Androcles and the Lion

A fun little work, short and to the point, based on the old fable, but with more wisecracking and dialogue. Shaw does not go out of his way to make any side of this look good, and Androcles himself is a wimpy sort of guy, lacking in any real courage except where animals are concerned. The Christians are not the bad guys, but neither are the pagans. They are all just sort of strange, with odd beliefs that at least some of them are willing to die for. Shaw skewers everyone equally, but there is a gentleness to his fun, and many of the characters are actually likeable. This was worth the time I spent.

Shaw was a man of conflicts, and though many came at him from without, the majority were simply Shaw running roughshod over himself. He was quick to adopt new ideas, and vehement in defending them, though he rarely kept them very long.

He firstly fought to abolish censorship, then supported the right of a regime to silence undesirables. He was a lifelong supporter of the people's revolution against economic tyranny, but praised totalitarian rule by both Stalin and Hitler. He condemned Romanticism in drama, and then wrote plays about beautiful, wealthy people and their conjugal angst, ending with double marriages. He unquestioningly accepted the health benefits of vegetarianism, but held a lifelong grudge against inoculation.

Nothing show more better represents Shaw's internal conflict than a comparison of one of his plays to the preface that precedes it. His prefaces were long, commonly longer than the play itself, and sometimes twice the length or more. They were drawn from long lectures which Shaw gave to various radical political groups, combining his pet interests with whatever new material Shaw had recently digested.

Rarely did the prefaces resemble the plays, either in tone, philosophy, or argument. They may have related to the plays by theme, but the combination of two thematic pieces which share no common point of view, they do not create anything more in conjunction than they might have, alone.

The preface to Androcles and the Lion does take Christianity as it's central motif, and so is more aligned to its play than many of his others. In the preface, Shaw begins with a thoughtful analysis of the gospels, showing how each disagrees with the others and all show the prevalent bias of the author.

It is an amusing and thoughtful deconstruction of Christian myth, showing that no sooner had Jesus been martyred than his message was subverted into several inconsistent political movements. Jesus' time as the messiah did nothing to patch the schisms already present in the early faith, and the moment he was gone his followers were more than glad to use his name to their own ends: whether it was Paul returning the church to John the Baptist's tradition, Mark obsessing with early prophecy, or Luke making Jesus into a mighty hero of romance.

They don't agree on where he was born, where he lived, what he said, what he did, what others did around him, or how or why he died. Shaw tries to read between the lines to find the real Jesus, and eventually determines he is an outspoken man who breaks with tradition to bring a personal faith based on deeds, not thoughts, and who became obsessed with the old myth of martyrdom and rebirth, and hence committed a crime which carried a penalty of death and refused the ways out which were offered to him.

All this is interesting enough, if not revolutionary in the realm of biblical scholarship. Shaw then ends his concrete analysis of how men have perverted the life of Jesus for political ends and begins instead to interpret the life of Jesus to match his own political ends, namely: Jesus the father of communist revolution.

What could better show the schism in Shaw's mind than the fact that he can move from ridiculing other men for doing something to doing it himself in the span of a few pages and yet, not to show any recognition of this shift? He goes on and on about how Jesus' church is the communist party and how his goals were the communist goals of abolishing and equalizing wealth, but we can see he's using Jesus in the same way the disciples did.

He then abruptly switches gears again, to a yet more unasked-for argument. No longer does he talk about Jesus or Communism, but about how people come to believe what they believe. Yet, the argument he presents is both old and useless: The Skeptic's Argument.

This might also be termed 'The Six-Yeay-Old's Argument' or 'The First Year Philosophy Major's Argument', as it boils down to responding to every statement with "what if that's not true?" or "why?" Shaw suggests that we don't really know anything, and so believing one thing or another thing is merely a matter of taste.

He gives the example of the 'sacred number' seven, which was often given in earlier times as an answer to various questions. He suggests that if the king asked his magistrate how far the sun was from the Earth, the magistrate might say "seven-hundred seventy-seven miles", and be declared correct on the basis of using a sacred number for a sacred measurement.

He then goes on to suggest that the new sacred number is 'a million', and that our new experts telling us the distance of the sun is millions of miles is the same as a medieval astrologer saying seven-hundred seventy-seven. He then suggests the same relationship between a million (rightly, billions of) bacteria and seven evil spirits. This allows him to come back around to his perennial hatred of doctors and especially, inoculation.

There is a viable defense against the Skeptic's Argument, and it is the mere fact that we all act, we all feel, we all argue, and in Shaw's case, he writes complex philosophical arguments. If it was merely a case of 'sacred numbers', then there would be no point to argue, to convince, or even, to believe. If it really all was the same either way, then everyone would be equally successful with their methods.

You could give a rocket seven-hundred seventy-seven miles worth of fuel or ninety-three million miles worth and get the same result. All that is required to refute Shaw's sophistry is to place an eye up to a microscope and simply count the bacteria. Of course, that requires enough knowledge of optics and medicine to recognize what you're looking at, which often seems to mark the difference between theories which stand the test of time and the delusions of pseudoscience.

Unfortunately, Shaw is not renowned for his due diligence. When enraptured by an idea, he would rather be interesting than well-informed, from changing Cleopatra's age by a decade in 'Caesar and Cleopatra' to his confused geography 'The Devil's Disciple'.

His politics are equally unfounded. His love of communism amounts to a love of his fellow man and a desire that all should be treated equally. He declined to equalize any of his own fortune, arguing (quite rightly), that anything he gave to the poor would be quickly snatched up by taxation and rent, thereby changing nothing.

Yet, he gives us nothing else--certainly no economic theory--to argue how a communist revolution might come about, or even whether it should. To Shaw, it seems better that men should not suffer unequally under the yoke of power, and that is enough. Like Marx, he seems to assume that the poor will eventually tire of the inequality and overcome it.

The same inequality has marked every culture throughout history, so one begins to wonder when the patience of the proletariat will be well and truly exhausted. He might as well suggest that since violence is harmful, we should quickly tire of it and move on to something else. Shaw's notions are much too lovely a dream for a man who loathes the "dishonesty of Romanticism".

Eventually, we do finish the prelude and get to the play, itself, which is Shaw's retelling of a Roman fable about a man who shows kindness to a lion and receives kindness in return. The story has sometimes been attached to Aesop, and indeed it proceeds as an instructional fable, but Shaw rewrites it in the form of a Christian parable.

Even though we have left the prelude behind, we have not left the realm of Shaw's internal conflicts, for this play proceeds along the lines of many of his plays, in that Shaw the philosopher seems intent on producing some deep message but Shaw the humorist will always undermine it by presenting it under the auspices of an aimless farce.

In some plays, the philosopher takes over, but these we rarely hear of and never see performed, for they are as uninformed and overwrought as his introductions. The humorist has created the more popular plays, which are usually along the lines of the classic English social farce, as practiced by Wilde and Wodehouse.

'Androcles and the Lion', contrarily, is a less witty comedy, relying on caricatures, physical humor, and absurdly realized arguments. The play contains a Christian allegory and a satire against the unfaithful, and if Shaw had stopped there, he would have simply produced propaganda. But the allegory is wholly combined with a satire against the pride, meekness, and thoughtlessness of Christians.

We might imagine that Shaw is endeavoring to achieve the same effect of his role model, Shakespeare, who would place so many contrary opinions in his carious characters' mouths that the reader might never guess what bias the author carried.

Yet Shaw is writing a fable, a Christian allegory, and has peopled his play with caricatures who, while sometimes vividly drawn, are not written as real people, but as symbols. They are the voices of Shaw's many ideas, and as such, are supported not only by their own words, but by the sweep of the story and the acts of those around them.

There is a sort of tonal bias which carries along the argument. It feels as if, in writing the argument or slight, Shaw is able to convince himself, and hence the world he writes changes to admit it; at least, until he can convince himself of the opposing view.

By the end of the play, all the heroes have been ridiculed and all the villains have been appealing, and each argument has swung into prominence and out again, so that the audience is left asking what Shaw's purpose is: what has been achieved?

In the realist movement, which influenced Shaw through Ibsen, the author deliberately writes in such a way as to negate his character's arguments, and to allow different points of view to be considered, and in the end, leaves nothing decided.

This does not leave the audience confused, because Realism intends to depict actual people and conflicts, and for something to remain undecided is a perfectly natural notion. That isn't to say that a Realist play should be just like life, but that it's form is meant to approximate and subvert the way life feels.

Human beings create patterns and symbols even where none exist, so it does not strike us as false to see archetypes or metaphors played out, as long as they are well-written enough to leave the author's hand hidden. There is a certain notion of sprezzatura in Realism, in that the author wants to construct something carefully and deliberately, but without calling attention to himself as its creator.

Shaw's works aspire to many aspects of realism, shifting morality and vividly, sometimes absurdly drawn characters, but as an author he is almost never invisible. He writes with his tongue in his cheek, winking at his audience, trying to allude over their heads, bringing in the newest ideas (before they have matured gracefully), and drawing heavily on archetypal stories, both allegorical and Romantic.

Another aspect of his writing which encourages disbelief is his reliance on soliloquies and structured, symbolic debates. Again, he evokes the style of Shakespeare, who also interjected allusion, wit, and light fourth-wall breaks. In the end, what separates their presentation of ideas is how much Shaw seems to commit himself to one idea or the other at any particular time. While Shakespeare can always be read wryly, Shaw can almost always be read earnestly.

We know from his prologues that he has no qualms about attaching himself to ideas, even ideas which are contrary to what he has said or done before, or contrary to his own interests. There is a fine line walked by all writers who mean to tackle and confront grand ideas. The author must be conceited enough to think he has something new to say in the first place, but self-deprecating enough to know when to bow out.

Shaw is given many grandiloquent titles by his adherents, from visionary to prophet, and these terms are more often given to those who go to far than those who do not go far enough. It is easier to impress and overawe with pomposity than with austerity, but what author is driven to write because it is the easy thing to do?

In the end, and author's bombasticy must be equaled or exceeded by his competence and diligence. There are such authors out there, as Twain or Nietzsche, who are more-or-less capable of maintaining this balance, but Shaw overreaches. It is his nature and his delight to overreach. He does it from all sides, and his philosophical over-commitment conflicts with his humorous over-commitment.

He is capable of being both profound and amusing, but he is neither funny enough nor profound enough to finally save this play's lack of purpose. He cannot fall back on the British class humor of his best plays, and his awkward combination of Christian allegory, Roman fable, religious satire, Realist philosophy, and slapstick humor is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. show less

I was advised to read this for the preface. Turns out the preface is longer than the play. So I read that, too. And now I'm off to reread [b:Andy and the Lion|1365825|Andy and the Lion (Picture Puffins)|James Daugherty|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1621386397l/1365825._SX50_.jpg|2441080].

Preface is one of Shaw's essays, "On the Prospects of Christianity: Why not give Christianity a trial."
I've no hope of giving you enough samples for you to appreciate Shaw's wit and insight; you should read it yourself; I'm sure that it's in the public domain. But in the meantime, here's a sample:

"... The iconolaters have never for a moment conceived Christ as a real person who meant what he said.... Thus it is show more not disbelief that is dangerous in our society: it is belief. The moment it strikes you ... that Christ is not the lifeless harmless image he has hitherto been to you, but a rallying center for revolutionary influences which all established States and Churches fight, you must look to yourselves; for you have brought the image to life; ..."

"Belief is literally a matter of taste."

"In England 9/10 of the wealth goes into the pocket of 1/10 of the population." (1915)

"Honest [a:Hugh Latimer|809659|Hugh Latimer|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], who was burned by us, was worth 50 Stephens and a dozen Peters."

"The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, ceases on such slips [sins], and shames us to the dust for being so low in the scale as to be capable of them." (Shades of [a:Frans de Waal|112082|Frans de Waal|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1222704792p2/112082.jpg].)

[a:Henrik Ibsen|2730977|Henrik Ibsen|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1286731403p2/2730977.jpg] is quoted as saying, "Your God is an old man whom you cheat."

" government is impossible without a religion; that is, without a body of common assumptions." (Well no wonder we have the Woke vs. Book Banners (for example) nowadays. We are not capable of sympathizing with the view of the other.)

The play itself is not nearly so quotable, but it is fascinating nonetheless. It does have this:

" we cannot afford to throw away lions as if they were mere slaves." (Which pretty much sums up Shaw's view of the use of religion [the Church] to the powerful [the State].)

There's also a short afterward by Shaw, also well worth reading.

I really should read more Shaw. These two works (the essay and the play can easily be counted separately) are the 4th and 5th, I think... but he's funnier, snarkier, and wiser than I remember to credit him. So much more than the inspiration for My Fair Lady. I encourage you to find something in his oeuvre to sample. show less

An Irreverent look at the possible form of early Christianity, and its encounter with Roman government. The romans in the play are portrayed as a rather idealized Indian Imperial civil Service, and the christians as generalized religious enthusiasts.

Shaw uses the framework of Aesop's tale of Androcles and the lion to examine how different people exhibit (or fail to exhibit) Christian virtues. In particular importance in the play is the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek. There were many ideas similar to those in "The Devil's Disciple" but as a play I think that this one isn't as good entertainment as "The Devil's Disciple" was.

read as part of the Kindle omnibus The Plays of Shaw

This play, set in Imperial Rome, is the story of a Christian being thrown to the lions. However, the play is a lot more than just a poor defenceless soul being ripped apart by a ravenous beast, nor is it an attack upon Christianity, but rather a critical look at the church in modern times. The intention of the play seems to be to remind Christians of where they have come from and what they have become.
The play was released in 1913, during a time when the Church still had a significant influence over society, though it was beginning to face attacks from scientific rationalism and modernism. It was the eve of World War I: a war in which both sides claimed divine support which resulted in one of the bloodiest wars humanity had show more experienced. However this relates more to the time in which the play was written rather than the play itself because at the time nobody actually believed that they were on the brink of war.
The book in which the play was published contains one of Shaw's characteristic prologues, and in fact the prologue to this play is longer than the play itself. In this prologue Shaw examines each of the gospels and concludes that Jesus was an exceptional man who had a lot to say regarding the way humans lived. However it is clear that he did not accept Christ's divinity, nor does he accept the resurrection but rather he believes that the true teachings of Christ were lost with the crucifixion and where then manipulated by the early apostles, with a particular focus on Paul, for their own purposes. What Shaw does not realise was that Paul, up until his conversion, was a very devout Jew who went around persecuting Christians. Paul was not the type of person to have radically changed his beliefs without some form of epiphany upon which there was some factual basis.
The play is based on an earlier story where the hero, Androcles, runs away from his master and hides in a cave where he meets a lion. He removes a thorn from the Lion's foot and bandages it and as a result the lion becomes his friend. Years later Androcles returns to Rome, is arrested as a runaway slave, and thrown to the lions. It turns out that the lion in the arena is the same lion that Androcles helped in the past and as a result the lion does not attack him: thus Androcles is spared.
Shaw uses this tale as a vehicle for his philosophy and analyses true religious values: which he believes is earnestness and lack of hypocrisy. While the lack of hypocrisy is important, and Jesus has much to say to the hypocrites of his day, the earnestness is not clearly something that is helpful. The key to Christianity is faith is an objective truth. It is all well and good to have faith, but if one has faith in something that is not true, then that faith comes to nothing. A great example is of an aeroplane. We may get onto the plane convinced that the plane will take us where we want to go, but no amount of faith is going to stop the plane's engines from exploding if there is a fault in those engines. Simply ask somebody who has survived a plane crash. show less

Shaw's bombast gets in the way of the play. He was really so full of himself that he could write a pedantic 100 page preface to a 42 page play? Even after the play is over Shaw appends another ten pages of lecture, just in case you fell asleep or skipped through the first hundred pages.