King Lear, Heartbreak House, and the Dynamics of Inertia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In light of its fragmented dramaturgy and contemporary concerns, on the one hand, and its extensive debt to the structures and characters of Shakespeare's King Lear, on the other, Heartbreak House deserves consideration as both Shaw's most experimental and most derivative play. Such a paradox was familiar to Shaw, but the tension between the play's modernity and its classical inheritance may obscure Shaw's insights into Shakespeare's dramaturgy and the uses he made of them. In fact, the most urgently modern aspects of Heartbreak House are not its references to airships or dynamite but its absorption and adaptation of a theory of tragedy implicit in Lear: namely, that through temporal and emotional endurance, inertia, and a deliberate unwillingness to make good on implicit contracts established with audiences, a play can deepen engagement with the plot by creating doubt about its continuance. Shaw's play opens up modernity to us less by what it chooses to represent than by its strategies for structuring audience anticipation and disappointment, strategies that represent the play's chief inheritance from Lear. As a result, Shakespeare's influence is rather more constitutive of than contrary to Shaw's modernity.