Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by George Bernard Shaw

  9 (p. 38) Bonapart’s pounding of the Paris mob to pieces in 1795, called in playful approval by our respectable classes “the whiff of grapeshot”: “The Whiff of Grapeshot” is the title of chapter 7 in Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 work The French Revolution (book 3, part 7). In the chapter Carlyle recounts how Napoleon fired with cannons upon a crowd of insurrectionists, killing 200 of them; he asserts that this action marked the end of the French Revolution.

  10 (p. 39) who can doubt that all over the world proletarians of the ducal kidney are now revelling in “the whiff of dynamite”: Shaw’s analogy creates a false moral equivalence between a crowd using violence to seize power and in turn being met with violence to a crowd witnessing a wedding and being blown up.

  11 (p. 39) we are a civilized and merciful people, and, however much we may regret it, must not treat him as Ravaillac and Damiens: François Ravaillac (1578—1610) assassinated King Henry IV of France (Henry of Navarre); Robert-Francis Damiens (1715-1757) attempted to assassinate King Louis XV of France. Both men were tortured and executed.

  12 (p. 40) Think of him setting out to find a gentleman and a Christian in the multitude of human wolves howling for his blood: The outcry against Morral and Nakens (see note on page 40) must have been extraordinary for Shaw to display anger as he does here. One hopes that Shaw’s appellation (howling wolves) was not meant to apply to the families of the twenty-three people killed by Morral, who might justifiably speak against Nakens for harboring a terrorist.

  13 (p. 45) It would be far more sensible to put up with their vices ... until they give more trouble than they are worth, at which point we should ... place them in the lethal chamber: Shaw was a man of ideas: Many were good; several were bad. The idea of executing incorrigible lawbreakers is an example of the latter. Shaw believed that execution should be reserved only for those criminals who are not capable of reform; he considered that system of dealing with crime to be morally superior for three reasons: He saw punishment of any kind as morally reprehensible and repugnant; he considered capital punishment to be murder and revenge dressed in solemn ritual; and he believed that capital punishment degrades the souls of the executors. Furthermore, he felt repeat offenders should be executed in a nonpunitive way rather than imprisoned because imprisonment is extraordinarily cruel punishment and therefore morally indefensible.

  14 (p. 49) Lady Britomart: Lady Britomart is named after Ed mund Spenser’s knight-heroine in book 3 of The Faerie Queene (1590) to indicate her formidable strength of character. The name also suggests a range of meanings and associations: British, Mars (god of war in classical mythology), and markets (capitalism) .

  15 (p. 54) “Do you think Bismarck or Gladstone or Disraeli could have openly defied every social and moral obligation all their lives as your father has?”: Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), known as the Iron Chancellor, was the first chancellor of Germany; rivals William Gladstone (1809-1898) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) were successive prime ministers of Britain.

  16 (p.57) “history tells us of only two successful institutions: one the Undershaft firm, and the other the Roman Empire under the Antonines”: Antonines is the collective name of the second-century Roman emperors Antoninus Pius and his sons, who succeeded him. Undershaft has borrowed this opinion about the age of the Antonines from English historian Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788).

  17 (p. 60) Adolphus Cusins: Shaw based the character of Cusins in part on his friend Gilbert Murray (1866—1957), a noted scholar of the religion and literature of ancient Greece. Murray’s translations of Euripides (later much criticized by T. S. Eliot for wordiness) were performed alongside Shaw’s plays at the Court Theatre in the first decade of the twentieth century.

  18 (p. 63) “pukinon domon elthein” [transliterated from the Greek]: The phrase, which means “to enter the thick (compact) house,” is adapted from a passage about the theft of a helmet by Autolycus (son of the messenger god Mercury, in Greek mythology) in book 10 of the Iliad, the epic poem about the siege of Troy attributed to the Greek poet Homer. Gilbert Murray (see note 17, above) furnished Shaw with this gag in a letter of October 7, 1905, by suggesting that the line could also mean that it was a bit thick of Autolycus to break into the house.

  19 (p. 78) “Romola”: Romola is the eponymous heroine of the 1863 novel by English novelist George Eliot. By his own admission, Shaw “almost venerated” Eliot in his youth; but he later came to regard her as too lacking in hope. By associating Snobby with the Chartists (see note on p. 77) and Rummy with George Eliot, Shaw is distinguishing himself from the previous generation of social reformers.

  20 (p. 82) striking her with his fist in the face: Though there are episodes of farcical violence in Shaw, this extended episode of realistic violence is unique. In spite of its realism, however, Bill Walker’s violence toward women has the literary model of Bill Sykes’s brutal treatment of Nancy in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1837-1838). The connection between the two Bills was made even more apparent when Robert Newton played both characters in the respective film versions: David Lean, who had been the film editor of Major Barbara in 1941, cast Newton as Bill Sykes in the Oliver Twist he directed in 1948.

  21 (p. 85) “coroner’s inquest on me daughter”: As the father of a daughter who has died, Peter Shirley foreshadows Under shaft in his later figurative loss of Barbara.

  22 (p. 96) “Dionysos”: In Greek mythology, Dionysus, the god of wine, is not one of the original Olympian gods and is consequently something of an outsider—a foundling god, one might say. The Greeks associated Dionysus with wine-drinking and ecstatic reveling, hence with the abandonment (or transcendence) of reason and rational restraint of the appetites. Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides’ The Bacchae, which depicts the seduction and destruction of the young ruler Pentheus by Dionysus, influenced the writing of Major Barbara, as did Shaw’s friendship and collegial relationship with Murray. Murray’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus was performed at the Court Theatre the same year Major Barbara was performed there.

  23 (p. 96) “One and another / In money and guns may outpass his brother; ... / But whoe’er can know ... / That to live is happy, has found his heaven”: Shaw has Cusins quote from Murray’s translation of The Bacchae, but he substitutes “money and guns” for Murray’s “gold and power.”

  24 (p. 97) “Is it so hard a thing to see ... / And shall not Barbara be loved for ever?”: Cusins continues to quote from The Bacchae, substituting “Fate” for “Hate” in Murray’s original and, as he goes on to indicate, “Barbara” in place of “loveliness.”

  25 (p. 106) “That will make the standard price to buy anybody who’s for sale. I’m not; and the Army’s not”: In a Wildean example of life imitating art, in 2002 a Florida chapter of the Salvation Army refused a large donation from an individual who had won the state lottery on the grounds that it would be hypocritical to accept the winnings because many of the Army’s clients had gambled away their families’ financial means of support.

  26 (p. 107) incidentally stealing the sovereign on his way out by picking up his cap from the drum: Snobby’s deft theft of Bill’s sovereign parallels Undershaft’s stealthy “removal” of Barbara’s ability to rely on the Salvation Army, which he is in the process of accomplishing underneath the surface of the action.

  27 (p. 114) the band strikes up the march, which rapidly becomes more distant as the procession moves briskly away: Shaw controls the mood and emotion of this moment through stagecraft. Having gradually crowded the scene from the beginning of the act to the climax here, he now swiftly removes almost everyone from the stage to enact the sense of Barbara’s feeling of abandonment and loss. Everyone (save Peter Shirley) and everything fades away from her, including the sound of the Salvation Army band, leaving her bewildered and desolate.

  28 (p. 114) “‘My ducats and my daughter’!”: Undershaft ironically quotes Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
on the subject of losing both his daughter and the money she stole from him while eloping with Lorenzo (act 2, scene 8). At this moment, Undershaft has “lost” his daughter by deliberately alienating her from her vocation as a Salvation Army savior of souls; and he has lost his money by donating a large sum to the Salvation Army.

  29 (p. 115) The mug smashes against the door and falls in fragments: Here Shaw creates in the action a realistic and striking analogue to the shattering of Barbara’s sense of self.

  30 (p. 116) “a Rowton doss”: This is a step up from a flophouse: A doss is a crude or makeshift bed; in the late nineteenth century, an organization chaired by English philanthropist Baron Rowton made good, inexpensive lodgings available to the poor.

  31 (p. 116) “Tell me about Tom Paine’s books and Bradlaush’s lectures”: American political philosopher Thomas Paine (1737- 1809) and English reformer Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) were radical left-wing thinkers; they appeal to Peter Shirley because of their antireligious (Paine) and unorthodox religious (Bradlaugh) views. Shaw implies that Barbara now needs to rethink how to channel her own deeply religious impulses.

  32 (p. 137) “Did you know that, Undershaft?”: Lomax’s presumptuously familiar form of address here is underlined by Undershaft’s pointedly formal address in his response: “Mr. Lomax.” Lomax’s carelessness with matches extends to his manners and, Shaw implies, to his intellectual exercises as well.

  33 (p. 138) “William Morris Labor Church”: William Morris (1834-1896), socialist and aestheticist, was one of Shaw’s heroes. That Morris has inspired the founding of a Labor church is a Shaw joke.

  34 (p. 144) UNDERSHAFT (enigmatically) “A will of which I am a part.”BARBARA (startled) “father! Do you know what you are saying; or are you laying a snare for my soul?”: Barbara’s response indicates that she interprets her father’s enigmatic statement to mean that God’s mysterious will drives the munitions works. But Shaw has made Undershaft’s self-explanation resemble closely that of Mephistopheles in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s nineteenth-century poetic drama Faust (part I): “I am a part of the part [Chaos] that originally was all there was.” Shaw thus preserves the ambiguity of Undershaft’s agency—that is, whether it is divine or devilish.

  THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA

  1 (p. 178) equipage (or autopage): Shaw here coins the latter term (referring to keeping an automobile) in imitation of the former, which means a horse-drawn carriage and the expenses and employees associated with keeping it.

  2 . (p. 181) every piano-tuner a Helmholtz, every Old Bailey barrister a Solon, every Seven Dials pigeon dealer a Darwin, ... every locomotive engine a miracle, and its driver no less wonderful than George Stephenson: Hermann L. F. von Helmholtz (1821-1894) was a renowned German physiologist and physicist; Old Bailey is London’s main criminal court building; Greek statesman Solon (c.600 B.C.), one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, was renowned as a wise lawgiver; Seven Dials, a meeting point of seven roads in London and a poor area in Victorian times, is an unglamorous locale; English inventor George Stephenson (1781-1848) invented the railway locomotive engine.

  3 (p. 208) Bluebeard: Bluebeard, the serial wife-killer of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale in Contes de ma mere l‘oye (Mother Goose Tales, 1697), is presumably based on the real-life figure of Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth-century homosexual pederast and serial killer of young boys. Shaw would use the historical character in his play Saint Joan (1923).

  4 (p. 226) I was reproached during the performances of The Doctor’s Dilemma at the Court Theatre in 1907: The Court Theatre is where many of Shaw’s plays were first performed between 1904 and 1907. These productions consolidated his reputation as an accomplished, provocative, entertaining modern playwright. This preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma was written after it had been rehearsed and performed at the Court Theatre. Shaw always advised readers to attend to his prefaces after they had seen or read the play.

  5 (p. 253) His combination of soft manners and responsive kindliness, with a certain unseizable reserve and a familiar yet foreign chiselling of feature, reveal the Jew: Although Shaw’s observations here of racial characteristics are without self-consciousness or prejudice, his calling attention to Doctor Schutzmacher’s racial identity was deemed too controversial when a film version of the play was made in 1958: The character was omitted in the adaptation.

  6 (p. 258) “What is it the old cardinal says in Browning’s play? ’I have known four and twenty leaders of revolt’ ”: The “old cardinal” is the papal legate Ogniben (Everygood in Italian), in English playwright Robert Browning’s A Soul’s Tragedy (1846); in the play, Ogniben cynically manipulates the protagonist, Chiappino, into demonstrating how unreal his political idealism is. Sir Patrick plays a somewhat analogous role in Ridgeon’s adventure of self-discovery. (Shaw had been a member of the Browning Society and knew Browning’s verse dramas well.)

  7 (p. 267) “Walpole! the absent-minded beggar”: The reference is to English writer Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The Absent-minded Beggar.” The accent in the delivery of B.B.’s line falls on “absent-minded”; “beggar” is used here figuratively to mean “fellow,” not an actual “beggar.”

  8 (p. 317) “I don’t believe in morality. I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw”: Michael Holroyd reports in his biography of Shaw (Bernard Shaw, vol. 2; see “For Further Reading”) that a blackmailer once tried to justify his criminal behavior by claiming he was a disciple of Shaw. Such a misuse of his works, Shaw felt, was due mainly to journalistic misrepresentations of his ideas.

  9 (p. 341) “I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; ... Amen”: Shaw indicated that Louis’s prayer derives from a story by German composer and writer Richard Wagner, “An End in Paris” (1841), in which the composer-protagonist professes a similar creed, but with “God, Mozart, and Beethoven” where Louis has his trinity of great artists.

  10 (p. 346) “I think it is Shakespear who says ... The readiness is all”: Shaw said that this hilarious mismatching and mangling of lines from Shakespeare’s plays was inspired by the duke’s fearful version of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (chapter 21). First, B.B. switches the order of “good” and “evil” in Marc Antony’s famous observation, “The evil that men do lives after them, / The good is oft interred with their bones” (Julius Caesar, act 3, scene 2). “If tis not today, twil be tomorrow” approximates Hamlet’s “If it be not now, yet it will come” (Hamlet, act 5, scene 2). “Tomorrow and tomorrow and to morrow” is from Macbeth’s despairing speech (Macbeth, act 5, scene 5). B.B. next comes close to Macbeth’s words about Duncan: “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well” (act 3, scene 2). “And like this insubstantial bourne ... wrack behind” combines Hamlet’s “from whose bourne no traveler returns” (act 3, scene 1) with Prospero’s “And like this insubstantial pageant faded / Leave not a rack [cloud] behind” (The Tempest, act 4, scene 1). “Out, out, brief candle” is Macbeth’s speech (act 5, scene 5). “Nothing canst thou to damnation add” is Othello to Iago (Othello, act 3, scene 3). Finally, B.B. returns to Hamlet’s same speech about Providence for “The readiness is all” (act 5, scene 5).

  PYGMALION

  1 (p. 361) Melville Bell: The reference is to American teacher of elocution Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905); inspired by his wife’s deafness, he invented “visible speech,” a system of written sounds, to help deaf-mutes communicate.

  2 (p. 367) St. Paul’s Church: In later editions Shaw specified, “Not Wren’s cathedral but Inigo Jones’ church.” Inigo Jones (1573-1652) and Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) were renowned English architects. Jones restored Saint Paul’s Church in 1634; Wren designed the new Saint Paul’s Cathedral after it was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

  3 (p. 369) “Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal,fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel‘s, flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin.Will ye-oo py me f ’them”: That is, “Oh, he
’s your son, is he? Well, if you’d done your duty by him as a mother should, he’d know better than to spoil a poor girl’s flowers and then run away without paying. Will you pay me for them?”

  4 (p. 374) “May I ask, sir, do you do this for your living at a music hall?”: The origin of this episode in the play can be found in a letter Shaw wrote to The Morning Leader (August 16, 1901) about his having been invited to the docks to explain elocution to the laborers. When Shaw instead explained to them the “phonetic alphabet,” they were amused and called him “a quick-change artist.” Also, though they recognized the difference between their pronunciation and that of educated people, “the nature of that difference—which they earnestly desired to remove—was a mystery to them.”

  5 (p. 381) On the walls, engravings; mostly Piranesis: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was an Italian architect and engraver; his Carceri (Prisons) engravings depict enormous and labyrinthine structures that, as geometric displays, appeal to Higgins’s scientific taste.

  6 (p. 397) “You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary ideas about me.... I cant account for it”: Higgins’s lack of self-knowledge in regard to his domineering nature is comparable to Lady Britomart’s similar disingenuousness in Major Barbara. Ultimately, though, Shaw’s comic motif of willful egotists who fail to recognize themselves as such probably derives from Sir Anthony Absolute (in Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals, 1775), who, in the midst of a passionate fury, asks his son Jack to be “cool” like his father.