George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

Church and Theatre
I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not
brought up to care; and a sense of the national importance
of the theatre is not born in mankind: the natural man, like
so many of the soldiers at the beginning of the war, does not
know what a theatre is. But please note that all these soldiers
who did not know what a theatre was, knew what a church
was. And they had been taught to respect churches. Nobody
had ever warned them against a church as a place where frivo-
lous women paraded in their best clothes; where stories of
improper females like Potiphar’s wife, and erotic poetry like
the Song of Songs, were read aloud; where the sensuous and
sentimental music of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gounod, and
Brahms was more popular than severe music by greater com-
posers; where the prettiest sort of pretty pictures of pretty
saints assailed the imagination and senses through stained-
glass windows; and where sculpture and architecture came
to the help of painting. Nobody ever reminded them that
these things had sometimes produced such developments of
erotic idolatry that men who were not only enthusiastic
amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous prac-

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GB Shaw
titioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even
regular troops under express command had mutilated church
statues, smashed church windows, wrecked church organs,
and torn up the sheets from which the church music was
read and sung. When they saw broken statues in churches,
they were told that this was the work of wicked, godless riot-
ers, instead of, as it was, the work partly of zealots bent on
driving the world, the flesh, and the devil out of the temple,
and partly of insurgent men who had become intolerably
poor because the temple had become a den of thieves. But
all the sins and perversions that were so carefully hidden from
them in the history of the Church were laid on the shoulders
of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable place of penance
in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the slenderest
chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving souls. When
the Germans bombed the Cathedral of Rheims the world
rang with the horror of the sacrilege. When they bombed
the Little Theatre in the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bomb-
ing two writers of plays who lived within a few yards of it,
the fact was not even mentioned in the papers. In point of
appeal to the senses no theatre ever built could touch the
fane at Rheims: no actress could rival its Virgin in beauty,
nor any operatic tenor look otherwise than a fool beside its
David. Its picture glass was glorious even to those who had
seen the glass of Chartres. It was wonderful in its very gro-
tesques: who would look at the Blondin Donkey after seeing
its leviathans? In spite of the Adam-Adelphian decoration
on which Miss Kingston had lavished so much taste and
care, the Little Theatre was in comparison with Rheims the
gloomiest of little conventicles: indeed the cathedral must,
from the Puritan point of view, have debauched a million
voluptuaries for every one whom the Little Theatre had sent
home thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr Chesterton’s Magic
or Brieux’s Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real reason why
the Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or
no, the fact remains that the lady to whose public spirit and
sense of the national value of the theatre I owed the first
regular public performance of a play of mine had to conceal
her action as if it had been a crime, whereas if she had given
the money to the Church she would have worn a halo for it.
And I admit, as I have always done, that this state of things
may have been a very sensible one. I have asked Londoners

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Heartbreak House
again and again why they pay half a guinea to go to a theatre
when they can go to St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey for
nothing. Their only possible reply is that they want to see
something new and possibly something wicked; but the the-
atres mostly disappoint both hopes. If ever a revolution makes
me Dictator, I shall establish a heavy charge for admission to
our churches. But everyone who pays at the church door
shall receive a ticket entitling him or her to free admission to
one performance at any theatre he or she prefers. Thus shall
the sensuous charms of the church service be made to subsi-
dize the sterner virtue of the drama.