SOURCE: "The Art of Shavian Political Drama," in Modern Drama, Vol. XIV, No. 3, December, 1971, pp. 324-30.

In the following essay, Nickson attempts to explain and correct readers' common misinterpretations of Bernard Shaw's political beliefs as expressed in his plays.

England, arise! the long, long night is over. . .

The unemployed of the Great Depression of the thirties are singing these verses of Edward Carpenter outside number ten Downing Street at the close of Bernard Shaw's On the Rocks "to a percussion accompaniment of baton thwacks." Straightway, one critic on the Left observed that "the play ends with the marchers outside the window singing 'England Arise!' which I understand is the theme song of Mosley's Black Shirts."¹ The playwright's conservative biographer, St. John Ervine, propounded an equally ingenious but dissimilar interpretation based on the second line of Carpenter's song, "Faint in the east behold the dawn appear." According to...