mad when I persuaded her to play the Helen of Euripides, and then launched her on a queenly career as Catherine of Russia.
It is not the whole truth that if we take care of the actors the plays will take care of themselves; nor is it any truer that if we take care of the plays the actors will take care of themselves. ”

“ NARYSHKIN. You are in high spirits this morning, Little Mother.
CATHERINE [with sudden levity.] I am always in high spirits, even when people do not bring me my slippers. [She runs to the chair and sits down, thrusting her feet out.]
The two ladies rush to her feet, each carrying a slipper. Catherine, about to put her feet into them, is checked by a disturbance in the antechamber.
PATIOMKIN [carrying Edstaston through the antechamber] . Useless to struggle. Come along, beautiful baby darling. Come to Little Mother. ”

“ EDSTASTON. Don't be angry, dearest: in this country everybody's a darling. I'll prove it to you. [To Catherine.] Will your Majesty be good enough to call Prince Patiomkin?
CATHERINE [surprised into haughtiness] . Why?
EDSTASTON. To oblige me.
Catherine laughs good-humoredly and goes to the curtains and opens them. The band strikes up a Redowa.
CATHERINE [calling imperiously] . Patiomkin! [The music stops suddenly.] Here! To me! Go on with your music there, you fools. [The Redowa is resumed.]
The sergeant rushes from the ballroom to relieve the Empress of the curtain. ”

“ PATIOMKIN. Madman: take care!
NARYSHKIN. Advise the Empress!!
THE SERGEANT. Sainted Nicholas!
VARINKA. Hoo hoo! [a stifled splutter of laughter] .
EDSTASTON [following the Empress and resuming kindly but judicially] . After all, though your Majesty is of course a great queen, yet when all is said, I am a man; and your Majesty is only a woman.
CATHERINE. Only a wo— [she chokes] .
EDSTASTON [continuing] . Believe me, this Russian extravagance will not do. I appreciate as much as any man the warmth of heart that prompts it ”

“ To an author who has any feeling of his business there is a keen and whimsical joy in divining and revealing a side of an actor's genius overlooked before, and unsuspected even by the actor himself. When I snatched Mr Louis Calvert from Shakespeare, and made him wear a frock coat and silk hat on the stage for perhaps the first time in his life, I do not think he expected in the least that his performance would enable me to boast of his Tom Broadbent as a genuine stage classic. ”

“ If my Russians seem more Muscovite than any Russian, and my English people more insular than any Briton, I will not plead, as I honestly might, that the fiction has yet to be written that can exaggerate the reality of such subjects; that the apparently outrageous Patiomkin is but a timidly bowdlerized ghost of the original; and that Captain Edstaston is no more than a miniature that might hang appropriately on the walls of nineteen out of twenty English country houses to this day. An artistic presentment must not condescend to justify itself by a comparison with crude nature ”

“ PATIOMKIN. You have conscientious scruples?
EDSTASTON. I have the scruples of a gentleman.
PATIOMKIN. In Russia a gentleman has no scruples. In Russia we face facts.
EDSTASTON. In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any facts if they are unpleasant facts.
PATIOMKIN. In real life, darling, all facts are unpleasant. ”

“ PATIOMKIN [effusively] . Darling, I am a man; and you are a man; and Catherine is a woman. Woman reduces us all to the common denominator. [Chuckling.] Again an epigram! [Gravely.] You understand it, I hope. Have you had a college education, darling? I have.
EDSTASTON. Certainly. I am a Bachelor of Arts.
PATIOMKIN. It is enough that you are a bachelor, darling: Catherine will supply the arts. Aha! Another epigram! I am in the vein today.
EDSTASTON [embarrassed and a little offended] . I must ask your Highness to change the subject. As a visitor in Russia, I am the guest of the Empress ”

“ Superficially Patiomkin is a violent, brutal barbarian, an upstart despot of the most intolerable and dangerous type, ugly, lazy, and disgusting in his personal habits. Yet ambassadors report him the ablest man in Russia, and the one who can do most with the still abler Empress Catherine II, who is not a Russian but a German, by no means barbarous or intemperate in her personal habits. She not only disputes with Frederick the Great the reputation of being the cleverest monarch in Europe, but may even put in a very plausible claim to be the cleverest and most attractive individual alive. ”

“ EDSTASTON [mollified] . Well, in a sort of way I do; though I don't know why I should. But my instructions are that I am to see the Empress; and—
PATIOMKIN. Darling, you shall see the Empress. A glorious woman, the greatest woman in the world. But lemme give you piece 'vice—pah! still drunk. They water my vinegar. [He shakes himself; clears his throat; and resumes soberly.] If Catherine takes a fancy to you, you may ask for roubles, diamonds, palaces, titles, orders, anything! and you may aspire to everything: field-marshal, admiral, minister, what you please—except Tsar. ”

“ You shall give the poor old Sergeant a rouble; and the blessed Nicholas will make your salvation his charge.
CLAIRE [impetuously] . I will give you [she is about to say fifty roubles, but checks herself cautiously] —Well: I don't mind giving you two roubles if I can speak to the Empress.
THE SERGEANT [joyfully] . I praise Heaven for you, Little Mother. Come. [He leads the way out.] It was the temptation of the devil that led your young man to bruise my vitals and deprive me of breath. We must be merciful to one another's faults. ”

“ I once recommended Miss Kingston professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage: did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker's oath? Miss Kingston's comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of standing up to our joint talents. ”

“ No sane and skilled author writes plays that present impossibilities to the actor or to the stage engineer. If, as occasionally happens, he asks them to do things that they have never done before and cannot conceive as presentable or possible (as Wagner and Thomas Hardy have done, for example) , it is always found that the difficulties are not really insuperable, the author having foreseen unsuspected possibilities both in the actor and in the audience, whose will-to-make-believe can perform the quaintest miracles. Thus may authors advance the arts of acting and of staging plays. ”

“ If the best available actors are only Horatios, the authors will have to leave Hamlet out, and be content with Horatios for heroes. Some of the difference between Shakespeare's Orlandos and Bassanios and Bertrams and his Hamlets and Macbeths must have been due not only to his development as a dramatic poet, but to the development of Burbage as an actor. Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at stake: if they did, they would write parts for heroes with twenty arms like an Indian god. Indeed the actor often influences the author too much ”

“ When the victim at last staggers to his feet, he is a pale fragile nobleman, aged and quite sober, extremely dignified in manner and address, though shaken by his recent convulsions.] Young man, it is not better to be drunk than sober; but it is happier. Goodness is not happiness. That is an epigram. But I have overdone this. I am too sober to be good company. Let me redress the balance. [He takes a generous draught of brandy, and recovers his geniality.] Aha! That's better. And now listen, darling. You must not come to Court with pistols in your boots.
EDSTASTON. I have found them useful. ”

“ In short, if Byron leaves you with an impression that he said very little about Catherine, and that little not what was best worth saying, I beg to correct your impression by assuring you that what Byron said was all there really is to say that is worth saying. His Catherine is my Catherine and everybody's Catherine. The young man who gains her favor is a Spanish nobleman in his version. ”

“ Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer Lytton, Wills, and Tennyson produced a few glaringly artificial high horses for the great actors of their time; but the playwrights proper, who really kept the theatre going, and were kept going by the theatre, did not cater for the great actors: they could not afford to compete with a bard who was not for an age but for all time, and who had, moreover, the overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not charging author's fees. ”

“ The Devil's Disciple, with which I won my cordon bleu in America as a potboiler, would have had a different sort of hero if Richard Mansfield had been a different sort of actor, though the actual commission to write it came from an English actor, William Terriss, who was assassinated before he recovered from the dismay into which the result of his rash proposal threw him. For it must be said that the actor or actress who inspires or commissions a play as often as not regards it as a Frankenstein's monster, and will have none of it. ”

“ THE PRINCESS DASHKOFF [returning] . Captain Edstaston, the Empress is robed, and commands your presence.
EDSTASTON. Say I was gone before you arrived with the message. [He hurries out. The other three, too taken aback to stop him, stare after him in the utmost astonishment.]
NARYSHKIN [turning from the door] . She will have him knouted. He is a dead man.
THE PRINCESS DASHKOFF. But what am I to do? I cannot take such an answer to the Empress.
PATIOMKIN. P-P-P-P-P-P-W-W-W-W-W-rrrrrr [a long puff, turning into a growl] ! [He spits.] I must kick somebody. ”

“ It is also to be considered that great plays live longer than great actors, though little plays do not live nearly so long as the worst of their exponents. The consequence is that the great actor, instead of putting pressure on contemporary authors to supply him with heroic parts, falls back on the Shakespearean repertory, and takes what he needs from a dead hand. In the nineteenth century, the careers of Kean, Macready, Barry Sullivan, and Irving, ought to have produced a group of heroic plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides ”

“ Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as well have belonged to a different solar system as far as Irving was concerned; and the same was true of their respective predecessors.
Thus was established an evil tradition; but I at least can plead that it does not always hold good. If Forbes Robertson had not been there to play Caesar, I should not have written Caesar and Cleopatra. If Ellen Terry had never been born, Captain Brassbound's Conversion would never have been effected. ”

“ THE SERGEANT [paternally] . Little Father, this is the English captain, so well recommended to her sacred Majesty the Empress. God knows, he needs your countenance and protec— [he vanishes precipitately, seeing that Patiomkin is about to throw a bottle at him. The Captain contemplates these preliminaries with astonishment, and with some displeasure, which is not allayed when, Patiomkin, hardly condescending to look at his visitor, of whom he nevertheless takes stock with the corner of his one eye, says gruffly] . Well?
EDSTASTON. My name is Edstaston: Captain Edstaston of the Light Dragoons. ”