Pygmalion and Three Other Plays Read online

  Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

  George Bernard Shaw

  John A. Bertolini

  Pygmalion and Three Other Plays, by George Bernard Shaw, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

  All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest.Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences — biographical, historical, and literary — to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

  Hailed as “a Tolstoy with jokes” by one critic, George Bernard Shaw was the most significant British playwright since the seventeenth century. Pygmalion persists as his best-loved play, one made into both a classic film — which won Shaw an Academy Award for best screenplay — and the perennially popular musical My Fair Lady.

  Pygmalion follows the adventures of phonetics professor Henry Higgins as he attempts to transform cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a refined lady. The scene in which Eliza appears in high society with the correct accent but no notion of polite conversation is considered one of the funniest in English drama. Like most of Shaw’s work, Pygmalion wins over audiences with wit, a taut morality, and an innate understanding of human relationships.

  This volume also includes Major Barbara, which attacks both capitalism and charitable organizations,The Doctor’s Dilemma, a keen-eyed examination of medical morals and malpractice, and Heartbreak House, which exposes the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for the bloodshed of World War I.

  John A. Bertolini is Ellis Professor of the Liberal Arts at Middlebury College, where he teaches dramatic literature, Shakespeare, and film. He has written The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw and articles on Hitchcock, and British and American dramatists. Bertolini also wrote the introduction and notes to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Shaw’s Man and Superman and Three Other Plays.

  FROM THE PAGES OF PYGMALION AND THREE OTHER PLAYS

  I am, and have always been, and shall now always be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or malexperienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.

  (from Shaw’s preface to Major Barbara, pages 43 — 44)

  “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”

  (from Major Barbara, page 127)

  “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.”

  (from Major Barbara, page 132)

  If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.

  (from Shaw’s preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, page 166)

  “I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything.”

  (from Pygmalion, page 394)

  “The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”

  (from Pygmalion, pages 451 -452)

  “The surest way to ruin a man who doesn’t know how to handle money is to give him some.”

  (from Heartbreak House, page 568)

  “His heart is breaking: that is all. It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

  (from Heartbreak House, page 596)

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  Dramatist, critic, and social reformer George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, into a poor yet genteel Dublin household. His diffident and impractical father was an alcoholic disdained by his mother, a professional singer who ingrained in her only son a love of music, art, and literature. Just shy of his seventeenth birthday, Shaw joined his mother and two sisters in London, where they had settled three years earlier.

  There he struggled — and failed — to support himself by writing. He first wrote a string of novels, beginning with the semi autobiographical Immaturity, completed in 1879. Though some of his novels were serialized, none met with great success, and Shaw decided to abandon the form in favor of drama. While he struggled artistically, he flourished politically; for some years his greater fame was as a political activist and pamphleteer. A stammering, shy young man, Shaw nevertheless joined in the radical politics of his day. In the late 1880s he became a leading member of the fledgling Fabian Society, a group dedicated to progressive politics, and authored numerous pamphlets on a range of social and political issues. He often mounted a soapbox in Hyde Park and there developed the enthralling oratory style that pervades his dramatic writing.

  In the 1890s, deeply influenced by the dramatic writings of Henrik Ibsen, Shaw spurned the conventions of the stage in “unpleasant” plays, such as Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and in “pleasant” ones like Arms and the Man and Candida. His drama shifted attention from romantic travails to the great web of society, with its hypocrisies and other ills. The burden of writing seriously strained Shaw’s health; he suffered from chronic migraine headaches. Shaw married fellow Fabian and Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend.

  By the turn of the century, Shaw had matured as a dramatist with the historical drama Caesar and Cleopatra, and his master-pieces Man and Superman and Major Barbara. In all, he wrote more than fifty plays, including his antiwar Heartbreak House and the polemical Saint Joan, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Equally prolific in his writings about music and theater, Shaw was so popular that he signed his critical pieces with simply the initials GBS. (He disliked his first name, George, and never used it except for the initial.) He remained in the public eye throughout his final years, writing controversial plays until his death. George Bernard Shaw died at his country home on November 2, 1950.

  THE WORLD OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW AND HIS PLAYS

  1856 — George Bernard Shaw is born on July 26, at 33 Upper Synge Street in Dublin, to George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw.

  1865 — George John Vandeleur Lee, Mrs. Shaw’s singing instructor, moves into the Shaw household. Known as Vandeleur Lee, he has a reputation as an unscrupulous character.

  1869 — Embarrassed by controversy and gossip related to his mother’s relationship with Vandeleur Lee, young “Sonny,” as Shaw was called by his family, leaves school.

  1871 — He begins work in a Dublin land agent’s office.

  1873 — Shaw’s mother, now a professional singer, follows Vandeleur Lee to London, where they establish a household that includes Shaw’s sisters, Elinor Agnes and Lucille Frances (Lucy). Shaw’s mother tries to earn a living per forming and teaching Vandeleur Lee’s singing method.

  1876 — Elinor Agnes dies on March 27. Shaw joins his mother, his sister Lucy, and Vandeleur Lee in London. Although he tries to support himself as a writer, for the next five years Shaw remains financially dependent on his mother.

  1877 — Shaw ghostwrites music reviews
that appear under Vandeleur Lee’s byline in his column for the Hornet, a London newspaper. This first professional writing “job” lasts until the editor discovers the subterfuge.

  1879 — Shaw completes and serializes his first novel, Immaturity. He works for the Edison Telephone Company and later will record his experience in his second novel, The Irrational Knot. Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House premieres.

  1880 — Shaw completes The Irrational Knot.

  1881 — He becomes a vegetarian in the hope that the change in his diet will relieve his migraine headaches. He completes Love Among Artists. The Irrational Knot is serialized in Our Corner, a monthly periodical.

  1882 — Shaw hears Henry George’s lecture on land nationalization, which inspires some of his socialist ideas. He attends meetings of the Social Democratic Federation and is introduced to the works of Karl Marx.

  1883 — The Fabian Society — a middle-class socialist debating group advocating progressive, nonviolent reform rather than the revolution supported by the Social Democratic Federation — is founded in London. Shaw completes the novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, drawing on his experience as an amateur boxer. He writes his final novel, An Unsocial Socialist.

  1884 — Shaw joins the fledgling Fabian Society; he contributes to many of its pamphlets, including The Fabian Manifesto (1884), The Impossibilities of Anarchism (1893), and Socialism for Millionaires (1901), and begins speaking publicly around London on social and political issues. An Unsocial Socialist is serialized in the periodical Today.

  1885 — The author’s father, a longtime alcoholic, dies; neither his estranged wife nor his children attend his funeral. Shaw himself never drinks or smokes. He begins writing criticism of music, art, and literature for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Dramatic Review, and Our Corner. Cashel Byron’s Profession is serialized in the periodical Today.

  1886 — Shaw begins writing art and music criticism for the World. Cashel Byron’s Profession is published.

  1887 — Swedish dramatist and writer August Strindberg’s play The Father is performed. The Social Democratic Federation’s planned march on Trafalgar Square ends in bloodshed as police suppress the protesters; Shaw is a speaker at the event. His novel An Unsocial Socialist is published in book form.

  1888 — Shaw begins writing music criticism in the Star under the pen name Corno di Bassetto (“basset horn,” perhaps a reference to the pitch of his voice).

  1889 — He edits the volume Fabian Essays in Socialism, to which he contributes “The Economic Basis of Socialism” and “The Transition to Social Democracy.”

  1890 — Ibsen completes Hedda Gabler.

  1891 — Ibsen’s Ghosts is performed in London. Shaw publishes The Quintessence of Ibsenism, a polemical pamphlet that celebrates Ibsen as a rebel for leftist causes.

  1892 — Sidney Webb, a founder and close associate of Shaw, is elected to the London City Council along with five other Fabian Society members. Widowers’ Houses, Shaw’s first “unpleasant” play, is performed on the London stage.

  1893 — Shaw writes The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren’s Profession, his two other “unpleasant” plays. The latter is refused a license by the royal censor because its subject is prostitution; as a result, the play is not performed until 1902. Widowers’ Houses is published.

  1894 — Seeking a wider audience, Shaw begins a series of “pleas ant” plays with Arms and the Man, produced this year, and Candida, a successful play about marriage greatly influenced by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

  1895 — Shaw writes another “pleasant” play, The Man of Destiny, a one-act about Napoleon, and drama criticism for the Saturday Review.

  1896 — Shaw completes the fourth “pleasant” play, You Never Can Tell. He meets Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Irish heiress and fellow Fabian. The Nobel Prizes are established for physics, medicine, chemistry, peace, and literature.

  1897 — Candida is produced. The Devil’s Disciple, a drama set during the American Revolution, is successfully staged in New York. Shaw is elected as councilor for the borough of St. Pancras, London; he will serve in this position until 1903.

  1898 — Shaw writes Caesar and Cleopatra and publishes Mrs. Warren’s Profession and The Perfect Wagnerite. His first anthology of plays, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, is published. He falls ill and, believing his illness fatal, marries his friend and nurse Charlotte Payne-Townshend; his wife’s fortune makes Shaw wealthy.

  1899 — You Never Can Tell premieres. Shaw writes Captain Brass bound’s Conversion.

  1900 — The Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Federation join forces to form the Labour Representation Party, which is politically allied to the trade union movement. The party wins two seats in the House of Commons. Captain Brasshound’s Conversion is produced. Three Plays for Puritans collects The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.

  1901 — Strindberg’s Dance of Death is completed. The Social Revolutionary Party, instrumental in the Bolshevik Revolution, is formed in Russia. Shaw writes about the eternal obstacles in male-female relations in his epic Man and Superman, which he subtitles “A Comedy and a Philosophy.” He also publishes The Devil’s Disciple and sees Caesar and Cleopatra produced for the first time.

  1902 — A private production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession is staged at the New Lyric Theatre in London.

  1903 — Shaw publishes Man and Superman. The Admirable Bashville is produced.

  1904 — John Bull’s Other Island premieres in London.

  1905 — Shaw writes the play Major Barbara, through which he at tempts to communicate many of his moral and economic theories, including the need for a more fair distribution of wealth. It is produced this year, as is Man and Superman. In New York City, Mrs. Warren’s Profession is publicly staged for the first time. Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis is published posthumously. The Sinn Fein party, dedicated to Irish in dependence, is founded in Dublin.

  1906 — The Labour Representation Party wins twenty-nine seats and shortens its name to the Labour Party. Henrik Ibsen dies. Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, a satire on the medical profession, is produced.

  1909 — Shaw writes The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet and the one act farce Press Cuttings, both banned by the royal censor.

  1910 — Shaw writes Misalliance, which he compares to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

  1912 — He publishes Misalliance, and his satire Androcles and the Lion is staged for the first time.

  1913 — A German language version of Pygmalion, another satire Shaw wrote in 1912, premieres in Vienna.

  1914 — With World War I imminent, Shaw publishes a polemical antiwar tract, Common Sense About the War, which provokes a popular backlash and public denouncement. Pygmalion is produced for the first time in English.

  1917 — Dejected over the war, Shaw writes Heartbreak House.

  1919 — Heartbreak House is published in New-York.

  1920 — The canonization of Joan of Arc gives Shaw the idea for a new play. Heartbreak House is produced in New York.

  1921 — Shaw publishes five linked plays begun during the war under the title Back to Methuselah, a dramatic work that begins in the Garden of Eden and ends in the year A.D. 31,920.

  1923 — Shaw writes Saint Joan, which is produced and hailed as a masterpiece.

  1924 — Saint Joan is published.

  1925 — Shaw is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for Saint Joan. He donates the prize money to fund an English translation of the works of August Strindberg.

  1928 — Shaw publishes his nonfiction The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism and writes The Apple Cart, a dramatic comedy set in the future.

  1929 — The Apple Cart is produced.

  1931 — Shaw visits Russia, where he meets Josef Stalin and Maxim Gorky. He completes the play Too True to Be Good, which explores how war can undermine established morals.

  1932 — Too True to Be Good is sta
ged for the first time.

  1933 — An international celebrity, Shaw makes his first trip to America. On the Rocks and Village Wooing are produced.

  1934 — Shaw writes the plays The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, The Six of Calais, and the first draft of The Millionairess during a cruise to New Zealand. Simpleton is produced this year.

  1938 — Geneva, a play that imagines a successful League of Nations, premieres.

  1939 — Shaw writes Good King Charles’s Golden Days, which is produced this year. He wins an Academy Award for the screenplay for Pygmalion, over which he exercised tight control.

  1943 — His wife, Charlotte, dies after a long illness.

  1947 — Shaw completes the play The Buoyant Billions.

  1948 — The Buoyant Billions is produced in Zurich.

  1949 — Shaw’s puppet play, Shakes Versus Shav, is produced.

  1950 — George Bernard Shaw dies on November 2 from complications related to a fall from a ladder. He bequeaths funds for a competition to create a new English alphabet based on phonetics rather than Roman letters. The competition, won in 1958 by Kingsley Read, results in the Shavian alphabet.