Notes on The Apple Cart

Plot
                   
The Apple Cart (1929) is George Bernard Shaw’s work of political satire. In the first act, two
of the King’s secretaries introduce the general setup of the play. This is followed by a long
conversation between Magnus, the King of England, and the Labour leader Mr. Boanerges,
who is the newest member of the cabinet. This leads up to a stormy meeting of the King with
the Prime Minister Proteus and the cabinet, during which the Prime Minister gives the King
an ultimatum to remain King without any real power, not even the veto, or else the cabinet
will resign. The ultimatum contains three conditions:
1.The king should not make any speeches to the public.
2.The king should not talk about the veto power anymore.
3.The king should not give any articles to the newspaper or run the paper from the palace.
Act II of the play introduces the American Ambassador, Mr. Vanhattan, who brings a
proposal for the United States to join the British Commonwealth in return for writing off the
debt owed to it by the British. The Commonwealth would be governed by the US President,
with King Magnus as its emperor. The King is suspicious of the proposal and sees it as a trap
in which England will ultimately perish. The second half culminates in another stormy
cabinet meeting during which the king responds to the ultimatum. He declares his intent to
abdicate from the throne and form a political party to contest elections. The King’s decision
and the thought of the King’s rosy political prospects causes the Prime Minister to withdraw
the ultimatum. The play ends inconclusively, but the political crisis between the King and the
cabinet seems to be resolved for the time being. The title of the play is symbolic in the sense
that the King outwits the Prime Minister and the cabinet and he upsets the apple cart by
foiling their plan to reduce the monarch to a rubber stamp.

Character Descriptions

King Magnus:

The king is a wise man and he is well known for his tact. He is a seasoned politician. His wit
and ability to charm helps him establish a rapport with the hostile Boanereges. The king is the
most prominent character who has the upper hand throughout the play. He has reasonable
foresight and has a deep insight in matters of the state. For him, a king can never be reduced
to a rubber stamp. He is determined to assert himself and exercise the political powers at his
disposal. He believes that the royal veto is essential to guard the public against corrupt
legislation. He is conscious of the limitations of his powers and finds himself the scapegoat
occasionally, but he knows that his position, despite everything, is still secure. He has love
for his nation and an ability to deal with political crises astutely. He is also a persuasive
orator. The king skilfully turned the entire situation in his favour and convinced the cabinet
that he is a force to be reckoned with. His diplomatic skills are also on display in his
interaction with the US Ambassador.

Prime Minister Proteus:

Proteus is temperamental and aggressive in his attitude towards the King. He is not able to
command much respect from the cabinet or control their frivolous behaviour. He is portrayed
as ambitious and power hungry, which is why he is threatened by the perceived
encroachment on his powers by the King. He often resorts to disparaging articles in the
newspaper against the king. He is also shrewd and knows how to manipulate, particularly
evident in his tactic to secure a private audience with the king. He is somewhat susceptible to
the king’s flattery, just like others around him. When he realises he has been outsmarted by
the king, he becomes hysterical, which isn’t unusual for him. He has difficulty in dealing with
the fact that the king has prevailed upon him and succeeded in preserving status quo.

Boanerges:

Boanerges supports democracy publicly only "to maintain the system which has kept [him] in
power". Privately, he thinks it is a sham. Boanerges has all the markings of a strong leader,
but he is too new to make a significant impact on Cabinet proceedings. The King recognises
his political prowess and declares sincerely "no common man could have risen as you have
done" Boanerges has earned his position by merit. He may have been born in the street but he
is just as capable politically as any other.

Critical Analysis
Post- World War I the British public began to look for strong leaders who promised to save
them from the evils of capitalism and the passivity of democratic regimes. But Shaw felt that
at such a time, more support was needed for the Government and not less. The struggle in the
Apple Cart is not between a royalist king and a democratic prime minister (neither
characterization is accurate), but between them both as national leaders and "plutocracy"-
between, that is, efficient and responsible government and a capitalism run rampant. At stake
was survival of England as an independent and healthy nation. England was threatened by
capitalist forces on two fronts: domestically, by a shaky economy and by Breakages, Limited,
a gigantic industrial corporation dedicated to waste and planned obsolescence, which "has
bought and swallowed democracy" and held all Britain - ministers, the media, commerce, and
industry - "helpless in [its] grip; and internationally, by the looming presence of the United
States, bent on an imperialistic venture to seize the Commonwealth under the pretense of a
benign desire for reunification. The democratically constituted Cabinet, however, emblematic
of Parliament as a whole, is irresponsibly blind to the impending dangers. Instead of uniting
with the king in a joint effort to preserve England's integrity, the one strategy that stands a
chance of decelerating "the run- away car of capitalism" before it is too late, the foolish
ministers try to strip Magnus of any effective power he might wield in the nation's defense by
compelling him to accept an ultimatum prohibiting his active participation in government
matters. With little or no help from a "bungling and squabbling" cadre of ministers, Magnus
has resolved one "crisis" after another, protecting the people as much as possible from
"corrupt legislation" and "the political encroachments of big business" during three years of
Labour Government ineptitude. Yet his obstructionist Cabinet, concerned more with
prerogatives than with remedies, insists on reducing the country's only hope for salvation to a
"complete nullity" or an "indiarubber stamp”. Magnus prevails precisely because Proteus
recognizes that should the adroit, very popular king carry out his threat of contesting
elections, he would "rally the anti-democratic royalist vote against him" and eventually
undermine his own position as prime minister. Magnus, however, harbors no ambition to rule
England as a tyrant, nor does he wish to be an "Emperor". He knows that "the day of absolute
monarchies is past," and that he cannot govern effectively without a Cabinet. Indeed, if
necessary, he will abdicate "to save the [constitutional] monarchy, not to destroy it". Here
Magnus is of the view that dictatorships, whatever their label, are inherently undesirable
forms of government because "in the long run . . . you must have your parliaments and settled
constitutions back again". The king also understands that "modern government is not a one
man job; it is too big for that".
Not democracy, plutocracy, or autocracy- Shaw prefers aristocracy, or as he puts it
"government by the best qualified". "Government," he says, "demands ability to govern", but
nature does not distribute the appropriate skills in equal proportions. Some are, necessarily,
better able than others to legislate wisely and justly. Only such individuals should hold
elective office. Shaw is not extolling the virtues of the modern aristocracy. On this point
Magnus is explicit: "I do not want the old governing class back. It governed so selfishly that
the people would have perished if democracy had not swept it out of politics". It is not the
aristocrat as "robber baron" that Shaw desires but, as Eric Bentley ob- serves, the aristocrat as
"gentleman." “A real gentleman," who "is not supposed to sell himself to the highest bidder:
he asks his country for sufficient provision and a dignified position in return for the best work
he can do for it. On stage, the gentleman-aristocrat comes alive in Magnus. Combining
probity and ability in the furtherance of the common good, Magnus is the ideal ruler. The
Apple Cart does not call for an end to participatory democracy and the resuscitation of
absolute monarchy. To be sure, government must be representative and consensual, with the
governing and governed alike adhering to the aristocratic ethic. But for Shaw, government
could never be literally by the people.
Magnus also argues in his State of the Kingdom message that, unlike himself, the Cabinet is
"dangerously subject" to the "tyranny of popular ignorance and popular poverty". He offers
two specific reasons for his allegation: the ministers have failed "to take control of the
schools," which foster a mentality opposed to progressive socialist reform, and the ministers
are dependent on a servile capitalist press, which can mobilize the miseducated citizenry.
Magnus asserts that his ministers cannot act autonomously in Parliament primarily because of
their failure to revamp a corrupt educational system that perpetuates "superstitions and
prejudices that stand like stone walls across every forward path". Administered by capitalists,
with strong vested interests in maintaining the status quo, schools at every level did not -
understandably - teach students "such vital truths about their duty to their country as that they
should despise and pursue as criminals all able-bodied adults who do not pull their weight in
the social boat" The press was free to undo the serious damage wrought by his country's
educational process. However, here too, the influence of rich capitalists was everywhere.
Unfortunately, "the Press was not free. In fact, it was little more than a propaganda tool of the
wealthy, who either owned the newspapers or advertised in them, since "editors and
journalists who express[ed] opinions in print that [were] opposed to the interests of the rich
[were] dismissed and replaced by subservient ones". Magnus reminds his ministers that they
are not free agents in the political realm because they "are held in leash by the Press, which
can organize against you the ignorance and superstition, the timidity and credulity, the
gullibility and prudery, the hating and hunting instinct of the voting mob, and cast you down
from power if you utter a word to alarm or displease the adventurers [i.e., capitalists] who
have the Press in their pockets. One of the few ministers with a semblance of integrity in
Magnus's Cabinet dreads the most, Lysistrata, Minister of Power Supplies, is well aware of
the grievous disservice Breakages, Limited, is rendering the nation. Still, she is afraid to
speak out lest the giant industrial corporation, "with its millions and its newspapers and its
fingers in every pie", marshal its awesome forces against her. Blowing the whistle on so
formidable and ruthless an opponent would achieve nothing save the certainty that she would
ultimately "be hounded out of public life". As Lysistrata foresees, in the inevitable
counterattack that would quickly follow, Breakages would use its newspapers to smear her
personally, professionally, and on the basis of her gender. In the end, she would succumb to
the pressure and resign. This would mean the loss of a dedicated public servant when
England could least afford it. For Breakages, it would mean the return to business as usual,
with impunity. Such is the poisoned power of capitalists and their obsequious press, as Shaw
envisioned it.
The brief debate in Act I between Magnus and the Cabinet over England's economic
condition discusses the harmful effects of "becoming] a parasite on foreign labor". Despite
the prevalence of high wages, which the Cabinet members interpret as incontrovertible
evidence of the nation's health, Magnus informs them that this seeming prosperity is illusory.
Because Britain relies so heavily for her survival on the "tribute" paid by poor countries
whose cheap labor has been exploited shamefully, unaristocratically, by huge amounts of
exported English capital, the domestic economy is actually so unstable that it could crash at
any time. It is overly dependent on external circumstances that could change drastically
without warning. What worries Magnus exceedingly is "revolution," not a revolution in
England, as his ministers misinterpret his meaning, but a revolution in "those countries”. The
Cabinet, however, is oblivious to the peril. In the ministers' superficial view, everything is
rosy. Magnus's Cabinet refuses to acknowledge the identical problem, nor do the ministers
appear especially concerned when the issue of England's overreliance on foreign countries in
which she has made substantial capital investments reemerges in the person of the American
ambassador, who comes calling with a thinly veiled plan to annex the British Empire. Should
England resist, Vanhattan tells Magnus, the United States would "be obliged to boycott you.
The two thousand million dollars a year would stop", implying that England could not
survive as an independent nation under such conditions. The nation that had once colonized
much of the globe and enjoyed unparalleled good fortune is herself in imminent danger of
being colonized and reduced to ignominious dependence by one of her former colonies.
Future events are testament to the fact that the majesty of England was to be eclipsed, in large
part, by the emergence of the United States as a world leader.
Despite Magnus's brilliant political coup, the play ends with the fate of England still very
much in doubt, for the economy has not been shored up, Breakages, Limited, has not been
contained, and the United States has not been dissuaded from pursuing its acquisitive
intentions. Far from being a regrettable lapse on the dramatist's part, this inconclusiveness is
deliberate: it throws into light the Cabinet's complete inability to rise above selfish concerns
and to act aristocratically in the best interests of a nation at risk.