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Candida – The Hidden Secret

In his Preface to Plays Pleasant, Bernard Shaw asserts that ‘every drama must present a conflict’. The end of the play may be a reconciliation or destruction; or, as in life itself, there may be no end; but the conflict is indispensable; no conflict, no drama. Shaw is not stating anything innovative when he confirms this. Aristotle in his Poetics has already stated that the soul of drama is the conflict that it represents. Conflict however, can be of two types – one which presents the conflictual aspect of internal moral dimensions like in Oedipus; the other conflict may be represented by the contemporary societal dialectics that can be portrayed as a social problematic to make the play a ground for depiction of moral and contemporary problems. Shaw in all his Prefaces had made it obvious that his plays would rather demonstrate the ills of the society rather than internal moral conflicts. His plays in this way took the shape of morally reformative plays that would expose the degenerative and decrepit aspects of the society. The appellation of ‘problem plays’ thus stuck to him and the Ibsenian influence, which was almost pan-European, also affected him.

Candida was published in 1894, and though immature and amateurish, the play enjoyed enormous success. It was part of his Plays Pleasant which included Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny and You Can Never Tell. It was a conscious attempt by Shaw to represent the ‘New Drama’ – the realistic social drama which came into existence with the drama of Ibsen in Norway and was marked by its rich flow of ideas and daring views on moral and social questions. It was introduced in England by the admirers of Ibsen such as Sir Edmund Grosse, Bernard Shaw and the dramatic critic William Archer who translated and discussed Ibsen’s work and forced people to admire it. The ‘New Drama’ dealt with the changing opinions of the ‘new’ woman, the ‘new’ man, the ‘new’ morality, and all the other ‘new’ social and political ideas. Most of these plays were produced at the New Theatre (the Independent).