



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 the
relations which inevitably exist in the theatre between authors and
actors. If the actors have sometimes to use their skill as the author's
puppets rather than in full self-expression, the author has sometimes to
use his skill as the actors' tailor, fitting them with parts written to
display the virtuosity of the performer rather than to solve problems of
life, character, or history. Feats of this kind may tickle an author's
technical vanity; but he is bound on such occasions to admit that the
performer for whom he writes is "the onlie begetter" of his work,
which must be regarded critically as an addition to the debt dramatic
literature owes to the art of acting and its exponents. Those who have
seen Miss Gertrude Kingston play the part of Catherine will have no
difficulty in believing that it was her talent rather than mine that
brought the play into existence. 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.

In composing such bravura pieces, the author limits himself only by the
range of the virtuoso, which by definition far transcends the modesty
of nature. 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; and I prefer to admit
that in this kind my dramatic personae are, as they should be, of the
stage stagey, challenging the actor to act up to them or beyond them,
if he can. The more heroic the overcharging, the better for the
performance.

In dragging the reader thus for a moment behind the scenes, I am
departing from a rule which I have hitherto imposed on myself so rigidly
that I never permit myself, even in a stage direction, to let slip a
word that could bludgeon the imagination of the reader by reminding him
of the boards and the footlights and the sky borders and the