Back to Methuselah

Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch) is a 1921 series of five plays and a preface by George Bernard Shaw.

The five plays are:

• In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 (In the Garden of Eden)
• The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day
• The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170
• Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000
• As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D. 31,920

The plays were published with a preface titled The Infidel Half Century, and first performed in 1922 by the New York Theatre Guild at the old Garrick Theatre in New York and was revived in 1958 at the Ambassador Theatre.

Plot

The plays concern themselves with immortality. Adam and Eve lose immortality in the first play, in the second the Brothers Barnabas decide to live for more than 200 years, in the third everybody begins to live much longer. In Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman we see an ordinary mortal meeting the immortals in Ireland, where a group of venal politicians have come to seek advice from an oracle, and in As Far as Thought Can Reach life gives up the material plane altogether.

Though out of fashion now (Franco Moretti described the series as "perhaps the biggest piece of trash in universal literature" and Terry Eagleton agrees with him), the plays described by Michael Holroyd as "a masterpiece of wishful thinking" represents Shaw's only real engagement with science fiction. But, in fact, one of Shaw's last plays, Farfetched Fables Fables (1950) is also an "engagement with science fiction." According to Louis Crompton in Shaw the Dramatist (pp. 252-3):

"The most extensive scholarly treatment of Back to Methuselah is H. M. Geduld's six-volume variorum edition of the play submitted as a doctoral thesis at Birkbeck College, University of London (1961). This thesis, which runs to fourteen hundred pages, includes a discussion of the intellectual and literary background, a collation of some forty editions of the text, annotations to the five parts, preface and postscript, and an account of the theatrical history of the play."

Copies of this variorum edition are available in the Goldsmiths Library in the University of London, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and in the Rare Books Collection of the University of Texas at Austin. A paraphrase of the following quote from Back to Methuselah is frequently misattributed to Robert F. Kennedy, even though Kennedy stated that he was quoting Shaw:

You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"

External links

• Back to Methuselah at Internet Broadway Database

• Link to Text at Project Gutenberg[1]