HOW He Lied to Her Husband” is a one-act bit of foolery that Shaw wrote for Arnold Daly after “Candida” had made a success in New York. It was presented for the first time on the evening of Sept. 26, 1904, and during the ensuing week was more vociferously discussed than any other one-act play that ever graced the boards of an American theater.
As he made fun of the vaporing Ibsenites of the early ’90’s in “The Philanderer,” just so Shaw got his joke at the expense of his own ecstatic followers in this little appendix to “Candida.” The latter had been presented with huge profit, and thousands of honest playgoers, alert for mysterious “symbolism” and subtle “purposes” had seen in its heroine a great many of the qualities they formerly sought and discovered in the much-mauled Ibsen women. Candida, in brief, became the high priestess of the advanced cult, in all its warring denominational variety. It became a sign of intellectual vigor to go to the Berkeley Lyceum and compare her with Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler and their company. And so Shaw indited “How He Lied to Her Husband.”
The characters in the little farce are a fashionable young poet named Henry Upjohn, an untamed American husband named Bumpus, and his wife, Aurora Bumpus, a young woman with yearnings. Aurora and Henry have seen a performance of “Candida” and have come away with a feeling that an intrigue after the fashion of Candida and Eugene, is one of those things that no really advanced poet or modern wife should be without. So Henry writes a sheaf of sonnets to Aurora and being determined to play the game according to the rules, proposes that they run off together. They are about to depart, conscientiously leaving the Bumpus diamonds behind, when Aurora, at the brink of the precipice, draws back.
Meanwhile Bumpus happens upon Henry’s sonnets and confronts the poet with the charge of having written them. Henry, determined to save Aurora, “lies like a gentleman”—and incidentally overdoes it. Bumpus, mistaking his well-meant prevarication for impolite indifference to Aurora’s beauty, or denial of it, flies into a passion, and is on the point of soundly thrashing the amorous bard when Aurora stays his hand. Then Henry confesses, and Bumpus is so much pleased by the manner in which the sonnets celebrate his wife’s charms that he offers to print them for private circulation among connoisseurs with broad margins and de luxe binding.
The play is built upon the lines of broad farce, and in New York it made an uproarious success. The encounter between Bumpus and Henry is extraordinarily ludicrous. Aurora throughout is the typical enthusiast of the women’s clubs—filled with vague longings and ambitions, but intensely practical and commonplace at bottom. Henry, during one of their tumultuous exchanges, is about to break her fan. She shrieks the warning that it cost a dollar. He ventures upon a dark, melodramatic oath. “How dare you swear in my presence?” she demands. “One would think you were my husband!”
A pretty bit of fooling, à la “The Wild Duck,” “The Philanderer” and “Alice-Sit-by-the Fire.” Shaw calls it “a warning to theater-goers.” It is.