FIFTY-SIX PLUS FIFTY-SIX EQUAL ONE HUNDRED TWELVE
(Page Four)


               
In the eleven years between Holmes’s retirement and the beginning of the World War, Watson completed his transcription of all the adventures making up The Return of Sherlock Holmes as well as the six which were to go into His Last Bow. He also wrote twenty-two Shavian plays and, with some help from Doyle, the longer adventure The Valley of Fear. In 1914, his literary activities were suspended due to his return to military service, but he was mustered out in 1916, and his output of theatrical works resumed in that year. He wrote no dramas in the five years from 1924 through 1928 but concentrated on the nine adventures he then contributed to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. He resumed the writing of plays in 1929.
            Of all the Shavian plays, it was in his Pygmalion, later to be made into the musical My Fair Lady, that Watson drew most freely from his Baker Street recollections. His Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering are but slightly rearranged portraits of Sherlock Holmes and himself, and Mrs. Pierce could easily pass for Mrs. Hudson. Perhaps his most striking use of Canonical material was having Higgins deduce, on first meeting Pickering, that the colonel had recently come from India.

All in all, Watson wrote fifty-six theatrical works and fifty-six eyewitness accounts of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures. His output thus is perfectly balanced between his two areas of creativity. His total of one hundred twelve highly successful literary works represents a major landmark in the history of world literature.

            By way of postscript, I might remark that the feminists have yet to latch onto William Shakespeare. It is always possible that somebody someday will prove that Shakespeare’s works were really written by Mary, Queen of Scots or even Queen Elizabeth I. In such an event, I am prepared to show that all of Shaw was written by Queen Victoria, who did not die as supposed in 1901, but is this very day alive and well and keeping bees upon the South Downs.

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