In the foregoing tragedy, _The Doctor's
Dilemma_, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and
the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year.
No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the
ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice
that the Greek form is inevitable when the drama reaches a certain
point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on
my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the
spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable
to it, which turned out to be the classical form."
It is hard to say whether Mr. Shaw is here writing seriously or in a
mood of solemn facetiousness. Perhaps he himself is not quite clear on
the point. There can be no harm, at any rate, in assuming that he
genuinely believes the unity of _Getting Married_ to be "a return to the
unity observed in," say, the _Oedipus Rex_, and examining a little into
so pleasant an illusion.
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