LIZA [rising and squaring herself determinedly]: He’s off his chump, he is. I don’t want no balmies teaching me.
(Eliza Doolittle’s very reasonable reaction to Henry Higgins’s impulsive suggestion that he become her tutor, Pygmalion, Act 2)
Pygmalion is by far George Bernard Shaw’s most famous play, turned into a British film in 1938, into the Broadway musical ‘My Fair Lady’ in 1956, and then into the multi-Oscar winning movie of the musical, starring Audrey Hepburn, in 1964.
It exists in two versions, the original 1914 version and a 1941 version to which Shaw added several sequences in light of helping write the screenplay for the 1938 movie. Having ground my way through his earlier plays, I hadn’t expected it to be quite so brilliantly funny as it is. It’s a comic masterpiece and I was surprised how little needed to be changed to turn it into the musical.
Act 1. The portico of St Paul’s church, Covent Garden
A random cross-section of Londoners take shelter from a sudden downpour of rain. It starts out with dialogue between a middle-class mother and her disapproving daughter, Clara, who demand that their wet harassed son, Freddy, finds them a cab. There arrives a Cockney flower seller who tries to hawk her flowers to all the shelterers-from-the-rain.
One of the crowd points out that there’s a bloke here taking notes of everything in a notebook, maybe he’s a copper’s nark. The flowerseller becomes alarmed and protests she wasn’t doing anything wrong in strident Cockney tones. Once drawn to everyone’s attention the note taker, obviously a man of education, amuses himself and entertains the crowd by saying precisely whereabouts in London the flowerseller, the mother and daughter, and other members of the crowd are from.
There’s another gentleman among the crowd, and he politely asks the note taker how he is able to locate people so accurately.
THE NOTE TAKER: Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That’s my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.
He goes on to explain to the Gentleman that he makes quite a good living giving elocution lessons. And while the flowerseller moans that he’s out to get her, the note taker makes the bet which is the core of the story:
THE NOTE TAKER: You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. That’s the sort of thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine scientific work in phonetics…
At which point the two posh men introduce themselves. The note taker introduces himself as Henry Higgins, author of Higgins’s Universal Alphabet, and the gentleman is none other than Colonel Pickering, author of Spoken Sanscrit, who’s come all the way from India to meet Higgins. They agree to go off to Pickering’s hotel, the Carlton, for dinner and further conversation.
All through this the flowergirl has continued to pester them, although Pickering insists he really has no change to give her. Higgins is just as dismissive, so dismissive that in a strop, the flowergirl flings her entire basket of flowers at his feet. The church bell chimes and, realising how uncharitable he’s being, Higgins tosses into it all the change he had in his pocket, before the two gentlemen exit to dinner.
The 1941 version adds a scene where we follow the flowergirl getting a cab to Angel Court, Drury Lane, and follow her up to her squalid room, an epitome of real poverty, where she counts the money Higgins tossed her with glee, before getting into bed.
Act 2. Higgins’s laboratory in his flat in Wimpole Street
Higgins has just finished giving Colonel Pickering a comprehensive tour of his recording and transcription devices, when his housekeeper, Mrs Pearce, announces the arrival of the flowerseller. She enters dressed up to the nines and announces she heard Higgins talking about elocution lessons the night before, and she wants some. For the first time she tells us her name, Eliza Dolittle.
Amid four-way banter between resentful Eliza, scornful Mrs Pearce, brutal Higgins and courteous Colonel, the latter says he’ll pay the costs of all her lessons if Higgins can train her so well that she passes for a lady at the ambassador’s forthcoming party and Higgins accepts the bet:
HIGGINS [becoming excited as the idea grows on him]: What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.
So Higgins says he’ll start the experiment straightaway and orders Mrs Pearce to take Eliza to the bathroom, strip her, throw away her filthy clothes, give her a thorough wash and order some proper clothes from Whiteleys, despite Eliza’s protestations at being treated like an object. Most of the comedy derives from how brutally direct Higgins is.
PICKERING [in good-humored remonstrance]: Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?
HIGGINS [looking critically at her]: Oh no, I don’t think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about. [Cheerily] Have you, Eliza?
Or his wonderful devil-may-care insouciance.
PICKERING: Excuse me, Higgins; but I really must interfere. Mrs. Pearce is quite right. If this girl is to put herself in your hands for six months for an experiment in teaching, she must understand thoroughly what she’s doing.
HIGGINS: How can she? She’s incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?
So the plan is agreed that Eliza will come and live with Higgins, be supervised by Mrs Pearce and taught not only how to speak, but how to behave, like a gentlewoman.
The bathroom scene (added in 1941) where Mrs Pearce takes Eliza up to the spare room which will be hers and introduces her to a bath, which she has never seen before. ‘I dursn’t. It’s not natural; it would kill me. I’ve never had a bath in my life.’
Meanwhile, Pickering is seriously asking whether Higgins is a gentleman when it comes to women. Higgins boisterously assures him that he detests women and the undermining influence they have. He is a confirmed old bachelor.
Mrs Pearce enters (with Eliza’s lice-infested hat) and sternly asks Professor Higgins not to swear in front of Eliza. He loftily insists that he never swears but Mrs Pearce is not to be brow-beaten. She goes on to ask him to mind his manners more, particularly his table manners, to which Higgins reacts with angry scorn until she lists his bad table manners. Pickering is greatly tickled by all this and it is all quite brilliant comedy.
An extra layer of comedy comes from the way Higgins, with his excitable enthusiasms and blunt rude manner, sees himself as the soul of amiability and politeness; from his lack of self awareness.
No sooner is this scene concluded than Mrs Pearce re-enters to announce the arrival of Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle. This also is brilliantly comedic because, rather than waiting to hear what Alfred has to say, Higgins launches straight in on a ferocious attack, accusing Alfred of a plan and ruse to send his daughter to his house then accuse him of abducting her. It is nothing short of blackmail, he says he’s going to phone the police, goes to the table and picks up the telephone receiver.
As you can imagine, Alfred Doolittle loses all the self righteousness he came with and is thrown on the defensive, explaining that he hadn’t heard from Eliza for two months till he bumped into a ‘boy’ Eliza took in the cab to Higgins’s house for a jaunt. When she learned she was going to stay, she sent the boy back to fetch her stuff from her rooms. Alfred bumped into this boy in the pub and learned about his daughter moving in with a gentleman and he’s come to see what it’s all about.
Higgins, in his aggressive style, tells Alfred he can take Eliza back, now, right now, and rings for Mrs Pearce and tells her to hand the girl over to her father. Mrs Pearce protests she has no clothes since she burned the old ones as requested. In his usual style, Higgins doesn’t care, her father can carry her naked through the streets of London for all he cares.
Alfred protests and asks to talk man to man (so Mrs Pearce discreetly leaves). Alfred tells Higgins he can have his daughter for £5. When Pickering delicately points out that Higgins is not installing Eliza as a mistress, Alfred righteously says of course not; if he thought that was the case, he’d ask for £50! Which made me laugh out loud.
When Pickering and Higgins are revolted by this venality Doolittle gives a droll speech about being one of the ‘undeserving poor’:
DOOLITTLE: Undeserving poverty is my line…I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth.
And humorously explains he has just as much right to the basics of life and a bit of a laugh as what the (hypocritical) middle classes call the ‘deserving’ poor.
DOOLITTLE: What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.
Higgins is so impressed by the man’s blarney that he gives him a fiver. As he opens the door to leave he nearly bumps into a vision of beauty dressed in a kimono. He doesn’t recognise his own daughter, and Higgins and Pickering are just as astounded. They have a bit of repartee, then he leaves.
Eliza gives her impressions of having a bath, and putting on clean clothes, expresses her horror at seeing a mirror, then it’s announced that the new clothes have been delivered and she and Mrs Pearce exit. This really ought to be the end of this long act but Shaw, prolix as ever, added a further scene as an example of the kind of lessons Higgins set about giving Eliza.
Which allows Shaw to jump past months and months of similarly painful elocution lessons, to the eve of her first presentation in polite society.
Act 3. The drawing room of Henry’s mother, Mrs Higgins
Which Shaw, as usual, describes in pedantic detail, describing the William Morris furniture and curtains and the precise style of the paintings on the walls. There is absolutely nothing over which Shaw is not a finicky precisionist.
Enter Higgins in a flushed hurry as always. Mrs H is horrified and tells him to go home, reminding him that he offends all her friends but Henry refuses to take no for an answer. He’s invited Eliza to the ‘at home’ and is nervous how she’ll perform.
By one of those wild coincidences which is allowed in comic novels or plays (in fact adds to the comic mood) Mrs Higgins’s guests are the very same family we met fussing about getting a cab in the rain in Act 1, namely Mrs Eynsford Hill, her son Frederick and daughter Clara.
Enter a transformed Eliza who looks and speaks brilliantly in front of pukka guests who, however, all have a nagging feeling that they’ve met her before though they can’t remember where (which plays up the irony of Eliza being the common flower girl they were all trying to avoid in the first act).
Eliza impresses until, that is, she starts telling a long story about her aunt who she thinks was ‘done in’ and Henry’s work quickly unravels, very amusingly. But not before the posh daughter of the guests (Clara) is delighted by what she takes to be the latest racy slang and the posh son (Frederick) falls in love at first sight.
Higgins signals to Eliza that it’s time for her to leave and the Eynsford Hills get up to leave, also. Once alone with her son, Mrs Higgins is cross with him and Pickering for not having considered what will happen to Eliza after their experiment is concluded. She will have become too highfalutin’ to return to her career as a flower seller but have no money to support the position in society her new accent requires. Neither Pickering or Higgins had given this a second’s thought which is why she calls them ‘a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll’ and ‘ two infinitely stupid male creatures’.
Act 4. Higgins’s rooms
A few months later Pickering and Higgins return late at night from a series of special engagements where Eliza passed herself as an upper class woman. Pickering congratulates Higgins and agrees to pay the wager (the cost of Eliza’s course of elocution lessons, and her outfits). Neither of them pay any attention to Eliza who has a fit and throws his slippers at self-obsessed, rude, bullying Higgins.
LIZA: I’d like to kill you, you selfish brute. Why didn’t you leave me where you picked me out of – in the gutter? You thank God it’s all over, and that now you can throw me back again there, do you?… What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of me?… Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else. I wish you’d left me where you found me.
She takes off the fine jewellery she’s wearing and shoves it at him, and takes off the ring she’s wearing and flings it at him and tauntingly asks how much of what she’s wearing is hers since they burned all her clothes when she arrived. Higgins is furious at her attitude and says she can take the whole houseful of clothes for all he cares, tells her to give instructions to Mrs Pearce for his breakfast and exist. Later that night Eliza packs her things and does a bunk.
Act 5. Mrs Higgins’s house
At Mrs Higgins’s house again where Henry and Pickering come to tell her that Eliza’s done a bunk. Mrs H has to explain to her son that neither of them treated Eliza with any respect or gave her any credit for her achievements.
Alfred Doolittle arrives wearing super smart wedding dress due to a wildly improbable sub-plot. Turns out Henry, in correspondence with an American millionaire about devising a universal language, mentioned in passing that Alfred was one of the most remarkable moral philosophers in England today, and so this millionaire left Alfred in his will ‘a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year.’
Doolittle laments that the money is going to ruin him – it’s going to make an honest man of him and force him to live by middle-class morality. As an example of middle-class morality he wails that all his relatives, with whom he previously had very little contact, are now getting in touch to sponge off him. He’s dressed up like this because the first requirement of middle-class morality is to get married and so he’s feeling compelled to marry his latest lover, much against both of their wishes.
In the middle of all this Mrs Higgins staggers Henry by revealing that Eliza is upstairs. She came seeking refuge the night before and Mrs Higgins graciously took her in. Mrs Higgins proceeds to lecture Pickering and Henry on how abominably they’ve treated the girl. Henry whines that Eliza threw his slippers at him but Mrs Higgins replied that, if it had been her, she’d have thrown her fire tongs!
Eliza enters acting very self possessed and quite beautiful. She and Mrs Higgins tell Henry a few home truths, starting with how he treated her like an object in an experiment. By contrast her real education in how to be a lady she attributes to Colonel Pickering who treated her with kindness and respect.
Pickering is genuinely fond of Eliza and repeatedly begs her to come back and live with them. Then he, Alfred and Mrs Higgins all go off to the wedding, leaving Eliza and Henry to have a long final scene between them. This is one long argument in which Eliza wails that all she wants is a little respect:
LIZA [much troubled] I want a little kindness. I know I’m a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I’m not dirt under your feet.
Henry softens a little, saying he’d quite like her to come back as he’s grown accustomed to her face. But they quickly fall to quarreling and he’s back to calling her an ungrateful idiot and she calling him a cruel tyrant etc.
This could go on all day but is drawn to a conclusion by two things. First, Eliza tells Henry that Freddy Eynsford Hill is in love with her and wants to marry her, which makes Henry burst out in contemptuous laughter.
But what finally breaks the deadlock is when Eliza has a brainwave and declares she could become a teacher of phonetics, just like Henry. In fact Henry had often commented that she had a better ear than him. Yes, she could earn a pretty living. This infuriates Henry who accuses her of ripping off everything he’s taught her but she is delighted that she’s cut through his hard skin and bluster and genuinely scored a point.
LIZA: What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That’s done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don’t care that [snapping her fingers] for your bullying and your big talk. I’ll advertise it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.
To his own surprise, Henry admits that it is a good idea. Above all it will make her independent instead of a millstone round his neck. Yes, he rather likes her like this, strong and independent. She can come and live with him and Pickering and they can be three bachelors together.
But at this moment Mrs Higgins re-enters to say the carriage has arrived to take them all to Alfred’s wedding and Eliza says, Yes, she’s ready. Patronising to the end, Henry asks Eliza to convey a message to Mrs Pearce about the shopping but Eliza simply replies that she’s passed all this information along already and can’t imagine how he’s going to manage when she leaves, and exits.
Mrs Higgins lingers long enough to tell her son that he has quite literally spoiled the girl but Henry humorously replies that she’s not to worry. Eliza is going to marry dim lovestruck Freddy and at the thought he bursts into hysterical laughter.
THE END.
Shaw’s controlling stage directions
As usual, I am a bit staggered by the minute control Shaw exercises over every aspect of the play. There is no detail of the sets, the costumes of the characters, their every gesture and line of dialogue, which Shaw doesn’t fuss over and dictate. There are the long, detailed and often very opinionated descriptions of each set which open each act. Then there are the countless pieces of dialogue are heavily directed by the stage directions in the text:
HIGGINS [revolted]
DOOLITTLE [unabashed]
HIGGINS [troubled]
DOOLITTLE [with fatherly pride]
MRS. PEARCE [blandly]
HIGGINS [impressively]
DOOLITTLE [evasively]
And so on and so on and so on. And then the notes in the New Mermaid edition by Shaw scholar L.W. Conolly bring this out even more, citing the refinements and additions Shaw made in the 1941 version, as well as countless notes for actors and directors he scribbled in the playbooks used to direct actual productions.
For example, when Higgins threatens Eliza that Mrs Pearce will thrash her with a broomstick, Shaw specifies that at this line, Eliza should grasp the back of a chair in fear (p.40); or correcting the actress playing Mrs Pearce who spoke the line ‘I won’t allow it, It’s you that are wicked’ with anger that, on the contrary, it should be spoken ‘steadily and quietly’ (p.36); or specifying that Eliza should throw the slippers at Higgins with real violence (p.93).
Summary
Act 1: Introducing Henry Higgins the phonologist, Colonel Pickering his fan and Eliza Doolittle the Cockney flower seller, taking shelter from the rain in the portico of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, with a few other Londoners and a middle-class mother and daughter nagging their (grown-up) son to get them a cab. In explaining who he is, Higgins says he offers lessons in elocution which the stubbornly persistent flower girl overhears.
Act 2: Eliza calls at Higgins’ apartment for lessons and Pickering and Higgins make a bet whether the latter can improve her elocution and manners so completely in 6 months that Eliza can pass for a duchess. To this end she will move in with Higgins and Pickering (and their housekeeper Mrs Pearce), be taught manners and elocution.
Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, a navvy and dustman, turns up expecting some kind of recompense for having his daughter abducted. Higgins is so ferociously aggressive, accusing Alfred of planning to blackmail the two bachelors, that Alfred is thrown right back on the defensive, but leaves with £5 which is just enough for him and his fancy woman to go on a spree.
Act 3: A few months later Henry brings a transformed Eliza to one of his mother’s ‘at homes’ where she looks and speaks brilliantly in front of pukka guests. Until, that is, she starts telling a long story about her aunt who she thinks was ‘done in’ and Henry’s work quickly unravels. But not before the posh daughter of the guests (Clara) is delighted by what she takes to be the latest racy slang and the posh son (Frederick) falls in love at first sight.
Act 4: A few months later Pickering and Higgins return late at night from a series of special engagements where Eliza passed herself as an upper class woman. Pickering congratulates Higgins and pays up the wager. Neither of them pay any attention to Eliza who has a fit and throws his slippers at self-obsessed, rude, bullying Higgins. Later that night she packs her things and does a bunk.
Act 5: At Mrs Higgins’s house again where Henry and Pickering come to tell her that Eliza’s done a bunk. Mrs H has to explain to her son that neither of them treated Eliza with any respect or gave her any credit for her achievements. Alfred Doolittle arrives wearing smart wedding dress due to the legacy from the American millionaire. Eliza enters and declares she won’t return to their flat and complains about Henry’s bullying insensitive behaviour. A very long argument between the pair ends with Eliza having the brainwave that she could become a teacher of elocution and marry lovestruck Freddy Eynsford Hill and she exits, along with Mrs Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Alfred for the latter’s weeding, leaving Henry helpless with mirth at the thought of his transformed flower seller marrying an upper-class twit.
The preface and sequel
The play has both a preface (5 pages) and what Shaw describes as a ‘Sequel’ (11 pages).
Preface
This is the usual inconsequential ramble. Shaw claims the notation of the English language is a shambles and requires an energetic phonetic expert to revise it. He names various phonetics experts from the 1870s and ’80s before alighting on the figure of English philologist, phonetician and grammarian Henry Sweet. Shaw devotes a page to this stubborn, contrarian character, and the difficulties of the form of shorthand he created which fell victim to the superior marketing strategy of the Pitman system. This is what I mean by ‘rambling’. He claims the University of Oxford never gave Sweet the credit he deserved, then goes on:
I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honours on him.
See how difficult it is to make out what Shaw is on about half the time? Anyway, the point of this windy preface is apparently to point out that Sweet (1845 to 1912) was not Shaw’s model for Henry Higgins, which all seems excessive for an audience who have never heard of Henry Sweet and never thought he was the model for Henry Higgins.
At the end of the preface, with uncharacteristic brevity, Shaw says the play had one simple aim:
If the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.
The play’s politics
It is worth stopping to consider this statement for a moment. Shaw was a member of the Fabian Society which believed sweeping reform of British society was necessary to achieve greater equality, but that it should be constitutional, parliamentary reform, not violent revolution.
Because of ‘My Fair Lady’ it’s tempting to see the play as simply a brilliant entertainment. But seen through Shaw’s Fabian prism, he is attacking, not the economic basis of British class structure but one of its most powerful symptoms or markers, snobbery about speech. All the modern debates about whether Eliza and Henry love each other, whether Higgins is a closet gay, whether Eliza becomes a strong independent feminist or remains the doll of two old misogynists – it is easy to forget the genuinely revolutionary intent of the play’s thesis: how we speak determines how we are perceived in society, society’s revolting inequalities are there for everyone to see in Britain’s howling snobbery about our accents and dialects, and it’s from this socialist perspective that Shaw says the phoneticians ‘are among the most important people in England at present’. So Pygmalion is very much an issue play but it’s worth trying to get back behind the feminist interpretations which now dominate discussion of the play, closer to Shaw’s original intent of attacking one of the bastions of Britain’s radically unequal and repressive society.
On a practical front, do you think anyone who saw the musical or watches the movie ‘My Fair Lady’ has ever been educated into realising there was a caste of men called the phoneticians and that they were ‘among the most important people in England at present’? No. Me neither. Authors, like artists, often have a grossly exaggerated sense of their impact on society which, by and large, is pretty close to zero.
The sequel (1916)
Shaw was furious when the actors in the British premiere of the play changed the scene to imply that Higgins and Eliza were on the verge of falling in love. Indeed this wish to have the lead protagonists end their bickering with a lovely romance has plagued interpretations and is the ending enshrined in the 1938 movie, the Broadway musical and Hollywood movie versions.
Shaw bitterly regretted describing the play as ‘A romance in five acts’ and ended up writing this ‘Sequel’ to try and clarify matters. For a start he says he called it a romance not in the sense that the hero and heroine get married at the end (they don’t) but simply because the transfiguration in Eliza seems fantastical, like something from an ancient myth of medieval legend.
You’d have thought this would be a simple point to make but somehow Shaw launches into a farrago of twaddle about why some men and women marry and others remain unmarried, a windy discourse unenlightened by any contact with Freud or any form of psychology, sociology, feminism or any school of thought except Shaw’s egregious satisfaction with his own genius and intolerable fondness for the sound of his own voice. If you think I’m being unfair, here’s an example:
When we look round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or aided by parental fascination.
As with the preface, this is 1) quite hard to understand – taking several readings to comprehend its full intent – at which point 2) you realise it’s useless.
But after a few pages like this Shaw gets round to the point he wants to make which is that: Henry Higgins for not, repeat not marry Eliza. Eliza marries Freddy. That’s the point the Sequel exists to make, emphasise and ram home, contrary to all producers, adapters and screenwriters who wanted Higgins and Eliza to end up an item.
Shaw goes on to elaborate on the young couple’s fortunes. They are poor because Freddy has no education and no prospects. The Colonel gives them £500 but this eventually runs out. Alfred refuses to subsidise his daughter because he has become a social success in the highest circles (dining with dukes) and this turns out to be very expensive, soaking up his £4,000 a year.
So Eliza asks if she can move in with the Wimpole Street bachelors and they agree, bringing Freddy, too. Henry objects to her teaching phonetics so she gives that up. Instead she recurs to the suggestion that she’d floated during the play of opening a flowershop and this is exactly what she and Freddy do, at South Kensington tube station. I go through there regularly to exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This fictional nugget has changed my view of that busy tube station forever; I’ll imagine Eliza there bustling over her buttonholes.
For some reason the Sequel contains a lengthy digression about the fate of Clara Eynsford Hill, Freddy’s sister, who Shaw seems much more concerned with than Eliza. She is a snobbish failure whose eyes are opened by the novels of H.G. Wells (who was, of course, a friend of Shaw’s). These (I think) make her see her life and values are all wrong but also make her determined to meet her hero which she finally does, for half an hour at a garden party, remaining dazzled for weeks afterwards. She happens to mention all this to the owner of a furniture shop who is also a ‘Wellsian’ who promptly hires Clara in the hope that she will attract Wells to the shop and effect a meeting. It is on this whimsical basis that Clara gets a job. It causes an almighty row with her mother who hoped her children would be above ‘trade’ but it means that the battle of trade has already been fought when a few weeks later Freddy shows up to tell mother he’s opening a flower shop with Eliza, and Mrs Eynsford Hill just gives up. The real puzzle about all this rambling digression is why on earth Shaw felt it necessary to drag his friend Wells into this farrago and include a physical description of him at the garden party where Clara meets him?
She had made up her mind that, cost what it might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible.
Is this a description written by a friend or an enemy? Either way, why on earth does Shaw give such prominence to his frenemy, placing him at the centre of this odd story?
Anyway, the flower business almost fails, repeatedly bailed out by the Colonel, much to Henry’s howling amusement, until Pickering insists they learn book-keeping to run it properly. This involves a course at the London School of Economics and Eliza begging Henry to show her how to write which turned into an intensive course in fine calligraphy, which led to them spending a fortune on unnecessarily high quality paper.
But meanwhile the business actually began to prosper, especially when they branched out into vegetables (asparagus being particularly profitable). She is a regular at Wimpole Street where she considers the Colonel the father she never had, but she has ferocious fights with Henry, and more than stands her own ground. In fact sometimes the Colonel asks her to be kind to poor Higgins. Sometimes she has fantasies about whisking him away to a desert island and using her wiles to force him to make love to her. But in real life, she likes the Colonel and sturdily dislikes Henry Higgins and that’s how it remains.
Henry Higgins in modern London
Although the play still has currency among the white middle classes who go to the theatre, and the movie appeals to all soft-hearted fans of the radiant Audrey Hepburn, its subject is receding into a historical past, into an ended era.
There are still plenty of chavs and proles who speak as roughly as Eliza but London, where the play is set, is now a staggeringly multicultural city. Higgins prides himself on being able to place a Londoner’s birthplace to within a few miles based on their accents. But most Londoners now weren’t born in London, many of them weren’t even born in England, and English isn’t their first language. According to the most recent data, the percentage of Londoners born in London may now be as low as 25%, and as many as 41% of current Londoners were not born in the UK.
In West London out towards Heathrow, a modern-day Higgins would have more grist detecting which part of India a person came from; in south London where I live, he would be challenged to decide which Caribbean island his random Londoners came from. But these are only two groups among the hundreds of nationalities and ethnicities which throng contemporary London. A modern-day Higgins would be just as challenged to determine which bit of Poland or Albania or Somalia or Ukraine or China a modern Londoner originated from.
The play and the movie feel nostalgic because they refer to a London, and an England, which have been abolished.
Credit
‘Pygmalion’ by George Bernard Shaw was first published in 1914. I read it in the 2008 New Mermaid paperback edition, edited with an introduction by L.W. Conolly who is extremely knowledgeable but, alas, American.
Related link
Bernard Shaw reviews
- Arms and the Man (1894)
- Candida (1894)
- John Bull’s Other Island (1904)
- Major Barbara (1905)
- Preface to Major Barbara (1905)
- The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906)
- Pygmalion (1913)
- Heartbreak House (1919)
Books & Boots 
Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes by George Bernard Shaw (1919)
NURSE GUINNESS: You’ll get used to it, miss: this house is full of surprises for them that don’t know our ways.
This is, until the last few pages, a very funny comic play, comparable to Pygmalion for its vivid characters and the frequency of its comic moments.
In the characteristically long (13,800 words) preface, Shaw informs us that he began the play in 1913, before a shot had been fired, but worked on and completed it in the first two years of the First World War. He didn’t let it be performed during the conflict out of tact and patriotism so it was first staged in 1919.
Shaw is so keen to emphasise that he began it before the war because he wants to give a prophetic force. He goes on to tell us that ‘Heartbreak House’ is not just a location in his play but is a symbol for the entire leisured lifestyle of the rich in the pre-war years, their heedlessness of the volcano they were dancing on, their selfishness and self-centredness.
The setting of a country house weekend is very appropriate. Maybe these kinds of civilised long weekends continue to this day, but country house parties where a diverse group of guests are brought together to interact are certainly a feature of Edwardian, Georgian and 1920s literature. Think of all those Agatha Christie novels where a bunch of suspects gather at the charming house of Lord or Lady something before one of them dies in mysterious circumstances, or the country house party novels of Aldous Huxley (although, admittedly, Captain Shotover’s house isn’t as grand as all that).
Act 1. Captain Shotover’s villa in Sussex, the poop: evening
We are in the living room at Heartbreak House, located in north Sussex, with (as so often in plays) French windows giving on to the garden where the author can conveniently dispose of characters when they aren’t needed or retrieve them from when they are.
It is however a very odd-looking room and sets the tone for a lot of the comedy to come, for it is built and decorated to resemble ‘the after part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery. Thus the windows are ship-built with heavy timbering and run right across the room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows; a row of lockers under the windows provides an un-upholstered window seat interrupted by twin glass doors, and the stage directions from start to finish refer not to stage left or right but to port and starboard.
This visual oddity sets the tone for the room and the house belong to the 88-year-old eccentric (or plain senile) inventor Captain Shotover. A modern reader might wonder whether Shotover has dementia, certainly several of the characters describe him as ‘mad’, but really he’s a comic invention, a man, already eccentric, who has reached the age where he doesn’t mind what he says to anyone, with the result that he is continually blunt to the point of rudeness, and beyond.
NURSE GUINNESS: They say he sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the more I believe them.
Among his many inventions (which he makes good money from) are for the ship with the magnetic keel that sucked up submarines and a patent lifeboat, but he is currently engaged on a grand visionary notion of creating some kind of rather Wellsian-sounding Death Ray which will defeat The Enemy before he can lift a finger.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: But I go on with the dynamite none the less. I will discover a ray mightier than any X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at me…
To this end he has a store of dynamite in the quarry. Rather like the introduction of a revolver in a Chekhov play, as soon as we learn this we wonder how long it’ll be before it explodes although this, like everything, is turned into suave comedy.
MRS HUSHABYE: There’s nothing to see in the garden except papa’s observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and things of that sort. However, it’s pleasanter out of doors; so come along.
RANDALL: Dynamite! Isn’t that rather risky?
MRS HUSHABYE: Well, we don’t sit in the gravel pit when there’s a thunderstorm.
Shotover is also given an obscure hobbyhorse, repeatedly banging on about striving to achieve ‘the seventh degree of concentration, whatever that may be.
One by one the cast appear, introduced to us and to each other in increasingly complex sequences and revealing a number of sometimes complex relationships. Here’s my attempt at a summary.
Cast
Captain Shotover – ‘an ancient but still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a whistle hanging from his neck’. Father to two daughters, Ariadne (now Lady Utterword) and Hesione (Mrs Hushabye). The second, married to Hector Hushabye, still lives with him. The first, (Lady Utterword) couldn’t wait to leave home, married Hasting Utterword 23 years ago, and was whisked off as his wife to umpteen colonies where he served as governor.
Shotover has a kind of cartoon version of senile dementia or at least is completely heedless of manners and conventions. He is entertainingly rude to everyone. As his daughter explains:
MRS HUSHABYE: You will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own way than try to explain.
As to his ‘eccentricity’ it’s genuinely funny the way he mistakes an invited guest to his house, Ellie, as his daughter, and then refuses to believe Lady Utterword – who he hasn’t seen for 25 years – is his other daughter.
Nurse Guinness – the house is looked after by Nurse Guinness, ‘an elderly womanservant’ who, in the best comic tradition, calmly ignored Shotover’s criticisms and indeed, everyone else’s, whilst quietly, efficiently getting on.
Ellie Dunn – ‘a pretty girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively dressed, evidently not a smart idler’, has been invited to stay by Mrs Hushabye aka Hesione. Three things about her: 1) her father is poor Mazzini Dunn, who set up a business which went bankrupt, was bought for a song by the pirate capitalist Mangan (who he went to school with), who re-employed him as manager. 2) This same Mangan (same age as her father) subsequently bumped into Ellie a couple of times and now assumes they are now engaged, despite not having asked Ellie, who is extremely reluctant. 3) Not least because she has fallen in love with a handsome charismatic man who’s had the most marvellous adventures, the improbably named Marcus Darnley.
Mazzini Dunn, poor bankrupt father of Ellie Dunn, has also been invited to stay. His Italian first name is a reference to Giuseppe Mazzini the spearhead of the movement for Italian Reunification (they were poets and visionaries).
‘Boss’ Alfred Mangan, ‘the bloated capitalist’ in Hector’s view who, it is strongly implied, stitched up his schoolfriend Mazzini Dunn. A very ordinary looking man he is driven by strong ambition and can be very assertive. He bumped into Ellie at the National Gallery, took her for a ride in his carriage and now assumes she is ‘his’.
Lady Utterword (Ariadne or ‘Addy’) – ‘a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous) is one of comic silliness’. She has spent 23 years abroad with her posh husband, Sir Hastings Uttword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in succession. Shotover several times refers to him as a ‘numskull’ and he never appears in the play. Instead:
Randall Utterword, younger brother of Hastings Utterword, Ariadne’s husband, turns up.
Hesione Hushabye (‘Miss Hessy’), married to dashing lover and fantasist Hector Hushabye. She was born when Shotover was 46 and since he is now 88, she must be
Hector Hushabye the seducer. It is a very funny moment when Ellie has just finished telling Hesione all about the marvellous man she’s met who tells the most amazing stories, and he walks through the door onto the stage and Hesione announces that he is her husband! Ellie is genuinely devastated (to some extent she’s the only character in the play with realistic feelings) but it turns out that Hector and Hesione have a very ‘modern’ marriage and she totally understand his addiction to falling in love with and flirting with numerous other women.
HECTOR: She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love to her automatically. What am I to do?
This frank admission of his inability to stop philandering is still funny today but it’s just one of the
Act 1 ends with a dialogue between Hector and Shotover which is so disturbing it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. It begins with Hector asking why the Captain has a store of dynamite (to blow up The Enemy) and develops into the notion that it might be a good idea to blow up everyone.
HECTOR: I tell you I have often thought of this killing of human vermin. Many men have thought of it. Decent men are like Daniel in the lion’s den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always survive. We live among the Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I’ll spare them in sheer –
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]: Fellow feeling?
HECTOR: No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must believe that my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their door is hell fire. I should spare them in simple magnanimous pity.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: You can’t spare them until you have the power to kill them. At present they have the power to kill you. There are millions of blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. They’re going to do it. They’re doing it already.
HECTOR: They are too stupid to use their power.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the sofa]: Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill the better half of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The knowledge that these people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having the aspirations. And when we are tempted to seek their destruction they bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.
HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]: May not Hesione be such a demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: That is possible. She has used you up, and left you nothing but dreams, as some women do.
HECTOR: Vampire women, demon women.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Men think the world well lost for them, and lose it accordingly.
Is this fantastical comedy? Is sane Hector egging mad Shotover onto ever more outrageous pronouncements? Or are they both maniacs feeding each other’s paranoid fantasies? When Shotover talks about ‘millions of blacks’ about to be let loose on ‘us’, is this clinical paranoia? And the conceit at the end about pretty women being a kind of distraction created by The Enemy so we ‘spare them’, what?
In fact things are clarified just a few minutes later. Hesione enters, breaking the spell of this dialogue, and the Captain scuttles off into his pantry, to one side of the room – at which Hector comments to his wife that, ‘He is madder than usual.’ So it was an act. So Hector was just egging the old madman on to wilder fantasies.
In his day the standard criticism of Shaw was that his plays were wordy expositions of his views, arguments spouted by two-dimensional mouthpieces. But the little scene I’ve just quoted shows how wrong this is. There are many purely comic passages, but also passages like this of wild fantasia, which are beyond argumentation, which take you into strange visionary places (cf the scenes with Peter Keegan in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, especially the long scene where he talks to a grasshopper!).
And the notion of an all-killing death ray is treated comically by all the members of his family, who take it as another one of Daddy’s madcap schemes. At the very end of Act 1 Hesione complains to Shotover and Hector that they’re broke and they both beg him to come up with a new invention.
MRS HUSHABYE: Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic keel that sucked up submarines. Living at the rate we do, you cannot afford life-saving inventions. Can’t you think of something that will murder half Europe at one bang?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on slaughter as it did when I was a boy.
I suppose passages like this are what Shaw meant by ‘prophetic’ of the huge slaughter about to commence across Europe, and/or satirise the wish of perfectly respectable middle-class types to devise ever-more destructive weapons of mass murder. But what makes ‘Heartbreak House’ so attractive is the way even quite bitter sentiments are embedded in lovely humour.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Why doesn’t your husband invent something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.
HECTOR: Well, that is a form of invention, is it not?
Act 2. Same as Act 1: after dinner
Mangan deliberately tells Ellie that he cold-bloodedly ruined her father, sitting her down and carefully explaining how he gave her money the seed money for his business knowing he’d work his fingers to the bone to get it going, but lack the business nous to make a go of it, leading to bankruptcy, at which point Mangan could pick it up for a song and make a fortune.
He tells her all this to put her off him, but to his amazement Ellie says she’ll still have him. Further paradoxes follow in an amusing tumble. He tries to dismay her by saying he’s in love with someone else, but she just says, so is she! All this cut and thrust makes Mangan think ‘this is a crazy house’ till Ellie goes behind him and draws her hands from his forehead to his ears again and again and lulls him to sleep, turns out the light and tiptoes out.
Nurse Guinness comes into the darkened room, trips over Mangan’s legs, tries to wake him then screams that she’s killed him. Mrs Hushabye and Mazzini come running and, when they can’t wake him up, Mazzini quickly guesses that he’s been hypnotised by Ellie and describes how she did it to him once, at a family party.
Their conversation turns into a very inappropriate flirtation which Mazzini resists because he says he has only ever loved once (his wife). Also, Mazzini claims that Mangan is actually useless at business, doesn’t manage the men or the day to day. He’s only rich because he obsesses over every penny and does that because he is terrified of being poor.
Ellie is fetched and denies having hypnotised Mangan. The two women send Mazzini packing then have a set-to about the sleeping Captain of Industry. Hesione thinks she has to save Ellie from this dreadful marriage but Ellie surprises her by being utterly, cynically clear eyed about her motives in marrying Mangan: it is for his money and also because, being old, he can’t expect her to love him, which she doesn’t.
This verbal sparring on goes on for a while, with Ellie lamenting that Hector is spoken for and didn’t wait for her, and during which Hesione naughtily admits that her lovely head of hair is mostly fake. I think the fake hair stands for all sorts of other attitudes, fronts and statements which are fake.
They wake Mangan and it turns out he was conscious the whole time and heard everything they said about him, Mazzini saying he’s rubbish at business, Hesione and Ellie calling him a lump. He sets about accusing Ellie, again, but once again she trumps him, defeating everything he says with irony, paradox or strong will, making him feel hysterical, like he’s going mad:
MANGAN [desperately]: In this house a man’s mind might as well be a football. I’m going…
The others come in and mock Mangan, whose Christian name, they’ve discovered is Alfred, but in the middle there’s a shot from upstairs.
All the characters run upstairs, then return in dribs and drabs with the knackered old burglar they’ve caught. it was Mazzini who meant to scare him with Hector’s duelling pistol which went off at the slightest touch.
The burglar says it’s a fair cop but gives a speech embodying one of Shaw’s hobby horses, how barbaric it is to lock people in prison (discussed at length in the preface to Major Barbara). Hector, and then all the guests, suggest they let him go but the burglar insists he should serve his time, which prompts Mangan to remark that even the burglars don’t behave naturally in this house.
Mazzini suggests the burglar could turn himself into an honest locksmith and the burglar says, yes, he could set up shop for £20 and then, somehow, the situation turns all the way round so that the burglar who they only apprehended a little earlier, is now demanding that they have a whip round to cough up at least £20 for him.
Hector gives him a sovereign and tells him to be off but he bumps into Captain Shotover in the doorway who surprises everyone by declaring that this is the mate of his old ship, Billy Dunn. Dunn explains that he breaks into houses in order to get caught and then shames the liberal guests into giving him a whip round.
More amazement when the calmly competent housekeeper, Nurse Guinness, reveals that Billy is her husband! The captain orders that Billy be held in the kitchens.
Meanwhile, Alfred Mangan is put out because everyone is ignoring him so Mrs Hushabye invites him for a walk on the moonlit terrace and for some reason this makes him burst into tears. Ellie explains that his heart is breaking but this makes Lady Utterword furious and she berates Ellie then exits onto the terrace. Ellie is bewildered until Captain Shotover explains that all her life Lady Utterword (his daughter Ariadne) has wanted someone to break her heart but now she’s so old she wonders whether she has a heart to break. Humorously all the other characters go running out to comfort her leaving Mazzini, Ellie and the Captain. Mazzini kisses his daughter goodnight and goes out.
Long scene with Ellie and the Captain who is the only person she feels she can talk to. She finds out more about his life, that the happiest experience of his life was being on the bridge of his ship during a 168-hour-long typhoon, that he spread the story that he’d sold his soul to the Devil in order to cow men so degraded that otherwise he could only manage them with kicks and cuffs. She explains why she’s marrying Mangan i.e. for his money and because being rich is better than being poor and the Captain delivers a surprisingly coherent sermon about gaining his money but losing her soul.
But he also delivers some haunting speeches about what it’s like to be very old (in 1920 the life expectancy for men was 56, Shotover is more than 30 years older than that) like in this admission about why he keeps running off stage into the pantry. It’s to take a shot of rum but not because he’s an alcoholic:
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: No, I dread being drunk more than anything in the world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women. Drink does that for you when you are young. But when you are old: very, very old, like me, the dreams come by themselves. You don’t know how terrible that is: you are young: you sleep at night only, and sleep soundly. But later on you will sleep in the afternoon. Later still you will sleep even in the morning; and you will awake tired, tired of life. You will never be free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to keep sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: I have had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water.
Or:
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: I am too weary to resist, or too weak. I am in my second childhood. I do not see you as you really are. I can’t remember what I really am. I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
See what I mean by the strange visionary quality of some of these scenes and speeches? Startlingly, having listened to him, Ellie confirms that all she wants is to marry a rich old man and asks whether he is rich. Maybe she should marry him! When the Captain says what’s wrong with her to say something like that she admits her heart was broken; she was genuinely in love with ‘Marcus Darnley’ and was heartbroken to learn he is really Hector Hushabye and married to Hesione.
Hector and Randall come in which is Ellie’s prompt to take the Captain by the hand out into the garden and leave the two men. The crux of their scene is they both fancy Lady Utterword, Randall as her husband’s brother, Hector as her sister (Hesione)’s husband. Randall explains that Lady Utterword enjoys flirting with men everywhere, makes endless scenes, her husband (his brother) doesn’t notice because he works 16 hours a day. He is upset because Hector has flirted with her more in ten minutes than he has in ten years.
Hector calls Lady Utterword in, explains the situation and Lady U upbraids Randall for being so tiresome and jealous, as if they were married and proceeds to demolish his character, calling him selfish, lazy, whiney, as needy as a 3-year-old, and that his nickname is Randall the Rotter. This reduces Randall to tears and Lady U stands domineeringly over him and mocks him as a crybaby.
Hector is upset by her bullying and, grabbing her by the throat, throws her down into a chair. She rather enjoys this domination. She explains that she treats Randall like a child, bullies him into having a good cry and then he feels better afterwards. She stalks out and Randall, just as she predicted, after his good cry feels cleansed and sleepy. Feebly he says he’ll get his own back on her by going to bed without saying goodnight. Hector realises what a feeble specimen he is and is left raging against his subjugation by the Shotover sisters.
Act 3. In Captain Shotover’s garden: night
Late at night all the characters are outside under the stars, mooning and dreaming, or at least that’s what you’d hope. In actual fact, there are inklings and prophecies of doom. Inkling:
MRS HUSHABYE [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the light, with Mangan]: He keeps telling me he has a presentiment that he is going to die. I never met a man so greedy for sympathy.
MANGAN [plaintively]: But I have a presentiment. I really have. And you wouldn’t listen.
MRS HUSHABYE: I was listening for something else. There was a sort of splendid drumming in the sky. Did none of you hear it? It came from a distance and then died away.
MANGAN: I tell you it was a train.
MRS HUSHABYE: And I tell you, Alf, there is no train at this hour.
Prophecy:
HECTOR. Heaven’s threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile creatures. [Fiercely]. I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and destroy us.
Lady Utterword says the problem with Heartbreak House is there aren’t any horses.
LADY UTTERWORD: There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. It isn’t mere convention: everybody can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don’t are the wrong ones.
She delivers a diatribe against Randall’s immature self-centred character, imagining he is in bed asleep but is interrupted by the sound of the flute, an instrument he plays, from his bedroom.
The ladies turn their attention to Mr Mangan, asking him point blank whether he intends to marry Ellie and how much he is worth. After protesting at having his personal affairs discussed in public like this, Mangan makes the surprise admission that he has no money. Turns out he doesn’t own any of the factories and whatnot he’s associated with, he merely administers them for the real owners, the shareholders and syndicates.
When Mrs Hushabye jokes that, with his level of deception he ought to go into politics, Mangan jokes that he was invited to join the government, unelected, and be put in charge of a department. See how nothing changes. He didn’t achieve anything in his own department but managed to undermine his rivals in all the others, all the while keeping his eye on the title he’d been promised. Incompetence, corruption and complete lack of experience rose to high political positions 100 years ago as they do today. In our time he’d have been put in charge of screwing up the Brexit negotiations or procuring billions of pounds of unusable PPE equipment.
HECTOR. Is this England, or is it a madhouse?
Outraged, Lady Utterword says her husband could ‘save the country’ if only we got rid of this:
… ridiculous sham democracy and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses
I.e. set up a dictatorship. Mrs Hushabye mockingly trumps her by saying it doesn’t matter who claims to be running the country as long as ‘we’, i.e. women, are running the men. Ellie laments how everything has let her down and turned out to be fake:
All these admissions drive Mangan wild and he suggests that, since they have stripped themselves morally naked they might as well take all their clothes off and he commences. The others stop him and when he goes to leave, talk him out of it. Alright, the exhausted man says, I’ll stay and propose to Ellie.
But Ellie surprises by saying she doesn’t want him any more. She was just testing her strength. Anyway, it would be an act of bigamy because half an hour earlier she married Captain Shotover!!!!
ELLIE: Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father. [She draws the captain’s arm through hers, and pats his hand. The captain remains fast asleep.]
It is a spiritual wedding and she doesn’t even know what she means but it is a beautiful evening and she is happy. Her father, Mazzini appears, in pyjamas and a silk dressing gown, claiming he can’t sleep with such a fascinating conversation going on under his window and the others bring him up to speed, especially the news that her daughter is no longer going to marry Mangan who turns out not to be a millionaire. Mangan for his part complains about being perpetually ganged up on, which triggers the speech which explains the play’s title.
MANGAN: There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly house I have been made to look like a fool, though I’m as good a man in this house as in the city.
ELLIE [musically]: Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it Heartbreak House.
And further lucubrations which we know from Shaw’s preface that he intended allegorically or symbolically.
HECTOR: Do you accept that name for your house?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: It is not my house: it is only my kennel.
HECTOR: We have been too long here. We do not live in this house: we haunt it.
By contrast Lady Utterword, who escaped the place as soon as she could, aged 19, has no illusions.
LADY UTTERWORD: Thank you, Hesione… The place may be Heartbreak House to you, Miss Dunn, and to this gentleman from the city who seems to have so little self-control; but to me it is only a very ill-regulated and rather untidy villa without any stables.
Which leads into a comic-nostalgic passage where they all mock themselves or each other:
HECTOR: Inhabited by—?
ELLIE: A crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him.
MRS HUSHABYE: A sluttish female, trying to stave off a double chin and an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of freedom.
MANGAN: A member of His Majesty’s Government that everybody sets down as a nincompoop: don’t forget him, Lady Utterword.
LADY UTTERWORD: And a very fascinating gentleman whose chief occupation is to be married to my sister.
HECTOR: All heartbroken imbeciles.
All of which is rejected by Mazzini (Ellie’s Dad), surely the nicest character:
MAZZINI: Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favourable specimen of what is best in our English culture. You are very charming people, most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.
Mangan starts crying that nobody realises he has a soul and likes poetry as well as money and Mrs Hushabye, who is inexplicably infatuated with him drags him off into the darkness. The atmosphere i.e. the dialogue, becomes more heavy with symbolism.
HECTOR [impatiently]: How is all this going to end?
MAZZINI: It won’t end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn’t end: it goes on.
ELLIE: Oh, it can’t go on forever. I’m always expecting something. I don’t know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.
Both Mazzini and Captain Shotover are given poetic speeches explaining how (Mazzini) all the politicking and meetings of his young adulthood ended up changing anything (Shotover) how, from the bridge of a ship the moon changes and the sea changes and the stars change but nothing really changes. Rather as in an Ibsen play, everyone repeats a key phrase, in this case ‘nothing happens’.
But the Captain develops his metaphor of the country, England, as a ship, a ship heading for the rocks, echoed by Hector wondering what we should do about ‘this ship that we are all in? This soul’s prison we call England?’
But while they’re talking about ships heading for rocks and captains asleep at the wheel there is a distant explosion and Nurse Guinness comes running in to say the rector’s house has been bombed. The house light had gone out, as the police ordered, but Hector perversely insists on going back in and turning it back on, bright as blazes.
Nurse Guinness says the police said to take shelter in the cellars but half the characters refuse to and at that moment the burglar, Bob Dunn, arrives to say the cellars are no good, where’s the quarry he’s heard about, he wants to take shelter in the cave.
Another explosion nearer this time. Captain Shotover says the next one will hit them and orders ‘Stand by, all hands, for judgment.’ Hector is insanely running round the house turning on all the lights and tearing down the curtains to make the place the maximum target for whoever’s doing the bombing.
Randall comes running in and pleads with Lady Underword to go to the cellars. What, with the staff, she replies and remains in her hammock. When hector strides in proud of his work but wishing the place was brighter Ellie insanely suggests setting the house on fire.
The droning overhead becomes louder and they all turn to look up into the skies. Hector tells Ellie to take cover but she refuses.
A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their seats, or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of the shattered glass from the windows.
It was a direct hit on the gravel pit, itself full of dynamite, so there go Mangan and the burglar. Insanely Hector quips ‘One husband gone’ and then ‘Our turn next’. And they wait. And wait. But hear the droning of the planes diminishing and another explosion, but now in the distance. They are safe. It’s worth quoting the final lines in full to convey the full nihilistic madness of all the characters:
MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her grip]: Oh! they have passed us.
LADY UTTERWORD: The danger is over, Randall. Go to bed.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Turn in, all hands. The ship is safe. [He sits down and goes asleep].
ELLIE [disappointedly]: Safe!
HECTOR [disgustedly]: Yes, safe. And how damnably dull the world has become again suddenly! [he sits down].
MAZZINI [sitting down]: I was quite wrong, after all. It is we who have survived; and Mangan and the burglar –
HECTOR: – the two burglars –
LADY UTTERWORD: – the two practical men of business –
MAZZINI: – both gone. And the poor clergyman will have to get a new house.
MRS HUSHABYE: But what a glorious experience! I hope they’ll come again tomorrow night.
ELLIE [radiant at the prospect]: Oh, I hope so.
THE END.
Thoughts
I got the impression from the book’s blurb and skimmed summaries that at the end of the play the house was blown up with everyone inside, and this which would have been pleasing in an explosive and total way. However, Shaw’s actual ending is far more disturbing, leaving the audience with much the same feeling as the characters, who had all, secretly, been hoping for their silly lives, their pointless worries and their petty squabbles could just be wiped out and are left anticlimactic and disappointed…
The realisation that they’re not going to be blown up after all, and that they will have to resume the masks and roles they are so sick of, is far more harrowing. It’s a punch to the guts. For me, in this reading, it anticipated the grey nihilism of Samuel Beckett.
The mad house
The power of Captain Shotover’s house as a symbol is built up through multiple repetitions and redefinitions.
LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know what you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling.
THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly wanted in this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only moderately young. Her children are not youthful.
LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in this house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age.
ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There’s something odd about this house, Hesione, and even about you. I don’t know why I’m talking to you so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that heartbreak is not like what I thought it must be.
MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this house.
THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts and turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to remember but probably you don’t, as it occurred many years ago— that your younger daughter married a numskull?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she’d marry anybody to get away from this house.
MANGAN: In this house a man’s mind might as well be a football. I’m going. [He makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the Captain, who has just emerged from his pantry].
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Whither away, Boss Mangan?
MANGAN. To hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and all here.
MANGAN [exasperated]. The very burglars can’t behave naturally in this house.
HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The man under your pose is apparently Ellie’s favourite, Othello.
RANDALL. Some of your games in this house are damned annoying, let me tell you.
HECTOR. Yes: I have been their victim for many years. I used to writhe under them at first; but I became accustomed to them. At last I learned to play them.
RANDALL. If it’s all the same to you I had rather you didn’t play them on me. You evidently don’t quite understand my character, or my notions of good form.
HECTOR [rising]. Something in the air of the house has upset you. It often does have that effect.
Through these multiple iterations, the house acquires a series of characters or associations, a kind of multi-faceted significance for both the characters and audience. I’m not sure it entirely lives up to Shaw’s stated aim of making it symbolise all of pre-war Edwardian society, but you can see what he’s aiming at.
Husbands and wives
The play is packed with paradoxical lines about husbands and wives and marriage, which are reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s plays, saturated in one-liners on the subject. But then, as I pointed out when reviewing Wilde’s plays, the war between men and women, and jokes about husbands and wives, go back through Restoration comedy, back through Shakespeare, through Chaucer, back to the Classical world.
The inability of men and women to get on is one of the oldest subjects in literature, from married Helen running away with Paris and Eve disobeying God and her husband right up to the latest Hollywood movie all about marital infidelity or the endless traumas of the dating game.
I take a Darwinian view. I see the centrality and extraordinary longevity of this subject through all of recorded literature as demonstrating how finding and choosing a mate, building a nest, reproducing and raising young ones, is the single most important function in the lives of humans (or any other form of life come to that, mammals, birds etc).
What’s distinctive and impressive about humans is how terrible they are at it, how unhappy they make themselves because of it, and how it has remained a subject for mockery, satire or anger for millennia. And so the same hackneyed subject is reiterated here, again and again:
MANGAN: Well, I thought you were rather particular about people’s characters.
ELLIE: If we women were particular about men’s characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan.
ELLIE [turning on her]: Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of course. But how can you love a liar?
MRS HUSHABYE: I don’t know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much love in the world.
MANGAN [almost beside himself]: Do you think I’ll be made a convenience of like this?
ELLIE: Come, Mr Mangan! you made a business convenience of my father. Well, a woman’s business is marriage. Why shouldn’t I make a domestic convenience of you?
ELLIE: It is just because I want to save my soul that I am marrying for money. All the women who are not fools do.
ELLIE: Why do women always want other women’s husbands?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in to one that is wild?
Or… these are conventions developed and streamlined in literature. These are literary tropes which have been with us since the dawn of writing because… why? Because it is a subject any writer can write humorously about and know his audience will get the joke, groan, cheer, laugh, whatever, but it requires little or no effort. Seen this way, maybe men-women and husband-wife gags are just easy.
Leonard Woolf
Inn her splendid biography of Leonard Woolf, Victoria Glendinning decribes Woolf being invited in June 1916 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb to go stay for a weekend at their house in Wyndham Croft in Sussex.
Leonard always found Shaw charming and friendly, ‘though if you happened to look into that slightly fishy, ice-blue eye of his, you got a shock’. He was never looking at you, or even speaking to you, personally. That blue eye ‘was looking through you or over you into a distant world or universe inhabited almost entirely by GBS, his thoughts and feelings, fancies and phantasies.’ That weekend contributed to the apocalyptic Shavian fantasies of his play Heartbreak House; Leonard remembered him writing it in the garden on a pad on his knee. (Leonard Woolf: A Life by Victorian Glendinning, 2007 edition, page 202)
Related links
Bernard Shaw reviews
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Posted by Simon on November 8, 2024
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/11/08/heartbreak-house-george-bernard-shaw/