Wit and Acid E-Book

George Bernard Shaw

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

'If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.' One of the most prolific and respected playwrights of the twentieth century, Bernard Shaw's legacy shows no signs of waning, and his beautifully written plays, laced with wry wit and invective alike, have seen countless performances over the years, their finest lines paraded in literary conversation and review. Meticulously selected by Simon Mundy, the Wit and Acid series collects the sharpest lines from Shaw's oeuvre in small neat volumes, allowing the reader to sample some of the very best barbs and one-liners the twentieth century has to offer, and this, the first volume, covers lines from the great writer's works published before 1911.

Leseprobe

Wit and Acid

Sharp Lines from the Plays of

George Bernard Shaw

volume i

selected by

simon mundy

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

[email protected]

020 8050 2928

www.renardpress.com

Extracts taken from plays first published between 1898 and 1911 (for more information see original publication dates on p. 84)

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2022

Edited text © Renard Press Ltd, 2022Introduction and selection © Simon Mundy, 2022

Cover design by Will Dady

Renard Press is proud to be a climate positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, used to train artificial intelligence systems or models, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the publisher.

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe – Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, [email protected].

contents

Introduction5

Wit and Acid11

Unpleasant Plays 1Widowers’ Houses13

Unpleasant Plays 2The Philanderer15

Unpleasant Plays 3Mrs Warren’s Profession17

Pleasant Plays 1Arms and the Man21

Pleasant Plays 2Candida27

Pleasant Plays 3The Man of Destiny31

Pleasant Plays 4You Never Can Tell41

Three Plays for Puritans 1The Devil’s Disciple45

Three Plays for Puritans 2Caesar and Cleopatra49

Three Plays for Puritans 3Captain Brassbound’s Conversion51

Man and Superman53

John Bull’s Other Island65

How He Lied to Her Husband69

Major Barbara71

The Doctor’s Dilemma75

Getting Married77

The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet81

Note on the Texts83

introduction

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was a writer who plied his trade with a volume and facility that his music-critic self would have recognised in Haydn, Handel or Saint-Saëns. He allowed his pen to carry on going with an ease that sometimes seems unstoppable. He wrote an awful lot of plays, containing an awful lot of words. He was a storyteller who loved the process of telling almost as much – perhaps more than – the story itself. There are moments in his plots where he turns a character inside out simply because the plot has to be resolved some time, even though the soliloquies arguing the opposite have been fierce enough to make such a change hard to credit.

He lived so long that he was born in the age of Dickens, shortly before his good friend Elgar, and died in the golden age of Hollywood in the year when James Stewart appeared in Winchester ’73 and as man who imagines a rabbit in Harvey. Much of Shaw’s writing was attached to the moment – the newspaper and magazine articles, the political pamphlets in support of the Socialist cause – and he never managed to get going as a novelist, though he tried. He was in his thirties before he turned properly from a critic into a playwright and the producers discovered him. Thereafter the plays flowed relentlessly for forty years.

He used the theatre for sharp social commentary, as a vehicle for debunking hypocrisy and as an antidote to establishment assumptions. As an Irish Protestant from a middle-class but relatively poor Dublinbackground who had struggled to make his way in London, he was as unimpressed by English imperial superiority as he was by Irish romantic nationalism. Most of all he was unimpressed by men – his father, schoolmasters, his mother’s companions. The result was that many of his plays revolve not just around strong women, but women who actively challenge their powerless status, legal and professional, in English society. They, along with the misfits, outcasts and reprobates, have all the best lines.

Shaw found that, though his novels made little headway, his plays were often initially more successful in print than on the stage, and this probably explains the length and detail of his introductory stage directions – so comprehensive that they would be hopelessly restrictive for any director or designer to follow, however intrusive the author tried to be in the production process. On the other hand, as historical essays, character studies and commentaries on interior design, they are superb. I have included one such almost complete: his portrait of a youthful Napoleon on campaign in northern Italy from The Man of Destiny – one of his shorter plays that on its first outing in 1897 made it no further into central London than Croydon.

The plays are not much easier to stage now, with many liable to outlast the patience of modern audiences. Shaw was always known for his resistance to producers making cuts. His themes were very much of their time, but the underlying issues – the tensions in marriage and gender relations, the absurdities of national stereotypes and the abuse of power – still hold good. His politics and obsessions are never far away, though he had enough self-knowledge to hold them up to the same satirical scrutiny as those he opposed. He was one of the founders of the Fabian movement, which fed the emerging Labour Party, but he was never a man comfortable with following a party line – the classic outsider artist. As he grew older, views which tune in well with left-wing causes of today – gender equality, the environment, vegetarianism, for example – strengthened. He would have had problems with our pandemic years, though, because he was fiercely against vaccination.

The tendency to write ten words when one would do means that Shaw’s lines do not have the one-liner punch of Oscar Wilde’s, Shaw’s close contemporary and Irish rival (it is perhaps no coincidence that Shaw’s London stage reputation only really took off after Wilde’s death). The lines are not pithy. That does not stop them being very funny, astute, pointed and satirical. He loves being rude about the English, letting his Englishmen send themselves up with disastrous nonchalence, and his non-English characters point out the deficiencies of the national character with relentless precision. The stripping away of their pomposity is delicious, and must have had Edwardian audienceswriggling with nervous discomfort. I do not know whether it is sad or inevitable that so many of the observations still hold good over a hundred years later. They stick firmly to the backsides of English nationalist voters in the first third of the twenty-first century.

That quality of still being relevant today, or at least sharply recognisable, has been the main criteria for selecting the quotations here. They work out of the context of plot and scene. Many need the prop of the line of dialogue before or after, but they still make their mark without too much surrounding clutter. For all his love of complicated ideas, Shaw uses language that is free flowing and surprisingly modern. There is none of the stiff-necked formality of most late Victorian writers.

For those like me who want spelling and punctuation to conform to standard usage, though, Shaw is a nightmare. He refused to use the apostrophe to denote a missing letter – insisting on ‘dont’ instead of ‘don’t’, and so on. Colons and semicolons litter the dialogue when a new sentence would be much more natural. In the pages that follow, then, please know that the indiosyncracies are his, not mine!

The selection of lines here samples the first half of his playwriting career, up until 1911. My own interest in Shaw started as a teenager, when I first read Man and Superman and realised that I agreed with so much of his undermining of religious and social convention, his championship of free love (much in vogue but still hard to put into practice in 1971) and his willingness to turn hierarchies upside down. Reading the plays through from the start fifty years later, I find I am still distrustful of isms and doctrines, still cheering at the same moments and have found many more to cherish. I hope these nuggets will gleam for others too.

simon mundy

2022

wit and acid

unpleasant plays 1

Widowers’ Houses

harry trench: The steamboat people were the scum of the earth: Americans and all sorts.

act i

sartorius: I dislike feeling at home when I’m abroad. It is not precisely what one goes to the expense for.

act i

unpleasant plays 2

The Philanderer

charteris: When one is young, one marries out of mere curiosity, just to see what it’s like.

act i

grace: No woman is the property of a man. A woman belongs to herself and nobody else.

charteris: Quite right. Ibsen forever!

act i

charteris: Principle’s the poorest reason I know for making yourself nasty.

act ii

charteris: The fickleness of the women I love is only matched by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

act ii

charteris: As a philosopher, it’s my business to tell other people the truth; but it’s not their business to tell it to me. I dont like it; it hurts.

act ii

craven: You dont half see how serious it is to make a man believe that he has only another year to live: you really dont… I’ve made my will, which was altogether unnecessary; and I’ve been reconciled to a lot of people I quarelled with: people I cant stand under ordinary circumstances. Then I’ve let the girls get around me at home to an extent I should never have done if I had my life before me. I’ve done a lot of serious thinking and reading and extra church-going. And now it turns out a simple waste of time. On my soul, it’s too disgusting: I’d rather die like a man when I said I would.

act ii

unpleasant plays 3

Mrs Warren’s Profession

praed: When I was your age, young men and women were afraid of each other; there was no good fellowship. Nothing real. Only gallantry copied out of novels, and as vulgar and affected as could be. Maidenly reserve! Gentlemanly rivalry! Always saying no when you meant yes! Simple purgatory for shy and sincere souls.

vivie: Yes, I imagine there must have been a fearful waste of time. Especially women’s time.

act i

vivie: They took me to the National Gallery…to the Opera… and to a concert where the band played all the evening: Beethoven and Wagner and so on. I wouldnt go through that again for anything you could offer me.

act i

mrs warren: Oh Lord! I dont know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.

act ii

vivie: People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I dont believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they cant find them, make them.

act ii

frank: When two people live together – it dont matter whether they’re father and son or husband and wife or brother and sister – they cant keep up the polite humbug that’s so easy for ten minutes on an afternoon call. Now the governor, who unites to many admirable domestic qualities the irresoluteness of a sheep and the pompousness and aggressiveness of a jackass…

act iii

crofts: If you’re going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles you’d better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all decent society.

act iii

crofts: As long as you dont fly openly in the face of society, society doesnt ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

act iii

vivie: Can you find no better example of your beauty and romance than Brussels to talk to me about?

act iv

mrs warren: You think people are what they pretend to be: that the way you were taught at school is the way things really are. But it’s not: it’s only a pretence to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people quiet… The big people, the clever people, the managing people all know it.

act iv

pleasant plays 1

Arms and the Man

raina: You are my enemy; and you are at my mercy. What would I do if I were a professional soldier?

the man: Ah, true, dear young lady: you’re always right. I know how good you’ve been to me: to my last day I shall remember those three chocolate creams.

act i

the man: Better not touch my hand, dear young lady. I must have a wash first.

raina: I see that you are a gentleman… You must not think I am surprised. Bulgarians of really good standing – people in our position – wash their hands nearly every day.

act i

petkoff: I dont believe in going too far with these modern customs. All this washing cant be good for the health: it’s not natural. There was an Englishman at Philippopolis who used to wet himself all over with cold water every morning when he got up. Disgusting! It all comes from the English: their climate makes them so dirty that they have to be perpetually washing themselves. Look at my father! He never had a bath in his life and he lived to be ninety-eight, the healthiest man in Bulgaria. I dont mind a good wash once a week to keep up my position, but once a day is carrying the thing to a ridiculous extreme.

act ii

Major Sergius Saranoff is a tall romantically handsome man… The ridges of his eyebrows, curving with an interrogative twist round the projections of the outer corners; his jealously observant eye; his nose, thin, keen and apprehensive in spite of the pugnatious high bridge and large nostril; his assertive chin would not be out of place in a Parisian salon, shewing that the clever imaginative Barbarian has an acute critical faculty which has been thrown into intense activity by the arrival of western civilisation in the Balkans. The result is precisely what the advent of nineteenth century thought first produced in England: to wit, Byronism. By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his ideals; by his cynical scorn for humanity; by his jejeune credulity as to the absolute validity of his concepts and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them; by his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his sensitive observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.

stage direction, act ii

petkoff: We shouldnt have been able to fight if these foreigners hadnt shown up to shew us how to do it: we knew nothing about it; and neither did the Serbs. Egad, there’d have been no war without them!

act ii

In the library after lunch. It is not much of a library. Its literary equipment consists of a single fixed shelf stocked with old paper-covered novels, broken backed, coffee stained, torn and thumbed; and a couple of little hanging shelves with a few gift books on them: the rest of the wall space being occupied by the trophies of war and the chase. But it is a most comfortable sitting room.

stage direction, act iii

raina: You have a low shopkeeping mind. You think of things that would never come into a gentleman’s head.

bruntschli: That’s the Swiss natonal character, dear lady.

act iii

sergius: The courage to rage and kill is cheap. I have an English bull terrier who has… much of that courage… but he lets my groom thrash him all the same. That’s your soldier all over… Your poor men can cut throats but they are afraid of their officers; they put up with insults and blows; they stand by and see one another punished like children: aye, and help to do it when they are ordered. And the officers!!!

act iii

catherine: The Petkoffs and the Saranoffs are known as the richest and the most important families in the country. Our position is almost historical: we can go back for twenty years.

act iii