Pygmalion And Three Other Plays

From John A. Bertolini's Introduction toPygmalion and Three Other Plays When St. John Ervine, a fellow playwright and future biographer of Shaw, was wounded by a shell and had to have a leg amputated, Shaw wrote to cheer him up. First he recounted to Ervine how he, Shaw, had once broken a leg and had to get around on crutches but found that he could do without his "leg just as easily as without eyes in the back of my head." Shaw then asserted that Ervine was actually better off than he himself was: "You will be in a stronger position. I had to feed and nurse the useless leg. You will have all the energy you hitherto spent on it to invest in the rest of your frame. For a man of your profession two legs are an extravagance." Shaw went on to enumerate other benefits to losing the leg, such as an increased pension, and no more going to the Front. Finally Shaw reached the logical conclusion: "The more the case is gone into the more it appears that you are an exceptionally happy and fortunate man, relieved of a limb to which you owed none of your fame, and which indeed was the cause of your conscription" (Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 550-501). Wit does not usually seem a humane weapon, but such a letter shows the same kind of comic courage Aristophanes exhibited when he condemned war by imagining women on a sex strike. Heartbreak Housewas written in a context where one could consider writing such a letter, and the play's mixed tones show it. Shaw claimed that the play wrote itself. By turns whimsical, farcical, melancholy, tragi-comic, and visionary,Heartbreak Housesometimes drifts and sometimes sails full speed aheadwhithersoever. Shaw said that it represented the European elite before the warby which he meant the people whose concerns should have been history, political economy, and government, but were instead sex, aesthetics, leisure activities, and money, and so people who let their countries blunder into war. Shaw arranges for various representative members of this society to gather for a weekend in the country in ancient Captain Shotover's house, which is designed to resemble a ship and therefore carries the metaphoric suggestion that it is the Ship of State. (People have been misled by Shaw's subtitle, "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes," to see a strong resemblance to Chekhov's plays, butHeartbreak Houseis at least equally indebted to Tolstoy'sThe Fruits of Enlightenmentor Gorky'sThe Lower Depths.) Shaw claimed repeatedly that he did not know what his play meant, and indeed it is full of mystery. The play is launched with a young woman falling asleep while readingOthello, so that the rest of the play seems to be her dream, a bed-voyage. It begins and ends respectively with the averting of a small and a large destruction. In between, identities become confused and fluid as in dreams. The Captain insists on mistaking Mazzini Dunn for his old boatswain, Billy Dunn, though they do not look alike, and when the real Billy shows up unexpectedly, Shotover asks him, "Are there two of you?"and gets one of the play's biggest laughs (in a play that has fewer laughs than almost any other of Shaw's plays). Billy explains to his Captain the confusion by noting that there were two branches of the Dunn family, the drinking Dunns and the thinking Dunns. Captain Shotover as an inventor, adventurer, and architect succeeds Ridgeon and Higgins as a figure for the artist, but an artist who has gone slightly mad from disappointment with reality, whose heart was broken when his daughter rejected his ways and left home, and who himself has taken refuge in rum. To fill the void made by his daughter's desertion, he enters into a spiritual marriage with young Ellie Dunn, who had been in actuality planning herself to marry an older man, the crude capitalist Alfred Mangan. In thatShaw, George Bernard is the author of 'Pygmalion And Three Other Plays', published 2004 under ISBN 9781593080785 and ISBN 1593080786.