Endnotes
1
1 (p. 5) they conclude that I am echoing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy: Shaw is naming several controversial figures of his time: German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 — 1860) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900); Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828 — 1906); Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg (1849 — 19 12); and Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910).
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2 (p. 6) though I already knew all about Alnaschar and Don Quixote and Simon Tappertit and many another romantic hero mocked by reality: Shaw lists three fictional romantic heroes: In “The Barber’s Fifth Brother,” a tale from The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Alnaschar is a dreamer who invests in glassware in a scheme to become rich and marry the vizier’s daughter, but then shatters the glass in a rage against his imaginary wife; Don Quixote is the idealistic romantic hero of the satirical romance of that name by Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1 616); Simon Tappertit, in Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), is a locksmith’s apprentice given to ambitious and romantic delusions.
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3 (p. 10) Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, is the victim in England of a single much quoted sentence containing the phrase “big blonde beast”: The phrase, from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals (1887; First Essay, section 11), refers to the noble animal element that reemerges from time to time in heroic peoples. “Blonde,” according to Nietzsche’s translator, Walter Kaufmann, refers not to the Teutonic races but to a lion’s mane.
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4 (p. 15) His [Undershaft‘s] conduct stands the Kantian test: The reference is to the categorical imperative — universal rule of ethical conduct — of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (17 24-1804): Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become a universal law.
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5 (p. 20) I am met with nothing but vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche, and am only too thankful that they are not about Alfred de Musset and Georges Sand: Shaw uses French writers (and lovers) Alfred de Musset (1810 — 1857) and George Sand (1804)-1876; pen name of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dude vant) as representatives of outmoded Romantic thought.
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6 (p. 26) a flag with Blood and Fire on it is unfurled, not in murderous rancor, but because fire is beautiful and blood a vital and splendid red: The Salvation Army motto, which appears on its flag, is “Blood and Fire.” Shaw explains here that the Blood and Fire are not literal but rather figurative of the beauty and energy of life and joy; like the English artist and poet William Blake (1757-1827), Shaw appreciated the power and exuberance of vital energy.
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7 (p. 28) like Frederick’s grenadier, the Salvationist wants to live for ever: During the SevenYears War ( 1756 — 1763), in his failed attack on Kolin (June 18, 1757), King Frederick II of Prussia (known as Frederick the Great) is said to have turned to his hesitant soldiers and urged them on with the taunt, “You scoundrels! Do you want to live forever?”
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8 (p. 38) he launches his sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but ... slaying twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine.... Had he blown all Madrid to atoms, ... not one could have escaped the charge of being an accessory, ... themselves also: Unfortunately, Shaw here seems to sympathize with Morral’s terrorist act (see note on page 37); at the least, he refuses to judge it as something worse than stupidity: The deaths of twenty-three innocent people and the injuring of ninety-nine others provoke him only to note that as participants in a repressive and exploitative capitalist society, they along with everyone else were guilty of allowing that society to continue its evil. It is an abhorrent view. And if it does not sound strange to our ears, that is because we heard this explanation of terrorism often enough after the terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
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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.
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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.
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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: Francois 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.
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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.
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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.
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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) .
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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.
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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).
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17 (p. 60) Adolphus Cusins: Shaw based the character of Cusins in part on his friend Gilbert Murray (1866 — 1957), a n
oted 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Pygmalion and Three Other Plays Page 68
