Heartbreak House
1919
Heartbreak House is Shaw's devastating portrait of English society asleep at the helm while history bears down on it. Written in the shadow of the First World War but set in the years before, the play unfolds in a house built to resemble a ship, its captain an aging radical who has lost his compass, his daughters two women marooned in different kinds of emptiness, and their guests a rotating gallery of capitalists, bohemians, and seekers who all talk brilliantly and mean nothing. Ellie Dunn arrives searching for purpose and finds only a parade of people performing the roles they imagine suit them. Shaw's great trick is revelation: the man presented as a Napoleon of industry turns out to be penniless; the mild-mannered nobody turns out to be the one actually keeping the world running. What appears solid is hollow. What appears frivolous is desperate. The house is a ship, and no one can agree on where it's headed. It is funny, bitter, and painfully prescient, a play about people who had every advantage and no idea how to use it before the reckoning came.
Editions
X-Ray
“You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.””
— Bernard Shaw
“Shall I turn up the light for you?No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.””
— Bernard Shaw
“Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat?Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.””
— Bernard Shaw
“The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.””
— Bernard Shaw
“Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.””
— Bernard Shaw
“We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.””
— Bernard Shaw
“A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.””
— Bernard Shaw
“When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.””
— Bernard Shaw
“Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.””
— Bernard Shaw
