Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

defeated by all the evidence that the Devil in Man and Superman, who argued that Man is primarily a destroyer with his heart in his weapons, was right after all. Just the number of the war dead—the prodigiousness of which can be gauged by considering that United States fatalities for the whole of the Vietnam war, some 54,000, about equaled the number killed on one side on a single day of battle on the Western Front.
    Major Barbara and its two predecessor plays—Afan and Superman (1903) and John Bull’s Other Island (1904; Shaw’s only major play about and set in his native Ireland)—form a trilogy on the theme of human destiny within a social order and a cosmic perspective, as Bernard Dukore has suggested in Shaw’s Theatre (see “For Further Reading”). All three plays use forceful images of heaven and hell, and debate propositions and ideas that would transform the world from a hellish place to a more heavenly one. But where Man and Superman projects an optimistic vision of human potential, both John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara end more ambiguously—that is, with the sense that any hope that humankind will put an end to war and waste remains in the realm of madness or fantasy—though Shaw still commits his characters to the fervent attempt to turn hope into reality. By the time Shaw wrote Heartbreak House, during World War I, he found himself a powerless witness to death and destruction on a massive scale such as the world had not seen. Heartbreak House records most precisely the reaction of the playwright to be like that of a man looking down from the top ledge of a skyscraper who becomes afraid, not that he will fall, but that he will jump. The tension in the play derives from Shaw’s instinct to resist yet give full expression to the allure of the jump that would let him be finally done with the world.
    John Bull’s Other Island made Shaw famous and popular in 1904. Previously he had been something of a coterie dramatist with a few mildly successful plays to his credit. But the topicality of John Bull’s Other Island—together with the fortuitous attendance at a performance by King Edward, during which he laughed frequently and noticeably, and apparently with such gusto that he broke his chair—raised Shaw’s recognition and reputation to a hitherto unattained level. Certainly Shaw’s Irish play has its hilarious moments and episodes; but it is also suffused with sadness over the spiritual paralysis Shaw diagnoses as deriving from his countrymen’s tormenting imagination, which drives them to flee from reality to the bottle and futile dreams. The play’s embodiment of this tragic condition is a defrocked priest, Father Keegan, who expresses in the last scene an ideal social and metaphysical order:
    In my dreams [Heaven] is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is, in short, the dream of a madman.
    Yeats in his old age cited this speech of Keegan along with a very few other passages in literature as moving him greatly; the line “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” from Yeats’s poem “Among School Children” seems to echo Keegan. At its core Keegan’s dream proposes that all life is holy because it is whole, that the material and the metaphysical are indivisible, that the social and the spiritual are equally in need of attention. And though that proposition is presented as and perhaps acknowledged to be a madman’s dream, it lies at the heart of the ideas that Shaw’s next big play, Major Barbara, confronts.

MAJOR BARBARA
    Major Barbara was successfully revived by the Roundabout Theatre in New York in 2001