Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (88 page)

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 questions 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.

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)

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.

—
George Bernard Shaw: His Plays
(1905)

In perfect innocence Mr. Shaw puts his apology into the mouth of one of the people in
Major Barbara.
“Andrew, this is not the place for making speeches”; and Andrew replies, “I know no other way of expressing myself.” Exactly! Here is a dramatist who knows no other way of expressing himself in drama than the essentially undramatic way of speech-making. He never knew any other way, but in his earlier plays he did make an effort to conceal the fact. In his earlier plays there was some pretence of dramatic form, unity, coherence. In
Major Barbara
there is none.

—
Drama and Life
(1907)

“The Doctor’s Dilemma”—the nature of the dilemma need not be specified here—is one long tirade against the medical profession. The supposed indictment is fortified by reckless misstatement, gross exaggeration, unscrupulous pleading, suppression of the truth, malicious suggestion, and dogmatic assertion. Occasional instances of maltreatment are quoted as general examples. A quasi-scientific gloss is imparted to fluent nonsense by the use of technical phraseology. In his preface he coolly writes: “I deal with the subject as an economist, a politician, and a citizen, exercising my common sense,” common sense being the one quality of which his fallacious illustrations are conspicuously devoid. He does not explain why an economist or a politician should be an infallible judge of medical ethics, practice, and ability. Never were methods more unscientific than those which he employs. Unfortunately the adroitness of his whimsical humor often distracts attention from his own malpractice. He does not always talk pernicious rubbish. His advocacy of sunshine and soap, for instance, as sanitary agents, is perfectly sound. But his wise edicts are mere platitudes. Some of his conclusions are indisputable, but when he points out the way to reform he shatters his pretence of being an economist. He ruins his case by his unjust perversity, dishonesty, and egotism. But his humorous caricatures of different types of physicians and surgeons are delicious, as is his possibly unintended exposure of the humbug of the so-called “artistic temperament” in the person of the fascinating rascal Dubedat. Mr. Shaw knows something about shams.

—March 30, 1911

A new book by George Bernard Shaw is always hailed by a multitude of readers; even the worst of the Shaw of today is so much better than the best of many writers that the bookbuyer’s enthusiasm will not be seriously dampened by
Heartbreak House.
It is probably the worst of Shaw....

For the characters are not typical, and the situations are often absurd. The workmanship is frequently slipshod, not in the old way which was Mr. Shaw’s clever flouting of conventional technique, but in pure carelessness. In some cases one smarts from the unadulterated theatrical hoakum.

—November 1919

If a man can be partaker of God’s theatre, he shall likewise be partaker of God’s rest, says Bacon. But if truth be the thing which Shaw will have most, rest is that which he will have not at all. If we will be partakers of Shaw’s theatre we must be prepared to be partakers of his fierce unrest.

But then no thinker would ever desire to lay up any other reward. When Whitman writes: “I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than oneself is,” we must either assent or dissent. Simply to cry out “Whitmanesque!” is no way out of the difficulty. When Ibsen writes a play to prove that building happy homes for happy human beings is not the highest peak of human endeavour, leaving us to find out what higher summit there may be, he intends us to use our brains. It is beside the point to cry out “How like Ibsen!”
Heartbreak House
is a restatement of these two themes. You have to get Ibsen thoroughly in mind if you are not to find the Zeppelin at the end of Shaw’s play merely monstrous. It has already destroyed the people who achieve; it is to come again to lighten the talkers’ darkness, and at the peril of all the happy homes in the neighbourhood.You will do well to keep Whitman in mind when you hear the old sea-captain bellowing with a thousand different intonations and qualities of emphasis: Be yourself, do not sleep. I do not mean, of course, that Shaw had these two themes actually in mind when he set about this rather maundering, Tchekovian rhapsody. But they have long been part of his mental make-up, and he cannot escape them or their implications. The difficulty seems to be in the implications. Is a man to persist in being himself if that self runs counter to God or the interests of parish, nation, the community at large? The characters in this play are nearer to apes and goats than to men and women. Shall they nevertheless persist in being themselves, or shall they pray to be Zeppelin-destroyed and born again? The tragedy of the women is the very ordinary one of having married the wrong man. But all these men—liars and humbugs, ineffectual, hysterical, neurasthenic—are wrong men. The play, in so far as it has a material plot, is an affair of grotesque and horrid accouplements It is monstrous for the young girl to mate in any natural sense with a, superficially considered, rather disgusting old man. Shall she take him in the spirit as a spiritual mate? Shaw holds that she shall, and that in the theater even spiritual truth shall prevail over formal prettiness.

—
Alarums and Excursions
(1922)

1. Shaw was an active member of the Fabian Society, a reformist, quasi-socialist organization. Do you see evidence of this affiliation in the plays in this volume?

2. . Consider Shaw’s treatment of strong-minded, unconventional young women. Do they seem real flesh and blood, or mere mouthpieces for Shaw’s ideas? What do you make of their usual association with older men?

3. What are the most common butts of Shaw’s humor?

4. Do you feel that the primary effect of Shaw’s prefaces is to illuminate the plays? What else do they do?

5. Shaw is a notorious polemicist. But are the endings of these four plays polemical? Do they make a point or argue a cause in an unequivocal way? Or are they ambiguous, suggestive rather than explicit?

FOR FURTHER READING

Collected Plays with Their Prefaces: Vols.
1-7. Edited by Dan H. Laurence. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.

The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw.
Edited by Bernard F. Dukore. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Collected Letters.
Edited by Dan H. Laurence. Vol. 1, 1874-1897, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965; Vol. 2, 1898-1910, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972; Vol. 3, 1911—1925, New York: Viking Press, 1985; Vol. 4, 1926-1950. New York: Viking Press, 1988.

The Drama Observed.
Edited by Bernard F. Dukore. Vol. 1 : 1880—1895; Vol. 2:1895—1897; Vol. 3:1897-1911;Vol. 4:1911—1950. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. An invaluable collection of all Shaw’s writings about theater.

Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes.
Edited by Dan H. Laurence. Vol. I:1876-1890; Vol. 2:1890—1893; Vol. 3:1893-1850. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981.

Ervine, St. John G.
Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work, and Friends.
New York: William Morrow, 1956. The most sympathetic and fair biography of Shaw.

Henderson, Archibald.
George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956.

Holroyd, Michael.
Bernard Shaw, Vol. 1, 1856-1898
:
The Search for Love,
New York: Random House, 1988.
Bernard Shaw, Vol.
2,
1898-1918: The Pursuit of Power.
New York: Random House, 1989. Bernard
Shaw, Vol. 3, 1918-1950 : The Lure of Fantasy.
New York: Random House, 1991. Bernard Shaw,
Vol.
4,
1950-1991: The Last Laugh.
New York: Random House, 1992. The most detailed and comprehensive biography. A condensed version is available:
Bernard Shaw: The One- Volume Definitive Edition.
New York: Random House, 1998.

Shaw, George Bernard.
Interviews and Recollections.
Edited by A. M. Gibbs. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. An indispensable record of first-hand personal views of and by Shaw.

Bentley, Eric.
Bernard Shaw.
New York: New Directions, 1947.

Berst, Charles A.
Bernard Shaw and the Art of Drama.
Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Bertolini, John A.
The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw.
Carbon-dale and Edwardsville: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1991.

Crompton, Louis.
Shaw the Dramatist.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969.

Dukore, Bernard.
Shaw’s Theatre.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

Evans, T. F., ed.
Shaw: The Critical Heritage.
London: Routledge, 1976.

Gibbs, A. M.
The Art and Mind of Shaw.
New York: Macmillan, 1983.

Gordon, David J.
Bernard Shaw and the Comic Sublime.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Holroyd, Michael, ed.
The Genius of Shaw.
New York: Holt, Rine hart and Winston, 1979.

Meisel, Martin.
Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963. A brilliant and delightful account of Shaw’s relationship to the theater of his youth.

Morgan, Margery M.
The Shavian Playground.
London: Methuen, 1972.

Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies:
Vols. 1-22 successive. General editors: Stanley Weintraub, Fred D. Crawford, Gale K. Larson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981-2003.

Turco, Alfred, Jr.
Shaw’s Moral Vision.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Valency, Maurice.
The Cart and the Trumpet.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Watson, Barbara Bellow.
A Shavian Guide to the Intelligent Woman.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Still the best case for Shaw as a feminist.

Wisenthal, J. L.
The Marriage of Contraries.
Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press, 1974.