



Produced by Eve Sobol





GREAT CATHERINE (WHOM GLORY STILL ADORES)

By George Bernard Shaw


     "In Catherine's reign, whom Glory still adores"
                                           BYRON




THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY FOR GREAT CATHERINE

Exception has been taken to the title of this seeming tomfoolery on the
ground that the Catherine it represents is not Great Catherine, but the
Catherine whose gallantries provide some of the lightest pages of modern
history. Great Catherine, it is said, was the Catherine whose diplomacy,
whose campaigns and conquests, whose plans of Liberal reform, whose
correspondence with Grimm and Voltaire enabled her to cut such a
magnificent figure in the eighteenth century. In reply, I can only
confess that Catherine's diplomacy and her conquests do not interest
me. It is clear to me that neither she nor the statesmen with whom she
played this mischievous kind of political chess had any notion of
the real history of their own times, or of the real forces that were
moulding Europe. The French Revolution, which made such short work of
Catherine's Voltairean principles, surprised and scandalized her as much
as it surprised and scandalized any provincial governess in the French
chateaux.

The main difference between her and our modern Liberal Governments was
that whereas she talked and wrote quite intelligently about Liberal
principles before she was frightened into making such talking and
writing a flogging matter, our Liberal ministers take the name of
Liberalism in vain without knowing or caring enough about its meaning
even to talk and scribble about it, and pass their flogging Bills, and
institute their prosecutions for sedition and blasphemy and so forth,
without the faintest suspicion that such proceedings need any apology
from the Liberal point of view.

It was quite easy for Patiomkin to humbug Catherine as to the condition
of Russia by conducting her through sham cities run up for the occasion
by scenic artists; but in the little world of European court intrigue
and dynastic diplomacy which was the only world she knew she was more
than a match for him and for all the rest of her contemporaries. In such
intrigue and diplomacy, however, there was no romance, no scientific
political interest, nothing that a sane mind can now retain even if
it can be persuaded to waste time in reading it up. But Catherine as a
woman with plenty of character and (as we should say) no morals,
still fascinates and amuses us as she fascinated and amused her
contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these Peters,
Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as eccentric
character parts, and produced scene after scene of furious harlequinade
with the monarch as clown, and of tragic relief in the torture chamber
with the monarch as pantomime demon committing real atrocities, not
forgetting the indispensable love interest on an enormous and utterly
indecorous scale. Catherine kept this vast Guignol Theatre open for
nearly half a century, not as a Russian, but as a highly domesticated
German lady whose household routine was not at all so unlike that of
Queen Victoria as might be expected from the difference in their notions
of propriety in sexual relations.

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. I have made him an English country
gentleman, who gets out of his rather dangerous scrape, by simplicity,
sincerity, and the courage of these qualities. By this I have given some
offence to the many Britons who see themselves as heroes: what they mean
by heroes being theatrical snobs of superhuman pretensions which, though
quite groundless, are admitted with awe by the rest of the human race.
They say I think an Englishman a fool. When I do, they have themselves
to thank.

I must not, however, pretend that historical portraiture was the motive
of a play that will leave the reader as ignorant of Russian history
as he may be now before he has turned the page. Nor is the sketch of
Catherine complete even idiosyncratically, leaving her politics out of
the question. For example, she wrote bushels of plays. I confess I
have not yet read any of them. The truth is, this play grew out of