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Lot 114

SHAW (GEORGE BERNARD)

10 November 2009, 11:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £2,040 inc. premium

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SHAW (GEORGE BERNARD)

Collection of scripts and letters, relating to Saint Joan, comprising: (i) the annotated carbon typescript of Saint Joan, inscribed on the upper cover by Shaw "Miss Elizabeth Bergner's copy, from G. Bernard Shaw/ 30th Nov. 1934": this being the script of the film adaptation submitted by Shaw to Elizabeth Bergner, whom he wanted to play Joan, with her husband directing (1934); (ii) an earlier autograph letter to Elizabeth Bergner, urging her to play Joan on the stage with Charles Macdona (1934); (iii) revised typescript, signed and dated at the end, of his interview with Thurston Macauley of the New York Times over alleged attempts at Roman Catholic censorship of Saint Joan, which could destroy any chance of its being made into a film ("...this play is not mine: it's Saint Joan's. I have only arranged it for the stage; and so I may call it a great play with as much detachment as you...") (1936); (iv) autograph letter to H.W. Massingham of the Nation, explaining problems of characterisation in Saint Joan (1924); (v) autograph postcard to the poet Sir Henry Newbolt ("...I am glad you liked Joan... the impression left by the deputy Inquisitor Lemaitre is one of small beer. But in tragedy you have to make the persons conscious of their own significance, and in a comedy to make them ridiculous by their unconsciousness of it..."), 1924

Footnotes

A FINE COLLECTION RELATING TO SAINT JOAN, INCLUDING THE SCRIPT OF THE FILM ADAPTATION GIVEN TO ELIZABETH BERGNER TO PLAY THE TITLE ROLE: "almost immediately after finishing the Pygmalion script, [Shaw] had started on one of Saint Joan. 'I had to make the scenario for that,' he told Theresa Helburn; 'for nobody could cut the dialogue and write the new scenes except myself.' It took him a fortnight and at the end of November 1934 he handed it to the Viennese actress Elizabeth Bergner who had created the role of Joan ten years earlier in Max Reinhardt's Berlin production. Bergner had recently married the Hungarian producer-director Paul Czinner who planned to form a syndicate including Twentieth Century-Fox and produce a film of Saint Joan starring his wife" (Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 1991, iii, pp.380-1).

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