



Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger





MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION


by George Bernard Shaw


1894


With The Author's Apology (1902)




THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY


Mrs Warren's Profession has been performed at last, after a delay of
only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the triumphant
amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of the London
theatre critics clean out of the practice of their profession. No
author who has ever known the exultation of sending the Press into an
hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic
confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of
distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life
of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the
stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama
elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who rushed from my play
to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked. What a
triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist to
the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts
execrations at Iago and warnings to Othello not to believe him! But
dearer still than such simplicity is that sense of the sudden earthquake
shock to the foundations of morality which sends a pallid crowd of
critics into the street shrieking that the pillars of society are
cracking and the ruin of the State is at hand. Even the Ibsen champions
of ten years ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave
days remonstrated with them. Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first
launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The