HOW TO LOSE AN EMPIRE: SHAW'S “SECRETARY FOR AMERICA” AND GENERAL BURGOYNE

Abstract

Some of Shaw's most provocative stage characters disappeared, in cinema terms, on the cutting-room floor. Immenso Champernoon, his spoof of G. K. Chesterton, failed to make it into Back to Methuselah (1920) and survives only in a volume of Shaw's odds and ends, Short Stories, Scraps and Shavings (1934). Edward VIII, who relinquished all for love, turns up only in a skit never made it beyond a newspaper piece. A dramatic dialogue between Jesus and Pontius Pilate survives in a preface to On the Rocks (1933). George III, the last Founding Father, and his secretary for America, the imperious Lord George Germain, were written into The Devil's Disciple (1896) for an early 1930s film version a scene never filmed and never staged. There are more, but such discards suggest the losses. In May 1899, Shaw was questioned by the Daily Mail about any concerns he might have regarding a London production of The Devil's Disciple, set in New Hampshire and excoriating the British for their incompetence in losing America. His first success across the Atlantic two years earlier, it contrasts a patriot militia captain whose public face is of a New England Presbyterian minister and an apparent reprobate and dissident who is an embarrassment to his upright Puritan family. Stealing the stage is a third-act walk-on, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, a real-life sophisticated general who is wittily scathing about lackluster leadership in London and endemic mediocrity in the army would cost his country its American Empire and Burgoyne his reputation. That Britain lost the war, and the colonies, seemed an obvious boxoffice drawback in the West End. Oh, Shaw scoffed, that difficulty can easily be got over. I am preparing a new version of the last act in which the