Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (75 page)

The Chinese tame fowls by clipping their wings, and women by deforming their feet. A petticoat round the ankles serves equally well.

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

ENDNOTES

Acknowledgments: For many of the footnotes and endnotes of this edition, and especially when I have not been able to track a reference myself, I have relied mainly on two sources: the series of selected Shaw plays annotated by A. C. Ward,
Candida,
Man
and Superman
(1956), and
The Devil's Disciple
(1958), and
The Complete Prefaces,
vols. I and 2, annotated by Dan H. Laurence and Daniel J. Leary, London and New York: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1993, 1995.

MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION

1
(p. 29) Summer afternoon in a cottage garden.... He looks over the paling; takes stock of the place; and sees the young lady: Contemporary readers may note with surprise the length and elaborateness of Shaw's stage directions. Shaw wanted the reading of his plays to be free from professional theater jargon. Hence, no technical stage directions (for example,
crosses stage right
)
.
Instead he describes the action and introduces the characters somewhat in the manner of a novelist.

2
. (p. 30)
THE GENTLEMAN:
Shaw does not identify his speakers by name until they are so identified in the dialogue. Thus readers learn the characters' names as audiences do. Shaw is trying to make the experience of reading the play replicate in the imagination the experience of attending a performance.

3
(p. 36)
“I shall use that advantage over her if necessary
”
:
Shaw generally depicts the struggle of children to become independent of their parents as ruthless and unsentimental, as is the case here. In his own life, he was more or less financially dependent on his mother until he was almost thirty. As he put it himself: “I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it” (Preface to The Irrational Knot, 1905).

4
(p. 62)
“The
people who get on in this world
are
the people who get up
and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them”:
In reviews of the 2002 London revival of the play, some critics identified Vivie's position here on self-help and choosing one's destiny as “Thatcherite” (after the conservative prime minister of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher), assuming that all right-thinking persons would dismiss her views but thus displaying a political partisanship that Shaw himself eschewed vigorously.

5
(p. 65)
“Yes,
saving
money.... Not likely”:
Shaw gives Mrs. Warren a Marxist rationale to articulate—namely, that the essence of capitalism is to exploit the laborer without allowing him or her an equitable share in the profits.

6
(pp. 65-67)
“Why, of course. Everybody dislikes having to work and make money.... That's all the difference:
Over the course of these three speeches, Mrs. Warren articulates a clear feminist position: Women are not allowed equal access to different ways of earning a living. Yet she does so while justifying prostitution. It is characteristic of Shaw not to let his audience smugly applaud a social principle—like equal access to jobs for men and women, which he himself espoused—but instead to make the audience think about it in a complex fashion.

7
(p. 75)
”The babes in the wood”:
Frank refers to a legend in which a greedy uncle arranges for his orphaned nephew and niece to be murdered so that he may obtain the property they inherited from their father, his brother. Their would-be assassin abandons them in the wood, where they starve to death. In pity, the birds cover their bodies with strawberry leaves. (See the Introduction to this volume for discussion of this allusion.)

8
(p. 91)
”The Gospel of Art is the only one I
can
preach”:
Praed is the first in a series of figures to whom Shaw attributes an allegiance to Aestheticism (a movement associated with Oscar Wilde and J. M. Whistler), a belief in the redemptive power of beauty and the autonomy of art, as an alternative to belief in religion.

9
(pp. 94-95)
”And he won't die until he's three score and ten: he hasn't
originality
enough”:
Frank's observation echoes one spoken by Al gernon in act I of Oscar Wilde's
The Importance
of Being Earnest
(1895): ”Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got ... the smallest instinct about when to die.”

10
(p. 103) Mrs. Warren goes out.... [Vivie] soon becomes absorbed in her figures: The language and imagery in these final stage directions—
“goes buoyantly,”
“dipping her pen in the ink,” “with a plunge”—
suggest that by immersing herself in her actuarial calculations. Vivie may be drowning her humanity. On the other hand, she has become an independent woman, not dependent on family (she sends her mother away), not dependent on men (she sends Frank away).

CANDIDA

1
. (p. 108)
the Guild of St. Matthew:
Stewart Headlam, good friend of Shaw and fellow Fabian, founded this Christian Socialist organization in 1877, and as such has been put forth by Shaw scholars as a likely model for the Reverend James Morell.

2
(p. 110)
”writes like an angel and talks like poor Poll
”: David Garrick, the leading actor of his time, devised this epitaph in 1774 for his friend, the playwright and novelist Oliver Goldsmith, in recognition of his talent for written expression, but also of Goldsmith's poor conversation (he could only parrot what others said).

3
(p. 122) Browning's poems and Maurice's Theological Essays: The poet Robert Browning and John Frederick Denison Maurice were Victorian thinkers who grappled with issues of religious faith and doubt. Their presence in Morell's library indicates that he thinks progressively.

4
(p. 123) Fabian Essays: Shaw is referring to a volume of economic, social, and political essays,
Fabian Essays in Socialism
(1889), written by members of the Fabian Society, which advo cated the gradual adoption of socialism by peaceful, not revolutionary, means—hence the name of the society, after Fabius Cunctator (the Delayer), so called for his tactic of postponing battle with Hannibal. Shaw edited and contributed to this volume, and its presence on stage represents the first of several explicit self-references in the fictional world of his plays.

5
(p. 129)
Woman Question:
The issue of equal rights for women was becoming more urgent and would reach fruition in the suffrage movement of the following decade.

6
(p. 131)
“Just as big a fool as ever
,
James?”:
Morell's recollection of this formulaic insult from three years ago both indicates his sensitivity to being called a fool and prepares for the way Eugene's version of the same insult will deeply affect him. Shaw is usually—and unjustly—not credited for such attention to psychological nuance.

7
(p. 135) sits down in the chair Morell has just left: With this stage direction Shaw begins to play with the seating arrangements—that is, which characters sit in which chairs—as a way of helping to express shifts in power and changes in relationships.

8
(p. 136)
“Say yes, James”
: Candida makes a powerful entrance (similar to Tartuffe's delayed entrance in Moliére's play) as an offstage voice, which seems to make her mysterious, and therefore strong. Moreover, she asserts control over her husband's language, the thing that makes him so influential in the public arena. Lexy copies Morell's language by repeating things he says, and Prossy copies it by typing his sermons and letters, but Eugene offers a counter-language to Morell's public speech, for Eugene speaks the private language of inner feeling, his true poetry. Candida—her name means truth, honesty—mediates between her husband's public language and Eugene's private language. She enters the play as a peacemaker between her husband and her father, and she ends the play by making peace between her husband and his would-be replacement.

9
(p. 137)
“Igh Church pictur”:
By referring to the mezzotint reproduction of Titian's Assumption (which Eugene has given to Candida) as a High Church painting, Burgess means a style of representing religious subjects favored by the part of the Church of England that retained Roman Catholic rituals without retaining allegiance to the Bishop of Rome—that is, the Pope.

10
(p. 144)
“It is easy ... to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that... is devil's work”:
Shaw's model for Eugene's shaking of Morell's confidence in himself and in his wife's love for him is Iago's shaking of Othello's confidence in the nobility of human nature and in his wife's fidelity to him—notable especially in the way Shaw follows Shakespeare in identifying such a process as the devil's work.

11
(p. 153)
“'Ev‘nly Twins”: The Heavenly Twins
(1893), by Sarah Grand (Mrs. Frances McFall), was a feminist novel several times alluded to by Shaw and drawn on extensively by him for his 1896 “pleasant play”
You Never Can Tell.
In later editions of
Candida
, Shaw excised this reference to the novel.

12
(p. 158)
“a tiny shallop to sail away in”:
Shaw has given Marchbanks a self-consciously “poetic” vocabulary in this speech; it is meant to show his immaturity and the derivativeness of his style at this stage of his literary development.

1
(p. 211)
Buckstone's Wreck Ashore
: John Baldwin Buckstone (1802—1879) was yet another popular and prolific Victorian playwright with whose work Shaw was familiar from his youth. Readers who wish to understand both Shaw's fondness for Victorian melodramas and farces and the uses to which he put that fondness in his own plays should consult Martin Meisel's
Shaw and the Nineteenth- Century Theater
(see “For Further Reading”).

2
. (p. 216) a rack of pegs suggests to the deductive observer that the men of the house are all away, as there are no hats or coats on them: A skilled crafter of plays, Shaw here directs the reader's attention to the presence or absence of men's coats, clothing that will assume both practical and symbolic importance as the play unfolds.

3
(p. 217)
dont:
Throughout the text of The
Devil's Disciple
presented here, Shaw has omitted apostrophes in contractions (except where doing so would create ambiguity). It was Shaw's practice whenever his plays were reprinted to make changes and emendations, to update references and clarify stage business, etc. He was intensely interested in reform of orthography and in the appearance of the printed page. At a certain point in his career he became convinced that apostrophes in contractions were an eyesore and unnecessary. And as his plays came up for reprinting he would omit them in the new editions. In the present volume, three of the plays are reprinted from early editions antedating Shaw's new practice:
Mrs
.
Warren's Profession, Candida,
and
Man and Superman.
The edition we have used for
The Devil's Disciple
, however, has been revised by Shaw to omit the apostrophes in contractions.

4
(p. 248) He goes out: With Minister Anderson's departure, Shaw replicates the basic situation in
Candida
at the end of act II, where the clergyman-husband leaves his wife alone with a man to whom the husband believes his wife is attracted, but Shaw does so with certain variations: Here the wife, instead of being wise and unconventional, is silly and complacent; the husband is older than the wife; and the intruder on the hearth, instead of being physically weak and awkward, is physically impressive and full of self-confidence. As much as anything in Shaw's plays, such variation on a situation marks Shaw as a dramatic artist: Having configured his characters in a certain relation and situation in one play, he frequently takes the same configuration and alters the angle from which he displays it, or shifts the postures of the characters in regard to one another; he will do so from play to play until he is satisfied that he has gotten everything to be had artistically from varying the configuration.

5
(p. 249) “You are
yourself again: so is Richard”:
This is a sly, joking allusion to a line from Richard
III—
though not Shakespeare's play. In 1700 actor and dramatist College Cibber (1671-1757) wrote a popular adaptation of Shakespeare's text, which at the time was considered unstageable. In act
5
of Cibber's play, the title character says: “No, never be it said, / That Fate it self could awe the Soul of Richard. /... Richard's himself again. / Hark! the shrill Trumpet sounds, to Horse: Away! / My Soul's in Arms, and eager for the Fray.” The line was so memorable that Laurence Olivier preserved it in his classic 1955 film version of the play.