Laurence Dan H. - Plays Extravagant

THE BERNARD SHAW LIBRARY

PLAYS EXTRAVAGANT

Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856. Essentially shy, he yet created the persona of G.B.S., the showman, satirist, controversialist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into English: Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities.

After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day; on Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Womans Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews, which were collected into several volumes published as Music in London 18901894 (3 vols., 1931); Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols., 1931). Among his five novels, Cashel Byrons Profession and some shorter fiction including The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales are published in Penguins.

He conducted a strong attack on the London theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British theatre. His many plays fall into several categories: his Plays Pleasant; Plays Unpleasant; comedies; chronicle-plays; metabiological Pentateuch (Back to Methuselah, a series of plays) and political extravaganzas. G.B.S. died in 1950.

BERNARD SHAW

TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD
THE SIMPLETON
OF THE UNEXPECTED ISLES
THE MILLIONAIRESS

DEFINITIVE TEXT
UNDER THE EDITORIAL SUPERVISION OF
DAN H. LAURENCE

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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This collection first published in Penguin Books 1981

Too True to be Good. Copyright 1933, 1934 by George Bernard Shaw. Copyright The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw, 1960, 1961

The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. Copyright 1934, 1936 by George Bernard Shaw. Copyright The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw, 1961

The Millionairess. Copyright 1936 by George Bernard Shaw. Copyright The Public Trustee as Executor of the Estate of George Bernard Shaw, 1961

All rights reserved

All business connected with Bernard Shaws plays is in the hands of The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 9SD (telephone: 071-373 6642), to which all inquiries and applications for licences should be addressed and performing fees paid. Dates and places of contemplated performances must be precisely specified in all applications. Applications for permission to give stock and amateur performances of Bernard Shaws plays in the United States of America and Canada should be made to Samuel French Inc., 42 West 25th Street, New York 10010. In all other cases, whether for stage, radio or television, application should be made to The Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 9SD.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196372-3

A POLITICAL EXTRAVAGANZA
with
Preface

TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD

First presented by the Theatre Guild at the National Theatre, Boston, on 29 February 1932.

Period The Present

ACT I : One of the Best Bedrooms in one of the Best Surburban Villas in one of the Richest Cities in England

ACT II : A Sea Beach in a Mountainous Country

ACT III : A Narrow Gap leading down to the Beach

CONTENTS

MONEY AND HAPPINESS

S OMEHOW my play, Too True To Be Good, has in performance excited an animosity and an enthusiasm which will hardly be accounted for by the printed text. Some of the spectators felt that they had had a divine revelation, and overlooked the fact that the eloquent gentleman through whose extremely active mouth they had received it was the most hopeless sort of scoundrel: that is, one whose scoundrelism consists in the absence of conscience rather than in any positive vices, and is masked by good looks and agreeable manners. The less intellectual journalist critics sulked as they always do when their poverty but not their will consents to their witnessing a play of mine; but over and above the resultant querulousness to which I have long been accustomed I thought I detected an unusual intensity of resentment, as if I had hit them in some new and unbearably sore spot.

Where, then, was the offence that so exceedingly disgruntled these unhappy persons? I think it must have been the main gist and moral of the play, which is not, as usual, that our social system is unjust to the poor, but that it is cruel to the rich. Our revolutionary writers have dwelt on the horrors of poverty. Our conventional and romantic writers have ignored those horrors, dwelling pleasantly on the elegances of an existence free from pecuniary care. The poor have been pitied for miseries which do not, unfortunately, make them unbearably miserable. But who has pitied the idle rich or really believed that they have a worse time of it than those who have to live on ten shillings a day or less, and earn it? My play is a story of three reckless young people who come into possession of, for the moment, unlimited riches, and set out to have a thoroughly good time with all the modern machinery of pleasure to aid them. The result is that they get nothing for their money but a multitude of worries and a maddening dissatisfaction.

THE VAMPIRE AND THE CALF

I doubt whether this state of things is ever intentionally produced. We see a man apparently slaving to place his children in the position of my three adventurers; but on closer investigation we generally find that he does not care twopence for his children, and is wholly wrapped up in the fascinating game of making money. Like other games it is enjoyable only by people with an irresistible and virtually exclusive fancy for it, and enough arithmetical ability and flair for market values to play it well; but with these qualifications the poorest men can make the most astounding fortunes. They accumulate nothing but powers of extracting money every six months from their less acquisitive neighbors; and their children accumulate nothing but obligations to spend it. As between these two processes of bleeding and being bled, bleeding is the better fun. The vampire has a better time than the calf hung up by the heels with its throat cut. The moneygetter spends less on his food, clothes, and amusements than his clerks do, and is happy. His wife and sons and daughters, spending fabulous sums on themselves, are no happier than their housemaids, if so happy; for the routine of fashion is virtually as compulsory as the routine of a housemaid, its dressing is as much dictated as her uniform, its snubbings are as humiliating, and its monotony is more tedious because more senseless and useless, not to mention that it must be pleasanter to be tipped than to tip. And, as I surmise, the housemaids day off or evening off is really off: in those hard earned hours she ceases to be a housemaid and can be herself; but the lady of fashion never has a moment off: she has to be fashionable even in her little leisure, and dies without ever having had any self at all. Here and there you find rich ladies taking up occupations and interests which keep them so busy doing professional or public work that they might as well have five hundred a year as fifty thousand for all the good it does them as the poor say in their amazement when they see people who could afford to be fashionable and extravagant working hard and dressing rather plainly. But that requires a personal endowment of tastes and talents quite out of the common run.