The debut performance of Shaw's Arms and the Man (on April 21st, 1894) was a staggering success. Indeed, Shaw took a curtain call. As the cheers subsided and the playwright prepared to speak, however, he was interrupted by a solitary hiss from the gallery.
Shaw, raising a hand to silence the crowd, bowed deeply in the heckler's direction. "I quite agree with you, sir," he declared, "but what can two do against so many?"
[The heckler, the literary agent R. Goulding Bright, had mistaken Shaw's satire on florid Balkan soldiers for a veiled attack on the British army. Had James Joyce been in the audience, however, he too might have hissed. "Shaw's works," he once declared, "make me admire the magnificent tolerance and broadmindedness of the English."]
Sources
Ervine, Bernard Shaw
