THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE, or Constancy Rewarded,” a blank verse farce in two tableaux, is a dramatization by Shaw of certain incidents in his novel, “Cashel Byron’s Profession.” Cashel Byron, the hero of the novel, is a prize-fighter who wins his way to the hand and heart of Lydia Carew, a young woman of money, education and what Mulvaney calls “theouries.” Cashel sees in Lydia a remarkably fine girl; Lydia sees in Cashel an idealist and a philosopher as well as a bruiser. The race of Carew, she decides, needs an infusion of healthy red blood. And so she marries Byron—and they live happily ever after.
Bashville is Lydia’s footman and factotum, and he commits the unpardonable solecism of falling in love with her. Very frankly he confesses his passion and resigns his menial portfolio.
“If it is to be my last word,” he says, “I’ll tell you that the ribbon round your neck is more to me,” etc., etc.... “I am sorry to inconvenience you by a short notice, but I should take it as a particular favor if I might go this evening.”
“You had better,” says Lydia, rising quite calmly and keeping resolutely away from her the strange emotional result of being astonished, outraged and loved at one unlooked-for stroke. “It is not advisable that you should stay after what you have just——”
“I knew that when I said it,” interposes Bashville, hastily and doggedly.
“In going away,” continues Lydia, “you will be taking precisely the course that would be adopted by any gentleman who had spoken to the same effect. I am not offended by your declaration; I recognize your right to make it. If you need my testimony to further your future arrangements, I shall be happy to say that I believe you to be a man of honor.”
An American pugilist-actor, struck by the possibilities of the story, engaged a journeyman playwright to make a play of it, and Shaw, to protect his rights, put together “The Admirable Bashville.” The one performance required by the English copyright law was given by the Stage Society at the Imperial Theater, London, in the summer of 1903.
“It was funny,” says James Huneker, who witnessed the performance. “It gibed at Shakespeare, at the modern drama, at Parliament, at social snobbery, at Shaw himself, and at almost everything else within reach. The stage setting was a mockery of the Elizabethan stage, with two venerable beef-eaters in Tower costume, who hung up placards bearing the legend, ‘A Glade in Wiltstoken Park,’ etc. Ben Webster as Cashel Byron and James Hearn as the Zulu King (whom Cashel entertains by an exhibition of his fistic prowess) carried off the honors. Aubrey Smith, made up as Mr. Shaw in the costume of a policeman with a brogue, caused merriment, especially at the close, when he informed his audience that the author had left the house. And so he had. He was standing at the corner when I accosted him.”
Shaw explains that he wrote the extravaganza in blank verse because he had to hurry over it and “hadn’t time to write it in the usual prose.” To anyone “with the requisite ear and command of words,” he says in another place, “blank verse, written under the amazingly loose conditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical and even obscurely technical, to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses, and to impress ignorant people with every possible extremity of fantasy and affectation, is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression, and this is why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the head of England since Shakespeare’s time in this form by people who could not have written ‘Box and Cox’ to save their lives.”
“The Admirable Bashville” may be seen in the United States before long. Not long ago the London Daily Mail reported that the eminent comedian and gladiator, Mr. James J. Corbett, was casting eager eyes upon it and that Shaw rather liked the idea of his appearing in it.
“He is a man who has made a success in one profession,” the dramatist is reported to have said, “and will therefore understand that there are difficulties to be encountered in making a success in another. Look at the books written to-day, and then consider which you would rather have—a man who can do nothing or a really capable prize-fighter.”
All of which you will find, much elaborated, in “Cashel Byron’s Profession,” which was written in 1882.