Mrs. Warrens Profession

Warren's Profession, by George
Bernard Shaw

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Title: Mrs. Warren's Profession
Author: George Bernard Shaw
Release Date: February 11, 2006 [EBook #1097]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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WARREN'S PROFESSION ***

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MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION
by George Bernard Shaw
1894

With The Author's Apology (1902)

THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY
Mrs Warren's Profession has been performed at last, after a delay of
only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the
triumphant amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of the
London theatre critics clean out of the practice of their profession. No
author who has ever known the exultation of sending the Press into an
hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic
confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of
distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life of
the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the
stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama
elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who rushed from my
play to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked.
What a triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist
to the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts
execrations at Iago and warnings to Othello not to believe him! But
dearer still than such simplicity is that sense of the sudden earthquake
shock to the foundations of morality which sends a pallid crowd of
critics into the street shrieking that the pillars of society are cracking
and the ruin of the State is at hand. Even the Ibsen champions of ten
years ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave days
remonstrated with them. Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first
launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild Duck,
exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his ideals! What
would Dr Relling say? And Mr William Archer himself disowns me
because I "cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it". Truly my play
must be more needed than I knew; and yet I thought I knew how little
the others know.
Do not suppose, however, that the consternation of the Press reflects
any consternation among the general public. Anybody can upset the
theatre critics, in a turn of the wrist, by substituting for the romantic
commonplaces of the stage the moral commonplaces of the pulpit,

platform, or the library. Play Mrs Warren's Profession to an audience of
clerical members of the Christian Social Union and of women well
experienced in Rescue, Temperance, and Girls' Club work, and no
moral panic will arise; every man and woman present will know that as
long as poverty makes virtue hideous and the spare pocket-money of
rich bachelordom makes vice dazzling, their daily hand-to-hand fight
against prostitution with prayer and persuasion, shelters and scanty
alms, will be a losing one. There was a time when they were able to
urge that though "the white-lead factory where Anne Jane was
poisoned" may be a far more terrible place than Mrs Warren's house,
yet hell is still more dreadful. Nowadays they no longer believe in hell;
and the girls among whom they are working know that they do not
believe in it, and would laugh at them if they did. So well have the
rescuers learnt that Mrs Warren's defence of herself and indictment of
society is the thing that most needs saying, that those who know me
personally reproach me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my
energies on "pleasant plays" for the amusement of frivolous people,
when I can build up such excellent stage sermons on their own work.
Mrs Warren's Profession is the one play of mine which I could submit
to a censorship without doubt of the result; only, it must not be the
censorship of the minor theatre critic, nor of an innocent court official
like the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner, much less of people who
consciously profit by Mrs Warren's profession, or who personally make
use of it, or who hold the widely whispered view that it is an
indispensable safety-valve for the protection of domestic virtue, or,
above all, who are smitten with a sentimental affection for our fallen
sister, and would "take her up tenderly, lift her with care, fashioned so
slenderly, young, and SO