MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION


by George Bernard Shaw


1894


With The Author's Apology (1902)




THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY


Mrs Warren's Profession has been performed at last, after a delay of
only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the triumphant
amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of the London
theatre critics clean out of the practice of their profession. No
author who has ever known the exultation of sending the Press into an
hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic
confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of
distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life
of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the
stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama
elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who rushed from my play
to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked. What a
triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist to