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 OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

PYGMALION, HEARTBREAK HOUSE, AND SAINT

JOAN

G B S was born in Dublin in 1856 into a family of

Ireland’s well-established Protestant Ascendancy. His father’s
alcoholism and business ineptitude caused the family’s fortunes to
decline, and Shaw left school at 15 to work as a clerk in a land
agent’s office. In 1876, he moved to London, where he attended
public lectures, joined political and cultural organizations, and, on
most days, furthered his learning in the Reading Room of the British
Museum. In 1884, he became a member of the newly founded
Fabian Society, which was devoted to political reform along socialist
principles, and remained one of their leading pamphleteers and
campaigners for much of his life. Starting in the mid-1880s, Shaw
worked variously as a book, music, art, and theatre reviewer, and
this cultural criticism formed the basis of his important studies The
Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) and The Perfect Wagnerite (1898).
He began playwrighting in earnest in the early 1890s, with Widowers’
Houses (1892), but his early plays were largely unperformed as they
did not conform with the commercial theatre’s demands for musicals,
farces, and melodramas. Shaw finally found success in New York in
1898 with The Devil’s Disciple (1897). With the windfall from the
production, he retired from journalism and married Irish heiress
Charlotte Payne-Townshend. In the new century, Shaw embarked on
forging a theatre of the future, transforming the problem and
discussion play into a theatre of ideas with Man and Superman
(1903), John Bull’s Other Island, and Major Barbara (1905). The
popular writer of Fanny’s First Play (1911) and Pygmalion (1912)
became a pariah following his condemnation of jingoistic patriotism
at the outset of the First World War. His comeback was slow but he
achieved worldwide acclaim as the writer of Saint Joan (1923) and
was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to
write plays, including The Apple Cart (1928) and Geneva (1936), but
his output dropped off significantly in the 1940s. Shaw died at his
home in Ayot St Lawrence in 1950.
B K is Professor of British and Irish Literatures at Université
Laval in Quebec City, Canada. His publications include The Selected
Essays of Sean O’Faolain (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016)
and George Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge University Press,
2015). He is general editor of the Oxford World’s Classics series of
Bernard Shaw’s writings.
 OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers
closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from
the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s
greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as
celebrated writing.
The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained
introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and
other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.
Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability
in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion,
philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive
commentary and essential background information to meet the
changing needs of readers.
 O X F O RD WO RL D’ S CL ASSICS

G E O R G E B E R N A R D S H AW

Pygmalion, Heartbreak House,

and Saint Joan

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

BRAD KENT
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 26 , United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in
certain other countries
Editorial material © Brad Kent 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2021
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing
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Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 978–0–19–879328–1
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–251176–8
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I benefited from the support of several people in assembling

this edition. Marianne Paquin helpfully tracked down scores of
sources. Similarly, the staff and archivists at Université Laval’s
library, the British Library, the Victoria & Albert Theatre and
Performance Archives, and the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry
Ransom Center have facilitated my research in countless ways. I
have benefited enormously from collaborating with Sos Eltis, David
Kornhaber, Liz Miller, Jim Moran, Larry Switzky, and Matt Yde—my
fellow editors in the Oxford World’s Classics’ Shaw series ,
wonderfully gifted scholars, and kind people all. Leonard Conolly,
Nicky Grene, Gustavo Rodríguez Martín, and Michel Pharand have
been generous with their friendship, expertise, advice, and criticism.
At Oxford University Press, Luciana O’Flaherty and Kizzy Taylor-
Richelieu have provided guidance at every stage of the series’
development. And, as always, I am grateful to Anne, Ryan, and Zoé
for all of the love and the laughs.
 CONTENTS

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of George Bernard Shaw
Abbreviations
Maps

PYGMALION
HEARTBREAK HOUSE
SAINT JOAN

Explanatory Notes
 INTRODUCTION

B the time Pygmalion opened in London on 11 April 1914, Shaw

was the best-known personality in England. The play’s success in
the West End and across the globe solidified his reputation as the
world’s greatest living playwright. Within a matter of months, though,
he fell from those heights, becoming public enemy number one for
his criticism of British jingoism at the outset of the First World War.
Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith told people that Shaw ought to
be shot, many of the colleagues whom Shaw had supported and
aided over the years turned their backs on him, and his plays
thereafter were rarely performed. Yet just as the Church canonized
the former heretic Joan of Arc in 1920, Shaw’s play about her led to
his own apotheosis and redemption: Saint Joan stormed stages,
garnered some of the strongest reviews of his career, and led to his
public adoration. His play Mrs Warren’s Profession, which the British
censorship had banned for over three decades, was suddenly
granted a licence for a public performance, causing Shaw to remark
that he was ‘in the very odor of sanctity after St Joan’.1 Producers,
consumed with a Shaw ‘monomania’,2 now flooded him with
requests to perform his works, and he was awarded the 1925 Nobel
Prize for Literature. The plays in this volume are the fruits of these
three distinct personal contexts, representing two pinnacles
separated by a traumatic nadir. Although highly critical of
melodramas, even Shaw would admit that audiences always love a
good comeback story.
They also love the self-made man’s tale of rags to riches. Born in
Dublin on 26 July 1856 to a family in economic and social decline,
Shaw was raised in genteel poverty. Having left school at the age of
15, he clerked for a land agency until he fled his native Ireland for
London on 1 April 1876. As he later commented, ‘London was the
literary centre for the English language, and for such artistic culture
as the realm of the English language (in which I proposed to be king)
could afford.’3 Once settled, he adopted a highly disciplined routine
of intellectual betterment, spending his days in the Reading Room of
the British Museum where in five years he churned out five novels,
four of which appeared episodically in socialist periodicals. The
autodidactic Shaw read widely and voraciously, attended public
debates on all manner of social, political, economic, and cultural
topics, and became a member of a number of literary associations.
In 1884, he joined the newly founded Fabian Society, an
organization dedicated to popularizing socialist objectives, and
quickly became its most recognizable proponent.
If in Pygmalion Higgins is the Pygmalion-creator and Eliza is his
Galatea-creation, then we might best understand Shaw as
Pygmalion to his own Galatea. Upon receiving a reader’s ticket for
the British Museum, he immediately consulted books on etiquette,
including Manners and Tone of Good Society, or Solecisms to be
Avoided, by A Member of the Aristocracy.4 However, his rise was
slow and he only completed his first play, Widowers’ Houses, at the
age of 36. He wrote another nine plays in the last decade of the
nineteenth century, but they were largely unperformed, failing to find
favour with the commercial theatres and instead depending upon the
nascent independent theatre movement for smaller-scale
productions with limited runs for a coterie audience. He was able to
survive those first few years in London thanks to his mother, who fed
and lodged him. However, with friends vouching for his abilities,
Shaw embarked on a career in journalism in the 1880s and was
variously employed as a music and art critic, a book reviewer, and
eventually a theatre critic. Despite this rather modest beginning,
Shaw candidly confessed to a friend, ‘My goal is to incarnate the
Zeitgeist.’5
Through his memberships in various cultural associations
throughout the 1890s, most notably the Independent Theatre Society
and its successor, the Stage Society, Shaw formed allegiances with
a number of other avant-gardist individuals who sought to forge
drama for a new age. One of them, Harley Granville Barker, was
perhaps the most talented actor of his generation. Together with
theatre manager J. E. Vedrenne, in 1904 Barker gave the New
Drama its first English home when they signed a lease for London’s
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Court Theatre. Over the three years that followed, they staged the
best of classical and contemporary European drama. And at the
heart of it all was Bernard Shaw: of the Court’s 988 performances,
701—an astounding 71 per cent—were Shaw’s plays, including
several world premieres.6 Politicians, amongst them Prime Minister
Arthur Balfour, several members of his Cabinet, and leaders of the
Opposition, repeatedly flocked to the Court to see how Shaw treated
such pressing social issues as poverty and the Irish question. His
popularity was cemented when King Edward VII, attending a Royal
Command Performance of Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island on 11
March 1905, laughed so hard that he broke his chair. With the help
of the Court’s gifted ensemble of actors, Shaw became the most
notable playwright of his generation. After a little over a decade, the
zeitgeist had come round to him.

Shaw’s Style and Technique

Just as the contexts surrounding the three plays in this volume are
decidedly dissimilar, so too are the plays themselves. Indeed, Shaw
works in three distinct modes: the problem-play comedy of
Pygmalion, the modernist experimentation of Heartbreak House, and
the history of Saint Joan. Yet the well-known adjective ‘Shavian’
indicates anything that is typical of him, and despite their apparent
generic and tonal differences, each of these plays illustrates the
inimitable Shaw style.
Shaw was somewhat dismissive about cultivating style in the
sense of fashioned prose. Nearing his eightieth year, he claimed: ‘I
have never aimed at style in my life: style is a sort of melody that
comes into my sentences by itself.’7 This notion of melody is central
to any discussion of Shaw’s style and the leitmotifs of his characters’
linguistic patterns. He regularly referred to the cast in musical terms:
this actor was a bass, that one a tenor, this one a soprano, that one
an alto. His mother was a gifted mezzo-soprano who taught singing
lessons, and Shaw himself was a gifted amateur pianist; thus it was
perhaps inevitable that music had a significant effect on how he
heard spoken language. In 1942, referring to Shaw as ‘probably the
best music critic who ever lived’, the poet W. H. Auden remarked that
‘his writing has an effect nearer to that of music than the work of any
of the so-called pure writers’.8 Likewise, Lewis Casson, a leading
British actor and director, claimed that ‘His combined technical
training in music and public speaking enabled him always to analyse
how effects were got, and to pass on the knowledge of how as well
as why. It was the same training that enabled him in his writing
instinctively to arrange his thought and his words so that when
spoken with their full intent and meaning they produce good music in
melody, rhythm, and phrasing; and surely that is the test of good
prose.’9 Casson’s wife, the actor Sybil Thorndike, who played the
lead role in the first London production of Saint Joan, recalled that
Shaw ‘knew the exact tune of every line he wrote. It was like a
musical score.’10
However, Shaw’s style has proven difficult to pin down, to the
point that some critics have claimed that he does not have one.11 Yet
so recognizable was his style that when he anonymously submitted
Pygmalion to the British censor of plays, the reader immediately
detected its authorship: ‘It is understood that this is by Bernard Shaw
and on internal evidence no one else could have written it.’12 Other
commentators have concluded that his plays have one overarching
trait: they are decidedly undramatic. William Archer, Shaw’s long-
time friend and colleague who also happened to be one of the most
perceptive drama critics of the day, admitted that any assessment of
Shaw’s technique was a challenge for many people:
Perhaps the most difficult task that criticism can attempt is a valuation of Mr
Bernard Shaw as a dramatist. Some people simplify the task by denying that he is
a dramatist at all, and considering him purely as a merchant of ideas. They regard
his plays as mere extensions or illustrations of his prefaces. But this is an
altogether too high-handed method of getting out of the difficulty.13

Eric Bentley provides a more capacious and perceptive catalogue of

Shaw’s qualities: ‘the endlessly witty and eloquent talk, the wideness
of reference in the dialogue, the incredible liveliness of the
characters, the swift tempo, the sudden and unexpected reverses
(especially anti-climaxes), in a phrase, the unusual energy coupled
with the unusual intellect’.14 These are many of the hallmarks of
Shaw’s style, the iconoclastic combination of which informs our
understanding of what it means to be ‘Shavian’.
Rather than simply parroting the charge that Shaw is undramatic,
it is more useful to understand that the definition of drama was
founded on conventions, which, as Shaw insisted, needed to be
radically overturned. In the 1890s, drama was informed by action.
Action, however, was narrowly conceived as physical action and
intrigue. For Shaw, this notion was encapsulated in the rigid structure
of the so-called well-made play. Shaw considered well-made plays—
popularized by Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou—too
constructed and artificial, and vilified them as ‘Sardoodledom’.15 He
insisted that he was ‘furiously opposed’ to ‘the method and
principles’ of such contemporaries as Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry
Arthur Jones, and Oscar Wilde: ‘They were all for “constructed”
plays, the technique of construction being that made fashionable by
Scribe in Paris, and the sanction claimed for it no less than that of
Aristotle.’16 He therefore had to fight not only what was currently
fashionable, but also the conventions and rigid generic boundaries in
place since the advent of Western theatre in ancient Greece.
As theatre critic for the Saturday Review from 1895 to 1898,
Shaw’s articles were, he admitted, ‘a siege laid to the theatre of the
XIXth Century by an author who had to cut his own way into it at the
point of the pen, and throw some of its defenders into the moat’.17
Taken as a whole, ‘they contain something like a body of doctrine,
because when I criticized I really did know definitely what I
wanted’.18 As the commercial theatres would not make room for the
type of plays he wrote and wished to see, Shaw criticized the
fashionable drama, exposing its mechanical constructions, lack of
intelligence, and support of conservative values. ‘Stage life’, he
lamented, ‘is artificially simple and well understood by the masses;
but it is very stale; its feeling is conventional; it is totally unsuggestive
of thought because all its conclusions are foregone; and it is
constantly in conflict with the real knowledge which the separate
members of the audience derive from their own daily occupations.’19
 As opposed to constructedness and emphasis on outward action,
Shaw instead recognized that drama was first derived from the
conflict of ideas and the conflicts within individuals. He found
evidence for this in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, who for Shaw was a
revolutionary writer because he proffered a new dramatic structure.
After Ibsen, Shaw declared, the ‘new technical factor in the art of
popular stage-play making’ of ‘every considerable playwright’ is

the discussion. Formerly you had in what was called a well-made play an
exposition in the first act, a situation in the second, and unravelling in the third.
Now you have exposition, situation, and discussion; and the discussion is the test
of the playwright. The critics protest in vain. They declare that discussions are not
dramatic, and that art should not be didactic. Neither the playwrights nor the public
take the smallest notice of them.20

The discussion, however, is not didactic from the point of view of

Shaw merely creating straw men that are done away with one by
one to allow his socialist ideals to prevail. Unlike the unilinear writing
found in the essays he wrote as a public intellectual or the
arguments of his prefaces, Shaw’s plays are multilinear.21 Yet all too
often critics have confused the public man with the artist, seeing the
discussion in his plays as mere extensions of his polemics because
they engage with many of the social and political issues he dealt with
in his journalism and Fabian Society pamphlets. In these accounts,
Shaw’s characters, despite their vastly different opinions, are
denigrated as lifeless puppets that merely spout Shaw’s views.
Instead, Shaw works through the issues, testing them via characters
who hold a variety of positions and at times change their
perspectives. He thereby invites his audiences and readers to do the
same. This is also the point of his inconclusive endings, which tend
to subvert or undermine expectations: the audience’s dissatisfaction
with the lack of resolution incites reflection and further discussion.
Shaw noted of his characters:
They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for
the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that
there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may
seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However
that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who agrees with them can possibly be
a dramatist, or indeed anything else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind.
Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I,
in that sense.22

Even T. S. Eliot, who was otherwise adversarial in his opinion of

Shaw, esteemed this ability in a review of Saint Joan: ‘No one can
grasp more firmly an idea which he does not maintain, or expound it
with more cogency, than Mr Shaw. He manipulates every idea so
brilliantly that he blinds us when we attempt to look for the ideas with
which he works.’23 No one viewpoint is entirely true, and thus each
character has their limitations. The result is a more encompassing
vision of the world, one that frustrates people who expect
consistency in personality and finality in plot.24 Recognizing this
equivocal trait in his plays, critics have referred to it in both
derogatory and admiring terms as Shavian paradox.25
A Shaw play generally has three characters—though on occasion
more—who represent different viewpoints. In a rhetorical sense,
these represent thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, with the third
character undergoing a conversion. In these instances, the drama
lies in the inner struggle that is provoked by and manifested in the
outer conflict of ideas. The drama of ideas is therefore
simultaneously performed on the outer and inner planes of the
characters. With the melodrama and conservative morality of most
well-made plays, outer action is necessary because the values of the
characters are fixed: villains and heroes have always been and
always will be villains and heroes. In effect, their representative white
and black hats are not interchangeable and no one dons grey
headwear. The advent of the omnipresent anti-hero in more
contemporary literature has in many ways its origins in Shaw’s
drama.
This is further evidence that changes in form and content tend to
stem from one another. Shaw’s oeuvre engaged with genres that
had long traditions in the theatre, including romantic comedy, the
history play, farce, and melodrama.26 Yet he always challenged their
tenets. Shaw’s romantic comedy, for example, is not terribly
romantic, and in his plays it is often the woman who chases the man
rather than the other way around. Similarly, in Shaw’s melodrama the
sheriff or pastor is conflicted, while the supposedly cussed and
amoral rogue does good in the end—but for no recognizably
altruistic or ethical reason. Hesione illustrates this in Heartbreak
House when she tells Ellie: ‘People dont have their virtues and vices
in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed’ (p. 166). By incarnating
such internal conflicts on stage, Shaw allows his audience to realize
their own contradictions and uncertainties as valid and not as signs
of weakness and failure to enforce rigid moral codes. In this way,
people who subject themselves to new experiences and points of
view become open to conversion and growth along the same lines
as Shaw’s characters.

Pygmalion
Shaw was a notably quick writer of plays. He began Pygmalion on 7
March 1912 and completed it on 10 June. However, this short
compositional period masks the fact that he often allowed his ideas
to gestate for some time before finally putting pen to paper. In a letter
written fifteen years earlier, Shaw said that he would like to write a
play involving ‘a west end gentleman’ and a ‘rapscallionly flower girl’,
‘an east end dona’ who would wear ‘an apron and three orange and
red ostrich feathers’.27
The story, however, has a much older pedigree. Shaw borrowed it
in part from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which recounts the story of
Pygmalion.28 According to myth, the goddess Venus was so enraged
at the perversion of her veneration rites that she transformed the
profligate priestesses into prostitutes. The sculptor Pygmalion
watched their wickedness and was so horrified that he became
celibate, then carved a female statue of such beauty that he fell in
love with it. Honouring Venus on her feast day, he asked her to bring
his work to life. Because of Pygmalion’s faith and good practices,
she breathed life into Galatea and, nine months later, a child was
born. It is the ultimate patriarchal wish-fulfilment: the ideal virginal
beauty object becomes the passionate possession of its male
creator.
Critics have recognized other literary forebears. The many
references made to Milton, for example, suggest that, like the great
poet, Henry Higgins is a rewriter of Genesis.29 Perhaps logically,
then, given the influence of Milton on Mary Shelley, parallels have
likewise been found with Victor Frankenstein and his monster.30
There are also resonances of Cinderella and her makeover that
leads to the climax of a grand ball scene.31 Several people pointed
out to Shaw that his story resembles chapter 87 of Tobias Smollett’s
Peregrine Pickle (1751), titled ‘Peregrine sets out for the Garrison,
and meets with a Nymph of the Road, whom he takes into Keeping
and metamorphoses into a fine Lady’. But Shaw, having never read
the novel and was thus unaware of the episode, protested: ‘The
experiment of two writers of fiction treating the same subject and
producing the same series of incidents—the same result practically
—shews that the human imagination runs in the same grooves, and
that this is the explanation of almost all the alleged plagiarisms.’32
Scholars are therefore forewarned from being too assertive in
declaring influences, while rigorous comparative work, whether
arising from whimsy or Shavian references, has led to greater
understanding of the play’s dynamics and politics.
Aware of Pygmalion’s potential for tremendous success, Shaw
took great care with it. In the past, he felt that London reviewers had
negatively impacted his ability to mount successful productions of his
plays abroad, with managers unwilling to take their chances on a
work that had been savaged as undramatic. Yet Shaw was a
favourite of Germanic audiences, and so when Siegfried Trebitsch,
Shaw’s Austrian translator, suggested that he premiere Pygmalion at
Vienna’s iconic Burgtheater, Shaw agreed.33 It duly opened there on
16 October 1913.
After its rapturous success in Vienna, Shaw began rehearsing the
play at His Majesty’s Theatre. Located in London’s West End, the
1,720-seat theatre was built for the famous actor-manager Herbert
Beerbohm Tree.34 Shaw had always exercised casting decisions and
directed his own works, but in opting for His Majesty’s Theatre, he
accepted that Tree would play a major role. Tree petitioned for
Doolittle, but Shaw demurred, believing that Tree could hold his own
as Higgins. For Eliza, Shaw chose Mrs Patrick Campbell, who had
long been one of London’s leading actors. She celebrated her forty-
ninth birthday only days before Pygmalion opened, when she was
asked to convince an audience that she was a flower girl more than
thirty years her junior. In 1913, after reading both Androcles and the
Lion and Pygmalion to friends, Shaw reflected: ‘I believe I was
slightly mad last year.’35 Little did he suspect that the first London
production of Pygmalion would take him to the brink of losing his
sanity.
Shaw first read the play to Mrs Pat shortly after he completed it.
She flirtatiously thanked him ‘for thinking I could play your pretty slut.
I wonder if I could please you.’36 He responded to her: ‘I must have
my Liza and no other Liza. There is no other Liza and can be no
other Liza.’37 However, the wooing began in earnest in February
1913, Shaw lamenting, ‘It seems to me that all the poets have been
in love with you; for they seem to have said everything; and my
words that would praise thee are impotent things.’38 By the time Mrs
Pat finally signed on to play Eliza the following year, Shaw was
completely smitten. Yet his rationale for casting her went beyond his
mawkish crush. As he had told Trebitsch, ‘Pygmalion is essentially a
star play; unless you have an actress of extraordinary qualifications
and popularity, failure is certain.’39 When they began rehearsals, no
one was bigger than Mrs Pat, who was able to leverage her
popularity into a lucrative contract for a £130 weekly salary, plus 2.5
per cent of the receipts with an eight-week guarantee.40
In casting Tree and Mrs Pat as the leads, Shaw had signed on to
direct a couple of ‘histrionic monsters’.41 In Shaw’s world, the ideal
production was a collaboration between artists, but failing competent
actors, he resorted to authorial dictatorship. In this case, neither Tree
nor Mrs Pat understood what he wanted and at times they merely
ignored his instructions. They often arrived not having learned their
lines, with Tree, much to Shaw’s horror, always prepared to
improvise. ‘As far as I could discover,’ Shaw later recalled, ‘the
notion that a play could succeed without any further help from the
actor than a simple impersonation of his part never occurred to Tree.
The author, whether Shakespear or Shaw, was a lame dog to be
helped over the stile by the ingenuity and inventiveness of the actor-
producer.’42 The conflict of egos made the production a trial for all
three. Tree found Shaw’s direction difficult to take, while Mrs Pat on
more than one occasion refused to act until Shaw had left the
theatre. Shaw got his revenge, however, at one point calling to her
from the stalls: ‘Good God: you are forty years too old for Eliza; sit
still and it’s not so noticeable!’43 Meanwhile, she purposely infuriated
Tree and the two of them spent days at a time refusing to speak to
one another. Subjected to their obstinacy and petulance, Shaw took
to writing them lengthy letters filled with advice. Vexed with this
approach, Tree fumed: ‘I will not go so far as to say that all people
who write letters of more than eight pages are mad, but it is a
curious fact that all madmen write letters of more than eight
pages.’44
Despite the backstage acrimony, the play received plenty of
positive advance publicity. In addition to reporting its success on the
Continent, the London press produced puff pieces featuring the stars
and the world’s most recognizable playwright. Ticket sales were
further driven by a whisper campaign about the play’s shocking use
of an expletive. One paper fuelled the fire by sponsoring a contest to
guess the naughty word that Eliza was rumoured to say.
With profanity and strong language now rather commonplace in
the theatre, it is rather difficult to imagine that someone saying
‘bloody’ on stage could cause a sensation. The reader’s report for
the censor rationally suggested that in this case it was innocuous:
‘The word is not used in anger, of course, and the incident is merely
funny. I think it would be a mistake to be particular about it, but since
the word has been forbidden in other plays—in a different sort of
connection, however—I mention it.’45 Tree was not convinced and
asked Shaw to substitute it for ‘ruddy’.46 He was right that it would
cause ripples, as the theatre world was forever altered after Eliza’s
resounding ‘Not bloody likely’ (p. 57). At the London premiere, the
stage manager timed the delirium that followed the line at ‘an
unparalleled minute and a quarter’.47 Shaw felt that this ‘nearly
wrecked’ the performance, as the audience ‘laughed themselves into
such utter abandonment and disorder that it was really doubtful for
some time whether they could recover themselves and let the play
go on’.48
Press coverage included accounts by scholars and intellectuals
discussing the origins of the word ‘bloody’. The Oxford Union and
Eton Debating Society argued over its use on the stage, the former
seeing it as having ‘a liberating influence on the English language’
and the latter as contributing to ‘the debasement and vulgarization of
the commercial theatre’.49 Shaw defended it as being ‘in common
use as an expletive by four-fifths of the English nation, including
educated persons’.50 It is actually Higgins who uses the word most
often, but this is kept offstage from the audience. Early on, Mrs
Pearce upbraids him for swearing:

I dont mind your damning and blasting, and what the devil and where the devil and
who the devil . . . but there is a certain word I must ask you not to use. The girl
used it herself when she began to enjoy the bath. It begins with the same letter as
bath. She knows no better: she learnt it at her mother’s knee. But she must not
hear it from your lips. . . . Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots, to the
butter, and to the brown bread. (p. 35)

At this point, the audience has a good idea of what to expect. In this
way, Shaw infuses his play with the same suspense and expectation
as the press had.
Pygmalion ran for 118 performances at His Majesty’s Theatre,
grossing a lucrative £2,000 per week. Shaw used his royalties to
help his old Fabian colleagues Beatrice and Sidney Webb finance
the New Statesman, a leading socialist paper.51 Mrs Pat took the
play on a successful tour of the United States in 1914 and 1915, and
revived it again in 1920. While it played to full houses on the world’s
stages, it achieved another level of triumph when it was made into a
movie in 1938. German and Dutch companies had previously filmed
it in 1935 and 1937, but Shaw personally adapted the 1938 script
from his play. The screen version was massively successful, and
there was a certain irony in the fact that it was directed by Anthony
Asquith, whose father, the prime minister, had wished Shaw shot
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difficult hour, during which she reviewed once more and for the last
time all the futile anguish and passion of a love that had bruised and
hurt her from its beginning. Then she opened the letter with fingers
that trembled not at all.
“Dear Barbara [he wrote]: I suppose by this time you have set me
down as a poor skate of a fellow. It probably hasn’t occurred to you that it
is entirely your own fault that you will never see me again. If you had
gone with me to the fair that day, as I wanted you to do, I should not
have met Jennie, nor gotten into a squabble with that unutterable cad,
Bamber. I hear he got off with nothing worse than a crack in his foolish
skull to remind him what it is like to try conclusions with a gentleman.
“I want to tell you, Barbara, that I’ve married Jennie, and so far,
neither of us is sorry. She is a dear little wife, sweet-tempered, and
entirely devoted to your humble servant. And I don’t find myself so
deucedly uncomfortable in her company as you used to make me feel
sometimes. Let me tell you, Barbara, that you’ll never succeed in making
any man happy till you get off that high horse of yours and stop trying to
run the universe. But I don’t suppose you’ll care for what I say, any more
than you cared for me, and I don’t flatter myself that was a little bit.
“Just one thing more before I say good-bye for always. If you want to
know who your master is, I’ll tell you. It is old Jarvis. I knew it all along.
But I let you go on deceiving yourself, since you seemed to prefer doing it.
You can settle it with him any way you see fit and I shall be satisfied.
“With best wishes for your future happiness, I am, my dear Barbara,
Yours faithfully.
“David Whitcomb.”

Barbara read this letter once; then she thrust it deep down
among the burning logs and watched it blaze and shrivel into a black
and scarlet shred, which flitted stealthily up the chimney and out of
sight, like a wicked wraith.
She was still thinking soberly rather than sorrowfully of David,
when Jimmy dashed into the room, his yellow hair standing up
around his rosy face like a halo as he pulled off his warm cap and
threw his books and mittens on the table.
“What d’ you think, Barb’ra,” he exulted. “I had a reg’lar
zamination in my ’rithm’tic to-day, ’n’ I passed it a hunderd and fifty.
My teacher said I did. I did a whole lot o’ zamples an’ wrote out all
the sevens an’ eights an’ nines, an’ didn’ mix up seven times nine
and eight times eight, or anyfing—I mean any-th-ing.”
“You’re home early, aren’t you, precious?” asked Barbara,
glancing at the clock.
“Yes, ’course I am; I met Mr. Jarvis, Barb’ra. He was drivin’ that
horse wiv a short tail, ’n’—’n’ he asked me did I want to get in and
drive him, ’n’—’n’ he let me, Barb’ra; ’n’ I don’t believe that horse
cares if his tail is short. He’s comin’ in the house now.”
“Who—the horse?” asked Barbara, in pretended alarm.
“‘Course not!” shouted Jimmy, in fine scorn. “Mr. Jarvis is. He said
he was bringin’ you a book to read. I like Mr. Jarvis, don’t you,
Barb’ra? Don’t you?”
Jarvis himself, entering at the moment, heard the little boy’s
insistent question. He stood before the fire, tall and grave, drawing
off his gloves and looking keenly at Barbara. She had grown only
more beautiful in his eyes, since the day when he had first noticed
her youthful loveliness, like a wind-blown spray of blossoms against
a dark sky. Now he perceived that something untoward had
happened to disturb the quiet friendship which had been slowly
growing up between them in the peace of the past months. Her
candid eyes avoided his, and a fluttering color came and went in her
soft cheeks.
“What is it, Barbara?” he asked, when Jimmy had gone exultantly
forth to boast to Peg of his initial victory in the difficult warfare of
education.
“I have just been reading a letter—from David,” she said, without
attempt at postponement or evasion. “He is married.”
“Well?” said Jarvis gravely.
“I was glad to know that,” she went on. “I have been afraid—for
that poor girl.”
She was silent for a long minute, while the logs purred
comfortably together in the fireplace.
Then she met his questioning eyes, her own filled with a deep,
mysterious light.
 “He told me what I had sometimes—thought might be true,” she
hesitated; “that you—were the unknown person, who—— that I
really—belong to you.”
Then the significance of her words flashed over her, and her face
glowed with lovely shamed color.
“I am quite rich now,” she went on hurriedly, “and you must let
me give you—pay you——”
“I will, Barbara,” he said, with a quiet smile. “If you will only give
me—what you have acknowledged really belongs to me. Will you,
Barbara?”
She turned to him, all her woman’s soul in her sweet eyes.
“To the highest bidder,” she murmured, and laid her hand in his.

THE END
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