Back To Methuselah - Commentary

Commentary

Michael Holroyd describes the plays as "a masterpiece of wishful thinking" and calls them science fiction. Methuselah is said to be Shaw's only real engagement with science fiction. Shaw uses science fictioneering in Methuselah to add plausibility to scenarios and to keep readers entertained while he propounds his vision of the human destiny. His prime interest was not scientific, but political, as stated in the Preface where he discusses changes he considers essential before mankind can govern itself successfully. The final play, As Far as the Mind Can Reach, offers no solution to the problem: Humans evolve to the point of becoming free-ranging vortices of energy, able to wander, solitary, through the Universe, thus requiring no government at all. Furthermore, one of Shaw's last plays, Farfetched Fables (1950) also classifies as science fiction. and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934) comes close to qualifying.

Shaw had an exalted opinion of Methuselah (his book); in the press release he wrote for its publishers (Constable & Co. London) he said it would "interest biologists, religious leaders, and lovers of the marvellous in fiction as well as lovers of the theatre" and described it as his supreme work in dramatic literature. He considered it a book for reading rather than playing on the stage, and was agreeably surprised when Lawrence Langner in New York and Barry Vincent Jackson in Birmingham insisted on producing it despite expectations of monetary loss, which were promptly justified. Unlike the plays Shaw wrote for staging, which include precise descriptions of the settings, the details of stage settings for Methuselah are sketchy and serve only to direct the imagination of the reader. When, e.g., the stage director for the Birmingham production asked how the Serpent was to be presented, Shaw responded with a clumsy sketch and suggested an artist be employed to design costume, colouring and lighting. The BBC, in contrast, was able to provide lavish scenery by sheer power of description for its 1958 radio production of the entire play,

Shaw's scientific rationale for evolving long-lived humans depended on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This accorded with the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, even though Lamarkism was in decline and Charles Darwin's views were ascendant in 1920, when the plays were written, Shaw's adherence to Lamarkian principles quite possibly was reinforced by his adulation of Stalinism. Under Stalin, thanks to the influence of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Institute of Agricultural Sciences), Mendelian genetics was officially rejected in favour of Lysenkoism, which was derived from the Lamarkian beliefs of horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin. Lysenkoism remained Soviet policy, enforceable by severe penalties, until 1964, when it was officially discredited.

According to Louis Crompton in Shaw the Dramatist (pp. 252–3):

"The most extensive scholarly treatment of Back to Methuselah is H. M. Geduld's six-volume variorum edition of the play submitted as a doctoral thesis at Birkbeck College, University of London (1961). This thesis, which runs to fourteen hundred pages, includes a discussion of the intellectual and literary background, a collation of some forty editions of the text, annotations to the five parts, preface and postscript, and an account of the theatrical history of the play."

Copies of this variorum edition are available in the Goldsmiths' Library in the University of London, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and in the Rare Books Collection of the University of Texas at Austin.

One quotation from Back to Methuselah is frequently misattributed to Robert F. Kennedy, even though Kennedy stated that he was quoting Shaw—"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'