文档介绍：MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION
MRS WARREN'S
PROFESSION

e Bernard Shaw
1894
1
MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION
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 pliments which every
essful farce or melodrama elicits from the newspapers. Give me that
critic who rushed from my play to declare furiously that Sir e 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 Wild Duck,
exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his ideals! What would
Dr Relling say? And Mr William Archer himself disowns me because I
"cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it". Truly my play must be more
needed than I knew; and yet I thought I knew how little the others know.
Do not suppose, however, that the consternation of t