7 (p. 399) “his native woodnotes wild”: English poet John Milton (1608-1674) refers thus to Shakespeare in his poem “L‘Allegro” (line 134) in order to distinguish his own art as sophisticated and premeditated from Shakespeare’s spontaneous products of the imagination. Shaw made a similar distinction between himself and Shakespeare, whom he considered to be the master of word music, but poor in ideas. By recalling Milton’s lines here Shaw makes Higgins, the figurative version of himself, a Miltonist; like Milton, Shaw was anxious about his own originality in comparison to Shakespeare. Milton and his creation Satan (in Paradise Lost) and Shaw and his creation Higgins all want to be the authors of themselves.
8 (p. 409) Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones; and her room ... is not crowded with furniture and little tables and nicknacks.... the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window curtains and brocade covers.... A few good oil-paintings ... (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler): English poet and artist William Morris (1834-1896), a friend of Shaw, introduced the idea of designing homes and furnishings according to aesthetic principles; he designed wallpaper, chintzes, and the like. Mrs. Higgins rejects Victorian horror vacui (“fear of empty spaces”) by not crowding her drawing room with “furniture and little tables and nicknacks”; in doing so, she proclaims her modernity. Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was a pre-Raphaelite painter and an associate of Morris; Mrs. Higgins’s embrace of Burne-Jones shows that her modernity stops short of Shaw’s contemporaries, for she has no paintings in the more modern manner of Whistler.
9 (p. 411) “My idea of a loveable woman is something as like you as possible”: Shaw refers to Higgins as having a “mother-fixation,” and as such he must be accounted as one of the earliest literary characters created from a consciousness of the Oedipus complex (a child’s sexual attraction to the parent of the opposite sex and jealousy of the parent of the same sex), a theory developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Shaw was familiar with Freud’s theories and wrote about them extensively to Gilbert Murray on March 14, 1911.
10 (p. 419) “bloody”: No one knows precisely why this particular adjective became taboo in British English, but it did. Its casual application seems to have been considered blasphemous or sacrilegious, or at least too vulgar for polite conversation. It was unheard on the British stage until Eliza uttered it in 1914; it provoked tidal waves of laughter, as much at the breaking of a taboo as at the enormity of Eliza’s social gaffe. Since there are no more verbal taboos on our stage, except politically incorrect ones, the original effect is not reproducible.
11 (p. 424) “Lionel Monckton”: This English composer (1861-1924) wrote the hit musical comedy The Arcadians, which ran in London from 1909 to 1911; Monckton’s most popular airs would have been familiar to Londoners like Higgins and Eliza.
12 (p. 428) La Fanciulla del Golden West: Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s great opera is actually titled La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the West, 1910); Shaw has conflated its title with that of its play-source, The Girl of the Golden West (1905), by American playwright David Belasco. The aria Higgins is “half-singing” is most likely “Ch’ ella mi creda libero e lontano” (Let her think that I am free and far away).
13 (p. 435) and finally goes down on her knees on the hearthrug to look for the ring: The hearthrug is in front of the fireplace where Higgins had flung the ring. By having Eliza search there among the ashes, Shaw is playing on the story of Cinderella. In later editions Shaw added that Eliza then puts the ring on the dessert stand, where she knows Higgins will find it because of his fondness for sweets.
14 (pp. 441-442) “it’s a choice between the Skilly of the workhouse and the Char Bydis of the middle class”: In Greek legend Scylla, a sea monster, and Charybdis, a whirlpool, occupied opposite sides of the Strait of Messina, through which Odysseus had to sail without being capsized by either. The phrase “between Scylla and Charybdis” means between two equal difficulties.
15 (p. 459) Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner: Since the first performance of Pygmalion in England, actors and audiences have rebelled against the unresolved ending of Shaw’s first version of the play, used in this edition. In Shaw’s later revision, Higgins “roars with laughter” as he informs his mother that Eliza is going to “marry Freddy.” In so doing, Higgins conforms to the prose narrative Shaw appended to the published version of the play.
16 (p. 469) Age had not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety: Shaw’s application of Enobarbus’s famous ascription of immortal vitality to Cleopatra (in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 2) shows his great affection and friendship for Wells, as do the sentences that follow.
HEARTBREAK HOUSE
1 (p. 477) Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall: With these two categories—metaphors, really Shaw indicates a division of the upper classes. Heartbreak House, as he goes on to explain, symbolizes the socially liberal, artistic, and intellectual but apolitical and self-absorbed group; Horseback Hall is the pro forma conservative, anti-intellectual, anti-artistic, but pro-leisure-sports and self-absorbed group. Shaw points out that neither group provided a good pool for political leaders.
2 (p. 479) the garden of Klingsor: Shaw uses this image as a symbol of sensuous self-indulgence. In German composer Richard Wagner’s 1882 opera Parsifal, the eponymous hero is tempted to such self-indulgence by the flower maidens in the magical garden of the evil magician Klingsor.
3 (p. 489) unsuccessful [attempt] to assassinate Mr Lloyd George: David Lloyd George (1863-1945) was prime minister of Great Britain during the last two years of World War I, and thereafter for four more years. Louis Cottin, an anarchist, attempted to assassinate him but only wounded him.
4 (p. 492) Tearing the Garter from the Kaiser’s leg, ... changing the King’s illustrious and historically appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against Ghibelline): The Order of the Garter is an order of chivalry founded in 1348 by King Edward III; at the start of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany and king of Prussia (1888 to 1918), was stripped of this high British honor. Also at the start of the war, Britain’s King George V changed his family name from the German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the English Windsor. The Guelphs and the Ghibellines were two warring political parties in Italy during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries; the Guelphs, the papal and popular party, opposed the authority of the German emperors in Italy, while the aristocratic Ghibellines supported the German emperors.
5 . (p. 516) to destroy the militarism of Zabern: Zabern, usually spelled Saverne, in northeastern France in the region of Alsace-Lorraine, was the site of conflict between the German military and local citizens that contributed to the motivation for World War I.
6 (p. 517) Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed;All Highest Hohenzollern languishes in Holland, ... Imperial Romanoff, said to have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, ... the lord of Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland; ... Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity: Hapsburg is the name of the ruling family of Austria that gained ascendancy over much of Europe during the sixteenth century. Hohenzollern is the royal family name of Kaiser Wilhelm II (see note 4, above), who abdicated to Holland on November 9, 1918. Czar Nicholas II of Russia (1868—1918), a member of the Romanoff (or Romanov) Russian dynasty and the last czar of Russia, was murdered with all his family by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Constantine I, king of Greece (1913-1917, 1920-1922), known as king of the Hellenes, did not support the Allied forces during World War I and consequently was deposed; he sought refuge in Switzerland. The Greek statesman Solon (c.600 B.C.), one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, was renowned as a wise lawgiver.
7 (p. 518) “Lass’uns verderben, lachend zu grunde geh‘n”: The English translation is “Laughing let us be destroyed, laughing let us go to our graves”; the quotation is from the ecs
tatic love duet between Brünnhilde and Siegfried that concludes Richard Wagner’s 1871 opera Siegfried.
8 (pp. 518-519) That is why I had to withhold Heartbreak House from the footlights during the war;for the Germans might ... not have waited for their cues: In a letter of October 5, 1916, to Sidney and Beatrice Webb (fellow members of the Fabian Society), Shaw recounts his experience with two zeppelins that passed over his country home in Ayot St. Lawrence; the experience was the inspiration for the end of the play. In the letter, Shaw writes: “The sound of the Zepp’s engines was so fine, and its voyage through the stars so enchanting, that I positively caught myself hoping next night that there would be another raid.” Clearly, Shaw transmuted these feelings into Ellie and Hesione’s emotions at the end of the play. Shaw adds the following observation in the letter after he notes the human suffering caused by the bringing down of one of the zeppelins and the gleeful response of some of the onlookers, as well as his own ability to get right to sleep: “Pretty lot of animals we are!”
9 (p. 524) “It has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to find that nobody expects me”: It is a common motif in dreams that one arrives at a place where one is not known or expected. Heartbreak House begins with Ellie’s falling asleep, and with Nurse Guinness’s just managing to prevent a crash of bottles to the floor. These two actions frame the play as a circular dream: The entire play may be seen as Ellie’s dream; at the end of the play, the motif of the bottles that do not fall is replicated on a grander scale by the house’s escaping destruction.
10 (p. 596) “it’s like the night in Tristan and Isolde”: In Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1859), the lovers are drawn to the night as the realm where a true and complete union can take place between them.
11 (p. 611) “Fall and crush”: Hector echoes Albany’s line, “Fall, and cease” in the last scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear. As Albany sees the ancient Lear carrying in Cordelia’s murdered body, he expresses his sense that the world should collapse and end in the face of such evil. Likewise, through Hector’s sense of futility here, Shaw is expressing his own anger at the carnage and stupidity of a world gone war-mad between 1914 and 1918.
12 (p. 624) “Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal”: Through Hesione’s near-breakdown, Shaw is alluding (again) to the final scene of King Lear, when Lear enters with the body of Cordelia in his arms and commands everyone to “Howl, howl, howl.” Lear is reduced to a grieving animal howling out its raw pain. It is such grief over the cataclysm of the war that keeps threatening to break through the surface of the play, as here in Hesione’s attempt to suppress her despair.
13 (p. 625) “Was there no heartbreak in that for your father?”: Shotover’s humiliation here in the confession of how his daughter Addy’s leaving home broke his heart shows how deeply Shaw has embedded King Lear in Heartbreak House; just as Lear’s denial of his own mortality manifests itself in his incestuous impulse to keep his daughter Cordelia to himself, so too does Captain Shotover’s resistance to crashing the ship of state on the rocks manifest itself in his spiritual marriage to Ellie, who, as befits the dream-like state of the action, can be both his daughter and his wife. The issue of Ellie’s marrying the older Mangan, a man her adored father’s age, is Shaw’ s version of the first part of King Lear, where Cordelia must first reject her father’s demands on her.
INSPIRED BY PYGMALION AND THREE OTHER PLAYS
My Fair Lady, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, opened on Broadway on March 15, 1956, to overwhelming applause from audiences and critics alike. The original production starred Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins and the incandescent Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle. Eliza gets things started memorably with “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” in which she daydreams for a “room somewhere / far away from the cold night air.”The roster of songs, which all became hits, includes “Just You Wait,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “On the Street Where You Live,” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”
Lerner and Loewe had attempted to turn Pygmalion into a musical in 1952 but found the task impossible. For this production they made several cuts to Shaw’s drama, most conspicuously changing Shaw’s ending into an unambiguously happy one. At the beginning of the libretto, Lerner inserted the phrase, “I have omitted [Shaw’s epilogue] because in it Shaw explains how Eliza ends not with Higgins but with Freddy and—Shaw and Heaven forgive me!—I am not certain he is right.”Thus My Fair Lady closes with Higgins’s famous: “Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?”
My Fair Lady quickly became a phenomenon in American thea ter. The Broadway production was a great commercial success, earned ten Tony nominations, and has been called the greatest stage musical of all time. On June 13, 1961, My Fair Lady beat out Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! as history’s longest-running Broadway play, and the best-selling original cast recording is still in demand. At the 1957 Tony Awards, Harrison earned a statue for his performance, and Andrews was nominated for hers (she spent a total of forty-eight months playing Eliza on the stage). My Fair Lady also won Tonys for best director (Moss Hart), best conductor and musical director (Franz Allers), best scenic designer (Oliver Smith), best costume designer (Cecil Beaton), and best musical.
Part of My Fair Lady’s commercial success was the multimillion dollar sale of the movie rights. George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story and David Copperfield) directed the lavish screen adaptation, produced by movie mogul Jack L. Warner. Rex Harrison reprised his stage role as phonetics professor Henry Higgins, and Audrey Hepburn replaced Julie Andrews, with songs voiced by Marni Nixon (who also sang Natalie Wood’s part in West Side Story). The 1964 film opens with a dazzling sequence of close-ups of flowers lining a brilliantly recreated Covent Garden Opera House. Hepburn’s waifish and unwashed Eliza stands by, selling flowers to the fabulously dressed, upper-class operagoers. Without delay, Harrison sidles up and begins to abuse Hepburn for her deplorable accent, giving vent to barbed dialogue that is indebted to Shaw’s original. Some of the more acerbic insults include “A woman who utters such disgusting and depressing noise has no right to be anywhere, no right to live,” and “Don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.” So begins one of cinema’s most intelligent romances, one in which the principal players neither touch nor kiss.
Cukor’s My Fair Lady was nominated for twelve Academy Awards. The film earned Oscars for best actor (Harrison); director; cinematography and color (Harry Stradling); art and set direction; sound; music and score adaptation (André Previn); and costume design (Cecil Beaton), as well as best picture. Oddly enough, Julie Andrews, who is generally agreed to be sorely missing from Cukor’s film, won the best actress Oscar for her performance in that year’s Mary Poppins.
The stage success of My Fair Lady in New York and London inspired MGM to produce a lavish widescreen film of The Doctor‘s Dilemma (1958). Directed by Anthony Asquith (who had co-directed with Leslie Howard the highly successful 1938 film of Pygmalion), it stars Dirk Bogarde and Leslie Caron, and features the experienced Shavian actors Robert Morley and Alastair Sim, who play two incompetent doctors with great comedic zest and skill.
Major Barbara was memorably filmed in 1941 while German bombs fell on London, inconveniencing the production greatly. The director of record is Gabriel Pascal, but the editor, David Lean, seems to have had a large part in putting the film together. Wendy Hiller, who effectively created the role of Eliza Doolittle on screen three years earlier, plays Barbara. Rex Harrison is an attractive Cusins, while Robert Morley makes a delightfully devilish Undershaft.
Heartbreak House has never been filmed, but Rex Harrison and Amy Irving starred in an excellent television adaptation in 1986. Harrison as Captain Shotover proves himself once again the premier Shavian actor of his time, while Amy Irving finds the emotional depth Shaw meant the role of Ellie to have.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as ques
tions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Three Other Plays through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.
COMMENTS
George Bernard Shaw
Every time one of my new plays is first produced the critics declare it is rotten, though they are always willing to admit that the next to the last play is the greatest thing I’ve done. I have educated the critics up to an appreciation of the next to the last of my plays.
—New YorkTimes (May 5, 1907)
H. L. Mencken
If we divest ourselves of the idea that Shaw is trying to preach some rock-ribbed doctrine in each of his plays, instead of merely setting forth human events as he sees them, we may find his dramas much easier of comprehension. True enough, in his prefaces and stage directions, he delivers himself of many wise saws and elaborate theories. But upon the stage, fortunately, prefaces and stage directions are no longer read to audiences, as they were in Shakespeare’s time, and so, if they are ever to discharge their natural functions, the Shaw dramas must stand as simple plays....
Shaw himself, a follower of Ibsen, has shown variations sufficiently marked to bring him followers of his own. In all the history of the English stage, no man has exceeded him in technical resources nor in nimbleness of wit. Some of his scenes are fairly irresistible, and throughout his plays his avoidance of the old-fashioned machinery of the drama gives even his wildest extravagances an air of reality.
Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 63